Dan Brickley

I wrote up a new post about what AI software finding might mean for the backdoor debate. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/08/14/e...

The piss tank on the ISS is now 40% full.

So many of the norms underlying academic culture relied on frictions associated with writing. It was entirely predictable that academia would be profoundly harmed when a machine came along to remove those frictions by making (insincere, inaccurate) communication effortless.

@miketuritzin.bsky.social fwiw x.com/vseplet/stat...

AI agents are checking the scientific literature — and spotting decades-old errors www.nature.com/articles/d4158… #AI #FactChecking

One more time!

David Miliband says 75th anniversary of refugee convention should be about defending core principles & fixing what does not work in practice "We’ve seen what works: giving refugees legal certainty, investing early in integration, and sharing responsibility fairly" www.aol.com/articles/dav...

Mentioned in Despatches: @markpackuk.bsky.social, @johnlsheridan.bsky.social, @danbri.bsky.social

now working in glorious WebGL !! added the morph target and wasted a lot of time trying to *ahem* _improve_ the avatar generation ; I noticed the tooth & back were poorly reconstructed so my idea was to synthesize and use multiple views to inject them at fitting time, not my finest idea

Posts claiming that Tony Blair’s son’s company is being paid £100bn to develop digital IDs are going viral again. But as we’ve explained before, there’s no truth to this. And plans for new digital ID mandatory for Right to Work checks have been abandoned. fullfact.org/politics/ton...

This week's net.wars, "Turn left at the robot", goes to the Human-Robot Interaction conference and finds that in robots versus kids the kids win every time: netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/03/20/t...,

Under the hood, we are using IETF Internet Messaging specifications commonly tagged as "email". Sounds old, right? Actually there is a lot of new stuff going on! For example, #chatmail apps now fully support: - RFC9788 ("Header Protection") to achieve minimal metadata - RFC9580 ("OpenPGP") to […]

@miketuritzin.bsky.social fwiw, x.com/love2code/st...

Language identification still proves to be a challenging task, especially for web data. In collaboration with @mlcommons.org @eleutherai.bsky.social @jhu.edu and 97 community members, we created CommonLID, a new benchmark for LangID for 100+ languages!

rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:subPropertyOf .

Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

We've extended submissions for our #CHI2026 workshop on Developing Standards and Documentation For LLM Use as Simulated Research Participants. Submit a short position paper by Feb 20th and let's think through some thorny issues together! sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.e...

I was shocked to learn 80% of our neurons are in the cerebellum—that little bit of hindbrain—vs ~20% in the big fancy neocortex. (Like learning ~55% of our cells are non-human!) Evolved perhaps for motor control/coordination, the cerebellum became the controller for many abstract mental activities.

Wowsers look at what happened to posts on Twitter/X about London crime after monetisation of posts was introduced… economist.com/britain/2026...

FOAF namespace server is back up at xmlns.com. Apologies for the downtime.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

It's cool that Chrome's new renderer/rasterizer (Graphite) is using Dawn (Chrome's WebGPU implementation) as its GPU abstraction layer. "Dogfooding" it like this means they're going to be extra-serious about perf/features/etc. blog.chromium.org/2025/07/intr...

Jules Verne was a prophet: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pur...

Well, it’s the day after Wallace and Gromit rode again – and it’s the 31st anniversary of the first appearance of the greatest sound effect in the history of the motion picture, so here’s the story of how (I found out how) they made it...

My colleague Sanjay Ghemawat & I have done a fair bit of performance tuning of various pieces of code. We wrote an internal Performance Hints document ~2 years ago as a way of identifying some general principles & we've recently published a version of it externally. Doc: abseil.io/fast/hints.h...

Loving this. "Antirender" engine converts architects presentation drawings into the likely reality of the designs :) antirender.com

Hi @w3c.bsky.social - do you know who wrote www.w3.org/blog/2016/do... ?

I’m half Chinese, but the most tiresome type of person on here wants me to apologize to asians for calling an anti-toxicity feature “zen mode.”

The flute is older than the wheel. A flute fashioned from the bone of a vulture was discovered in a cave in Germany and thought to be 35,000 years old, making it tens of thousands of years older than the wheel. Don’t reinvent the woodwinds.

“making improvements to the software's quality” #busted #breaking #latecapitalism

One of the most level-headed commentators about AI is apparently blocked by 146,000 bluesky users. Decentralised blocklists are important and useful but also a way of outsourcing decisions to someone who may be angrier and more polarised than you. x.com/emollick/sta...

*bird noises* We heard from many developers and organizations that even finding open source tools that can be used for online safety is a challenge. Our first baby step is putting together this curated list of awesome safety tools. We welcome contributions and feedback! github.com/roostorg/awe...

@philarcher.bsky.social do you still have your PICSfail doc online somewhere?

Lots of open positions at GS1 Global Office right now at all levels. Brussels, New Jersey, hybrid, remote... are any of these you or someone you know? www.gs1.org/about/careers

ChatGPT agent: "create a PDF of a novel D&D adventure, add illustrations, make it super interesting and deep, add tables, etc" "Fix the formatting, build it out more" Got a 19 page PDF. Agent doesn't do layouts well, but pulls off building a coherent adventure, historically very hard for LLMs.

If anyone can explain to me why this is still such a common occurrence for people with apostrophes, hyphens, etc - please get in touch! I’m going to write about it

Gephi Lite: a lighter web based version of Gephi | Alexis Jacomy | #DH2025

Powerful study forthcoming in PETS showing how Apple’s claims that the Apple Watch cannot be made to interoperate with Android are false. arxiv.org/html/2507.07...

There's a real paucity of policy discussion on the left about the problems we're going to face if AI does in fact carry on getting better.

Whatever you think of NewsGuard’s approach or the usefulness of its labels, the decision speaks to how the internet, political landscape, and notions of collective truth have polarized beyond recognition since 2018. www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/lang...

[DSIT] ‘said Google Cloud … had “agreed to work with the UK government in helping public services use advanced tech to shake off decades old ‘ball and chain’ legacy contracts which leave essential services vulnerable to cyber-attack”.’ Wow. Nobody talks about Google Cloud’s charity work.

Are you a UK AI academic that wants to be GPU rich this summer? The Sovereign AI Unit has a call out for high ambition proposals in our core priority areas. Apply by July 7th! www.gov.uk/government/p...

@tomwestgarth.bsky.social can you post x.com/tom_westgart... here?

“Boids Demo Reel” survived as a videotape cassette on my bookshelf for many years, then was digitized for a documentary around 2010. “Breaking the Ice” was on broadcast quality reel-to-reel videotape until 2023 when Tom McMahon and others worked on a remastering for the 50ᵗʰ SIGGRAPH conference.

I enjoyed being invited to attend AAMAS last week in Detroit to receive the 2025 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award for my 1987 SIGGRAPH paper “Flocks, Herds and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model.” aamas2025.org/index.php/co... #autonomous #agents #multiagent #boids #flocks

Excellent nature photos: “A Photo Appreciation of Life in Our Oceans — A collection of images showcasing some of the incredible marine biodiversity across our blue planet” #photography #nature Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

To expand a little, despite @danbri.bsky.social's best efforts I still can't get excited about AI or indeed horrified by the so-called 'hallucinations'. I am, however, fascinated by C-Suite hallucinations when elders and betters start displaying some form of primitive pattern recognition