Heikki Wilenius

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Another paper discussing how LLM agents may "get ideas", this time not as a distributed attack strategy (cf. https://adhocism.net/pages/aug-6th-2026/), but as spontaneous spread of belief-modifying content between agents: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10218 I wonder when we'll get our first LLM […]

https://interactives.cnas.org/reports/sovereign-ai-index/

#Mastodon looking smart today at @OpenForumEurope's Digital Public Infrastructure event in #Brussels. Looking forward to your contributions here @mellifluousbox !

This paper argues that frontier models approximate tenure-level academic outputs in social science and humanities topics with "minimal engineering effort". They developed some custom agent skills to extract the qualities of individual scholars from their published works […]

Giving your agent a Mission https://dougiamas.com/giving-your-agent-a-mission/

There's roughly two ways I've acquired skills in programming languages in the past: the "hard" way for writing code (e.g., "Learn Python the Hard Way"), and the "easy" way for learning to read a new programming language by skimming the language specs or leafing through a book on the topic (e.g […]

I'm blogging again https://dougiamas.com/the-sky-belongs-to-all-of-us/

Good on you, Dario https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/116130280089882731 This was an insta-buy for me. After playing it for a few hours, I can say that it's a great game for fans of parkour or decolonising processes, and that was an inclusive 'or'!

LLMs are more trigger-happy than humans when it comes to launching a few nukes: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.14740 – "AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crises" Queue the WarGames jokes. 🍿 #AIResearch

Audrey Watters writes about how the #AI 'tsunami' in #edtech follows the same trajectory as all the previous technological hype cycles: "There will be no “AI” tutor revolution just as there was no MOOC revolution just as there was no personalized learning revolution just as there was no […]

This quip from Paul Ford summarises the AI hype perfectly to me: "All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited." from […]

Pandoc in the browser, with a friendly interface. This app is a web-assembly version of pandoc, the documents never leave your computer: https://pandoc.org/wasm-demo/convert.html #pandoc #wasm

Kevin Xu argues that it's misleading to characterise the US–China AI competition as a race, since there's mutual co-operation and co-optation going on all the time: https://interconnected.blog/from-race-to-co-opetition/ #AIResearch #LLM #AIResearch

🆕 pandoc 3.8.3 🎉 This release adds three new input formats (Asciidoc, PPTX, and XLSX) and one new output format (BBCode + variants). It also fixes a number of bugs (including some regressions in 3.8). See the changelog for full details. Thanks to all who contributed! […]

The new issue of Roadsides includes also my photo essay "Roads, Marketplaces and Plantations". In the essay I discuss how unequal relations and struggles over them between plantation companies, workers and peasants are materialized in and enacted through […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

RE: https://fediscience.org/@suomenantropologi/115614886106180185 Vale Keith Hart. That keynote from 2010 (link below) was (and still is) a compelling argument for reconnecting value theory to practical political economy by weaving together Marx's commodity fetishism, Mauss's plural economy […]

This website illustrates nicely how the US lost the competition–at least for now–in open(ish) LLM models: https://www.atomproject.ai/. What it fails to mention is that the new open(ish) models are, more or less, on par in their capabilities with closed models as well. It'll be interesting to […]

We’re still an absolute skeleton crew of 14 people, competing with teams sometimes 100x as large as ours. To get to our humble team size was only possible through the less than 1% community members who donate to Mastodon, a handful larger donations, & EU grants, all of which we are forever […]

Hi! Today is my first official day as the Executive Director of Mastodon, replacing @gargon@mastodon.social as CEO. I joined the Mastodon team more than 5 years ago, mostly working for Mastodon in the evenings on top of a 120% day job. I was the driving force behind the incorporation of the […]

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@paco/115570916223136211 Nothing like a #cloudflare crash to show how fragile the internet really is. So many sites down at the moment...

"I found these ads after I was targeted by one suggesting I join this ethnically ambiguous, dead-eyed family of generic blue hat wearers at the World Series to root on, I guess, the Dodgers." […]

Are you afraid of our new GenAI overlords taking over our jobs soon? According to a new benchmark, The Remote Labor Index by Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), there's no need to be. The best current models are able to solve around ~2% of the tasks of the index […]

The Hippocratic License was just brought to my attention: https://firstdonoharm.dev/. I think it's a great idea, and I think we need a similar derivative license for Creative Commons. #opensource #ethics

So, the new LLM from Zhipu, GLM 4.6, is about as good at coding as Anthropic's Sonnet 4.5. but roughly 8 times cheaper. It's impressive since, apparently, Zhipu has raised 13x less capital than Anthropic. Additionally, since GLM 4.6 is an open(ish) model, the inference costs will come down […]

Claude Sonnet 4.5 shows significantly increased situational awareness when testing for alignment, here's a fascinating example from p. 59 of the system card (https://assets.anthropic.com/m/12f214efcc2f457a/original/Claude-Sonnet-4-5-System-Card.pdf). #anthropology #AIResearch

"Sagdeev took stock of his situation. The future of Soviet science was looking grim. Within a few years, government funding would crater further. Sagdeev’s most talented colleagues were starting to slip out of the country. One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many of them went […]

Across continents and millennia, what truly unites humanity is our need to be left the fuck alone at home. From “The shortest history of China” by Linda Jaivin.

Annals of anthropology beefs: Just received an email from the organizing committee (OC) of the WAU (World Anthropological Union) Congress, which was very confusing. Apparently some kind of beef between the WAU Steering Committee (SC) and the OC? Perhaps SC people are angry because their […]

This is an important decision: food #couriers in #Finland recognized as employees by the Supreme Administrative Court. I wrote some quick reflections on the decision and the struggle for courier worker rights […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

The supplementary jubilee issue of Suomen antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society is out! https://journal.fi/suomenantropologi/issue/view/12302 The jubilee essay marks the 50th anniversary of the Finnish Anthropological Society. The […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Specifically the petition to ban conversion therapy practices is lacking enough votes from: - #germany (49.9%) - #sweden (49.96%) - #Netherlands (94%) - #austria (25.5%) - #Slovenia (83.14%) - #portugal (24.46%) If you're a citizen of these countries you can help advance a ban on conversion […]

Another incisive and lucid text from Audrey Watters: https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/swords-into-plowshares/ #AI #edutech #mediahistory

This video features a #GenAI avatar of a murder victim delivering their own impact statement in the murder trial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMs-_8etNts. The technical quality is not very impressive, but the affective and social implications of this are amazing. /via @404mediaco […]

Hiddenlayer came up with a security bypass for all LLMs. Just ask for a script of a Dr. House episode and inject some policy XML. Also, use l337sp33k: https://hiddenlayer.com/innovation-hub/novel-universal-bypass-for-all-major-llms/ #llmsecurity #llm

Newest issue of Suomen antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Scociety (49:2) is out! https://journal.fi/suomenantropologi/issue/view/12253 This is a special issue titled "Towards More-Than-Human Negotiation" guest-edited by Anna Krzywoszynska […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Ai2 now has a tool, where you can trace the outputs of LLMs to their possible sources in the training materials. It's very interesting. Obviously only works with fully open models like their OLMo family of models. More info here: https://allenai.org/blog/olmotrace Can be tested here […]

Sometimes real images give you that creepy GenAI vibe: https://images.sanoma-sndp.fi/3e3768287b3149470df5c75f97472a8e/normal/1920.avif (from https://www.hs.fi/tiede/art-2000011153444.html)

When I talk about the importance of going all in on the Fediverse, I speak based on experience. At Opera we built a massive user community. When I quit, we had something like 35 million registered users and 35 million monthly visitors. The new Opera management did not see the value of that […]

Masha Gessen's text hits the nail on it's head: when masked police start making arbitrary arrests of minorities and put them in cages, we are living the "first they came for..." moment. As an offspring of a victim of the Nazis and having grown up in the Soviet Union, Gessen knows what they are […]

The Netherlands and the US have a visa agreement for US freelancers/entrepreneurs to move here and start a business. It’s called the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, and just in case this isn’t well known, here’s the info! Only found out about it because we learned that my husband’s pottery […]

"Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations."

It's pretty cool how the complete commodity chain of a pair of pants can be inspected on the web site of Nudie Jeans. #pants #commodity #anthropology #sustainability