Jed Brown

Jed Brown

@jedbrown.org

Prof developing fast algorithms, reliable software, and healthy communities for computational science. Opinions my own. https://neuromatch.social/@jedbrown https://PhyPID.org | aspiring killjoy | refuse epistemicide | he/they

1.6K followers1.3K following1.9K posts

Jed Brown reposted

Debt finance is really hard to understand for those not well-versed in financial markets, so here's a helpful explainer. A key takeaway: investors in debt are seeing big problems with Big Tech's thesis on AI and charging more to cover its risk-taking.

Matt Scherer@matthewus.bsky.social

Anthropic's IPO filing yesterday revealed at least* $550bn in off-balance sheet debt, for a company with $16B in annual revenue. Paying its bills will require Anthropic to sustain implausible revenue growth given the pressures that are squeezing their--and the whole AI ecosystem's--margins. A 🧵

I made an epistemicide shirt last year on Spreadshirt and it's one of my favorites. A friend just asked for one, so I went to place an order only to find that the 1998 definition of Boaventura de Sousa Santos is banned.

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org

"Epistemicide" is widely used in sociology and information science, and has a Wikipedia page, etc. It was coined by a Portuguese sociologist and came into my lexicon via a Cypriot colleague. Two further resources with more depth on the subject:

Oh, hey. Good on Spreadshirt for having thinking people involved in moderation. My inquiry: > I hope spreadshirt management understands the irony of censoring the definition of the term "epistemicide". Response: 👇

Jed Brown reposted

I wanted to "respectfully" share with you the reaction of the architect of the 134 and 135 initiatives. They talk a big game about what they want you to "think" they want to accomplish, but the tone and the slurs are the real story.

Jed Brown reposted

Replying to @jedbrown.org

🤣🤣the Deloitte report is SO WOEFUL the West Australian govt wants it's $$ back Expert in public governance on Deloitte errors:“they’re so extensive tt you probably need a new report, or at the very least someone to go thru that material from the ground up & rework it manually without the use of AI"

theguardian.com‘Extremely disappointed’: WA government seeks reimbursement from Deloitte over flawed university reportState paid consultancy firm $166,000 for feasibility study on merging the three tertiary institutions

Jed Brown reposted

It is interesting that courts are willing to just come out and say that we want human reasoning. Academic disciplines seem institutionally loathe to say the same thing

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org

I like the reasoning of the courts in these cases (thread). But these are the norms that must be established in scholarship. Court filings are uniquely adversarial, with clear professional duties and the court having authority to impose sanctions for Rule 11 violations.

Apollo says profit margin is increasing for the Mag-7. Meanwhile, free cash flow is decreasing most everywhere (Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, and now Meta report negative cash flow; Microsoft's has declined). Nvidia circular financing can't prop up everything www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications...

Jesse Felder@jessefelder.com

Apollo: ‘Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.’ www.apollo.com/wealth/insig...

> A fraternity member who videoed the incident got death threats from other members [..] and a group of fraternity members went to his house to “beat the sh– out of him,” but he wasn’t home. After that, the student dropped out of school [..]. National frat leadership “refused” to show [..] the video

dailycamera.comMore than 100 Boulder fraternity members suspended after hazing incident, emails showEach member found responsible for hazing “was suspended at that time and will remain suspended pending completion of the Fraternity’s member disciplinary procedures, which remain ongoing,” according t...
Nicole Bedera@nbedera.bsky.social

The origin story of our current moment in American fascism is the creation of white fraternities—which exempted a piece of campus from race and gender integration and allowed the most powerful students to bond over their hateful ideologies and group violence.

India's surveillance state is escalating. 130 million voter registrations purged and over 5000 preemptively arrested as gov "treats the desire to protest as a latent security threat". Tech reduces the cost and deflects accountability for despots to implement their will. Shoddiness is a feature.

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social

Police in Delhi are skillfully using automated surveillance to suppress the constitutional right to assemble peacefully at scale, writes Tech Policy Press contributing editor Amber Sinha.

Jed Brown reposted

This is genuinely some of the most worrying news I have seen in the past few years, in terms of the ongoing effort to hold the AI industry accountable on climate Me losing work because the org I'm pitching to is funded by Anthropic is far more of a threat than actual competition from generative AI

John Kostyack@kostyack.bsky.social

Having worked for and with NGOs and foundations for most my career, I can't even begin to grapple with what NGO advocacy would look like if most philanthropic support was coming from Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and their ilk.

Remote bricking the Save function in standalone Office to upsell an MS365/Copilot subscription.

T. Greg Doucette@gregdoucette.bsky.social

So my old version of Office 2021 apparently got EOL'd ten days ago The support doc on the "End of Support" page says things will continue to work like normal But I can't save files anymore unless I sign up for an M365 subscription, which I neither want nor need

Jed Brown reposted

She's such a better steward for this than Bernie is, if folks didn't want men to be the leaders all the time, that would be incredibly obvious.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

AOC: "As AI begins to encroach in our society, their goal is to take your cognition away from you. AI's goal is to take your thoughts away from you, your ability to think away from you, so that you become dependent on a machine ... reading books is active resistance"

This has the same fact pattern as the University of Colorado regents censuring Wanda James: Democrat woman regent initiates censure of a Black woman regent who spoke up about racism. Law firm paid to manufacture rationale, censure as punishment for stating uncomfortable fact, millions in legal fees.

Jed Brown reposted

I'm out here sweating in the theory mines, discussing gender and race and tech, and these chucklefucks just tweet it out.

KetAnthropic JoshAI@ketanjoshi.co

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

Jed Brown reposted

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

Jed Brown reposted

Somewhere away from "We'll just win elections and make the big platforms behave!" and "All that matters is winning so we should just use whatever platform gets us the most eyes!" there has to be a recognition that Meta/TikTok/YouTube/X are permanent thumbs on the scale until we crush them.

Jed Brown reposted

Have you registered? This session in the AAUP’s fall webinar series on AI spotlights materials from our new Toolkit for Activism on AI to share strategies for investigating and challenging retirement fund and endowment investments. Register at: www.aaup.org/event/higher...

I don't know where the author read 11% (Computer Science enrollment is down 27% since 2025 and 34% since 2024). With more decline in the pipeline because first-years are down about 50% and I don't see an enrollment surge on the horizon (more likely the opposite). data.colorado.edu/reports/enro...

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Jed Brown reposted

Jed Brown reposted

This will make the Internet a intolerable place for Black folks. Depending on the licensing of that data, if it's open; it'll be great for moderation (to understand language) but great for harassment (by exacerbating digital Blackface). Are there any ethics folks working at Howard?

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Jed Brown reposted

This was such a great conversation! It was clear the hosts knew exactly the right questions to ask about Title IX. We walked through how the entire system was designed to betray survivors—and delivers on that goal.

Liberal Currents@liberalcurrents.com

Half the Answer #109: Sociologist Nicole Bedera speaks to us about how institutions of higher education regularly prevent survivors from accessing justice and in fact punish them for coming forward. www.liberalcurrents.com/sexual-viole...

Jed Brown reposted

something that occurred to me is, everyone knows it’s possible to become a musician with work and practice. but you can’t work on and practice music while staring slackjawed at your phone. the real promise of generative AI is the ability to ‘make’ ‘art’ without reducing your slackjawed scroll time

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Jed Brown reposted

The linked website is not just non-authoritative, it has actively false information on it. Relying on the (almost certainly AI-generated) legal information on this website is VERY DANGEROUS.

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Jed Brown reposted

There's an underappreciated issue on the horizon for federal permitting. The issue is not specific to BAAJA, the draft permitting bill, but I believe BAAJA would make the issue worse. The issue comes from generative AI and has been eating away at academic peer review for the last couple of years.

There are a lot of validity issues with these benchmarks, which should be interpreted as favorable conditions. Even so, it's clear that OpenEvidence is not a reliable source. Is it good that clinicians are relying on this product outside of their expertise?

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> Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings.

doi.orgGeneral-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks - Nature MedicineIn an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.

There is a cautiously-worded Editor's Note "Engaging With Medical Evidence in the Age of AI" published today alongside the new JAMA paper. The paper above (representative of quite a few others) quantifies that caution, and I wish the editor's note had cited it. doi.org/10.1001/jama...

Agents are malware. "Alignment" is divination. We know how to build security, but "AI" vendors have sold investors on a fantasy that "agents" will do everything without friction. They are incapable of security engineering and a lot of debt rests on issuance of a "get out of liability free" card.

Cynthia Brumfield@metacurity.com

Check out my latest CSO piece on how bad security practices and not agents with minds of their own cause those "rogue" AI hacking incidents. AI agents aren’t ‘going rogue.’ Frontier labs are skipping security basics. 1/2 www.csoonline.com/article/4234...

The Society for Healthy Children has pledged to use land mines only in a way that protects and supports the health of children. By signing the Charter of Ethical Use of Land Mines we’ve committed to: • Promote responsible and ethical use of land mines • Work mindfully in relation to impact

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Jed Brown reposted

Replying to @abeba.blacksky.app

collecting the #AISUMMITIE threads in one place Here's one bsky.app/profile/abeb...

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app

"Today's AI summit brings together businesses, governments and civil society together" Minister Peter Burke TD (fact: there are no civil society representatives, not in the list of speakers) #AISummitIE