James McDermott

French police have searched the offices of Elon Musk's social ⁠media network X, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in April related to a widening investigation into the platform, the Paris prosecutor's office said.

It's very interesting in the age of Claude Cowork to look back a year or two to see "sensible, anti-hype" articles which were wrong at the time but are now demonstrated to be wrong. A lesson for all people who think anti-hype is automatically sensible. Example: cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/how...

are you displeased with today’s AI safety evaluation landscape and curious about what greater conceptual clarity, methodological soundness, and rigour in AI evaluation could look like? if so, consider coming to Dublin to pursue a PhD with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a... pls repost

Occasional reminder that I sell books and similar stuff on eBay. Link to my store is below. Just reached 4100+ items for the first time. So there are categories and internal search in the storefront, which might help a bit. www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...

The HUMIES are the annual competition at #GECCO for human-competitive results created by evolutionary computation methods. ***Ten thousand dollars in prizes for human-competitive results*** Submit by Friday May 29, 2026 See www.human-competitive.org for more

Wrote a Substack on this #aras25 poll: Catherine Connolly is surviving her scrapes - yet Heather Humphreys is within the margin of error for winning open.substack.com/pub/gavreill...

New special issue of GPEM on Evolutionary Computation in Art, Music and Design! Edited by Penousal Machado and Juan Romero link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New book review, freely available in GPEM: “Reversible world of cellular automata” by Kenichi Morita, reviewed by Tomas Rokicki link.springer.com/article/10.1...

GPEM journal has a new special issue on "twenty-five years of grammatical evolution"! Edited and with an introduction by Mahdinejad, Murphy and Ryan. Special issue: link.springer.com/collections/... Introduction: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our gas cooker is an annoying sigmoid. The gas tap is either on with minimal flow, or on with full-flow, with only a tiny range - about 5 degrees of the controller's turn - giving useful intermediate values.

Next up: Massachusetts

Ireland! We need just 1,483 ppl who are Irish nationals to sign this EU petition to initiate a ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy* across the EU. The UN considers such ‘therapy’ to be mental torture. #SpeirGorm Please sign & share with all EU citizens that you know: eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#...

Students who can't really write in English but use LLMs to write their emails to me - should I treat them as having communicative intent? Do they intend to say the things they say, or do they intend some underlying meaning which I should charitably guess at? Or is it just empty syntax?

Dear international colleagues, repression in the Netherlands is worsening. We can really use your support. Please join me in signing this open letter demanding accountability from our Executive Board for the wrongful arrest of six students and staff at my university docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I could write an essay on this image Satire of antisemitic cartoons made to mock antisemitism repurposed by an Israeli to depict the Irish as the shadowy backers of their non-white enemies, thus bringing the caricature's functionality back to its original intent

The GECCO 2025 conference will be held in Málaga, 14-18 July 2025. You won't miss it, will you? gecco-2025.sigevo.org/HomePage

Happy to announce differential operators for PySR + SymbolicRegression.jl! This means you can literally just... evolve an integral:

i asked Claude to write a Barthelme-esque short story with the aesthetic sensibilities of "The School", and it gave me this. i mean. i mean.

this ennui is not caused by shortcomings of people on Twitter, it's just people

Honored to receive the Best Paper Award at the #NeurIPS2024 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop Check out our preprint "Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems" at arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02273!

I do not know why The Whole of the Moon has such power, but by god it has. But plugging it into a singing schoolhallfull of Irish children *exactly as old as I was then* is a supercharger event.

I refuse to read the article but I wonder what scenario people like this imagine, when they hear we're running out of data. Do they think it's used up, or deleted?

Diarmuid Ferriter for president www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024...

YES, now we're thinking with portals. Bad news for those clinging to the hope we would run out of data. Or that LLMs can't reason.

Science Foundation Ireland has said the termination of Professor Philip Nolan's contract with the agency was "never intended to imply any finding of wrongdoing on his part"

I was previously an international reviewer for the Marsden fund. I think this decision is embarrassing for NZ and should be reversed. www.science.org/content/arti...

Over 30 prominent scientists call for a ban on the creation of a "mirror cell"--a microbe made of molecules that are mirror images of their natural forms. It could cause a mind-boggling global disaster. Here's my story [gift link] 🧪https://nyti.ms/3OUCXp6

Would it be fair to divide the AI world into "techbros" and "tech anti-bros"?

SMBC is on Bluesky! AI discussion in the 98th percentile, in four panels, with jokes! And often sex!

The original sin of the modern left is conflating morality with truth. You see it all the time here and on Twitter, and increasingly in real life. To escape it, we need to be able to imagine: *a bad person who is still correct*. A weird, unthinkable thought.

Not even a trace of mercy for people staying at home in big cities in boring plains, Lucas?