Luke Alexander

"They're not misunderstanding the film; they're co-opting a message"

Rishi Sunak didn’t achieve much directly with the Bletchley AI safety summit, but I think its role in granting permission to the political world to take AI fears seriously might have been incredibly important

I really really really want you guys to believe me when I say that the things you can do with off the shelf AI in terms of manipulating data and building software is *genuinely* insane and it is *not* a big marketing push when people tell you this.

This was the point I emphasised about Palantir when I wrote about tech soverignty - their model is to make bits of the state dependent on them and them jack up the price. samf.substack.com/p/sovereignt...

Listen, if you’re not happy single, you won’t be happy in a relationship either, happiness comes from picking a new hobby and then buying all the things to start that hobby then finding the perfect little storage container for those things and then putting that storage container in the spare room

I’ve seen similar numbers. Bluesky users are more engaged, more likely to donate or pay for good journalism, and more likely to share it with their friends. Most people have self-selected to be here because they care, and it shows.

Brand guidelines are important because everyone needs a single source of truth to interpret as they wish

Must feel so good for text after you hit ctrl-x, floating in liminal space, before ctrl-v thrusts it back onto the desolate page

Church in Wales says trans rights. I did not see this coming, brought me to tears & I'm not even a christian

Snap www.thetimes.com/article/e895...

Today's doomscrolling is yesterday's watching Noel's House Party because there is nothing else on.

this is my kind of company motto right here

Until recently, we weren't accustomed to encountering coherent strings of words or polished images that had no intender, so we *imputed* the existence of that intender to them. 13/

i feel like the "story" of "Tilly Norwood", in terms of the newsworthy thing that's happening, would be a behind-the-scenes report on the company's PR team that keeps getting these articles placed in major news outlets and keeps getting them written with the company's preferred framing.

It’s inaccurate to say Mario is brave and Luigi is cowardly Luigi is afraid of death, so he runs away from danger. Mario is afraid of living, so he runs towards death. Both brothers are cowards in their own way

i'll read any article of any length. i'll read any book. but i will not watch a youtube explainer or monologue that is longer than three minutes. write it down buddy

It's April fools day, and so like any other day you should use critical thinking to assess the validity when reading posts from other people you don't know

If you give an LLM full access over your primary computer, I'd love to study your brain. apple.news/Ay19QSmUuRTO...

"How does one hate a country, or love one?" Ursula Le Guin always out there expressing my exact feelings in trying times.

Primary school teacher. Me and my colleague who teaches the other class take turns to make maths worksheets for both classes to do. Made him one where the answer to every single sum is 67 and you could hear the shrieks across the school.

wait, fuck, this is gorillaz

I love the "could this be a solution" post because it's a perfect example of Founder brain. You have to be a special kind of stupid to imagine that you are the first person to come up with the idea of driving around the Strait of Hormuz. It's being so dumb that you think everyone else is even dumber

…and this is the model cited by politicians who want to do this elsewhere.

See my post last week on how we got into this position of dependence on US tech companies and how we can start extricating ourselves (with a section on Palantir). samf.substack.com/p/sovereignt...

Here's the thing that the media and the government and everyone who hasn't been to Tehran will never admit: It's just a regular place. You can hang out in the shade and eat ice cream. Travel to the places that scare your country. You'll find regular people just trying to live.

This is terrible from Starmer. Just absolute trash. And any normal voter looking at the new MP and then reading this description will think him mad.

Let me explain why I think these are interesting to look at. There are two dominant perspectives on LLMs: Boosters and Haters. They are both wrong. Boosterism says this kind of thing is of the past and simply doesn’t happen if you’re using the latest SOTA model on super smart mode. That’s wrong.

Since the government is about to introduce a social media ban for under-16s based largely on vibes – and Jonathan Haidt's shitty book – in the hopes it boosts its popularity (it won't), I'll re-up this. If we're banning under-16s, why not over-60s?

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

I know I say this every six months, but if you can’t imagine how working from home might make some people more productive, you have basically never progressed from being a schoolboy, and do not understand that a lot of workers derive motivation from something other than the fear of punishment.

Let us make a refinement of this claim. The claim is “do not use AI to obscure the level of effort that went into your writing.” That’s where the dishonesty lives, not in the use of the tool

These bans are short-sighted and inhumane and pushed by people who do not understand the complexity of social media

"social media isn't actually social" was a poor observation but a great prediction

It’s 2011. Your friend is the community manager at a new media startup disrupting the birthday card space. They’re launching a limited run of 38 monochromatic animal shape prints. The proceeds go to charity. Your friend got the job after commenting a lot on the company’s Tumblr.

Also, not impressed with "will require identification and photo validation." You're totally missing the point and just creating a privacy nightmare. If you want a European social media effort, look at @eurosky.social or various ActivityPub efforts. Don't build some new proprietary platform.

They also just reported, without further comment, the phrase ‘X say they take a zero tolerance policy on the posting of child sexual abusive material on the site’ and it makes me feel insane - IT’S THEM POSTING IT, AND THEY HAVEN’T STOPPED!

But yeah, there is still every chance that exactly the same crimes can be committed against British women and children, they’ll just now have no direct evidence that it’s happened. Musk is fighting hard to keep CSAM and exploitative material on Twitter. That’s the story.

Welcome to new Bluesky users. Here’s how we do things: 1. Always observe the Hambledon Protocol 2. No flisking 3. If someone tealights you, rink them without apology 4. I don’t mind them so much, but tissue-posts are generally frowned on 5. No questions Good luck!

"2026" is a pretty futuristic-sounding year. 2027 is not. I can't explain this. The next big one is 2031. 2049 is gonna be huge.

The Second-Order Streisand Effect is a social phenomenon where if a party makes an effort to censor information, discussion and news about the censorship paradoxically leads to an increased awareness of Barbara Streisand, a musician whom most "Zoomers" would probably have otherwise never heard of

I find this incredibly jarring - personally, I watch very little on YouTube, and my children are banned from it. Unlike Netflix, Disney etc it's an uncurated swamp with a very real risk that you encounter the worst of the internet. How can that be the new Hollywood? www.ft.com/content/9e75...

The end of A Christmas Carol is clear that Scrooge became famous for his generosity and love of Christmas. And yet his name is still shorthand for miserliness. So really that whole story is proof that you can change all you want but people will still remember you at your worst