Profile

The recent "Odd Lots" episode, "How a Trade War With China Could Become a Hot War," is a critical listen It moves beyond typical economic analysis to model the escalatory pathways from trade disputes to kinetic warfare The historical parallels drawn, not just to the American Revolution but more pointedly to 1930s Japan, provide a sobering framework for analyzing current US-China tensions This is the kind of second-order thinking that's desperately needed in policy discussions right now.

"A skeletal 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq is the lead picture for the Guardian, which reports on Israeli attacks on aid hubs and worsening starvation in Gaza. Palestinian Faiza Abdul Rahman, who is "constantly dizzy" from lack of food says: "We have faced hunger before, but never like this", a quote the paper uses as its main headline"

Newspaper headlines: 'Crushing' treatment delays and '4-star fiasco'

Doctors' strikes and concerns over immigration feature on Thursday's front pages.

If you want to know the truth about AI then read the comments in this thread from @npub1zjps...u8q9 TL:DR large language models (LLMs) were a big breakthrough and are an incredibly useful tool for searching and summarization, but the language fluency of their chatbot frontends fools us into thinking they are intelligent

Bluesky Social

Christopher Mims (@mims.bsky.social)

thiiiiis semantic search is CRAZY useful in how it can unlock the value of the vast majority of data, which is unstructured the fact that LLMs ca...

It's troubling that police are using generative AI to produce legally significant text like police reports, given the known risks of bias and hallucination What's worse is when there's no audit trail or any kind of transparency to prove the claimed "officer-in-the-loop"

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Axon’s Draft One Is Designed to Defy Transparency

Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn...

Astounding imagery of how far ahead China is in solar even as the U.S. is now undoing its own clean energy initiatives in a national self-sabotaging, rolling-coal fuck-you

The Atlantic

Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects

As the Trump administration's “big, beautiful bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wi...

This is a really excellent overview of the privacy challenges that anyone building generative AI systems should consider It's a good primer for anyone interested in this field Barberá and Popa-Fabre, "Privacy and Data Protection Risks in Large Language Models (LLMs)" https://rm.coe.int/privacy-and-data-protection-risks-in-large-language-models-llms-/1680b68fe9

Hey, if anyone will be looking for someone with a technical background to work on privacy or AI safety later this year, I might be available for a new gig starting around October I’m a computer scientist by background, with a history of managing engineering teams in compliance, privacy, trust, and AI safety I’d be particularly keen to help in the non-profit or benefit-corp space

Meta was caught red-handed using its Facebook app to eavesdrops on your browser sessions even if you had taken privacy precautions such as using incognito mode

Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android

Oh great. Now all personal data the the US government knows about us will be collected by Palantir, the Blackwater of tech

Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data...

Concerning that the Republican in the US Congress want to prevent AI regulations by the states If the example of privacy regulation is anything to go by, the only hope of any reasonable AI regulations in the US is from the states

Tech Policy Press

US House Passes 10-Year Moratorium on State AI Laws | TechPolicy.Press

The US House advanced a 10-year pause on state AI regulation, but its fate is uncertain in the Senate.