Cennydd Bowles

Saw them at Primavera last year. Proper good.

One thing I’ve not interrogated properly is how my experience of seeing GamerGate from the inside, and its utter misappropriation of ethics as an abuse vector, inspired my decision to get into actual ethics.

"i just do math" is something a cs phd student studying AI at stanford said to me once. i think about him a lot.

Thought for a minute I’d somehow unsubbed and/or missed an issue. Phew!

new scam going around where they hire you for a job but pay you less than the value your labor produced

Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up

Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up https://theonion.com/guy-in-philosophy-class-needs-to-shut-the-fuck-up-1819568055/

I made it up at the time but I since learned that eg ‘provotype’ existed prior. (Worse IMO but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) Tbh I now think it all fits plausibly under the umbrella of design fiction.

Maggie Boden and Murray Shanahan on a panel in 2018

Very sad to learn of the death on 18th July of Margaret (Maggie) Boden, a titan of cognitive science and AI. I met her many times, and respected her greatly.
www.theargus.co.uk/memorials/de...

Thank you mate.

Thank you Alan.

Thanks Marijam.

Thank you.

A black and white cat faces the camera on a wooden deck. Her paws are stretched out in front of her.

Our sweet, silly cat Beemo died yesterday. One of those slowly-then-quickly illnesses turned out to be an irreversible kidney problem. She was loving, easygoing and vocal, and a dear companion to us both. We’re in bits – but this is the price of love. Hug your nonhuman friends, all.

Bloody hell. Wishing you a swift and triumphant recovery.

A four panel meme, featuring John Connor talking to The Terminator, from Terminator 2 John: Wait a second, you’re saying you’re from the future? Terminator: Great question! Thanks so much for asking. Let’s think about the answer…hmm! The current year is 1983. Working backwards logically, I’m from the year 1965, which is 300 years in the future. Anything else you’d like to know? John - stares blankly Terminator: I’m sorry, I can see that was not the right answer. I actually came from the year 829392 AD, which is 10 years in the past from this year, which is 3

I am begging for a Hollywood movie or TV writer to make something that features realistic 'artificial intelligence'

Why We Don't Italicize Spanish YouTube video by Daniel José Older

A decade later, I still think this is the best video on whether or not to italicize words in non-English languages when writing in English. www.youtube.com/watch?v=24gC...

BBC Two - Aftersun Sophie is beginning to remember a formative holiday she took as a child.

Only now noticed that Aftersun is on iPlayer for the rest of the year. It broke my heart at a parentally significant time of my life. Deeply recommended. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Anywhere you can get to on a Transport for Wales train is a part of Greater Wales

This Boer/Grok fiasco is funny, but it previews how AI chatbots will be used more subtly to manipulate public opinion.

They present decontextualized authority: unsourced, unauthored, always confident.
And we are being trained to trust them as objective or as the Wisdom of Crowds.

At one point in the interview, Zuckerberg spoke about the time he spends with his children. When he got to his oldest, a nine-year-old daughter, he explained how they discuss the news together — hopefully from a reputable publication, not the false information that looks like news proliferating on Facebook. While it’s nice that he tries to engage with the interests of his kids, he also made a striking comment that illustrated the depth of his ignorance. “It hadn't occurred to me before how much in order to understand technology, you need to really understand government and civics and politics and law and like all of these different things,” said the man who has been running one of the most influential technology companies in the world for more than two decades. Somehow, it had taken explaining current events to his child to realize this quite obvious fact — but it doesn’t seem to have given him much humility.

During a recent interview with Theo Von, Zuckerberg admitted a startling revelation. While talking to his daughter about the news, he realized understanding politics and law is important to fully understanding technology. What a discovery!

www.disconnect.blog/p/mark-zucke...

any excuse to repost the greatest Tetris story ever, when a reporter went to cover early e-gaming championships and discovered that his wife was unknowingly *the world's greatest Tetris player* by a huge margin

archive.boston.com/news/globe/m...

Entirely my plan, but cricket.

Every now again it’s useful to repeat advice about accessing papers that are behind a paywall that excludes you. Email the author. My estimate is that 90% of academics are so thrilled that a living, breathing, possibly even reading, person shows interest that they will swiftly send you a copy.

A chart titled the realities of UX design The x axis: bad for the business to good for the business The y axis: bad for the user to good for the user so the 4 segments are: good for user/bad for business - it's empty good for user/good for business - has three coloured portions 1. good for user but neutral/middling for business - "You can do it if you do it on your own time, expect extreme implementation resistance" 2. good for user but middling to good for business - "rare but likelihood of implementation can improve with examples of edge-case marketing potential" 3. neutral to good for user and neutral to good for business - "majority of projects you propose but have to rigorously justify with business metrics" bad for user/good for business - has two coloured portions 1. neutral to mid-bad for user but good for business - "majority of your assigned work" 2. mid-bad to bad for user but good for business - "occasional work that may trigger career contemplation (aka dark patterns)" bad for user/bad for business - it's empty

I posted this on twitter ~3y ago and it struck a chord.

Still relevant?

Babe are you ok? You've hardly touched your actions willed in such a way that they could become a universal law

‘How much Weltschmerz is too much? We ask five people who’ve scrolled so much that they’ve cast aside any prospect of personal happiness and instead wallow in the pits of other-directed despair.’

Page 1 of an article 'Symbolic Gestures' from Digital Frontier. A big headline reads 'Your job is to convey how the system works'.

Page 2 of the Digital Frontier article. Pullquotes read 'Awful and mawkish visual cues' and 'We value not just the content of the book but also the experience of turning the page'

Page 3 of the Digital Frontier article. Pullquote: 'This is just what happens with culture. It gets remixed. It gets adapted.'

Couple of grabs here, but I recommend getting the actual magazine from digitalfrontier.newsstand.co.uk

I gave some thoughts on skeuomorphism for Digital Frontier, a new magazine on humanity & technology. Kudos to the writer and mag for engaging with the term’s actual meaning (a once-functional feature retained ornamentally), not just parroting the false equivalence with physical metaphor.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

It might seem madly decadent just now, but planting seedlings, reading, walking, birdwatching, getting into some kind of exercise or craft, making models from a kit, perfecting the world's best tomato sauce, making music, sketching are all actually extremely important, joyful things to do