J.P. Loo

Becher also warns about the danger of a new Israeli government being considered "good enough" - e.g. that (important) action against settler terrorists will ease int'l pressure to end occupation; that facilitating (vital) humanitarian aid to Gaza will ease pressure for an IDF withdrawal.

a lot of people are somehow labeling this as an anti-China story when it’s actually just a whole new mode of risk for infosec to grapple with, something we have no current way to adequately test for afaik

An internal model at OpenAI has produced a claimed refutation of ETH! Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi, and I have been asked to help organize an open and independent examination of this claim. 1/4

Kit fine asked an LLM about musicology, and there’s more stuff about non-classical music, which is bad (or maybe not bad, I dunno). But Gideon Rosen thinks analytic philosophy is pretty cool

A little later, they write that T&F ‘conducted a second investigation of the paper…[t]hat…appears now to have been concluded…’ and provide a link, but it goes to a 2024 correction, which I think results from the /first/ investigation rather than any second one, and doesn’t seem to back up the claim.

Obrigado, povo brasileiro! 📸 Ricardo Stuckert

The long-serving strongman leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, has conceded defeat in an election that pitted him and his right-wing party against a diverse student-led opposition movement that spent two years protesting his government.

🚨 Password2Shell 🚨 An attacker just has to type in the username and password to gain full control. Full writeup here: man7.org/linux/man-pa...

🚨 Today (Fri 23rd) is the last chance to download the full 109 page BBS collection on 'conscious AI and biological naturalism', including target article, 50 commentaries, and my author response. Don't miss out (& do click 'save pdf')! doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Reminder that "formally proved program X" is a meaningless statement. You formally prove that some program or a reduced model of it upholds some kind of property or invariant

If I moderate my sleeping schedule by [redacted] hours I too will amount to a frontier lab!

In the BibiLeaks Chronicle, Stephen Pollard claims to have discovered an (unquantified) ‘phenomenon of left-wing voters who will vote for Netanyahu, specifically so he has no need of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’—and writes that ‘only in the last week or two’ has Eisenkot ‘started to campaign with…vigour’!

Hours after her release on 100,000 Egyptian pound bail on Wednesday, State Security prosecutors moved against Mada Masr editor-in-chief Lina Attalah on charges of “establishing and operating a website without a license.” The first trial hearing is scheduled for Tuesday October 27. 🧵

My first piece in @foreignpolicy.com was published today. I argue that the recent tensions between Azerbaijan and Turkey run deeper than the hijab-ban protests or Baku's relations with Israel. At their core is the more fundamental issue of sovereignty. foreignpolicy.com/2026/10/23/t...

Sadly, another harvest in Masafer Yatta was not. Settlers attacked Palestinian farmers — but the IDF arrested two of the farmers, and evicted the others from their own land, after declaring it a closed military zone. Sound familiar? It’s happening every single day.

Back in the field harvesting olives this morning at the invitation of Palestinian families (near Beit Jala today) with @rabbijilljacobs.bsky.social @truahrabbis.bsky.social and many other new released-from-detention friends. Our harvest today was peaceful & successful.

@pymundgenealogy.bsky.social is it uh normal for hilltop types to sing NK(?) songs?

Maybe the BBC should get someone who actually knows what he is talking about then.

I guess where I come down on this is like, we gotta just stop publishing 2015-era-Kaggle-entry-style projects in journals and reporting them in the news. The goalposts need to move. Predicting on the eval set better than chance is now basically easy. You should have to demonstrate more, now.

In the West Bank, Israeli forces arrested 80 international and Israeli volunteers non-violently resisting settler terrorism, including two British citizens. The arrests further demonstrate the settlers’ impunity and influence on the state in displacing Palestinians and blocking a two-state solution.

Who said it?

« On nous demande d’écrire que LFI est derrière le mouvement » : autour du 17 octobre, la fabrique d’un bouc-émissaire Par @paulinegraulle.bsky.social, Pascale Pascariello, @davidperrotin.bsky.social, @camillepolloni.bsky.social, @ellensalvi.bsky.social et @matthieusuc.bsky.social

github.com/mvuorre/pdf-...

My recent book AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview is free online today and tomorrow (through Oct 19, presumably UK time). I don't think the hard copy is available yet. Get it while it's free! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

@avishaybsg.bsky.social @yairwallach.bsky.social do you know whether this has attracted much comment in Israel at the moment?

My friend @vlstarodubtsev.bsky.social a war veteran and scholar was attacked and viciously beaten by far-right thugs in Lviv while on his way to give a lecture on the history of labor and socialist movements in Galicia for UA’s main democratic socialist org. 20 vs 1. Fucking cowards.

🚨 PLEASE SHARE WIDELY 🚨 Today in Lviv, Ukrainian military veteran Vladyslav Starodubstev, who now works in veterans’ rehabilitation, was assaulted by far-right thugs before giving a talk on the history of the left in Lviv and Galicia.

labour mp clarifies: yes, trans people must be banned from hospitals

More and more of Anthropic's documents are LLM slop now. This is not good and shows they're unable to set boundaries

I don’t think LLMs are converging on e.g. educated pre-LLM Kenyan or Nigerian English from experiments with Pangram. A slightly modified way Pangram might end up biased is (regionally varying) two-way influence: post-LLMs, the reviewers’ varieties of English disproportionately change to match LLMs’.

Gilad Kariv, Democrats #3: Israel should retain the settlement blocs and remain in the Jordan valley for decades. Too many partionists still propose to stay quiet, sanction nothing and await a magical doveish turn, not just because it won’t happen, but because the actual result would be a bantustan.

dixit Malebranche (who wasn’t exactly known for going outside):

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your CV? Scientist: I made it in TeX and can't figure out how to remove the gap but I also don't want to get yelled at if I post a question on stackexchange, so I have instead decided to appreciate the gap, which is still there

Largely agree with complaints about #5 and #6, but #4 is a distinct and perhaps better point: accepting explicability isn’t lexically ahead of predictive power (or even the converse!) advanced AI systems’ formalisations might mislead us in trial design e.g. in what actually is tested in vivo/silico.

many such cases

Using AI for just ten minutes makes subjects more instrumentally rational

The bare minimum is the activation of the EU blocking statute. More broadly, we need coöperation between the parties to create a Western non-US blocking statute encompassing Britain, Canada, Australia, Japan, Norway &al. It’s not easy, but it’s paperwork—we’re meant to be good at this stuff.

Most AI consciousness people do not believe current models are conscious but believe that it will be hard to tell when the transition happens and so it is worth putting in place appropriate mitigations in advance

analytic philosopher DESTROYED by facts and his own imagining of a distinction between the desired answer and what he thinks he is saying

A good piece that pairs well with Amos Brison’s interview with Yagil Levy in @972mag.com of 25.ix.