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Reposted by Stuart Watt

Colin Duggan 🇨🇦 @thesaxbygale.ca · 14h

Tories are all upset because, after years of bumper stickers and flags, it was Katy Perry who achieved their dreams.

Reposted by Stuart Watt

Ben MacLeod 馬志斌 @benmacleod.bsky.social · 16h

Canadians – If you have some time this long weekend, fill out this godawful government survey on AI, which itself seems to have been written by AI trained exclusively on buzzword-laden LinkedIn posts.

Nico Mara-McKay 🦇 (they/iel) @nicomaramckay.com · 4d

Canadians: The federal government is seeking public input on how AI should be developed and used in business, research, and the military.

If this scares the shit out of you, please let them know:

Help define the next chapter of Canada's AI leadership

Current status: Open from October 1 to October 31, 2025 Canada helped invent modern AI. To stay a leader—and protect our digital sovereignty—we're running a 30-day national sprint to shape a renewed...

ised-isde.canada.ca

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 18h

Call me skeptical if you like, but most interesting impacts across domains happen because people move between them, not tech. That’s been studied in the sociology of science. The tech to enable discovery of connections goes back to the Memex, it’s not new. It’s the people, always the people.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 19h

Happy to report that I laughed more at the movie Deep Cover than I have for a few years. Great fun, well written, and a fantastic cast loving every moment. More “British style” comedy than you’d expect from the crew. Reminded me of Elgin James and Stephen Merchant’s “The Outlaws”. Would recommend.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

For a lot of my apps, containers would ramp costs by a factor of two — or in the case of Kubernetes, up to ten. I’m not getting the benefit. Feels like the kind of scam Intel pulled when they bought McAfee, far and away the biggest consumer of cpu cycles in existence.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

Agreed. I’m adding this issue to my list of tech risk dumps, because it’s actually a great example of shifting the risk onto customers and off corporations.

Although I’m not a massive fan of containers. Kubernetes does my head in. It’s stupid decisions which uniformly benefit big cloud providers.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

That’d scare the hell out of me. The thing that rankles most is the almost complete lack of enforcement — or if there is some, they’ll target non-drivers anyway.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

Due to the nature of this kind of analysis, there’ll be some work that’s categorized as “surveillance” here that arguably isn’t, and you know what? I don’t mind, because the message needs to get through that a lot of CV tech is oppressive. We can be better, so let’s be.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

A great read. Now that I’m increasingly working on CV, i love this, because it’s more leverage for my stance that most folks are doing it entirely wrong anyways.

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · Jun 25

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature

An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

www.nature.com

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

Now you know why. If pedestrians or cyclists try, they get mown down by drivers turning right. Drivers don’t even bother to look.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

I was in an AWS training session years back, and fully the first ten minutes was warnings about not giving money to Jeff by messing up Lambda. It did not inspire confidence.

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Reposted by Stuart Watt

David Lewis @uniondesign.bsky.social · 1d

So someone “vibe coded” an app w/ a Google Maps API key that racked up a $50,000 bill and… LOL. But TBF those keys default to wide open. No restrictions by domain, IP, enabled APIs, etc. Massive potential for damage. They should be like a deadman’s switch… default to fully locked w/o explicit input.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

If I was still a functional academic, I’d be studying the cognitive biases we have wrt complex systems. I’ve long believed anything we can’t grasp the design, we tend to treat as an intentional system. Don’t have the evidence, sadly.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 1d

That was always the part that made me howl. 😀

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 2d

Bad editing there, sorry, but I’m sure you get the gist.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 2d

Sociologically, I think this is enthralling. One of the key concepts of late modernity is the rising importance of *non-knowledge*. So it’s not a surprise that late modernity is AI differs deeply from GOFAI in valuing lack-of-knowledge about how things happen (i.e., emergence) in a whole new light.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 2d

So for many in AI, I’d argue emergence is used as an anti-theory. Not only do we not know what (e.g.) thinking is, we don’t *need to know* because it can only come out from the interaction between system, data, and environment. Effectively it becomes an epiphenomenon, and so we are back to Watson.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 2d

I’d argue your take on emergence (which usually doesn’t deal with is the questionable one. Certainly it would not be recognized in biology or dynamical systems, where engineered systems are not the norm. Emergence isn’t a tech concept, but a scientific/philosophical one.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 2d

Thank you for assuming — I l know precisely what it means, and how it is commonly used in the AI field, which is not always the same thing. (As well as 30+ years in AI, I’ve got a background in dynamical systems theory and artificial life, and worked with some wonderful biologists in the field)

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 2d

See that’s why I think all the modern AI thinking tends to go in a great big circle right back to Watson-style behaviourism. Not even Skinner-style behaviourism, which is a bit more subtle. Effectively today’s AI (unlike GOFAI) is trying to undo the cognitive revolution via some “radical emergence”.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 2d

I’ve heard people give variants on this argument for 30+ years, and mostly all they say is: we don’t understand either QM or consciousness, so they’re obviously the same thing.

I don’t want your “spooky” unification concepts, you better have a damn good theory, and I haven’t heard one yet.

Daily Neuron @dailyneuron.bsky.social · 2d

New research suggests quantum cognition, a field applying quantum math to decisions, could finally connect microscopic brain processes with our conscious experience. #consciousness #cogsci

dailyneuron.com/quantum-cogn...

Quantum Cognition May Be the Missing Link to Understanding Consciousness - Daily Neuron

New research suggests quantum cognition, a field applying quantum math to decisions, could finally connect microscopic brain processes with our conscious experience.

dailyneuron.com

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 3d

I’d never heard of them but I have a thing in transit with them apparently. And it is tracking okay so far.

Reposted by Stuart Watt

Tom Schaller @schaller67.bsky.social · 3d

Things that cause autism, per RFK jr:

1. Tylenol
2. Circumcision
3. Holiday sweaters
4. Seattle sports fandom
5. Oscar-watch parties
6. Ketchup on hot dogs
7. Visiting Brooklyn
8. Dental brush picks
9. Greta Gerwig films
10. Hummus

Stay tuned, more super-scientific studies forthcoming…

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 3d

Assuming you mean the king, I can do that in Canada. And I get to have a Kinder egg after.

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Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 3d

Do not let this happen, Canada.

Try this in Nova Scotia and I’ll host a bring a pitchfork party.

Stacie Smith (She/Her) 🇨🇦 🏒 🧠 @stacesmith94.bsky.social · 3d

The AI boom is driving up electricity bills

Tech giants are now looking to Canada to b...

readthepeak.com

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