Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 1d

This is also not to claim that the first response you get from a LLM is typically all that good - or that they're great for discovery generally. But if I need a reminder of something I *know* but can't quite retrieve, repeated prompting will usually get me there eventually.

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 1d

And yes, I know that the integration of AI responses into search engines is one of the reasons why they're steadily becoming worse and worse.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 1d

Not sure I've seen it mentioned elsewhere, but at least one driver of increased use of LLMs is the continuing degeneration of internet search engines of a way of finding anything useful.

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Reposted by Naomi Colvin

EuropeanPowell @europeanpowell.bsky.social · 1d

⚠️Three-quarters of UK police forces refuse to say if they even have a contract with Palantir.
Read that back.
The head of the UK branch of Palantir is Louis Mosely, grandson of British Fascist Oswald Mosely.
goodlawproject.org/uk-police-fo...

UK police forces dodge questions on Palantir | Good Law Project

After Leicestershire Police removed details of a deal with the controversial US spy-tech firm, three quarters of UK police forces refuse to say if they even have a contract with Palantir.

goodlawproject.org

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 2d

Rule Britiannia!

Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 2d

Another astonishing sign of incredible incompetence from the UK Conservatives. They can’t even get right the name of the country they want to represent.
(Image via LBC political editor Natasha Clark)

Promo bar of chocolate saying
"When Labour negotiates,
Britian loses"

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 3d

Not taking a ride on the One Battle After Another hype wagon. Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro are excellent in it, however.

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 3d

This government would probably have proscribed the Greenham Common camp

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 3d

Protest is a right, not a privilege.

Labour seem to be inviting Reform to outflank them on civil liberties. Bizarre.

Paul Brand @paulbrand.bsky.social · 3d

Home Secretary tells Sky News that “there is a gap in the law” when it comes to frequent, repeated protests on the same issue. Hence she will be giving police greater powers to move them to another location or time.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 4d

Hard not to conclude that Polanski has been extremely successful in raising the profile of the Greens also

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 4d

I can absolutely see this happening. A cooperation agreement between Polanski’s Greens and the independent Muslim candidates who did so well last time would see Labour kicked out of swathes of London constituencies.

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 4d

Greens ‘on track’ to supplant Labour as favourite party in London, says Zack Polanski

Exclusive: poll asked voters to rank parties on how favourably they felt about them, with strong support in capital and among younger voters The Greens are viewed more favourably than any other party in London and among younger voters, polling produced for the party has shown, with its leader, Zack Polanski, saying this showed they were “on track” to supplant Labour. The YouGov poll, carried out to coincide with the Greens’ ongoing annual conference in Bournemouth, asked voters in England to rank the five main parties in order of how favourably they felt about them, rather than the usual metric of which they planned to vote for. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Naomi Colvin

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 5d

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com today on how the broader slopification of social media has led to an almost 10% drop in time spent on platforms worldwide. Except in the US, where consumption of "extreme rhetoric, engagement bait and slop" has continued to rise.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

The AI Safety people call this dynamic gradual disempowerment, and they're right to identify it as pernicious. I think it's one of the more realistic harms we're facing in the current technological moment, in fact.

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

And then the reliance on LLMs in education is compounded by all the flaws in the way these systems work, as @edzitron.com describes.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

This is already happening in education, where teachers are having to adjust to a world in which students are using LLMs for everything and not necessarily in ways that are conducive to students being able to formulate arguments independently.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

However, in this case - because experience actually helps people get better at doing stuff - we're actually setting up a situation where there will not be that store of expertise to draw on in order to do things properly in the future.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

Naturally short sighted corporate decision making that weights cost cutting over quality output is part of this. Training people up costs money.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

I also find this take a bit complacent, if I'm totally honest, because even job losses *today* don't account for the problems we're storing up for the future. I'm thinking of trainee/first job roles in particular.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

Basically, I don't really buy the argument that AI is not already cannibalising actual jobs that people do to play the rent. I think a lot of recent grads looking for entry level roles in texty occuptions would be able to pay testament to this.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

However - the fact that the AI labs not making money does not mean that they are not already destroying value.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

Finally got around to reading @edzitron.com's (huge!) Case Against Generative AI what he says about bonkers circular economics of the gen AI industry is compeling and more than worth your time. www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

The Case Against Generative AI

Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - First It Giveth Before we go any further: This is, for the third time this year, the longest newsletter I've ever written, weighing in somewhere around 18,500 wo...

www.wheresyoured.at

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

The Met thing is here: news.sky.com/story/met-po...

Met Police calls for protest against Palestine Action ban to be cancelled after Manchester synagogue attack

Police say they want to deploy every available officer to protect Jewish communities, but are instead having to prepare for Saturday's planned gathering in London's Trafalgar Square.

news.sky.com

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

Even in those cases, as person will have no doubt been involved in data curation, filtering, preprocessing etc.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

Well done @zackpolanski.bsky.social. Also disgusting to see the Met pounce on this to call for the cancellation of the next @defendourjuries.bsky.social demo. Any "resourcing issues" (ie capacity to arrest elderly people holding up signs) are directly the responsibility of the Home Office.

Farrukh @implausibleblog.bsky.social · 5d

Zack Polanski shames Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood

"Shabana Mahmood is being deeply irresponsible"

"Conflating protests against a genocide in Gaza and weaponising that against an antisemitic attack on our streets, a terrorist attack, is deeply irresponsible"

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 6d

Spotify seems to think any early music-ish thing I want to listen to needs to be followed by Gregorian chant. It really really doesn't.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 7d

This is actually a major life goal achieved, believe it or not.