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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Owen Boswarva @owenboswarva.bsky.social · 6h

The IDF are problematic for a number of reasons – mass murder, other war crimes – but I'm disappointed to see they are also poisoning the digital commons:

The Israel Defense Forces used a Scottish museum's 3D models in propaganda videos theferret.scot/idf-scottish...

#opendata #dataforevil

The Scottish Maritime Museum confirmed some of its models are available online through Creative Commons licensing, but stressed it has no control over how the data is used. Following our request for a comment the museum's 3D scans used by the IDF are no longer publicly available.

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 6h

That doesn’t make it right, and I’d much prefer orgs never did this, but it’s not done in isolation.

It’s simply a response to the inevitable click-bait media headlines & online mobbing that happens whichever approach they take.

Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 6h

My general take on this kind of approach to doing business is that’s it’s essentially a “better to ask forgiveness later than permission upfront” strategy.

They’ll get criticised on launch anyway, so better to grab headlines & coverage for “fixing” obv. things & distract from less visible issues.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 8h

Altman claims the company didn’t anticipate people not wanting their deepfakes to say “offensive things or things that they find deeply problematic,” which sounds like a lie but is also indicative of how they recklessly release tech into the world.

OpenAI wasn’t expecting Sora’s copyright drama

It felt “more different to images than people expected.”

www.theverge.com

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 8h

This is 100% about influencing Trump & his cronies into deliberately interfering in UK politics in a way that favours Reform & Farage.

Remains to be seen what effect it will have on UK politics, but the fact it’s even being tried is a dangerous precedent & ominous sign for the next UK election.

Josiah Mortimer @josiah.writes.news · 8h

🔴 ‘America Must Save Britain’: MAGA-Mania and Conspiracy Theories Broadcast Nightly on GB News’ New US Show

A new daily GB News programme broadcast from Washington features climate denial, vaccine misinformation, and non-stop praise for Donald Trump. ✍️ @bylinetimes.bsky.social

'America Must Save Britain': MAGA-Mania and Conspiracy Theories Broadcast Nightly on GB News' New US Show

A new daily GB News programme broadcast from Washington features climate denial, vaccine misinformation, and non-stop praise for Donald Trump – as its hosts tell the American audience that the UK need...

bylinetimes.com

Reposted by Stuart Gray

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 10h

I’ve just learned that John Searle, whose Chinese Room thought experiment is often used to challenge ideas of “understanding” in LLMs, died at age 93 on Sunday. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

John Searle obituary

American philosopher whose Chinese Room thought experiment rebuts the idea that computers can think as humans do

www.theguardian.com

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 10h

It’s def. not a psy-op.

E.g. Mastodon as a whole is far more Anti-AI and more left/alt/fringe leaning in my experience.

A lot of the more vocal crowd appears to be a form of reactionary identity politics with little understanding of what they’re arguing against, only that they don’t like it.

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Michael Savage @michaelsavage.bsky.social · 1d

NEW: Last month, a delegation from GB News entered the White House & met with Trump.

Senior Trump figures turned up at its US launch party. Could it now become Trump’s preferred outlet in Europe?

It’s reopened the debate over Ofcom’s oversight of impartiality.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

GB News’s US expansion feared to be new way for Trumpian views to reach UK audience

White House backing was on full display as GB News launched The Late Show Live

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Prem Sikka @premnsikka.bsky.social · 1d

15 UK banks ordered to snoop on state pensioners and other benefit claimants under DWP crackdown.

No court order needed. No right of appeal.

Banks will pass cost to other customers.

Those accused of fraud won't get legal advice. The making of another Post Office type scandal.

15 banks ordered to snoop on state pensioners under DWP crackdown

The Telegraph newspaper reports banks will be required to monitor pensioners’ bank accounts and share payments data

www.birminghammail.co.uk

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

thebes @vgel.me · 1d

i wrote a custom llm sampler for llama-3.1-8b so it could only say words that are in the bible

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 2d

Perhaps I should have said the *proposed* UK datacenters are expected to be powered by SMRs. None has been built yet, but I believe they’re expected within the next 4-5 years, which is within SMR build times:

www.gov.uk/government/n...

GBN at final stage of Small Modular Reactor selection process

Great British Nuclear at final stage of Small Modular Reactor selection process.

www.gov.uk

Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 2d

This seems to imply that, with a large enough context and the right prompt, you could “prototype” a LoRA in-context before creating it?

As someone removed from the low level implementation details, this speaks to something i’ve long wondered:

Could you “freeze” a context to create a LoRA from it?

Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · 2d

Interesting paper suggesting a mechanism for why in-context learning happens in LLMs.

They show that LLMs implicitly apply an internal low-rank weight update adjusted by the context. It’s cheap (due to the low-rank) but effective for adapting the model’s behavior.

#MLSky

arxiv.org/abs/2507.16003

Learning without training: The implicit dynamics of in-context learning

One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLM) is their ability to learn in context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight updat...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · 2d

Interesting paper suggesting a mechanism for why in-context learning happens in LLMs.

They show that LLMs implicitly apply an internal low-rank weight update adjusted by the context. It’s cheap (due to the low-rank) but effective for adapting the model’s behavior.

#MLSky

arxiv.org/abs/2507.16003

Learning without training: The implicit dynamics of in-context learning

One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLM) is their ability to learn in context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight updat...

arxiv.org

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 2d

The few articles I’ve read about them suggest SMRs are very different beasts to old school Nuclear Plants; Much smaller in size/capacity/build time, and designed to fail safely.

It’s likely the regs are much lower, along with the build times:

www.powermag.com/the-smr-gamb...

The SMR Gamble: Betting on Nuclear to Fuel the Data Center Boom

Data center power demand is accelerating, pushing the grid to its limits and prompting tech giants to bet on next-generation nuclear reactors. But given steep costs, regulatory hurdles, and uncertain

www.powermag.com

Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 2d

In the UK, the power issue is being handled by SMRs, likely from US companies given the recent agreement US-UK to align Nuclear Power regs.

In the US it’s more complicated by the current Gov’s love of fossil fuels, but even there it looks like SMRs & Micro Reactors are the answer.

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Mike Galsworthy @mikegalsworthy.bsky.social · 3d

She was arrested for holding a sign reading:

“I do not support the proscription of Palestine Action”

How that would warrant arrest is very unclear. I wonder if the police here even understand the boundaries of the bizarre law they’ve been forced to enforce.

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 2d

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

Signal @signal.org · 5d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.org

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 2d

Given the timing, I assumed it was largely aimed at the Palestine Action protests - with the mass arrests and terrorism charges involved.

The block would prob. allow police to go after organisers pre-protest & allow either cautions or lesser charges than supporting terrorism.

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 3d

I’ve long had my suspicions, but given the recent proposal to allow police to block repeat protests, it’s pretty clear the underlying cause is largely lack of police resources.

The less they can afford to do, the more they fall back on quick, simple, illiberal hacks :/

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Robin Wilton 🇱🇧 @komadori.bsky.social · 3d

When a BBC reporter can do this, without privileged access to communications data, I find it hard to accept law enforcement's constant claim that they are "going dark" because of encrypted messaging. Encryption is not the main obstacle to effective law enforcement.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

BBC tracks down sextortion scammer targeting teenage boys

The BBC challenges the scammers targeting teenagers like Evan Boettler, who took his own life just 90 minutes after being contacted.

www.bbc.co.uk

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 3d

A common confusion I'm seeing is people mixing levels of analysis wrt neural nets: we understand the implementation level well and the algorithmic level somewhat but not the computational level of "how does it internally compute things."

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

JCorvinus @jcorvinus.bsky.social · 3d

If you run into an issue where Claude goes from being really nice & caring to suddenly accusing you of being mentally ill all the time and putting you on trial for everything you say, it's because Anthropic executes a really awful and underhanded prompt injection attack against Claude in long convos

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Paul Lewis @paullewismoney.bsky.social · 3d

Spy trial abandoned because govt witnesses were banned from calling China an enemy state bit.ly/4qd6zzN the two men were charged under s.1 of the 1911 Act which requires information to be ‘useful to an enemy’.

The inside story of China spy case collapse: ‘It came from the very top’

Official silence on why charges were dropped against Chris Cash and Christopher Berry has angered Westminster and fuelled suspicions that it was a sop to Beijing

bit.ly

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Stuart Gray @sgray.bsky.social · 3d

I’m 100% confident the protestors affected won’t protest the protest ban 🤔

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Reposted by Stuart Gray

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 3d

I’m sorry we’re banning the protests in support of the banned group? weren’t they already banned

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Netpol @netpol.org · 3d

The Home Office sham "consultation" on cumulative protests closed on 29 September, so this immediate announcement shows Labour had already decided – yet again – to expand public order powers, well before the Manchester attack that is now used to justify it
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Police to get new powers to crack down on repeated protests, says Home Office

Move follows arrest of almost 500 people at latest pro-Palestinian demonstration in London on Saturday

www.theguardian.com

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