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Extremely excited! My new novel Future Song is out in July: Near-future Bristol. When the daughter of Laia, a climate refugee, is kidnapped, who can she trust as she desperately searches for her baby girl? "Exciting and unpredictable" Zoe Gilbert
Is anyone keeping track of which verification kernel is used in these exercises, so that when they find a bug in one of them they know which "proofs" to reassess? If not, they're not proofs. And talking about the number of lines of code instead of insights is just crap.
Tim Kindberg retweeted
Lula victory speech:
"We had to overcome foreign interference through digital platforms, which we will have to regulate.
We cannot have monstrously huge corporations earning millions & billions, paying no taxes to this country & trying to steer this country's election results."
Tim Kindberg retweeted
So brilliantly put.
"The right-wing poor." One of the greatest achievements of contemporary capitalism.
💙🤍❤️
"Le chef-d'œuvre le plus abouti du capitalisme contemporain n'est ni l'iPhone, ni la start-up licorne, ni même le milliardaire visionnaire.
Non.
Son produit phare, son bijou anthropologique, sa plus belle réussite, c'est le pauvre de droite. Une véritable prouesse sociale, dépouillé matériellement, mais riche en certitudes contre ses propres intérêts.
On l'a façonné avec soin. On lui a expliqué que ses problèmes venaient toujours d'en bas ou d'à côté, l'immigré, l'assisté, le fonctionnaire, le chômeur, jamais du haut. On lui a appris à hair l'impôt tout en survivant grâce aux services publics. À défendre les héritiers tout en n'ayant rien à transmettre. À applaudir ceux qui l'écrasent, pourvu qu'ils parlent fort et promettent l'ordre.
Le pauvre de droite est une créature fascinante, il vote contre lui-même avec ferveur, persuadé qu'un jour, peut-être, il sera du bon côté de la barrière. Il confond la brutalité avec le courage, l'autoritarisme avec la protection, l'injustice avec le mérite. On lui vend la peur en kit, l'identité en solde, la colère en vrac par abonnement mensuel.
À l'aube de ce monde nouveau, les monstres ne surgissent pas des marges : ils montent des urnes, des plateaux télé, des slogans simplistes. Ils prospèrent sur la misère organisée et la lucidité sabotée. Le capitalisme n'a pas seulement produit de la pauvreté ; il a réussi bien pire : la rendre docile, obéissante, hargneuse, et reconnaissante. Un chef-d'œuvre je vous dis !"
Maximino Fernández
Tim Kindberg retweeted
So let met get that straight: paying a wealth tax is impossible (“billionaires have no liquidity”, “it would be taxing unrealized gains”, “their wealth is virtual”) but paying half a billion to influence elections is possible. Did I understand well?
Elon Musk has cemented his record as the largest individual political donor in modern American history.
Musk poured $446 million of his own money into this year’s midterm elections, mostly aimed at preserving the Republican Party’s control of Congress. wapo.st/4igb5Kq
If consciousness is computable (i.e. the brain is just an information-processing machine performing a computation) then a Turing machine can compute it. No need for a physical substrate at all - it exists in a Platonic realm. Fight me.
Tim Kindberg retweeted
It's tonight, #Bristol! A great free event, a great book and great ideas for combatting climate change.
Tim Kindberg retweeted
BREAKING WSJ:
Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of the military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine relied on.
wsj.com/world/ukraine-starli…
Tim Kindberg retweeted
A bank windfall tax (£19bn per the Positive Money proposals) could have capitalised the “Energy Wealth Fund”, instead of tying us more tightly into insecure, volatile fossil fuel technology and adding to climate change.
Tim Kindberg retweeted
Dirty energy is actually clean energy is today's, erm, gas-lighting.
Fantastic initiatives in Ghent favour delicious plant-based food over meat and cheese. Seems to be enhancing meals for people across the board. Also there's encouraging progress on making plant-based cheese based there. Link in reply.
Guardian article theguardian.com/food/2026/oc…
Greenlighting Jackdaw is unconscionable. Arguments for: negligible. Against: need for leadership on urgency of reducing carbon emissions. Its against public wishes. @uklabour will lose a lot of support over this. But reprobates who run @Shell will be happy @Miatsf @andyburnham
Government support for drilling at #Jackdaw takes a wrecking ball to any pretence of UK climate leadership & pours fuel on an overheating world - and for what? It’s equivalent to just 2 months of UK gas demand, creates just 27 direct jobs & has *no* impact on energy bills🧵1/4
This is just silly. Why do people think AI may be conscious if not because it's "intelligent"? It has no other attributes. Do they think spreadsheets might be conscious?
"three reasons why AI isn't conscious." really?
"consciousness is not intelligence": not a reason why AI isn't conscious, just rebuts a bad argument for AI consciousness (AI: intelligent therefore conscious).
"consciousness is substrate-dependent"/"noncomputational": would be a reason if true, but truth needs to be established.
more accurate title: "three reasons why AI might not be conscious".
xitter.cf/Nature/status/21121504…
Tim Kindberg retweeted
Speak to any hard-bitten older farmer around me in Somerset, or anywhere in Britain, and they will tell you that they grew up among fields teeming with corncrakes, grass snakes, hares, hedges full of yellowhammers and other songbirds, car windscreens splattered with bugs after the shortest summer drive, nearly all now gone. 98% of wildflowers, gone. Huge shoals of herring, cod, and other fish in the sea, a distant memory. Across almost every indicator, the losses during just one human lifetime have been catastrophic. The data is all there, as are the anecdotes. Britain is among the most nature-depleted countries on earth.
Replying to @TrooperSnooks @p4rus
We are not the most nature depleted country. That's just a myth. We are one of the most human altered countries, i.e. one with the least amount of truly wild places. Our biodiversity is actually quite high for a small country, partly as a result of human intervention.
Tim Kindberg retweeted
Aftermath of the flooding in Istanbul!
Those of you who have been following my account over the last four years will agree with me that this is happening over and over and it's getting worse.
I feel sick thinking about what it'll be like in 5/10 years.
Tim Kindberg retweeted
Zelenskyy: "When our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. Many people noticed it.
There was less hate, less division, fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. It's pretty clear where those bots were coming from.
If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves once again that Europe is not the source of the problems."
The big problem is that Russia figured out how modern society consumes information a decade ago, but the West hasn't.
There are millions of bots commenting and posting Russian propaganda. There are paid influencers spreading it, with Russian bots supporting their content.
There is a gigantic machine operating to radicalize and influence Western societies, and there is not enough defense in place.
It doesn't just influence elections, it sows discord, engulfs societies in culture wars, radicalizes teenagers, and shapes political decisions when elected officials fail to read the room.
That needs to change. And fast.
Whereas there's only one square in the 'AI is conscious' bingo card: *Meaningless*
Okay, here it is, the Bad AI Consciousness Takes Bingo blog post, with rebuttals for each and every square and some additional honourable mentions!
(I'd like to thank @united for making this post possible, and for the extra pretzels)
open.substack.com/pub/polytr…
Tim Kindberg retweeted
FACTCHECK: UK Conservatives double the ‘cost of net-zero’ after spreadsheet blunder
The Tory "Right Way" booklet makes an erroneous claim about the cost of cutting emissions, possibly taken from a Jan26 thinktank report, and deffo the most idiotic error I've seen for a while 🧵
Tim Kindberg retweeted
Brilliant take by Terence Tao on Open AI's recent math release.
In 1993, Andrew Wiles announced a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Months later, experts reading it found an error. It took him another year, with Richard Taylor, to fix it.
The proof became a proof because people had to read it line by line. The talks and workshops were part of how it got to be true.
A proof now costs hours. Understanding it still costs years, and the experts who pay that cost never asked for the result.































