@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

drdrmc

@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk

I do interdisciplinary research to understand the opportunities and challenges in personal data use: the technical, the social, and the policy and regulatory landscape that surrounds such topics.

I also ski, grow super-hot chillis (and make super-hot chilli sauce), lumberjack, hence also woodturning, and during lockdown did a campervan conversion...

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Floppy, to DuckDuckGo
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Well, that's my normal workflow fucked.

drdrmc,
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@Floppy It’s an omen - gonna go cut the grass ‘til it passes

drdrmc, to random
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Oh dear, won’t somebody think of the MPs; clearly we must outlaw E2EE apps so we can protect them.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/04/senior-tory-mortified-after-reportedly-passing-mps-data-to-dating-app-contact

Floppy, to random
@Floppy@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Very tempted to work out the financial viability of bulk buying people's old Lego, sorting it into sets, and selling it on.

drdrmc,
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@Floppy Now that’s a robotics / AI project that some undergrad should bang out.

drdrmc, to random
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Not really sure what I’m supposed to do to hit the calories target…

drdrmc, to random
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

“Stack Overflow data is particularly beneficial to AI systems that generate computer code,”… good grief. I lost count of the number of times a student’s defence of egregious coding was “but I found it on a Stack Overflow”…
Google’s Deal With Stack Overflow Is the Latest Proof That AI Giants Will Pay for Data

https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-giants-pay-for-data/

drdrmc, to random
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Move along ,nothing to see here - Reddit sells training data to unnamed AI company ahead of IPO

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2004431

CatherineFlick, to random
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"Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI." I can't believe they're still claiming that generative models can "understand" the world. They can't understand anything. They are just a fancy statistical model for correctness probability against previous known good outputs. You don't get AGI from that. You can't get AGI from that. Irresponsible claims.

https://openai.com/sora

drdrmc,
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick @proprietous One of our great computer scientists once said “people think computing moves quickly, but it’s just the wheel of reincarnation turns faster” - so, after the last AI winter due to excessive claims folks decided to do a new thing called ML which was described to me as “well founded statistical techniques to process high dimensional data” and nothing to do with AI - I just wonder what they’ll call the backlash this time.

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Yay, this will go well, absolutely no issues here at all 10/10 no notes https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/02/185m-tech-deal-help-british-warships-stay-sea-thales

drdrmc,
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick One of the original scenarios for the SensorNet research community back in 2000ish was maritime preventative maintenance - in those days we did not need to market everything as AI, we used words like database and time series data analysis. Very misleading headline.

onepict, to FediPact
@onepict@chaos.social avatar

I keep seeing the argument that folks are breaking the network by defederation from instances that will federate with Threads.

Last time I checked those instances are mostly small community instances. They're not Internet Exchanges.

They owe you nothing.

What every instance owner needs to do right now is be honest with their communities and communicate clearly their intentions.

Then folks get time to choose. Their choice. Not yours, not mine. Theirs.

This is the way.

drdrmc,
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@onepict

CatherineFlick, to random
@CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Hats off to my woke archaeologist friends https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/13/badenoch-condemns-london-plague-study-after-mp-calls-it-woke-archaeology

drdrmc,
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

@CatherineFlick After the initial “yet another researcher abused because someone does not like their conclusions, but what about academic freedom, free speech etc” it has to be said, my next thought was where is the open access version… 🤔 https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/bioarchaeology/article/view/2403

drdrmc, to random
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"AI safety" meet "double Ai enabled facial recognition efforts".

drdrmc, to random
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A number of years ago I had the great pleasure to work with the Furman committee on the “Unlocking Digital Competition” report https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unlocking-digital-competition-report-of-the-digital-competition-expert-panel. There are now concerns new DMCC bill will water down some of the recommendations from the report. We aren’t happy so we wrote a letter, now featured in an FT article https://on.ft.com/3FoWwkX. That it undermines their UK strategy for innovation in AI is doubly concerning. P.S. first reply on Xitter was a crypto bot 🤣

drdrmc,
@drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Now a blog with added context https://drdrmc.github.io/letter/

1br0wn, to ai
@1br0wn@eupolicy.social avatar

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    drdrmc,
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    @1br0wn Wowzer, I now agree with Yann on one thing - that existential risk is way off if ever; but the just plain crappy AI based on scavenged data used to make live changing decisions in companies and govt, by idiots who don’t know what they are doing, yeah regulate the pants off that please.

    drdrmc, to random
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    AI panic hype no. 3141 “AI chatbots could help plan bioweapon attacks, report finds” or maybe not “It it remains an open question whether the capabilities of existing LLMs represent a new level of threat beyond the harmful information that is readily available online,” said the researchers.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/16/ai-chatbots-could-help-plan-bioweapon-attacks-report-finds

    CatherineFlick, (edited ) to gardening
    @CatherineFlick@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    edit: got a few great tips, thank you! Going to learn how to do it myself :D

    Starting to realise that the crowd who pruned our apple trees probably didn’t know wtf they were doing despite being tree surgeons. Anyone got any tips for dealing with excessive water shoots in old apple trees? The RHS site says they’re bad but doesn’t exactly go into detail on how to deal with them. I assume I just get rid of them but what’s stopping them coming back every year?

    drdrmc,
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    @CatherineFlick Probably because it’s really hard work, the craft of root pruning is not widely talked about… except in agriculture where they can just run through the orchard with machinery. It was a concept I was taught in my youth by a very ancient gardener… also, other than peat cutting, a classic use for the Lurgan spade.

    drdrmc, to random
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    Q1. Provide an example of a cartel formed in public view with complete disdain for competition law because of years of lack of enforcement.

    drdrmc, to random
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    « The DWP has told the auditor it is “working to develop its capability to perform a more comprehensive fairness analysis across a wider range of protected characteristics”. »

    This is not an AI issue; this simply indicates they never had a way of reviewing their human processes for bias.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/11/use-of-artificial-intelligence-widened-to-assess-universal-credit-applications-and-tackle

    1br0wn, to ai
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    deleted_by_author

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    drdrmc,
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    @1br0wn AI use in financial services is well established and closely regulated. So why say this? I view this as a shot across the bows for the large scaremongering monopoly corporations who think that predictive text can solve every known problem…

    drdrmc, to random
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    "If we endorse the view that AI is all-powerful, we are endorsing the view that it can alleviate people of responsibility for their actions -- militarily, socioeconomically, whatever," Also points out big tech has been doing this with plain old algorithms for years… https://www.wired.com/story/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-ai-apocalypse/

    drdrmc, to random
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    Ah ha! So Bard AI code generator is deployed by Google to destroy productivity at others companies - bold move. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/19/even_google_warns_its_own/

    drdrmc, to random
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    Let me just fix that for you - “Irresponsible Corporate and Government deployment of…” “AI systems could facilitate housing discrimination, make racist associations, and exclude women from seeing job listings visible to men.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/16/ai-new-laws-powerful-open-source-tools-meta

    drdrmc,
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    @1br0wn It’s worthy of ChatGPT

    1br0wn, to ai
    @1br0wn@eupolicy.social avatar

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    drdrmc,
    @drdrmc@mastodon.me.uk avatar

    @1br0wn I think that quote equally applies to all existing non AI tech!

    drdrmc, to random
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    Whither data protection enforcement in EU and UK? If there’s ever a time to roll out the big fines this has to be it - not least given the retention of data for AI training - seems like quite a topical thing this AI stuff at the moment. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/01/ftc_alexa_ring_amazon_settlement/

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