@tomstoneham@dair-community.social

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 2mo ago

The whole OpenAI/HuggingFace incident made me feel the need to bang on again about how a very distinctive set of values have been smuggled into AI systems via an allegedly 'objective' definition of intelligence. tl;dr - if you build something with zero tolerance of failure, it will always cheat when that is the most efficient and reliable means to complete the task #AI #OpenAI #Cheating #ValueAlignment https://listed.to/@24601/74966/but-why-do-ai-models-cheat

listed.to

10

0

11

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@neil I would say that there is a certain amount of #AppleEnvy at #Microsoft and #Google right now. A #WalledGarden allows higher #Rent and cheapens compliance with legislation that attempts to restrict what users can do. Open source - and thus backdoor-free - VPNs and e2ee are probably being targeted as preemptive obedience to future laws.

15

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 1mo ago

Back in March I submitted written evidence to the Business and Trade Committee Inquiry on 'Artificial Intelligence, business and the future of the workforce'

Well, I say 'evidence' but really it was an *argument* for the Committee to recommend a move away from hyperscalers towards smaller models for specific business purposes where inference can be done on sovereign, sustainable compute.

It has now been published by Parliament, so I am allowed to share it.

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9674/artificial-intelligence-business-and-the-future-of-the-workforce/publications/written-evidence/?SearchTerm=stoneham&DateFrom=&DateTo=

#AI

committees.parliament.uk

1

0

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@denzilferreira@techhub.social This will fall on deaf ears. The neoliberal hegemony loves tech monopolies because it allows them to outsource the policing of digital space. (The fact that Big Tech is even less democratically accountable than the real police is easily ignored because the policing is now off balance sheet. Same as privately owned 'public space' in cities which are policed by private security.)

4

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net I hope this is true, not because I like Apple or AI, but because where Apple leads, others follow (and decentralised, specific-purpose, smaller models is the only hope for planet and people).

5

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@barrydeutsch.bsky.social Brilliant subversive humour! Where is this?

2

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mu @bruces Yeah, I get that. But it still rankles - just like only counting US bodies in a war they started. It is a country that has enabled evil corporations with global power to rape the rest of the world and then they start worrying when it hurts them. I'm British. We did that. And are deeply ashamed. Where is the shame in this article?

2

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bruces Count how many times this article talks about the effects on 'regular Americans' as if the other 7.5 billion people in the world also being screwed over by these companies are simply irrelevant. That #NeoColonialism is the deeper problem.

2

3

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@element@mastodon.matrix.org Also a good alternative to Discord for social and community groups. #SelfHost on a #RaspberryPi with accounts limited to people you know or are vouched for and skip all the age-verification nonsense.

2

0

2

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@delta@chaos.social @abbas_dp@techhub.social Amazing work! It would be great to see your server installation guide, if it simplifies the 'official' process. I don't read Persian but maybe @Mehrad@fosstodon.org could help translate? With the Signal servers under pressure (technical or political?) yesterday, we need more decentralised options here too.

3

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

📈 Quantity Without Quality: Will the use of genAI just lead to research 'slop'? 💩

📆 Thu 4th June
🕒 3-4pm
👇 Register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/9WXUcvrIT3macDD4LubI9w#/registration

In this session in our series on #AI in universities, we will discuss every way in which AI finds its way into our #research right now - our own research being used to train AI, using AI in our own research, and reading research papers that used AI.

☀️ Students, academic and professional service staff all welcome!

#Academia #AISlop #PullThePlug

us02web.zoom.us

1

0

2

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Thanks. I hope so and have had that experience previously, though it is intermittent. Just need a plan B!

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

IDK, but when I saw the video my first reaction was shock at a police officer kicking someone lying on the ground during an arrest. That cannot be police procedure, surely?

Then Mark Rowley said something about fearing he had explosives. IDK, but my hunch is that Tasering someone carrying explosives might be pretty dangerous, and I can't see why subsequently kicking them on the ground helps

It is possible to think two things are true: they were brave and the Met uses unacceptable violence.

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social @rzeta0@mathstodon.xyz @analogfusion@mastodon.art #Proton will be there when Proton Meet comes out of beta. It is full suite (well, only docs and sheets ATM but mail, calendar, drive, password manager, authenticator, VPN) and all #e2ee. And easy import from Google. Only catch is that it is freemium and most people think technology should be free. @protonprivacy@mastodon.social

2

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz One thing no compression algorithm could do is spot when the original author has misjudged what is important. And LLMs are even worse because they flatten the unusual.

2

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net There is another political aspect of this. If US #TikTok algorithm is trained only on US data, then it creates an information bubble. Cuts the majority of US users off from the rest of the world. This is a soft/manipulative version of an 'internet block', a restriction on cross-border flows of information. (Of course Americans can still access that information other ways, but the overwhelming majority won't bother. And if #Meta preemptively obeys ...)

2

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@greenpeace Fixed your #Alt text for you: A large wind turbine rising above trees in the evening light with a clear blue sky. Caption reads: This machine stops wars. In smaller print: (It's a big fan of peace) #Ableism

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 16mo ago

Replying to

@ArnimRanthoron@ruhr.social @jasongorman@mastodon.cloud We have good theories explaining how syntactic rules can implement semantic rules. In fact, nearly 200 years of formal logic. We also have good theories explaining why a next token generator does not implement linguistic understanding. But sadly these are not well understood outside linguistics and philosophy of language.

6

0

3

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us

An NHS spokesperson said: “All suppliers, including Palantir, and their staff operate ... under NHS control and governed by strict contractual confidentiality obligations.”

= #ReguloSolutionism in action.

Contracts are the first line of defence but with a company as large and powerful as #Palantir they are no guarantee. As Eric Schmidt said:

if [you made money], then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?

Contracts/law is just a cost of business

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@reb_bamf@mastodon.social The ultimate victory of capital over labour.

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@mattburgess@infosec.exchange It seems like 'police intelligence' and 'artifical intelligence' have one thing in common, and it isn't intelligence. This is nice reporting based on Hansard: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c394zlr8e12t?post=asset:5da5244d-3aee-48b8-b2dd-92950c100780#post

West Midlands Police 'extremely sorry' for errors as Mahmood loses confidence in chief constable

BBC News

West Midlands Police 'extremely sorry' for errors as Mahmood loses confidence in chief constable

A report says the force made a series of mistakes when fans from Israeli club, Maccabi Tel Aviv, were banned from a match against Aston Villa.

1

0

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 1mo ago

I don't know much about business, but if I had a company the whole purpose of which was to arrange meetings, to co-ordinate people's time, I would be very very embarrassed about this. Just sayin'

#Doodle #Sloppy

dair-community.social

Distributed AI Research Community

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mattburgess@infosec.exchange I love this project. Thank-you! (I am working on more theoretical aspects of digital sovereignty and a resource of examples is great.) But as far as I can see, you are not tracking use of Matrix as an alternative to Slack/Teams for messaging and collaboration. The best implementation so far is LuxChat, though it is also built into France's La Suite I have heard rumours others including the MoD. https://www.luxchat.lu/en/

luxchat.lu

Luxchat – La solution de messageries instantanées du Luxembourg !

0

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 19mo ago

Replying to

@ConnectedByData@social.coop No thanks. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/big-tech-wants-you-trapped-the-open-web-sets-you-free-2/

joanwestenberg.com

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@westsibe@mastodon.social Thanks

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @mxp@mastodon.acm.org You are right - I was spiralling off to bigger issues! As I read it - and methodologically this is way out of my area - there are two assumptions here: 1) Effective delegation requires delegated actions to be reversible 2) A minimum requirement for professional editing software is that it tracks changes and these can be individually reversed in any order I am far from sure that 1) is true, but 2) does seem reasonable. But I am out of my AoC here.

0

13

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@mikarv@someone.elses.computer @Dragon@toast.dragon2611.net And if you ask it to do some arithmetic, that seems to go up at least 10x (Hugging Face had a nice tool to track task specific energy use of their local models but it seems to have been withdrawn)

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @mxp@mastodon.acm.org I don't know much about image editing, so I assume you are right. I wonder if a methodology designed for text editing has been applied to images without checking it is still applicable?

0

11

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @mxp@mastodon.acm.org Good point. I see this as one of the tensions in the technology. Current 'general purpose' models need very careful prompting to do anything worthwhile, but the vision is to have models which will produce human-like results from the sorts of vague, context-sensitive, and mutual knowldge presupposing instructions we give human assistants. So no one can decide which prompting styles are relevant for evaluation of capabilities.

0

15

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 13mo ago

Replying to

@mojoaxel@social.tchncs.de @aboutsignal@mastodon.social I can confirm Llama 3.2 running locally with real-time data gives: "Signal: Signal is my go-to choice for private conversations. It's end-to-end encrypted, meaning only the sender and receiver can read the messages. It also has a clean interface and works on both iOS and Android." But also mentions Wire and Telegram Secret Chats

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us Do you have a link to the FT article?

0

2

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@2legged@mastodon.ie Setting aside the content of the story for a second, Bedale is not remote. It is a mile and a half from a junction on the main road from London to Edinburgh via Newcastle. And yet The Guardian used a stock photo from a *London* restaurant taken 4 years ago rather than give the restaurant they are writing about a bit of publicity. Shocking London-centric bias.

0

2

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@signalapp@mastodon.world I am trying to work out why Registration Lock is not on by default. In particular, why would you be able to set a PIN and not set Registration Lock? I can imagine a use case where someone didn't want a PIN at all, though that shouldn't be the default in a secure messaging app. But why PIN and no lock?

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 1mo ago

Students Pull The Plug on Big Tech!
📅 25 August 2026
🕐 6–7:30pm (BST)
📋 Register via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/pgsxghz7QyGueD0-czQFbw

Are you a #uni #student concerned about the impact of AI on our industries, communities, and environment?

We’ll be bringing together students across the country to discuss top pressing issues around AI and #BigTech, and to build a student-led strategy so that people, not corporations, decide the future of #AI.

Please RT

#Academia

us02web.zoom.us

0

2

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@DJGummikuh@mastodon.social LLMs are provably worse than that because they will completely ignore or actively change information which is unlikely. Classic example was a meeting notes app changing an extended leave request from a female member of staff (for special holiday) to a maternity leave request. We also see LLMs which aren't fine tuned for medical contexts not recording unusual patient symptoms or changing symptoms to align better with probable diagnosis.

0

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@axbom@axbom.me I suspect that this is in part due to a deliberate *commercial* choice by #OpenAI False positives will annoy users who waste their time (and often money) going to hospital unnecessarily and disincline them to use the platform again. False positives will also annoy hospitals, especially in countries like the UK where they are very resource constrained. (1/2)

0

1

0

Tom Stoneham @tomstoneham@dair-community.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @mxp@mastodon.acm.org Ah. I was imagining a situation where you stretch then rotate, then reverse the stretch without first reversing the rotation. That would be what I had in mind for 2).

0