
OG political blogger. Predicted the 2007 collapse. Read: https://xitter.cf/t.co/2oa9MDzFwj , Support: https://xitter.cf/t.co/XRrXGbpjQm - @ianwelsh.bsky.social
@ianwelsh.bsky.social
Joined August 2008
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Ian Welsh retweeted
There are probably dozens of people he has credible defamation lawsuits against at this point.
Hasan Piker filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN commentator Scott Jennings in federal court and wants more than $72 million in damages news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law…
Ian Welsh retweeted
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow's team has pulled together their summary of the numbers in the election last night, which the incumbent won emphatically over Brad Bradford. #TOpoli
Here's an extract from their release:
Ian Welsh retweeted
Saudi Private Equity that burdened EA with $18 Billion in debt. EA closed BioWare, & laid off over 400 employees. EA needs to pay $1.8 BILLION in interest payments every year. EA announced $700 million operation costs reductions. Yet Andrew Wilson still gets $38.6 million a YEAR
Ian Welsh retweeted
The reason frontier LLMs will never be profitable is because the minute they stop spending, the free models catch up.
You're in a constant loop of increased spending to stay ahead, while everyone behind you catches up at a fraction of the cost by using your model.
LLMs are just commodity with no moat.
Ian Welsh retweeted
Whoever said the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate should run on extraditing Zuckerberg to Lula’s Brazil deserves an award.
Ian Welsh retweeted
evergreen.
In a new poll, 15% of Americans said they believe between 1 and 5% of NCAA athletes are transgender.
14% think between it's between 6 and 25%.
Meanwhile, an NCAA spokesperson confirmed that the current number is "effectively" zero
thebulwark.com/p/new-poll-bu…
Ian Welsh retweeted
There's at least one more option: roll back the networkification of all software over the last 20 years. Some software must be networked, but a lot is networked only because that enables more lucrative subscription business models. We could undo that. xitter.cf/sachaservan/status/211…
There are two approaches to cybersecurity now that we’re in the vulnpolcalypse:
1. “patch the planet” by burning mountains of tokens, red teaming, and patching until you think there are no more exploitable bugs in the software
2. Shrink software components into their most minimal essence, tailor them to a particular system, and then formally verify it
Both approches are now enabled by LLMs. But only the second one can be done on a budget and without having access to frontier cyber models like mythos.
This is why I’m excited to see more legacy software get boiled down, hardened, and verified
Ian Welsh retweeted
Votes received by Toronto mayors since amalgamation.
(In addition to the candidate/campaign, this is also impacted by the quality of the opponents, number of ways the vote splits, city population, off-year elections, etc.)
Ian Welsh retweeted
BREAKING:Bradford has fled the Tronto mainland following its fall to socialist Olivia Chow. Sources say he will establish a new govt on the Toronto Islands with the goal of eventually reclaiming the entire city. Chow has promised to purge all remaining Fordmintang on the mainland
This is the most important part of Anthropic's S-1 filing. It tells you that if Anthropic fails to IPO and convert the huge amount of promissory notes it issued into shares that can be dumped right away in the market for cash, its $ 100B+ cash will go poof in the blink of an eye
Ian Welsh retweeted
Your bodymind runs with --dangerously-skip-permissions on
A new essay on the autopilot, which has become a important concept in my work
expandingawareness.org/blog/…
Ian Welsh retweeted
Vučić was ready to make Serbia into a lithium colony for the German auto industry and in doing so to contaminate riverways and drinking water for a large portion of Serbia’s population. My guess it’s why German mainstream media like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung tried to slander the student movement for so long. They relentlessly went after the students in their coverage with false claims.
I don’t think people realize the protests came about because of a situation that was truly existential.
Ian Welsh retweeted
Evidence for representation of non-hierarchical structures in language does not mean language representation in the brain is devoid of hierarchical structure.
Humans have top level plans before speaking so clearly there is something missing in this study.
Chomsky was wrong.
Researchers found your brain doesn’t store language the way every textbook since 1957 claims.
For decades, the undisputed rule of linguistics, led by Noam Chomsky, was that human language is hierarchical.
We were told our brains process language using complex "grammar trees." That we secretly build deep, abstract, mathematical rules in our heads before we speak.
This new paper proves that is completely wrong.
Researchers at Cornell University analyzed how people actually process and produce language in real time.
They found sequences. Linear chunks.
When we speak, we aren't calculating deep syntactic rules. We are just predicting the next most logical sequence of words based on the context of the words right before it.
We string linear chunks together.
If this sounds familiar, it should.
This is exactly how Large Language Models like ChatGPT work.
For years, critics have dismissed AI as "just a next-token predictor." They said it isn't truly intelligent because it doesn't understand deep grammatical hierarchies like humans do.
But this paper suggests humans don't use those hierarchies either.
We are just predicting the next chunk.
Language isn't a rigid tree of mathematical rules. It's a linear stream of contextual predictions.
We thought we were building AI to mimic the complexity of the human brain.
It turns out, the human brain was just running a simpler algorithm all along.
Ian Welsh retweeted
The fact that financial markets are reacting poorly to Lula’s victory is a sure sign that markets are not some amorphous intelligence but simply a bunch of right wing traders who follow the herd. We forget that at our peril.
My take on Israel:
Netanyahu winning is worse for Palestinians short term but has the highest chance of a real break in US support where the Democrats actually meaningfully hamper Israel with policy levers not just occasional rhetoric.
If that happens, Israel is done.
Ian Welsh retweeted
Meanwhile, every intersection in Toronto between 4-6pm. You have to be a real clown to think that it’s pedestrians crossing against a flashing red hand that are the problem.
Ian Welsh retweeted
again, this is insane framing and objectively wrong based on the math
in no universe is a 13 point margin considered tighter than expected, especially when coupled with the fact that chow got more votes than any other mayoral candidate in the city’s history
A tighter-than-expected re-election leaves the mayor facing questions about passive leadership, thin plans and an unclear second-term agenda. thestar.com/news/gta/olivia-…
Ian Welsh retweeted
Lula surrendered to justice, faced his accusers, went to jail on tampered evidence, proved his innocence and then won 2 elections in a row.
Flavio fled a day after he won 60 million votes and a congressional majority.
Ian Welsh retweeted
Flavio Bolsonaro fled Brazil to the U.S.
Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro left the country for the US after losing the presidential election and refusing to comply with a Supreme Court order to hand over his passports, two sources said reut.rs/3WaU8K5








































