Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 1d

How the UK Supreme Court is gradually taking the Human Rights Act out of major rulings

London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 2d

‘None of this is being done in secret – the judgments are public – but the changes have barely registered. Judges, whether serving or retired, tend not to speak out. Barristers know on which side their bread is buttered.’

Conor Gearty on the Human Rights Act: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Conor Gearty · Unwelcome Remnant: Erasing the Human Rights Act

The Supreme Court is quietly editing the Human Rights Act out of existence. None of this is being done in secret – the...

www.lrb.co.uk

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

also excellent sound design which made the subject matter ring true (as in tinnitus).

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 5d

Saw Tuner - the surprise film the London Film Festival last night - would recommend. it is actually about a piano tuner. Takes you on a journey that ends in a satisfying place (not common I find). Very tightly written too.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 8d

This is also not to claim that the first response you get from a LLM is typically all that good - or that they're great for discovery generally. But if I need a reminder of something I *know* but can't quite retrieve, repeated prompting will usually get me there eventually.

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 8d

And yes, I know that the integration of AI responses into search engines is one of the reasons why they're steadily becoming worse and worse.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 8d

Not sure I've seen it mentioned elsewhere, but at least one driver of increased use of LLMs is the continuing degeneration of internet search engines of a way of finding anything useful.

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Reposted by Naomi Colvin

EuropeanPowell @europeanpowell.bsky.social · 8d

⚠️Three-quarters of UK police forces refuse to say if they even have a contract with Palantir.
Read that back.
The head of the UK branch of Palantir is Louis Mosely, grandson of British Fascist Oswald Mosely.
goodlawproject.org/uk-police-fo...

UK police forces dodge questions on Palantir | Good Law Project

After Leicestershire Police removed details of a deal with the controversial US spy-tech firm, three quarters of UK police forces refuse to say if they even have a contract with Palantir.

goodlawproject.org

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 9d

Rule Britiannia!

Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 9d

Another astonishing sign of incredible incompetence from the UK Conservatives. They can’t even get right the name of the country they want to represent.
(Image via LBC political editor Natasha Clark)

Promo bar of chocolate saying
"When Labour negotiates,
Britian loses"

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 10d

Not taking a ride on the One Battle After Another hype wagon. Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro are excellent in it, however.

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 10d

This government would probably have proscribed the Greenham Common camp

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 10d

Protest is a right, not a privilege.

Labour seem to be inviting Reform to outflank them on civil liberties. Bizarre.

Paul Brand @paulbrand.bsky.social · 10d

Home Secretary tells Sky News that “there is a gap in the law” when it comes to frequent, repeated protests on the same issue. Hence she will be giving police greater powers to move them to another location or time.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 11d

Hard not to conclude that Polanski has been extremely successful in raising the profile of the Greens also

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 11d

I can absolutely see this happening. A cooperation agreement between Polanski’s Greens and the independent Muslim candidates who did so well last time would see Labour kicked out of swathes of London constituencies.

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 11d

Greens ‘on track’ to supplant Labour as favourite party in London, says Zack Polanski

Exclusive: poll asked voters to rank parties on how favourably they felt about them, with strong support in capital and among younger voters The Greens are viewed more favourably than any other party in London and among younger voters, polling produced for the party has shown, with its leader, Zack Polanski, saying this showed they were “on track” to supplant Labour. The YouGov poll, carried out to coincide with the Greens’ ongoing annual conference in Bournemouth, asked voters in England to rank the five main parties in order of how favourably they felt about them, rather than the usual metric of which they planned to vote for. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Naomi Colvin

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 12d

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com today on how the broader slopification of social media has led to an almost 10% drop in time spent on platforms worldwide. Except in the US, where consumption of "extreme rhetoric, engagement bait and slop" has continued to rise.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

The AI Safety people call this dynamic gradual disempowerment, and they're right to identify it as pernicious. I think it's one of the more realistic harms we're facing in the current technological moment, in fact.

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

And then the reliance on LLMs in education is compounded by all the flaws in the way these systems work, as @edzitron.com describes.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

This is already happening in education, where teachers are having to adjust to a world in which students are using LLMs for everything and not necessarily in ways that are conducive to students being able to formulate arguments independently.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

However, in this case - because experience actually helps people get better at doing stuff - we're actually setting up a situation where there will not be that store of expertise to draw on in order to do things properly in the future.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

Naturally short sighted corporate decision making that weights cost cutting over quality output is part of this. Training people up costs money.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

I also find this take a bit complacent, if I'm totally honest, because even job losses *today* don't account for the problems we're storing up for the future. I'm thinking of trainee/first job roles in particular.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

Basically, I don't really buy the argument that AI is not already cannibalising actual jobs that people do to play the rent. I think a lot of recent grads looking for entry level roles in texty occuptions would be able to pay testament to this.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

However - the fact that the AI labs not making money does not mean that they are not already destroying value.

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

Finally got around to reading @edzitron.com's (huge!) Case Against Generative AI what he says about bonkers circular economics of the gen AI industry is compeling and more than worth your time. www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

The Case Against Generative AI

Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - First It Giveth Before we go any further: This is, for the third time this year, the longest newsletter I've ever written, weighing in somewhere around 18,500 wo...

www.wheresyoured.at

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Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

The Met thing is here: news.sky.com/story/met-po...

Met Police calls for protest against Palestine Action ban to be cancelled after Manchester synagogue attack

Police say they want to deploy every available officer to protect Jewish communities, but are instead having to prepare for Saturday's planned gathering in London's Trafalgar Square.

news.sky.com

Naomi Colvin @auerfeld.bsky.social · 12d

Even in those cases, as person will have no doubt been involved in data curation, filtering, preprocessing etc.

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