I work in schools using data to help them manage their operations. Leeds via London.
Morley
Joined August 2012
- Tweets817
- Following269
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- Likes32.5K
Sam retweeted
Zelensky says SpaceX continues to sabotage Ukrainian efforts to defend cities from jet-engine Russian drones following the spat with Trump. While Starlink-guided Ukrainian drones have been capped at 160 km/h speeds inside Ukraine, the same drones tested by Ukrainian personnel can fly at above 180 km/h in EU airspace, he says.
Sam retweeted
BREAKING: 🇫🇷 A major cyberattack has hit supermarket refrigeration systems across France, reportedly causing fresh and frozen food to spoil after hackers remotely manipulated temperature controls.
According to BFMTV, the attack began overnight from Sunday into Monday, targeting older versions of refrigeration-control software supplied by Danish company Danfoss.
The attackers allegedly exploited the systems’ defrosting function, forcing refrigeration equipment to heat continuously instead of keeping products cold. Temperatures were reportedly set as high as 50°C, destroying entire stocks of food within hours.
Several major supermarket chains have been affected, including Intermarché, Super U and E.Leclerc. Metro stores and independent businesses, including butcher shops also have been impacted.
Around 150 Intermarché stores are reportedly affected, according to industry sources cited by BFMTV. The full number of affected locations remains unclear.
The financial damage is already significant. In Haguenau, Alsace, an Intermarché store reportedly lost its entire frozen-food stock, worth approximately €50,000. A nearby Super U allegedly had to discard both fresh and frozen products, with losses estimated at €220,000. An E.Leclerc store in the same town was also affected, although its losses had not yet been calculated.
The combined losses reported at the Intermarché and Super U stores in Haguenau alone amount to around €270,000. Nationwide damage could reach several million euros.
Intermarché reportedly confirmed the incident in an internal communication, warning that several stores had suffered losses of frozen products. Coopérative U also acknowledged the attack and established crisis teams to assist affected stores and coordinate with refrigeration specialists.
Technical investigations are ongoing, and the full extent of the damage has yet to be established.
Authorities and companies are still working to determine the full circumstances of the attack. The identity of the perpetrators has not been confirmed.
Sam retweeted
Asked by The Telegraph whether they remained friends, Ms Speitan said: “Yes, it’s still the case.”
“What was, hasn’t changed,” she said, adding that she believed he had been “targeted” by “the system”.
Riiiight.
Scoop: The Green Party member behind the 'Zionism is racism' vote is close friends with an Al Qaeda terrorist.
Approached by the Telegraph, Lubna Speitan defended Mingh Quang Pham, who is serving a 44-year sentence for plotting a suicide bomb attack on Heathrow.
He had planned to target passengers returning from Israel, using shrapnel dipped in rat poison.
In 2015, Ms Speitan offered to testify in Pham's defence in a US court.
Today she said it was "insulting" and a "character assassination" to ask about her relationship with the convicted terrorist, and claimed it was part of a "mainstream media" plot to discredit her.
Read the full story here (gift link) telegraph.co.uk/gift/9eecdc9…
Sam retweeted
Etihad threatening to sue. UAE reportedly intimating that UK investment could be pulled. A Prime Minister couching any criticisism. If this sorry saga doesn't convince you that state ownership of football clubs should never be allowed, nothing ever will.
Sam retweeted
The disparity between parties spraying around tax cut promises and Britain’s worsening fiscal position is remarkable.
Identifying tax rises/spending cuts is the only credible stance at the moment (until growth improves).
Sam retweeted
Fun post. I think most of the people that travelled this path were/are sincere BUT it's also very funny that there was a moment where they also determined that the money going on insecticide-treated bednets might be better used for extremely generous spending on themselves
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Sam retweeted
Human bricklayers are on notice...
I got to see robot bricklayers first-hand building new homes in the Netherlands. They can lay 1,000 bricks a day - twice as much as a human brickie - and it takes just a couple of months to train a human supervisor
And they're about to launch a pilot in the UK! This could have pretty major implications for construction costs and times
My report for @thetimes thetimes.com/life-style/prop…
Sam retweeted
Actually, it may already be close to the best, since many of the highest performing jurisdictions have massive amounts of private tuition...
Sam retweeted
This was a really moving interview
“Once I saw the TV… I knew the world had changed forever”
Jonathan Egan, whose father and aunt were both killed in the 9/11 attacks, reflects on the personal and global impact of the events 25 years on.
#Newsnight
Sam retweeted
The "others have slipped back" is the critical point. In the face of headwinds (pandemic, smartphones) we have stayed at the same level and others have not. That's a success.
Sam retweeted
Schools have strong incentives to report high GCSE grades. So when coursework/controlled assessments were used, many schools turned Y10/11 into mark collection factories, with children (especially in lower sets) repeating tasks until they hit the target. Soul-destroying for them.
Sam retweeted
There are two ways of improving outcomes. Option 1: Tinker with assessments & qualifications until they show better outcomes. Option 2: Actually ensure more pupils learn more.
I’m worried the reforms coming our way focus on Option 1 instead of Option 2.
I think education should be about what you can do, and not what you can’t do.
Read my full piece in @theobserveruk where I set out my vision for reforming England's education system - from tackling the SEND crisis to reimagining what success looks like beyond exams.
observer.co.uk/news/national…
Sam retweeted
Imagine growing up in absolute dirt poverty in east Tennessee, daughter of a tobacco farmer, going to school wearing rags your mother stitched into a coat, and when you die the British royal family has its military band play your up-the-workers country-pop anthem in tribute.
Sam retweeted
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris sing The Carter Family classic "Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow" (1976)
Sam retweeted
A shocking chart from a new study on student AI use in China. Good grades on homework used to predict good grades on tests. Now, it might mean the opposite. economist.com/graphic-detail…
Sam retweeted
"Fabulist conmen in important national institutions who use libel law to intimidate journalists shouldn't be investigated & exposed because it is likely to cause them significant personal difficulties, & they may respond in extreme ways" is not a sustainable principle.
Sam retweeted
So important that we keep a local planning system and believe in devolution as a country so that the opinions of Leeds MPs don't matter on this. Leeds City Council's decision should be supported. 👍 – at Leeds, England
Sam retweeted
Karoline Leavitt: “The conflict in Iran would be over by now if President Trump had better intelligence.”
