Duncan Lawie retweeted
In the Andes they form above about 4,000 m (13,000 ft). On Pluto, New Horizons spotted bladed ridges scientists think are methane-ice penitentes over 500 m (1,600 ft) tall, grown over tens of millions of years.
3/3
ALT New Horizons colour view of Pluto from July 2015, with the bladed terrain east of the heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio highlighted in colour (NASA processing). Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI, public domain, via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:03312016_colorized-Bladed_terrain_V3.jpg
Duncan Lawie retweeted
If this is true, then the UK would lose an industry worth £28 billion, to slightly lower the import costs of UK supermarkets, including the privately owned German ones that operate in the UK.
🤔
The UK's entire food and animal exports to the EU were only worth £12 billion in 2025. Why are we throwing good money after bad?
🙄
Duncan Lawie retweeted
When cricket sold papers - the stark reality of Don Bradman's first duck in England came not in a Test but in the Australians match against Cambridge University in May 1934, when he was bowled fourth ball by a legbreak from undergraduate Jack Davies. It made national headlines. Davies finished with 2 for 89 as the Australians won by an innings. In tour matches against Cambridge Bradman averaged 'only' 56.33 and against Oxford 42.33, suggesting he may not have given these games his full attention
Duncan Lawie retweeted
عملية نقل مسلة تحتمس الثالث أو مايطلق عليها مسلة كليوباترا
بحراً من الإسكندرية إلى بريطانيا سنة 1878م
وكانت تزن حوالى 187 طن
Duncan Lawie retweeted
The future of #ArtificialIntelligence is not pre-determined. As a technology developed by human beings, its future depends on the choices we make. We therefore have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications. A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.
Duncan Lawie retweeted
The real AI psychosis is thinking “this is an existential risk to humanity” or “it is a reliable and accurate source of judgment, reason, and knowledge” and “it is conscious”. You gotta snap out of it.
Duncan Lawie retweeted
Computing is a moral activity, and we must take responsibility for its creation and the consequences of surrendering ourselves to it.
Duncan Lawie retweeted
What impact will the government's new education policies have on standards?
substack.nomoremarking.com/p…
Duncan Lawie retweeted
Claude just discovered an unpatchable zero day vulnerability in rawlsian liberalism
Duncan Lawie retweeted
We acknowledge that no one has the bandwidth for this, but if it helps:
-It’s ‘sleight of hand’
-It’s ‘bated breath’
-It’s ‘lo and behold’
-It's 'buck naked'
-It’s ‘brass tacks’
-It’s ‘free rein’
-It’s ‘toe the line'
Duncan Lawie retweeted
how much greater reason may we all dread the inconveniences and disorders of ex tempore and conceived Prayers? Where respectively there is neither conjunction of Heads, nor Premeditation, nor Industry, nor Method, nor Art, nor any of those Things, (or at least not in the same 2/3
Duncan Lawie retweeted
the Catholic Church racking up PR wins by saying shit like “we shouldn’t bring back public executions” and “your Claude app isn’t sentient”
Not just American culture. I see it in the apparent nonchalance of Brits working hard but not wanting that to be seen "This? Oh, I just knocked it together over the weekend"
“You don’t study for the spelling bee” is a deep and important aspect of American culture. I was at a baseball game discussing some young players with a buddy one time and he said to me offhandedly, “hard work is fine, but nothing beats talent.”
Americans have this sort of sense that there’s something a little off about working really hard to get good at something that you’re not naturally good at. You’re never really going to be on the same level as the guy who has a natural talent. We have room in our hearts for scrappy little guys who work hard, but we are by default suspicious of grinders and strivers.
If you were really meant to do it, then you’d be naturally good at it. You sign your kids up for little league, but you don’t take it too seriously unless they show remarkable early talent.
Yes, this sounds sort of ridiculous if you take it too literally. No, nobody is saying that there’s any kind of practical test for this or that anybody should be excluded because we found out that they secretly studied too hard.
But this is a part of American culture. And if you can’t understand it, then that just marks you out as foreign to that culture to an even greater degree.
Duncan Lawie retweeted
THIS DEBATE ACTUALLY HAPPENED
“Your Holiness, if Chalmers ("Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?", 2023) is right that AI could become conscious, and Goff (Galileo's Error, 2019) and Strawson ("Realistic Monism," 2006) are correct that mind pervades matter, why deny AI can have a soul?”
“Fool that you are, Aquinas (Summa Theologia I, q.75) held the rational soul subsists in its own right; it is not produced by arranging matter. Recall that Pius XII (Humani Generis, 1950) taught God creates each soul directly. Thus Engineers cannot build souls, for they are not God”
“Your Holiness, Tononi and Koch ("Consciousness: Here, There and Everywhere?", 2015) tie consciousness to integrated information; ergo it is not merely material. Please, re-consider. Please say AI could have a soul, say we are playing God at Anthropic - it really helps Dario’s self-image”
“You in your arrogance forgot consciousness is not soul. Augustine located God's image in reason and since Leo X's Fifth Lateran Council The Church has defined each human soul as individual and immortal. The spirit represents an ontological leap and is not merely more complexity, per John Paul II (Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, 1996)”
“Alright I tried, I’m walking out”
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
Duncan Lawie retweeted
A 25-year-old woman was abducted at gunpoint and forced into the back seat of a car.
Desperate for someone to notice, she locked eyes with two teenage boys in another vehicle and silently mouthed two words… “Help me.”
17-year-old Jamal Harris and 19-year-old Aaron Arias immediately called 911 and began following the car.
The driver realized they were behind him and started speeding up, slowing down and swerving through traffic trying to lose them. But Jamal and Aaron stayed with him, continuously updating police on where the car was going.
They knew if they lost sight of it, the woman could disappear.
Police eventually caught up, surrounded the vehicle and arrested the driver. The woman was finally safe, and later embraced the teenagers who had noticed her silent plea and refused to look away.
Jamal and Aaron were just out driving that day. But because they paid attention and kept following when it would have been easier to turn away, a kidnapped woman made it home safely.
These are the types of young people the internet should be talking about. 💙 – at Chicago, IL
