Gard Jenset🇳🇴🇬🇧🇮🇹🇺🇦

PhD English linguistics (historical/corpora) from University of Bergen. Former associate prof. Currently data science in industry. Views are my own.

[Joakim 🌹🇳🇴🇪🇺 @joakial_]

Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre:

The fallen, their next of kin, and those who served in Afghanistan deserve to be spoken of with truth and respect. The statement made by the President of the United States is disrespectful. I fully understand why both veterans and bereaved families are reacting strongly to this.

NATO allies stood together in Afghanistan for twenty years. Approximately 10,000 Norwegian women and men served in the country. Ten Norwegian soldiers lost their lives, and several were wounded. They fought in an operation that we, as political leaders, decided that Norway should take part in. They stood side by side with soldiers from, among others, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States. They deserve our gratitude.

The photograph below shows the guard of honour at Kabul International Airport in August 2021. Norwegian soldiers played a key role in operating the field hospital at the airport, which provided invaluable assistance to wounded allies and Afghans in the final phase of the mission. Alongside the American flag, the Norwegian flag was the last to be lowered when the final Norwegian soldiers left the country in the early hours of Monday, 30 August 2021. Norwegian soldiers remained until the very end in Kabul, shoulder to shoulder with our American allies.

Photo: The Norwegian Armed Forces

[Darth Putin @DarthPutinKGB]

Apparently people are surprised that a man whose only friends on the world stage are a KGB agent & a North Korean Stalinist planned to unleash a murderous secret police on his population.

Looking back, there were signs

[Preben Aavitsland @Prebens]

And if you storm the US Capitol?

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

BREAKING!!! Trump has arrived in Greenland

[Lakshya Jain @lxeagle17]

OK, so as someone who works on this stuff daily, here's my take on LLMs for coding: There are some things they're really good at and some things they're really bad at, and knowing where to draw the line on how to use them is the key.

I remain astounded by how incredible LLMs are for my productivity. I have to manage multiple engineers and write a ton of code on a daily basis. AI just makes my life a lot easier, because of three things:

1) It's really good at writing boilerplate code that you *need* (read and write to this AWS resource, create an SFTP client for me, etc). It's also extremely good at doing regimented tasks with minimal complexity (generate test cases, etc).

2) It's extremely good at finding (coding) packages that you didn't know existed. Python, Java etc are just oceans of libraries at this point, and the documentation for a lot of them is fairly sparse and shoddy, and exists as a Frankenstein's Monster across multiple websites and forums. No sane person has the time to read this.

3) It's amazing at helping you debug — whether through parsing large volumes of logs, or through processing errors for complex pipelines and suggesting solutions. You have to be pretty careful with prompts here, but if you know how to prompt it, the gains are immense. Things that used to take me 5-6 hours to debug now sometimes take minutes.

BUT: it's really bad at one major thing.

AI is horrible — and I mean *HORRIBLE* — at generating complex pieces of code and logic. A hallmark of AI-generated code is that it yields insanely long and unnecessarily convoluted blocks, with a ton of emojis.

If you ever ask it to do something open-ended and semi-complex, be ready for your work to swell by 5x. (In the process, it'll also generate a couple very nasty bugs.)

I'm pretty okay with senior, staff and principal software engineers using a lot of AI to speed them up. At this point, those folks have been coding at a high level for years, and it's second nature for them. Exceptions always exist, but they're generally very aware of where it can go wrong, and how.

I'm less patient with inexperienced engineers doing this, because they tend to blindly use AI to generate volumes of code and think "Lots of Code = Good". What this usually results in is bugs that eventually get exposed, which the rest of us then have to clean up. Moreover, they don't learn much from this, and so they're not building any muscle memory or making any real progress.

[toomas hendrik ilves @IlvesToomas]

These are the most shameful and dishonorable comments one could possibly make about those who came to America's assistance and sacrificed for you.

[А. Z. Fоrеmаn: Seriouѕ Рhіlоlоgy, Ѕіlly Веhаvіоr @azforeman]

This is undoubtedly true. This captures a reality that many people haven't yet come to terms with: artificial intelligence is not merely an assistant for writing—it may become a default writer. And the implications of this are far more profound than most assume. People who haven’t seriously experimented with AI tools don't realize just how powerful and seamless they already are. They still imagine the clunkiness and hilarious shibboleths of older iterations of ChatGPT rather than a system capable of managing nuance and register, producing emails, marketing copy, technical documentation, code that is indistinguishable—sometimes superior—to what most humans can produce, essays and even moving artistic prose.

This gap in understanding is one of the most dangerous aspects of the current AI debate. Much of the public discourse about AI in writing and education remains caught up in surface-level concerns: plagiarism, productivity, efficiency. But what is really at stake is cognitive atrophy. Writing is not just a way of communicating ideas—it is a tool for forming them. When we write, we clarify, confront contradictions, wrestle with uncertainty. We slow down and think. The act of drafting, revising, structuring—these are exercises in reflection, logic, imagination, and self-discipline. When AI takes over that process, those mental muscles atrophy.

What we’re likely to see is a split, not unlike the one we've seen in other domains touched by automation. Just as very few people today understand how their smartphones work, or how to fix a car, or how to do long division by hand, very few people will understand how to craft a persuasive argument, or a nuanced narrative, or a logical sequence of ideas. Writing will become a specialized skill, like glassblowing or Latin verse composition—taught for cultural reasons, practiced by a few artisans, but functionally irrelevant for the average person. And this is not just about losing a skill. It’s about losing a way of being.

Even in education, where writing is likely to remain a requirement for some time, students may come to see it as an alien ritual like doing long division, something artificially imposed on them in contrast to how things are really done in the world. After all, if every adult they know uses AI to write, why should they view writing as a personal or valuable act? The result is that the skill and the habit will gradually disappear. And with it, the kind of independent, critical, recursive thinking that writing fosters.

This worry is well-founded. More people should be taking it seriously. The issue isn't just whether AI is “cheating” or whether it can help us write faster—it’s whether we are prepared to give up the kind of thinking that only writing teaches us to do.

Every sentence before this one was actually written by an AI. I'm not kidding. This paragraph is the only thing I'm typing myself. Think about that for a moment.

[York Minster @York_Minster]

On Palm Sunday Christians commemorate Jesus Christ's entry into Jerusalem, ahead of his death and glorious resurrection later in Holy Week.

We are blessed to be joined today by The Reverend Canon James Walters (@LSEChaplain), who will give the sermon at Sung Eucharist.
🧵

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

So to be clear, the current Trump administration plan is now to let China do advanced electronics manufacturing while we “reshore”…textiles and coffee production?

[Gard Jenset🇳🇴🇬🇧🇮🇹🇺🇦 @gjenset]

The exact same playbook as the Brexit discourse: first, it was "leaving the EU will make us more prosperous". Then, whenever someone pushed back on that narrative (now decisively falsified), they would praise the patriotic virtue of making ourselves poorer.

[Jay Nordlinger @jaynordlinger]

How quickly they went from, “Tariffs will be a bonanza for our country, resulting in a golden age of prosperity,” to, “Paying higher prices and tolerating shrunken 401(k)s is patriotic.” Economic nationalism is a snare and a delusion. People should stop falling for it.

[dave johnston 🇺🇦🇬🇪🇮🇱🇲🇩 @davejohnston556]

@mhmck

[Raphael Glucksmann @rglucks1]

Dear Americans,

Since the White House press secretary is attacking me today, I wanted to tell you this ⤵️

[PanEuropeanMovement @EuropeanPan]

Today in Europe:

Serbians🇷🇸 rallied against their govt.

Hungarians🇭🇺 rallied against their govt.

Romanians🇷🇴 rallied in favour of the EU.

Italians🇮🇹 rallied in favour of the EU.

Georgians🇬🇪 rallied against their govt and in favour of the EU.

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

"no one has died" because of feeding USAID to the woodchipper, Elon claimed. In this devastating piece the NYT went out and learned some of their names and stories:

[No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC]

The stock market is tanking so badly it almost feels like we are being governed by someone who went bankrupt six tim—

Oh.

[Andrea C. Love, PhD @dr_andrealove]

I can’t believe this needs to be said.

TransGENIC mice

are not

TransGENDER mice

[toomas hendrik ilves @IlvesToomas]

Estonia is a small country but for our population our losses were up there with US's and UK's.

As president I went to every funeral.

You can write off Trump's inanities to IQ but a man with a Yale law degree says this???

What an absolutely disgusting thing to say.

Apologise.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Trump's demands to Zelenskyy (the defender):

1) Formal apology
2) Give up the minerals
3) Hold elections even though Ukrainian law forbids it
4) Declare Russia as the non-aggressor
5) Give up all the temporarily occupied territories to Russia

Trump's demands to Putin (the aggressor):

Absolutely nothing.

This cannot be stressed enough - Trump is allied with Putin.

[Liz Cheney @Liz_Cheney]

Here is some truth: Putin invaded Ukraine. NATO is the most successful military alliance in history. Since 1945, American leadership has ensured freedom and security for ourselves and millions of others around the world. Together with our allies, we defeated the Soviet Union—an empire so evil it had to build gulags and walls to keep its own people in. Destroying America’s alliances and abandoning the cause of freedom is morally and strategically indefensible. Putin will pocket Trump’s naive concessions and demand much more. Appeasement makes a wider war more likely, not less.

@realDonaldTrump, @JDVance, and @elonmusk have made clear who they are. Only fools—or Kremlin tools—would abandon NATO, side with Russia, and demand Ukraine surrender in the face of Putin’s brutal aggression.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Three years ago, Russia launched a brutal and unprovoked invasion on Ukraine. They did not succeed taking the country thanks to heroic ongoing defending from Ukrainians.

The war on Ukraine is a war on Europe. I stand with Ukraine.

Time for Europe to step up its support.