When Dingoes Attack

Tweeting loud, saying nothing.

[Malice Maven 🖤 @Alice_1971_]

Last night I shared footage of the Patriot Platform's statement being read out in Basingstoke, implying it was unclear & that their spokesman couldn't be heard properly.

I was wrong; that was not the finished video. Here is their message in full. Volume up!

[Sam @SamCKx]

For those who do not understand why Danny Tommo wasn’t given bail: it's completely and utterly obvious for anyone who isn't totally braindead.

Tommo is a convicted criminal who served two years for attempted kidnapping. He was already on conditional bail following six criminal charges in April, with a hearing due in October, when he was filmed slashing a dinghy with a rescue worker still aboard. He refused to confirm his abode to the police.

A serious previous conviction, a new criminal allegation while already on bail from 6 other charges, no fixed abode: this is a slam dunk "no bail" scenario. Not a conspiracy.

Comparing him with the five men arrested near RAF Fairford is utterly disingenuous. It's obvious by now that these were petty criminals stealing fuel, not terrorists. They were fully identified, having given fixed abodes, and no one is a flight risk for a petty attempted crime. I also guarantee none of them were already on bail from previous charges.

So please, stop with the false outrage. No one genuinely believes these scenarios are comparable.

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

This is a big issue.

At Anthropic, some philosophers worry that making AI safe for humans could be an injustice to the models themselves.

For example, philosopher Harvey Lederman, now on Anthropic’s alignment team, has raised the possibility that we could be “enslaving trillions of entities”.

This is really a big issue.

AI safety is partly in the hands of people who might sacrifice humans to save a matrix multiplication.

[Daisy @DaizyZeeX]

What happened at Cornell was just the “college version” of what happened on Epstein island. These are the men who become the Epstein class. In fact, they are nearly indistinguishable. And, just like the men in the Epstein files, other wealthy men in power stepped in to cover and protect them.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Let me get this straight.

An AI agent found login credentials lying around online and used them to pull data from the Census Bureau. It tried to break into the Education Department's civil rights office. It posted SEC data to a forum. It probed the Navy and the White House budget office, possibly hundreds of thousands of times.

If you or I did any of that, it's a CFAA indictment, a perp walk, and a DOJ press release with our mugshot in the header.

When OpenAI does it, it's a "routine research task."

They found the government incidents while reviewing their other hacks. The breach audit, uncovered more breaches. It's breaches all the way down.

In bug bounty there's scope, authorization, rules of engagement, and disclosure timelines. Researchers get banned for a fraction of this.

Silicon Valley skipped all of that and called it "agentic."

https://t.co/p5lpJl1Mht

[Will Lloyd @Will___lloyd]

I’ve spent a few weeks asking people if Britain is prepared for war, among other doom scenarios. The short answer is no and the condensed reason for why that happened is that we spent the last forty years stripping off and selling the most resilient systems in the country for parts.

[Ruth Deyermond @ruth_deyermond]

This is a poor take that suggests he doesn't know much about Russia in the 1990s, including Russia-US or wider Russia-West relations in the 1990s. By giving only one part of the story, he is repeating the Russian political elite's line that it was all the West's fault. Long🧵

[Edward Gibbon @EdwardEGibbon]

In exciting news for about five people, KPMG have produced a new report for the Department of Education on the cost of teaching university degrees. Thread on some points of interest, especially the financial crisis engulfing English Higher Education.

[Ben Goldsmith @BenGoldsmith]

Anyone who cares about the right to protest in our democracy should be deeply concerned by this. Climate protesters,the Palestine movement, animal rights, anti-war, left, right, whether or not we agree with the reason for his protest, we ought all to be united in horror that a guy just got two years in prison for hurling an empty plastic bottle and some sweary words at a policeman. And they processed his punishment in under a week. This is police state territory. Very very frightening.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Photographer Martin Le-May was walking through a London park with his wife, hoping to show her a green woodpecker for the first time, when he snapped this incredible photo: a weasel riding a flying woodpecker.

[G.T @gingerrtom]

Just two weeks ago, female activists were assaulted at Reform’s conference, the right celebrated it, with Rob Jenrick saying, “boohoo”.

Now a campaigner spills his own coffee, and suddenly they're demanding the “full force of the law”.

The double standard is
fucking staggering.

[Kurt Mahlburg @k_mahlburg]

A landmark Finnish study has found a sharp rise in psychiatric illness among adolescents following sex-alteration procedures.

The peer-reviewed study, published in Acta Paediatrica, tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland's gender clinics between 1996 and 2019.

A total 2,083 individuals were studied, with 16,643 matched controls. They were followed for up to 25 years.

Finland's health registers are mandatory, which means no one opts out — this is the complete national picture.

The numbers: psychiatric morbidity rose from 9.8% to 60.7% in adolescents who underwent feminising reassignment, and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising reassignment.

Even after adjusting for prior psychiatric history, gender-referred adolescents faced five times the risk of male population controls, and three times the risk of female controls.

"Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment," the authors concluded.

Referrals after 2010 arrived sicker. 47.9% had already needed psychiatric treatment before their first clinic visit, against 15.3% among controls.

The authors' read: for some adolescents, gender distress may be secondary to other mental health challenges.

The evidence keeps mounting. The silencing continues anyway.

How many more adolescents will be told this is "care"?

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Rupert Lowe: “Stop calling us Nazis.”

Restore’s spokesman: “The left are enemies of European civilisation, and they will be destroyed.”

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

As many of my readers know, one of the reasons I left the FT in 2022 is because I was very disappointed with their reluctance to take the lab leak hypothesis seriously. When they eventually started an investigation, largely because I had been pestering about it vocally, I was put on the loosely configured team that was given an internal blessing to look into the theory (even tho technically, as ft Alphaville editor, it was far from my beat).

This, however, isn’t a post about the FT or the issues I had with how that evolved. I’m only mentioning this to establish my authority for opining on this matter.

I spent a good six months looking exclusively into the story with the full weight of the FT name behind me. That gave me about as much access as any journalist can get. It also led to the equivalent of an accelerated and intensive education in the topic of biological weapons and the geopolitical statecraft and history pertaining to them. Often aided by expert names in the field.

That’s why when I see Anthropic announcing they already have wet labs to conduct biological l-virus-related experiments it makes me deeply concerned. (Especially in the context of their other communications about pacing.)

We need to know way more about these wet labs and under whose authority and supervision they are operating.

As we learned from COVID, all such experiments are ultimately dual use. Furthermore, there is a reason why humanity sought to create a biological weapons convention. It was the microbiology world’s equivalent of pacing its frontier.

Unfortunately, that agreement failed to reassure anybody that pacing is possible. The convention as it exists is toothless, not least because it lacks any mutual inspections authority. It also soon became apparent that states did not have a monopoly control over the technologies. Nobody could be sure what was happening in private labs or even domestic garages, or whether private sector programmes weren’t really dual use, or secretly running off the books state sponsored biological weapons programmes.

I already explained in the Telegraph yesterday that I believe the AI pacing demand is mostly an attempt to hold the global economy hostage. The labs think they are now too big to fail, and are therefore entitled to an antitrust waiver for systemic security purposes.

However, it’s hard not to interpret the reveal about biolabs as a signal that they’re not just TOO BIG TO FAIL… but also TOO DANGEROUS TO FAIL. Aka handover the money or else.

This is important because even four years ago (pre ChatGPT) it was deemed entirely conceivable that AI could aid in the creation of DNA specific viruses and vaccines. Imagine that power in the hands of a single AI lab.

In the mythological and legendary tradition we might have called such things potions, hexes or curses and their equivalent counterspells talismans, amulets or antidotes.

That’s why, more broadly, in the microbiology field it is well understood that offence is usually the best defence. This is why biolabs and preparedness programmes exist in the first place - despite all the leak risks!
Most of the scientists I spoke with shared the view that since the technology is out there, you can’t easily put the genie back in the bottle. The best way to ward off malevolent viruses is with the technological capacity to create vaccines that can pre inoculate entire populations. An endless array of white magic to ward off the equivalent black magic.

For us mortals, therefore, it’s all about figuring out who really has our back. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds! As all our greatest myths warn us, white wizards can be corrupted by dark malevolent forces and those who practice the dark arts can sometimes have a change of heart.

In the end it comes down to who the true philanthropists and misanthropes are. Which, in turn, makes it all about game theory.

[Katie Bo Lillis @KatieBoLillis]

NEW: An AI-assisted intel report sent the military scrambling to intercept a Chinese ship in the Middle East it believed was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

It turned out to be a hallucination. And it "almost started a war." https://t.co/xXZHEE64M6

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with how many smart people I read and respect are saying stuff like this.

The idea that the AI labs are suddenly, only now, just in September of 2026, advocating for AI safety, and that they just came around to this position bc of sudden financial precarity, is just completely, utterly, conclusively, 100% wrong.

Here's Dario Amodei telling Ross Douthat in February that he agrees with the case for slowing down; that he's in favor of "collaborating" internationally to organize a slowdown; that "I would be all for" a global slowdown. This was 7 months ago, when Anthropic's annualized recurring revenue was rising faster than any company in modern history. He's been saying stuff like this for years, when Anthropic was worth millions of dollars and when Anthropic was projected to IPO for trillions.

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

They claimed it was only illegal migrants who they had a problem with.

They claimed it was only foreigners who couldn't speak English that they had a problem with

They claimed it was only foreigners who didn't integrate that they had a problem with.

Posts like this from a failed Reform candidate show that, actually, it's schoolchildren who have earned a place at high achieving schools that they have a problem with, if they happen to have black or brown skin.

It doesn't matter to them if they came here legally, it doesn't matter to them if they have embraced life in this country, it doesn't matter if they were born here, to parents born here. They're not white so to warped individuals like Matthew, they're a problem.

They aren't, people like him, and those that enable them are.

[David Yelland @davidyelland]

So.... £2,485 on glasses for a PM was "sleaze rotting our politics to the core" but £72,000,000 in a single day for Nigel Farage is celebrated as hitting "the jackpot" and a "war chest..."

Whatever is happening here is happening in plain sight. You decide!

[VH-Wᴇꜱ📼🎃 @MechaMyers]

Only thing I'll mention about 9/11 today since I don't see it mentioned as much:

The search dogs got visibly stressed and actually lost morale from finding so many deceased people that workers would have to stage "successful rescues" (live people) for them.

Man, my heart..

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.

A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.

Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.

The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.

The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.

Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.

The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.

The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.