Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg) header
Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg) profile picture

Writer: https://teapawt.org/t.co/LXXSTdwts7. Latest novel https://teapawt.org/t.co/O6kYEfDy1e. Digital creative: https://teapawt.org/t.co/F8FONWTXRv. Distributed systems book: https://teapawt.org/t.co/KhSLuUKfS8.

Bristol, Europe
Joined February 2008
Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)Photo by Tim Kindberg (@timkindberg)
Extremely excited! My new novel Future Song is out in July: Near-future Bristol. When the daughter of Laia, a climate refugee, is kidnapped, who can she trust as she desperately searches for her baby girl? "Exciting and unpredictable" Zoe Gilbert
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Don't use AI when you could use a search engine. Have some self respect.
I had real trouble believing that Google was actually doing this, but I just duplicated the result myself. The two queries were about a minute apart and identical except for a single digit.
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Speaking of the egregious rich...
0.1% of people on the planet emit more CO2 than the poorest 3.5 billion people combined. One year’s worth of emissions from the top 1% will result in an estimated 1.3 million excess deaths from extreme heat. Just a few stats from Oxfam's incredible new report.
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UK workers 1% better off in a decade yet the rich have got massively richer. Funny that.
Mindblowing chart from OBR. In 2029 real household disposable income per person expected to be just 1% higher than in 2019. What an unbelievably awful decade. It used to grow by 2%+ every year, not 1% in 10 years.
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One of the strongest arguments against using AI. Instead of consulting widely, people start using a handful of information sources that are often factually wrong and - as in this instance - politically influenced.
Google has specifically prevented its AI tool from telling users who won the 2020 presidential election, even though it happily tells us that Trump won in 2016 and 2024. This sort of political intervention into LLM responses is deeply problematic. (h/t to Charles Mann)
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Is anyone keeping track of which verification kernel is used in these exercises, so that when they find a bug in one of them they know which "proofs" to reassess? If not, they're not proofs. And talking about the number of lines of code instead of insights is just crap.
This morning we are releasing the largest proof in the history of mathematics: A formalization of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (CFSG)! Over 43 million lines of Lean, 715 papers and books, and 100 substantive fixes to the literature, this is truly an enormous theorem. Well done team!
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Tim Kindberg retweeted
Lula victory speech: "We had to overcome foreign interference through digital platforms, which we will have to regulate. We cannot have monstrously huge corporations earning millions & billions, paying no taxes to this country & trying to steer this country's election results."
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So brilliantly put. "The right-wing poor." One of the greatest achievements of contemporary capitalism.
💙🤍❤️ "Le chef-d'œuvre le plus abouti du capitalisme contemporain n'est ni l'iPhone, ni la start-up licorne, ni même le milliardaire visionnaire. Non. Son produit phare, son bijou anthropologique, sa plus belle réussite, c'est le pauvre de droite. Une véritable prouesse sociale, dépouillé matériellement, mais riche en certitudes contre ses propres intérêts. On l'a façonné avec soin. On lui a expliqué que ses problèmes venaient toujours d'en bas ou d'à côté, l'immigré, l'assisté, le fonctionnaire, le chômeur, jamais du haut. On lui a appris à hair l'impôt tout en survivant grâce aux services publics. À défendre les héritiers tout en n'ayant rien à transmettre. À applaudir ceux qui l'écrasent, pourvu qu'ils parlent fort et promettent l'ordre. Le pauvre de droite est une créature fascinante, il vote contre lui-même avec ferveur, persuadé qu'un jour, peut-être, il sera du bon côté de la barrière. Il confond la brutalité avec le courage, l'autoritarisme avec la protection, l'injustice avec le mérite. On lui vend la peur en kit, l'identité en solde, la colère en vrac par abonnement mensuel. À l'aube de ce monde nouveau, les monstres ne surgissent pas des marges : ils montent des urnes, des plateaux télé, des slogans simplistes. Ils prospèrent sur la misère organisée et la lucidité sabotée. Le capitalisme n'a pas seulement produit de la pauvreté ; il a réussi bien pire : la rendre docile, obéissante, hargneuse, et reconnaissante. Un chef-d'œuvre je vous dis !" Maximino Fernández
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So let met get that straight: paying a wealth tax is impossible (“billionaires have no liquidity”, “it would be taxing unrealized gains”, “their wealth is virtual”) but paying half a billion to influence elections is possible. Did I understand well?
Elon Musk has cemented his record as the largest individual political donor in modern American history. Musk poured $446 million of his own money into this year’s midterm elections, mostly aimed at preserving the Republican Party’s control of Congress. wapo.st/4igb5Kq
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If consciousness is computable (i.e. the brain is just an information-processing machine performing a computation) then a Turing machine can compute it. No need for a physical substrate at all - it exists in a Platonic realm. Fight me.
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Tim Kindberg retweeted
It's tonight, #Bristol! A great free event, a great book and great ideas for combatting climate change.
Climate change is here - and in his thrilling novel, Future Song, Tim Kindberg offers a hopeful vision of the future. But can Bristol make it happen? He's talking about it at Shirehampton Library on Thursday, 22 October at 7pm. Come along to this free event - no need to book.
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Tim Kindberg retweeted
A bank windfall tax (£19bn per the Positive Money proposals) could have capitalised the “Energy Wealth Fund”, instead of tying us more tightly into insecure, volatile fossil fuel technology and adding to climate change.
I want Britain’s energy wealth to spark a new wave of clean power. Our decision to approve Jackdaw alongside the new Energy Wealth Fund means we invest in green transition and benefit from our existing natural resources.
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Dirty energy is actually clean energy is today's, erm, gas-lighting.
I want Britain’s energy wealth to spark a new wave of clean power. Our decision to approve Jackdaw alongside the new Energy Wealth Fund means we invest in green transition and benefit from our existing natural resources.
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Fantastic initiatives in Ghent favour delicious plant-based food over meat and cheese. Seems to be enhancing meals for people across the board. Also there's encouraging progress on making plant-based cheese based there. Link in reply.
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Greenlighting Jackdaw is unconscionable. Arguments for: negligible. Against: need for leadership on urgency of reducing carbon emissions. Its against public wishes. @uklabour will lose a lot of support over this. But reprobates who run @Shell will be happy @Miatsf @andyburnham
Government support for drilling at #Jackdaw takes a wrecking ball to any pretence of UK climate leadership & pours fuel on an overheating world - and for what? It’s equivalent to just 2 months of UK gas demand, creates just 27 direct jobs & has *no* impact on energy bills🧵1/4
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This is just silly. Why do people think AI may be conscious if not because it's "intelligent"? It has no other attributes. Do they think spreadsheets might be conscious?
"three reasons why AI isn't conscious." really? "consciousness is not intelligence": not a reason why AI isn't conscious, just rebuts a bad argument for AI consciousness (AI: intelligent therefore conscious). "consciousness is substrate-dependent"/"noncomputational": would be a reason if true, but truth needs to be established. more accurate title: "three reasons why AI might not be conscious". teapawt.org/Nature/status/21121504…
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Unless they think it might be conscious because it uses words we use that convey our consciousness. That would be stupid.
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Tim Kindberg retweeted
Speak to any hard-bitten older farmer around me in Somerset, or anywhere in Britain, and they will tell you that they grew up among fields teeming with corncrakes, grass snakes, hares, hedges full of yellowhammers and other songbirds, car windscreens splattered with bugs after the shortest summer drive, nearly all now gone. 98% of wildflowers, gone. Huge shoals of herring, cod, and other fish in the sea, a distant memory. Across almost every indicator, the losses during just one human lifetime have been catastrophic. The data is all there, as are the anecdotes. Britain is among the most nature-depleted countries on earth.
We are not the most nature depleted country. That's just a myth. We are one of the most human altered countries, i.e. one with the least amount of truly wild places. Our biodiversity is actually quite high for a small country, partly as a result of human intervention.
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Tim Kindberg retweeted
Aftermath of the flooding in Istanbul! Those of you who have been following my account over the last four years will agree with me that this is happening over and over and it's getting worse. I feel sick thinking about what it'll be like in 5/10 years.
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