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James Ball

@jamesrball.com

1.4k Following60.8k Followers

Political editor @ The New World
Opinion @ The i Paper
Fellow @ Tech Policy Press
Fellow @ Demos
PhD researcher @ UCL Laws
newsletter @ techtris

Latest book: The Other Pandemic – How QAnon Contaminated The World. 🏳️‍🌈
https://www.jamesrball.com/

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@jamesrball.comOct 12, 2026, 8:09 AM

If you want to encourage growth via green industries, your subsidies should be predictable and stable! And we are doing the opposite of that.

@jamesrball.comOct 12, 2026, 8:08 AM

Incredibly frustrating policy, if confirmed

@jamesrball.comOct 12, 2026, 7:53 AM

Good summary as to why That One Graph isn't saying very much. l

@jamesrball.comOct 12, 2026, 1:40 AMReposted by @jamesrball.com

Just feels like we could easily have this turn into one of this things "everyone knows" that we have no idea was actually true or not. Actual reporting would be lovely, if there's any out there? (The Elon getting mad at Zelensky thing was a reply about refineries, not data centres, btw)

@jamesrball.comOct 12, 2026, 1:36 AMReposted by @jamesrball.com

Little worried we've just memed the whole "all the bots stopped after the data centre was bombed" thing into existence. Like, it's nice to have nice things but don't think I've seen much more than "I read some comment threads and there ere fewer bots than normal" as evidence. Maybe I've missed it?

@carlbergstrom.comOct 11, 2026, 8:25 PMReposted by @jamesrball.com

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

@jamesrball.comOct 12, 2026, 1:40 AM

Just feels like we could easily have this turn into one of this things "everyone knows" that we have no idea was actually true or not. Actual reporting would be lovely, if there's any out there? (The Elon getting mad at Zelensky thing was a reply about refineries, not data centres, btw)

@jamesrball.comOct 12, 2026, 1:36 AM

Little worried we've just memed the whole "all the bots stopped after the data centre was bombed" thing into existence. Like, it's nice to have nice things but don't think I've seen much more than "I read some comment threads and there ere fewer bots than normal" as evidence. Maybe I've missed it?

@robarmstrong.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 6:24 PMReposted by @jamesrball.com

The poor guy really can't take the pressure that comes with his job

@pwhitewood.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 5:05 PMReposted by @jamesrball.com

On Facebook, this has 2400 laughing reactions and the comments are worse. A stark example of the dehumanisation of migrants

@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 4:21 PM

Yeah, just as Liza was singing happy birthday, which was a little rude of him. He did love the sweater you knitted for him, though.

@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 4:16 PM

But mitt was very grateful for your help

@adamserwer.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 1:45 PMReposted by @jamesrball.com

After years of championing "free speech," Texas lawmakers have enabled a dramatic rise of censorship in Texas universities, banning concepts, canceling courses and closing departments seen as "woke," and even using AI bots as censors. All in the name of freedom. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

In other professors’ syllabi, the bot flagged the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, essays by the Mexican American MacArthur genius grant recipient Sandra Cisneros, and materials related to a class about the Holocaust (that professor was told to drop material regarding Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people).

Putting aside the ideological slant of the new rules, the bot, like many large language models, seems to “hallucinate,” or make mistakes. The AAUP lawsuit lists texts banned for their “sex-based ecofeminist framework” and “gendered ecofeminist frameworks.” These phrases might sound persuasively like academese, but the academics behind the lawsuit had never heard of them; these concepts “do not exist,” the complaint says. Matthew Pehl, a history professor at Tech, told me that he knew several people who’d received reports from the system that were “plainly written by an AI that had hallucinated content or confused content from one class to another.”
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@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 4:09 PM

This will kill people. It will kill *children*. RFK Jr has been told this multiple times, and he is doing this anyway.

@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 4:08 PM

This is a truly grotesque "trial" of a vaccine known to be safe and effective. It will in practice randomly withhold that treatment from a percentage of children to see what happens. It is absolutely the reverse of good practice.

@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 2:19 PM

Hmmm.

@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 2:10 PM

God, that's *genius*.

@carlquintanilla.bsky.socialOct 11, 2026, 1:55 PMReposted by @jamesrball.com

BARCLAYS DESK: “.. let’s face facts; the combined disclosed lab revenues of circa $150bn .. is not going to cut it when the ecosystem needs well in excess of $1trn .. I’ve yet been presented with a credible framework as to where this money is going to come from ..”

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@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 2:07 PM

54 minutes 10 seconds is the record on the attempts so far. The shortest attempts last less than a minute.

@jamesrball.comOct 11, 2026, 2:00 PM

More "Love Thy Neighbour" after this break!

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