Mary Branscombe

Omnivorous technology journalist. girl with the USB earring; author of the Cassidy At Large technomysteries. Like my writing? Buy me a ☕ https://ko-fi.com/marybranscombe. she/her. Warning: contains opinions. signal marypcbuk.44

Articles & links

Mary Branscombe reposted
@lukaszolejnik.bsky.social

"Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data" www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) vatican.va
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Pope Leo XIV's 42,300-word Magnifica Humanitas, signed May 15 and published May 25, addresses AI as the central challenge to human dignity.
  • The encyclical states AI systems are 'cultivated' not 'built' and explicitly denies they possess experience, a body, or the capacity to feel pain.
  • Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican's May 25 presentation alongside theologians and three cardinals.
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Mary Branscombe reposted
@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

".. The Meta excess-compute story has made investors question whether hyperscalers are building more AI capacity than they can use profitably." .. The market is “probably starting to price in peak-memory-cycle risk after a very strong run.” @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/new…

bloomberg.com View on Bluesky →
Mary Branscombe reposted
Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social

My spicy ghost pepper hot, but 100% genuine take: scholars in my specific subfield (sociology of culture) have been using generative AI responsibly in research since at least 2013. I'll even put a date on it: Mohr and Bogdanov, 2013. + www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com View on Bluesky →

Recent commentary

this will make @ironyuppie.com laugh: I'm reading an IBM blog about how AI fails without real time data and only they can fix it and there is NO DATE on the blog post (but it does link to what it calls a recent study that's from 2022, so there's that)

View on Bluesky · ♥ 5 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 23d ago

Resisting the urge to reply to a GitHub comment where someone has clearly pasted the thread into ChatGPT and asked it to parse it and then regurgitated that into the thread complete with the usual “gotcha” telltales to ask if they can’t just get ChatGPT to write the code they want instead

View on Bluesky · ♥ 7 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 26d ago

also can anyone remember where to find the huge long list of things reinforcement learning systems get horrifically, terrifyingly wrong that has the video clips of one trying to learn to walk by banging its head on the floor to push itself along? because we're rediscovering how hard reward design is

View on Bluesky · ♥ 6 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 23d ago

I have fought SQL and won, and fought Copilot and won at the same time! I wanted to make a virtual collection for URLs in my clipboard manager (the vintage but fabulous clipmate) and virtual collections are written in SQL and I don't SQL but Copilot does, right? only it's DBISAM not SQL

View on Bluesky · ♥ 5 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 7d ago

wait is OpenAI on the verge of being in lawsuits with both Microsoft (sued by) AND Apple (suing) as well as being in court with Musk right now? huh

View on Bluesky · ♥ 4 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 55d ago

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