Shakeel
@ShakeelHashim
Editor @ Transformer. Prev: AI safety and EA comms, journalist @TheEconomist, @Protocol, @finimize
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Ofcom has been sending several American clients pretty stupid letters over the last six months. Pinged the White House about it this morning. Got a callback 20 minutes later asking for recommendations for visa bans. What a time to be alive.
Affordable housing requirements are like a gateway drug for left-NIMBYISM. You think you're just having a quick puff on the "we need more units at X% below market rate" pipe, but soon after you're injecting "supply can't solve the housing crisis" directly into your eyeballs.
867 new homes to replace a car park and shopping arcade in Peckham. Rejected by the council (and opposed by the local MP, Labour environment minister @Miatsf). standard.co.uk/news/london/pe…
One of my least popular predictions is that in our lifetimes the treatment of AIs will become a widely accepted moral issue
People will regret their casual use of disgusting hateful slurs like clanker
I gave it this prompt this morning and it did everything correctly — figured out which exhibition it was, found the booking site, added the ticket to the basket, then handed back to me to checkout. Slow, but functional!
ChatGPT agent is now fully rolled out to all Plus, Pro, and Team users. Sorry about the delay!
Hugging Face still has a ton of porn hosted on its website which can be accessed without logging in or verifying your age. Not entirely sure how that's compliant with the UK Online Safety Act ... which even 4Chan's taken action to comply with today!

The UK Online Safety Act means subreddits like /r/cider, the support forum /r/sexualassault, and /r/stopsmoking are now blocked for people under 18. Thank you @Jess4Lowestoft for protecting our CHILDREN from these sick freaks
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from Cummings' latest: this attitude is pervasive – several months ago, the most senior AI reporter at a major international news org asked me "but are companies actually going to find useful applications for all this stuff?"
This came into effect today:
The new UK Online Safety Act is INSANE. As of next week you need to prove you’re over 18 to be able to view “content that incites hatred against people of a particular race [or] religion” or content which “encourages a person to ingest … a physically harmful substance”.
The most interesting thing about this is how, over the years, this guy has consistently shifted how he frames impact (at least sometimes seemingly in line with fundraising efforts). Now, he’s in the ‘push adoption’ phase, so it’s calm people down, rather than freak them out.
I still can’t believe we’ve let sociopathic losers with no understanding of humanity accumulate such vast power over us.
Agreed with Neil here — a pretty important omission
The author of this op ed is lambasting Trump for permitting the sale of the exact same H20 chips that the Biden administration ok’d WHILE THE AUTHOR WAS ADVISING BIDEN ON THESE ISSUES. That’s remarkable. I guess he’s changed his mind since starting to advise Anthropic.
Extremely dark for Temu to be sponsoring content that jokes about how their products are made by slaves…

I feel quite confident in saying that Keir Starmer does not understand what "AGI" really means
I've transcribed this further, because the clip below is just a tease. Keir Starmer: "I think AGI is going to be pretty amazing. And I'm a massive AI fan."