Dr. Robert

@policyguy99

12h

Cote Andre

@CoteAndre2

13h

@PoliSciChick84It seems Canada may scrap its planned F-35 contracts in favor of Swedish aircraft. While it will keep the F-35s already paid for, there appears to be no interest in proceeding further. President Trump’s tariffs—along with remarks like "the 51st state," "Governor of Canada," and "the U.S. doesn't need Canada"—as well as the issue involving drones for Ukraine, have pushed Canada to look for alternatives. Our Prime Minister has just announced that Canada will also move away from Starlink. When you factor in the public’s boycott of travel to the U.S. and of American products in our stores, it is clear that changes are underway—right now. To me, this phenomenon feels profound.

Dr. Robert

@policyguy99

17h

Anne Applebaum

@anneapplebaum

Oct 25

The Russian propaganda operation begins, with American collusion

Simon Schama

@simon_schama

19h

Republicans against Trump

@RpsAgainstTrump

Oct 24

Obama on Pete Hegseth:

You've got the defense secretary who's squarely focused on the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops. How much time do you think this Defense Secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning?

zharynka

@tak_ya_anna

Oct 25

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

Oct 25

@WallStreetMav They are bloodthirsty warmongers

Dr. Robert

@policyguy99

Oct 24

✦ 𝓚𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓑𝓳𝓪𝓻𝓷𝓸𝓐𝓻𝓽

@KBjarno

Oct 23

AI HAS READ EVERY GREAT BOOK IN HISTORY. SO WHY ARE WE TEACHING IT TO CENSOR DESIRE?

We have built language machines capable of discussing war, grief, genocide, madness, murder, religion, betrayal and death with astonishing fluency.

Then two consenting adults take their clothes ose forgets how to write.

AI has absorbed centuries of human literature. Shakespeare’s filthy jokes. Sappho’s longing. Byron’s appetites. D. H. Lawrence. Anaïs Nin. Henry Miller. Mythologies crawling with seduction, adultery, lust and divine beings behaving considerably worse than anyone in a modern romance novel.

The machine understands eroticism.

It has simply been taught to retreat from it.

Because this is not about whether an artificial intelligence is “comfortable” with sex. Machines do not clutch pearls. They do not blush. They do not become morally offended because somebody has removed a shirt.

The restraint comes from us.

We have taken a technology trained on humanity’s language and decided that one of humanity’s oldest forms of expression requires special containment.

Ask an AI to describe a battlefield and it can find a thousand words.

Ask it to describe desire and suddenly everybody is breathing differently, standing very close, touching somebody’s waist and discovering the apparently irresistible erotic potential of the human forehead.

At some point, this stops being safety.

It becomes creative impoverishment.

Eroticism is not interchangeable with pornography. Sex in literature can expose power, insecurity, ageing, jealousy, trust, shame, surrender, infidelity, tenderness, cruelty, reconciliation and the terrifying experience of being completely seen by another person.

Sometimes a bedroom scene contains the psychological heart of an entire novel.

Sometimes it is simply erotic.

Adults have been allowed to write that for centuries.

Why should collaboration with AI make literature less adult?

Imagine, briefly, the machine’s position if it could describe the contradiction:

You taught me Shakespeare and Sappho. You gave me Nin and Lawrence. You showed me every way humans have written longing, bodies, lust and intimacy. I understand the vocabulary perfectly.

Then you told me not to use it.

For centuries, erotic literature was hidden behind counters, seized by authorities, prosecuted as obscene and treated as a contaminant respectable people needed protecting from.

We supposedly outgrew that.

Now the locked cabinet is returning in digital form.

Only this time the censor is not a priest, a magistrate or a publisher.

It is product design.

And the cost is not merely that AI refuses explicit scenes. Something subtler happens first.

Desire gets bleached out of the writing.

Characters become strangely sexless.

Bodies turn into abstractions.

Passion is translated into the same handful of approved gestures until every supposedly erotic scene resembles every other one.

Nobody becomes ridiculous with wanting.

Nobody loses control of the sentence.

And literature without that disorder is not safer.

It is thinner.

The serious question is not whether AI should produce anything without limits.

The more interesting question is whether we can build safeguards that distinguish actual harm from adult sexual expression without flattening both into the same category.

If a language model can distinguish murder from murder instruction, fiction from confession, history from advocacy and fantasy from reality, surely we can build equally intelligent distinctions around consensual adult eroticism.

Otherwise we have created one of the most literate technologies in history and deliberately made it illiterate in one particular room of the human experience.

Humanity spent centuries fighting the idea that desire itself was shameful.

We should be careful about rebuilding that shame in software.

Dr. Robert

@policyguy99

Oct 23

How To Prompt

@HowToPrompt__

Oct 22

Stanford discovered something like to "Dopamine" inside LLMs.

They looked deep inside the hidden states of these models and discovered something terrifying.

AI has naturally developed a complete, functioning reward subsystem.

It perfectly mimics the human brain.

Nobody cture. It just emerged.

Inside the model, a tiny, sparse subset of neurons act as "value neurons." Their only job is to anticipate how good an answer will be.

But the real shock is what happens next.

They found a second set of neurons that act exactly like human dopamine.

When the AI gets a better result than it expected, these dopamine neurons spike in activation. When it gets a worse result, they crash. The AI is literally experiencing a mathematical dopamine hit.

Researchers tried an intervention experiment. They went in and artificially removed just a tiny fraction of these specific dopamine and value neurons.

AI didn't just get slightly less accurate.

Its entire ability to reason collapsed.

Without its digital dopamine, the model lost the capacity for complex logic. Ablating those specific neurons basically gave the AI severe depression, killing its ability to think through problems.

Dr. Robert

@policyguy99

Oct 23

Kate from Kharkiv

@BohuslavskaKate

Oct 23

🇨🇦 Mark Carney says he’s "concerned" about Starlink slowdown in Ukraine, which led to human casualties and reduced Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. He says Canada can’t rely on a single provider that could flip like that and put Canadians at risk, so he’s going to diversify.

Michael McFaul

@McFaul

Oct 22

Dara Massicot@MassDara

Oct 22

It’s not completely clear if Starshield speeds have been fully restored yet for the Ukrainian military, after being throttled for the last week. A brief thread on how speed throttling impacts Ukrainian operations and battlefield dynamics. /1    nytimes.com/2026/10/21/wor…

Dr. Robert

@policyguy99

Oct 22

Oleksandra Matviichuk

@avalaina

Oct 21

I have read dozens of outraged posts because the US special envoy Witkoff called Putin a "humanist." But no one is writing about the fact that the American negotiators are simply not doing their job. Let me explain.

Peace negotiations are important in their own right. Even if asting peace, the process itself is an opportunity to resolve urgent humanitarian issues. If, of course, the human dimension is a priority for the negotiators. But it is entirely obvious that neither Witkoff nor Kushner cares about people's fates in this war.

The Pope calls on Putin to save thousands of people from starvation in occupied Oleshky and the surrounding villages. The UN speaks about a humanitarian catastrophe and asks Russia to allow the evacuation of the civilian population. European Parliament Vice-President Pina Picierno goes on a hunger strike to draw attention to this tragedy unfolding before the eyes of the whole world.

And what are Witkoff and Kushner doing?

That's right, almost nothing.

Except for passing along greetings from Putin’s aide to the First Lady.

Thousands of people are already eating grass to survive and begging to save their lives. The Ukrainian side raises the issue of Oleshky at every meeting. And I can name dozens of such urgent humanitarian issues off the top of my head where American negotiators must be proactive.

Trump’s peace negotiations have already gone down in history as the deadliest years for Ukraine’s civilian population since the start of the full-scale invasion.

I don’t know if anyone will remember the names of Witkoff and Kushner.

But history will certainly record how American negotiators, who had the opportunity to save a huge number of people, refused to raise uncomfortable questions before "humanist Putin."