@MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org

Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Aug 02, 2026

Boosted by

Fellow denizens of the United Kingdoms, I will be in Clacton for results night on 13 Aug. If Binface gets in, I want to be able to say I was there. This sounds like the kind of pointless trip some of y'all would be well into, so let's connect! Please boost this for visibility, and why not join us witness a key moment of postmodern British politics where a cartoonishly ridiculous gets elected MP. If he can beat Binface, that is #UKPol #Clacton #Binface4Clacton #CountBinface

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Jul 18, 2026

“In reclaiming our science and our dignity, we need to reject the idea that fast is good or even neutral (Stengers 2018). When we show our students how slow science is not only possible, but necessary for a truly sustainable and liveable world, we empower critical scholars to resist fast science, and reject the concomitant AI infiltration.” ([Guest et al., 2025, p. 7]

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Jul 18, 2026

I'll just leave this here.

Generative AI Can Harm Teaching by Alp Sungu, Benjamin Lira, Angela Duckworth :: SSRN
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7007339

#AI #Teaching #Education @edutooters@a.gup.pe

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Jul 18, 2026

You know that trend of running AI models through psychological tests run for humans?

To little surprise, this pre-print finds that instruments designed for human minds cannot be meaningfully applied to statistical engines for the production of text.

Meyer, J., Garcia, D. and Wulff, D.U. (2026) ‘Apparent Psychological Profiles of Large Language Models are Largely a Measurement Artifact’. arXiv. Available at: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.20205.

#AI #LLM #AIAlignment

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Jul 11, 2026

Replying to @emilymbender@dair-community.social

@emilymbender@dair-community.social "Most basically, though, I do not use AI, because I for the most part like the activities of my work enough that I do not feel the constant need to streamline it." I'm getting this on a sticker for the back of my laptop.

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Jun 28, 2026

Replying to @mike@sauropods.win

@mike@sauropods.win Yeah, it's kind of telling people in the west know oil come from the middle east, yet they often don't know that S-A is the largest oil exporter worldwide....🤔

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Jun 26, 2026

Replying to @mike@sauropods.win

@mike@sauropods.win You forgot Saudi Aramco!

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 14, 2026

Replying to @JaxVent@lgbtqia.space

@JaxVent@lgbtqia.space Yeah, but the Online Safety Act :/

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 13, 2026

Replying to @grant_h@mastodon.social

@grant_h@mastodon.social 'I'm not angry, just disappointed' said the teacher. 🤣

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 10, 2026

Replying to @kaye@cathode.church

@kaye@cathode.church Someone please make it happen

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 10, 2026

RE: @openculture@toot.community

"recently, I have adopted the practice the Japanese refer at 'Tsundoku'"
-- Me, on a first date
#Books #bookstodon

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 09, 2026

Two years ago, I called gen AI 'Mid-as-service'. This has now been quantified. TL;DR, AI models return the same business advice regarding of context, the average of all the internet slurry they've been trained on. Who could have thought, eh. Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got “Trendslop” in Return. https://hbr.org/2026/03/researchers-asked-llms-for-strategic-advice-they-got-trendslop-in-return #AI #Trendslop #HarvardBusinessReview

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 09, 2026

Why are we calling a machine 'intelligent', it's not like we call forklifts 'strong'?

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 09, 2026

Ok, but hear me out: what if we called the billion monkeys with typewriters 'agentic'?

#GenerativeAI #AI

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 02, 2026

Replying to @grant_h@mastodon.social

@grant_h@mastodon.social Yeah, that's been the design pattern I've seen and used: default to None and test for it, if you're doing anything anything fancier than a Bool or an Int

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · May 02, 2026

Replying to @grant_h@mastodon.social

@grant_h@mastodon.social Don't think it's a mutability problem, more the fact that lists are passed by reference? (And they're mutable, but that's not really their fault)

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @mguhlin@zirk.us

@mguhlin No. Sure, hard to keep track! I mean what'sthe platform though?

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Apr 24, 2026

Replying to @mguhlin@zirk.us

@mguhlin This is intriguing... what am I looking at?

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Apr 24, 2026

Replying to @mguhlin@zirk.us

@mguhlin Note that it is the students raising the alarm, how are we, the adults, letting this happen?

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Apr 19, 2026

Replying to @flying_saucers@mastodon.social

@flying_saucers @nazokiyoubinbou @juergen_hubert the whole AI-as-deep learning thing is predicated on amounts of compute and training data only available to a few actors in the space, and this is before 'generative' AI. MeredithWhittaker and Kate Crawford have been tapping that sign for almost a decade now. It's always structurally favoured the Big Pocket crowd. What's ironic is that your frontier, agentic, chatbot of 2026 would give a competent literature review on anyone bothering to ask

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Will Berard 🫳🎤🫶 @MrBerard@mastodon.acm.org · Apr 19, 2026

Replying to @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social

@juergen_hubert 'ethical generative AI' is like 'fair-trade cocaine' - the words make sense, you can put them together, and imagine how it could be, in the abstract, possible. In practice, though, this would require a massive change in how these things are produced and consumed. There's no there there.

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