Blog: IrishPhilosophy.com Catherine Barry, Hume Scholar, working on a PhD at Maynooth University on religious toleration in 18th century Ireland. #EarlyModern, with a broad interest in Irish intellectual thought.
“There’s this general mindset that says, ‘Let’s go ahead and claim certain abilities, because eventually that might become true anyway.’ And my sense is: That’s not science. That is investment.” Do Large Reasoning Models (specially trained cousins of LLMs) actually reason?
Quanta MagazineFrom this week’s Qualia column: “I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI ‘reasoning’?” www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-reason...
Interesting comment on the article. There is no cast iron way for publishers to know you wrote your book except the paper trail. Moral: don't delete your drafts.
Maureen AvisA debut thriller dazzles a 14-way auction. Then its own agents withdraw it, unable to account for how the manuscript came to exist. Nobody proved AI was used. The deal died because nobody could prove it wasn't. deadline.com/2026/07/ai-q...
The early 20th century is itself weird with universal suffrage, labour laws, more freedom for women, first inklings of welfare state. Taking a long view of history populism & authoritarianism are the norm.
Garvan WalshePS the converse - how was populism suppresssed is well dealt with here open.substack.com/pub/mariosri... ; I don't think the 1930s/2010-2020s are exceptional, I think it's 1945-1985 that's weird - that's the period where Authoritarian voters *aren't* voting for Authoritarian parties
I hope no company would be dumb enough to ship a truly unique book to the scan and dump mill. That said, why don't AI companies make these scans available to the public? It could be an apology for the "contamination" they've unleashed.
Sacrifice! At the Harvest FestivalWhy is everything so transparently evil now?
"what is burning today is not just a forest, but a way of inhabiting the land that is no longer possible" from www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/a...
Marie Le ConteI say this with nothing but love in my heart for the fatherland but can you imagine any other country looking at wildfires and thinking "quick, get a philosopher on the line"
"Another way of putting this is that it was liberal social democracy that limited the ability of wealth to influence politics and also limited the influence of right wing populism on the political right, and when neoliberalism swept social democracy to one side it allowed both to emerge."
Simon Wren-LewisNew post: The relationship between capital, plutocracy and populism mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-... Right wing populism is generally very bad for the economy and business. Yet populist governments are almost always supported by an oligarchy or plutocracy.