John L. Walters

@johnlwalters.bsky.social

285 Followers 381 Following

Writer, composer, editor, musician, record producer.

In the first phase of the trial, Meta was found to have repeatedly violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act as its recommendation algorithms essentially "steered" young users toward harmful content and contacts. Recommendation algorithms are the tools that Meta uses to automatically curate the content a user sees on its platforms. In ruling on this second phase of the trial, Judge Biedscheid found that Meta's harms reached the level of "public nuisance", , or an issue of health and safety that has become so widespread it is negatively impacting a general public.
Detail of bar chart from an article titled ‘For CMOs, the challenge of AI visibility begins beneath the surface.’ Caption reads ‘37% We use turkey, off-the-shelf solutions (e.g., Adobe Firefly)’
From the Leiden Declaration https://leidendeclaration.ai/ Don't believe the hype There is currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products. Consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.
"Flaubert said if you are writing the biography of a friend, you should do it as if you are taking revenge for him," says Carr. "I didn't know that quote when I began the book, but I was taking revenge for him, because I got fed up of the people who couldn't see the continuity in his life and work." Ian Carr on Miles Davis, quoted in ‘Putting in the extra Miles’ by John L Walters, The Independent, Wed 25 November 1998.
FINANCIAL TIMES Iran war hits pistachio supplies amid Dubai chocolate boom How one of the world’s smallest countries is feeling the fuel crisis
Black and white detail of mechanical skull with eyeballs, image used to promote the documentary Ghost in the Machine.
Allister Heath Why full-fat supernatural Christianity is the final, tragic outcome of our failed educational system ALLISTER HEATH The Telegraph
Gil Evans portrait on the back of the _Individualism_ CD reissue.
English National Opera at the Coliseum, 16 February 2026.
LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think. LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text. There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons – indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don't think. There are two possible explanations for this effect: 1. The tech industry has accidentally invented the initial stages a completely new kind of mind, based on completely unknown principles, using completely unknown processes that have no parallel in the biological world. 2. The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.
Kurt Elling (fourth from left) and the Yellowjackets, playing the music of Weather Report at Cadogan Hall.
Michael Gibbs receives an honorary doctorate at Birmingham Conservatoire, 13 November 2025. 📷 JLW
Cover of The AI Con
Paperback copy of The AI Con by Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna.
Hermeto Pascoal at the Barbican, July 2016.
Remember ‘Don’t be evil?’
We barely have the language to speak about what's good about tech anymore. We're so used to it being this monstrous oppressive force that it feels almost unnatural to observe the ways in which it has improved life.
Hubris
J. D. Vance (bearing scythe) visits the Pope.
Daily papers on display at Tony’s Corner Store, Denmark Hill, 20 February 2025.
Cover of Landscape’s 2nd vinyl release on the band’s Event Horizon label. Text reads: Workers’ Playtime / Nearly Normal / Too Many Questions / 33 1/3 EP.