Wessel van Rensburg

@wildebees

My mind is digital, my heart in the southern bit of Africa, media voyeur, blogger, tech fetishist and meme hustler.

Hackney, London
Joined November 2007

Tweets

You blocked @wildebees

Are you sure you want to view these Tweets? Viewing Tweets won't unblock @wildebees

  1. Pinned Tweet
    1 Oct 2017

    Data: Countries with higher levels of inequality have lower levels of growth in the long run.

    Undo
  2. 8 hours ago

    • To administer the first half a billion vaccines took 113 days • The second half a billion 30 days • The third half a billion 23 days • And the fourth half a billion were administered in the last 16 days We keep on counting on here:

    Undo
  3. 5 hours ago

    Andrea Coscelli, the CMA’s chief executive: “We intend to thoroughly investigate Facebook’s use of data to assess whether its business practices are giving it an unfair advantage in the online dating and classified ad sectors.”

    Show this thread
    Undo
  4. 6 hours ago

    “Regulators in Brussels and the UK announced formal competition investigations into Facebook on Friday in a joint assault on the social media company’s use of customer data to dominate in core markets such as digital advertising.”

    Show this thread
    Undo
  5. 24 hours ago

    Decent article in the FT about the difficulties and need to climb manufacturing value chains.

    Undo
  6. Jun 3

    What if they had done this from the start? Maybe the world would have been a bit better off.

    Undo
  7. Jun 3

    More businesses launched on Stripe since the start of 2020 than did in the rest of Stripe's history before then. Overall rate of migration to the internet economy is hard to overstate.

    Undo
  8. Jun 2
    Show this thread
    Undo
  9. Jun 2

    [“Watching someone’s facial expressions is an invasion of privacy, especially if it’s done without their knowledge,” he says. “I strongly believe there should be laws passed that prohibit the recording of facial expression, let alone its interpretation or measurement”]

    Show this thread
    Undo
  10. Jun 2

    “No matter the application, the goal is the same: to make humans less inscrutable and easier to predict at scale. With office staff and students working remotely during coronavirus, business is booming”

    Show this thread
    Undo
  11. Jun 2

    “Medical researchers think that AI mining of primary care records could revolutionise work on slow-moving diseases like dementia, Parkinson’s and heart failure. Previously, the need for repeated interviews made large, long-term studies prohibitively expensive.”

    Show this thread
    Undo
  12. Jun 2

    “Google has found potential in prediction: last year, it worked with HCA to build an online portal that combined data on Covid tests, hospital admissions and ventilator use from facilities across the US and used AI to anticipate surges”

    Show this thread
    Undo
  13. May 29

    The left-right reversal of the diploma divide since 1970 across all western democracies is really something.

    Undo
  14. Jun 2

    "Building something that made AIs as comprehensible as people would be an unprecedented achievement in the field. And it still might not be good enough to allow for safe deployment of large-scale AI systems."

    Show this thread
    Undo
  15. Jun 2

    With scale, AI's are becoming more powerful, meaning the impact of where it gets something wrong will be more dramatic.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  16. Jun 2

    Anthropic about themselves: "Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems."

    Show this thread
    Undo
  17. Jun 2

    Economies of scale favour deep pockets. "OpenAI changed course 2 years ago when it sought Microsoft’s backing to feed its growing hunger for computing resources to power its deep-learning systems. It promised the software company first rights to commercialise its discoveries."

    Show this thread
    Undo
  18. Jun 2

    "The new company, Anthropic, is led by Dario Amodei, a former head of AI safety at OpenAI. It has raised $124m in its first funding round. That is the most raised for an AI group trying to build generally applicable AI technology."

    Show this thread
    Undo
  19. Jun 2

    The rebel group split from OpenAI, "founded with the backing of Elon Musk in 2015 to make sure that superintelligent AI systems do not one day run amok. The schism followed differences over direction after it took a landmark $1bn investment from Microsoft"

    Show this thread
    Undo
  20. Jun 1

    There is this idea that it always takes terribly long for power systems to change. But as you in this chart, the UK's system changed *very* rapidly in recent years. As I explain in my new post – – this was possible, in part, thanks to carbon pricing.

    Show this thread
    Undo
  21. Jun 1

    Just been out in Old Street on the best night of the year so far. Bars empty. Perhaps just an inner London thing?

    Undo

Loading seems to be taking a while.

Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

    You may also like

    ·