Thomas Fraise

Are you telling me the guy who believes aliens (who are coming from the past) are intercepting US missiles is not credible

On the value of going back to the classical foundations of our concepts: sometimes, they are very well written. Such is the case with Laing’s The Divided Self - "within ourselves there can only be our footprints".

"LLMs have exposed a vast pre-existing cultural appetite for false profundity, and gave everyone a machine that can produce it on demand."
Interesting take! It works with a lot of airport literature too, I guess.

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Elle est hyper drôle ! www.instagram.com/p/DLxxPw7ANlc/

Beyond Manoeuvre Theory for European Defence This article contributes to the debate about European defence in the light of the Russo-Ukraine war and growing doubts about US commitment to Europe. It argues that Europeans need to fundamentally re....

A remarkable piece outlining a realistic vision for the defense of Europe which could actually be sustainable, and would not rely on wishful thinking about the inexhaustible magic of extended nuclear deterrence.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

9 Conclusion We have demonstrated that LLMs enable deanonymization of pseudonymous online accounts at scale, outperforming classical methods. In many cases, LLMs enable us to perform attacks that would not have previously been possible, due to the lack of structured data or features. These attacks require only publicly available models and standard APIs. Our pipeline uses only publicly available embedding models, standard LLM APIs, and LLM-agent scaf-folding, placing them within reach of moderately resourced adversaries. Pseudonymity does not provide meaningful protection online. Users who post under persistent usernames should assume that adversaries can link their accounts to real identities or to each other, and that the probability rises with each piece of micro-data they post. Preventing such attacks appears challenging. Not reveal- ing any data on online platforms is difficult, as the data we use is the very data that makes online communities worth-while. Although LLM providers could aim to detect and block attempts to misuse their models for deanonymization (as they do, for instance, for cyberattacks), we are pessimistic that this is possible as our deanonymization framework splits an attack into a combination of seemingly benign summarization, search and ranking tasks. Recent advances in LLM capabilities have made it clear that there is an urgent need to rethink various aspects of computer security in the wake of LLM-driven offensive cyber capabilities. Our work shows that the same is likely true for privacy as well.

Welp:

“We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization... Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.”

arxiv.org/pdf/2602.16800

The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought Abstract. In the 1950s, a new intellectual figure emerged in American strategic debates: the nuclear strategist. Drawn largely from the RAND Corporation, t

This paper is part of a wonderful special issue on Ritual Action in World Politics with many smart people, including my colleagues in the Ritual Deterrence project. It is available open-access thanks to the European Research Council (ERC).
academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic...

Nuclear strategists may not have defined US nuclear policy. Deterrence theory, however, did provide eliteswith a sense that the mysterious and unverifiable workings of nuclear deterrence could ultimately be known and controlled.

This is exactly what the practice of nuclear deterrence entails: knowledge gaps are massive, and loss of control can be disastrous. Actors who engage in this kind of endeavor need a sense of confidence in the controllability of events: magic does just that.

Magic is not the "other" modernity, but a form of knowledge societies turn to when faced with low probability, high consequences risks which cannot be tamed through rationally accumulated knowledge.

Taking the "wizards" metaphor seriously, it shows how, thanks to the peculiar features of RAND's early nuclear strategy, deterrence theory emerged as a powerful magical script for the practice of nuclear deterrence, turning ideal connections between causes and effects into real one.

It argues that the epistemic authority of nuclear strategists was grounded in their possession of magicians features - liminality, secrecy, esoterism - and that this allowed them to develop a highly influential script for the practice of deterrence, eventually making it socially sustainable.

The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought Abstract. In the 1950s, a new intellectual figure emerged in American strategic debates: the nuclear strategist. Drawn largely from the RAND Corporation, t

What were the 'Wizards of Armageddon' good for? 🧙
Critiques of nuclear deterrence have mocked the "medieval wizardry" involved in their "esoteric body of learning" who would ultimately have amounted to little policy influence. My latest article argues differently.
academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic...

Les données du PRIO et de l'Uppsala Conflict Database (UCPD) sont de très bonnes qualités pour les conflits contemporains. Il y a une bonne discussion des dimensions méthodo chap. 2 et 5 là dedans (livre magistral, par ailleurs)

The Magicians of Nuclear Strategy: Ritualized Knowledge Production and the Origins of Strategic Nuclear Thought Abstract. In the 1950s, a new intellectual figure emerged in American strategic debates: the nuclear strategist. Drawn largely from the RAND Corporation, t

I have a new paper out! I will post a thread about it later, but here is a link to the open-access.
academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic...

La propension à traiter l’IA, discursivement, comme un acteur autonome affecte notre capacité à penser la redevabilité des acteurs responsables de ses dérives.

À noter que ce n’est pas l’IA, mais bien des entreprises identifiables et redevables qui ont commis ce vol.

Currently reading this. It’s nice. Interesting to see how actors navigating the constraints of the nuclear age invariably lead to changes in domestic structure.

A few thoughts on possible US-Iran conflict (1/11):

Long format. Enquête sur une supercherie : le prof d’université s’est-il inventé un « Prix Nobel » ? Professeur de Lettres à l’Université Marie & Louis Pasteur de Besançon, le Montbéliardais Florent Montaclair est le lauréat 2016 de la Médaille d’or de philologie, une science qui a pour objet l’étude...

Absolument fan de cette histoire.
www.estrepublicain.fr/faits-divers...

Je lis Les Deux Mégots, sur l’affaire Alessandri et, soyons honnête, c’est une accumulation de dingueries, mais celle-ci frappe assez fort.

A big issue in current arguments in favor of a European extended nuclear deterrence is the lack of a theory of extending deterrence, with associated mechanisms explaining how, say, spoken commitments to an ally results in the production of security.

Il y en a quelques uns qui se préparent à marmonner en regardant leur pompe sur les bancs de la 17e chambre du TJ de Paris.🤞

[Numéro 139-140]
La menace en masses. La guerre « moderne », la cohésion sociale et le déploiement d’une surveillance à mobile sécuritaire (États-Unis, années 1910-1930), par Alexandre Rios-Bordes
A lire sur CAIRN : shs.cairn.info/revue-cultur...

Un article pour celles et ceux intéressés par le développement du renseignement policier en France

Merci !!

Et d'ailleurs, les adversaires de la Russie semblent le penser aussi, puisqu'ils prennent la capacité de dissuasion russe au sérieux. Maintenant, j'imagine que nous ne sommes jamais à l'abri d'un accident. Mais effectivement, pas comparable à, disons, l'état de l'infanterie

Je ne suis pas spécialiste des forces nucléaires russes, donc je ne peux pas forcément très bien répondre mais globalement, si la question est "Est-ce que leurs forces nucléaires sont en état de fonctionnement", je dirais que la réponse est Oui.

D'un point de vue général, la quasi-totalité des Etats dotés sont lancés, depuis plusieurs années, dans des programmes de modernisation à grande échelle. La course demeure encore relativement lente, mais le départ a bel et bien été donné.