Lots of your favorite philosophers are assholes. dailynous.com/2025/09/19/p...

@dieworkwear.bsky.social I thought you might enjoy this. I did. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRnv...

Why does Western Paleolithic cave art strongly prefer animal side views and often use abbreviations? Our new paper in Topics in Cognitive Science challenges long-held assumptions about these artistic choices using cognitive science experiments. A thread 1/n onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

this is a good thread but I might actually take it further -- I don't think manosphere shit is actually about getting laid, I think it's literally about male loneliness, by which I mean, men addressing their loneliness via homosocial bonding through misogyny

* Active inference meets uncertainty and attentive absorption in games * Using PCG for Metastudies (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...) * Reward cues/juicy feedback across games and gambling

Imperial opened its President’s PhD Scholarships (first deadline Nov 3): bit.ly/3JW2xuW Ping me to apply for a scholarship on: * Competence/empowerment/learning progress in games: models and DDA * The appeal of aleatoric uncertainty in games: models and tests ...

“不知道，不知道，不知道，不知道 。。。” youtu.be/hrE-SIdXqQE?...

Loving and Knowing is one of my favourite philosophy papers of recent years. Listen to the pod then read the paper. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🎙the Core of Loving & Knowing with @participha.bsky.social Philosopher Hanne De Jaegher discusses life experiences and how they led to her academic journey in cognitive science and the scholarship behind ‘participatory sense-making’ #psm #phil #embodied #sensemaking #varela #loveandphilosophy

his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time

Posted without comment

/8 I think there is a temptation, if you talk and write and debate for a living, to say that talking and writing and debating is inherently morally praiseworthy. I'm not sure it is. But that reflects a general philosophical split that I have with many people who talk about free speech:

'Common diabetes drug metformin cuts long covid risk by 64 percent in UK study' 'The present study demonstrates the potential benefits of metformin in the effort to mitigate Long COVID....' www.news-medical.net/news/2025090...

Adam Curtis voice ...

“So long as I’m not dead, no one will be able to guarantee he truly knows me, that is, be able to give meaning to my actions, which, as linguistic moments, are therefore indecipherable.” - Pier Paolo Pasolini, Observations on the Long Take (1967)

‼️New study from my lab: proud to share not one but two Bloomberg articles covering our new report on Chinese outbound FDI. We spent the summer painstakingly coding investment across the global south. The results are striking:

Apart from the idiot taxis thing it's the "fallen behind" thing I object to. The concern with relative position on a path of linear progress (where the future is Trump or Xi or Musk?) is extremely stupid but insofar as it is believed by politicians, stops us having nice things and damages the planet

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wahey: last minute decision to write up work a CHI paper! How painful can it be?

This is good. Dinzu are reliably solid. dinzuartefacts.bandcamp.com/album/monast...

This was playing in the coffee shop I was writing in this morning. Didn't know Almeida before. Confused me when I heard it: very 90s Chicago somehow, but the strings etc. are obviously not that. I think it's the v guitar centric writing. Love his rhythm playing too. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo8p...

You are not persuading the text pipeline! You are stumbling on to a mathematical vector in which you are causing the word delivery mechanism to replicate sequences other people typed up in which they are persuaded and that OpenAI likely stole without permission!

sticking my local Hölder exponents in my bio

Sand batteries are literally just silos of sand that retain heat exceptionally well -- so well that they can be tied to heat exchange systems to serve as proxy *electrical* batteries. Finland's new model can store enough power (100 MWh) to heat an entire town for a week. newatlas.com/energy/large...

I shall try to contact Donald tomorrow evening.

Positive tipping points for climate, like the UK phasing out coal, show how big steps toward a low-carbon future can suddenly become unstoppable. Can we identify where the next tipping points could happen, and figure out how to help trigger them? These researchers say YES. Read more:

I'm currently hiring a PhD student in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on Persuasive Design. Scholarship in collaboration with BDIC, fully funded for 4 years. If you're interested, find out more here: www.ucd.ie/cs/phdvacanc...

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." Hits different in 2025

Before transitioning I was a respectability-politics lesbian. Even post-transition my career, my manner of dress, and my work is very palatable to the mainstream. Because of that I think it's particularly important to talk about why I reject respectability politics and you should too. Short 🧵

There's a crank in everything / that's....

It's worth noting that these are not merely stupid questions, but have the function - as does much of the professional and academic ethics industry - of taking up up space for serious discussion of politics and value with speculative, sci-fi bollocks. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

From Bristol Patriots' facebook page if anyone wonders how it went for the fash today.

seemingly new to bsky: @xabibaran.bsky.social one of the most interesting people thinking about the conditions and consequences of agency and autonomy. Surely worth a follow.

The Pareto principle (not to be confused with Pareto optimality) states that, for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. In politics roughly 99% of obnoxious irritation is caused by 1% of politicians. If we can learn to ignore them we could have normal life back again.

"if the United States were to issue a legal request to Microsoft for the data of a French citizen hosted in the EU, Microsoft would comply regardless of French or EU law."

"Then, as quickly as I had grown to enjoy anisota, I ran out of stamina. The buttons no longer worked, the site became dead and inert. 'What a strange thing for a website to do,' I thought. But I put my phone away and went to do something else." 🕯️🖤

Bogdan Raczynzki released a new record last year and I missed it. bogdanraczynski.bandcamp.com/album/youre-...

this is fun

📢The open access version of our book is available now via OUP's site: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

I find that operational coherence is a concept that deserves serious engagement from practicing scientists and needs to be better known/appreciated. There's a lot to be gained from adopting such a pragmatic perspective.

More-than-human agency people. What is the word "agency" picking out for you that's different from "causality"? e.g. I just read that bacteria dying exemplified more-than-human agency. What's left over after we lose the autonomous processes of self-reproduction that ground intentionality?

Hong Sang Soo - Clare's Camera I want a science reform movement built around this reply.

Large Language Models Do Not Simulate Human Psychology arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06950

Published today in IJHCS: we find that multi fractal patterns in keystroke timings can serve as a marker of fatigue. This points to opportunities for unobtrusive, cheap, privacy conserving monitoring of fatigue, and the timing of effective interventions. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I wrote about the new Cass McCombs album, and talked about Julia Jacklin, James Joyce, Philip Larkin and Alan Partridge along the way. Hope you enjoy. open.substack.com/pub/robinall...

Do I know people who circuit bend video? Ideally HDMI and LED rather than CRT? Any hints for good resources?

TIL the original paper describing CRISPR, by Francisco Mojica, was rejected by 4 journals and took 2 years to be published

More-than-human agency people. What is the word "agency" picking out for you that's different from "causality"? e.g. I just read that bacteria dying exemplified more-than-human agency. What's left over after we lose the autonomous processes of self-reproduction that ground intentionality?

A blog post from my PhD student Tegan Roberts Morgan about her recent work on how understanding sensory metaphors can help us design technologies to support positive interactions between young and old. blogs.ed.ac.uk/smartsense/c...