#phylo #phylogenetics

hi i'm a billionaire my company, which will definitely not murder everyone, is named SauronMurdersEveryone Inc after the beloved jrr tolkien character sauron whom i have always admired for his disruptive use of world changing technology and for murdering everyone

We need a critique of AI in academic publishing. Following my decision not to sign an AI addendum to my contract with Cambridge University Press, I wrote this short essay which is now out in the Dublin Review of Books. 👇 drb.ie/move-over-fo...

In an interview with BBC News, Sir Paul Nurse PRS says that visa restrictions are endangering the UK economy: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning. Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

ATUIN Wrapped In 2025, you typed 11904 commands! That's ~32 commands per day. Your Top Commands: [▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮] 3849 ls [▮▮▮ ] 1518 cd [▮▮ ] 1046 nano [▮ ] 495 head [ ] 347 grep Total: 11904 Unique: 5508 I guess I forget where things are a lot.

Tell your MP to attend Monday's debate on digital IDs! action.openrightsgroup.org/tell-your-mp...

This is great. More please! The more folk who rely on LLMs for funding planning means my chances go up even before I submit!

One reason is because university presidents now only exist for their fundraising ability, academic credentials and intellectual achievement are simply glossy ‘extras’.

Didn't have Bong Joon Ho starting the Butlerian Jihad (Bongian Jihad?) but I'll take it!

We are delighted to announce our upcoming LGBTQ+ seminar given by Dr Ross Brooks who will be talking about his upcoming book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life! 2nd December @ 4pm in the Life and Mind Building, open to all members of Oxford university 🥳🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @rossb-brighton.bsky.social #QueerBiology

On the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪 Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...

We've created an environmentally catastrophic facsimile of the absolute worst colleague you ever had.

Look, LLM use in academia isn't just students. You need to be speaking clearly with your collaborators about your writing standards from the beginning. Make people say out loud that they don't write their own articles anymore.

Wth @nature.com? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Don't call it a "bubble." OpenAI, Microsoft, & Alphabet are just fine with that term because they get to tell you that all the dot-com bubble or the railroad bubble or the whatever bubble was, was a shaking out the greats after an intense period of mania. This isn't a bubble. This is a time bomb.

I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Wired is Expired.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

“LLMs aren’t going away” statements are wishes, not predictions, that they’re trying to make happen. Treat them as advocacy for a specific future, not observations of inevitability

My thoughts are first and foremost with those who lost loved ones or live with life-limiting conditions like Long Covid. The Inquiry’s finding that an earlier lockdown could have saved 23,000 lives is devastating. We must learn lessons: act early, protect lives & jobs, and ensure Govt is prepared.

Two weeks left to apply for this position! Feel free to email if there are any questions.

My new favorite kind of meme is "here are detailed instructions on how to turn off AI". 🔨

Twitter and chat gpt are down. Bad day for people who suck.

Oh, the irony of people using generative AI to "summarise" my papers 🫠 (here the real paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1...)

I can‘t believe that we‘re willingly handing over crucial parts of our workforce, data management and even education to a criminal version of Clippy

Presumably the "bot" has not been trained on any review of their paper - pre review policy at the journal - so it's not doing anything other than statistical mud pies of whatever it has been trained on. It can't think. It can't synthesize. And it cannot understand. All LLMs are overstated claims.

Really excited to see that seats are filling up! There are still a handful left - get them while you can! evomics.org/apply-worksh... bsky.app/profile/jlst...

since chatgpt has coached another young person in a mental health crisis to their death, I am yet again tapping the sign

Nothing irks me more from a pub when you're sat at a table and a staff member comes over and reserves the table for later. I am here now, I might have stayed later. I am not coming back.

Arthur took a deep breath without much enthusiasm.

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month. Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his new book, Doctorow lays out how tech companies have made our lives progressively worse, finds Matthew Sparkes

"The new Luddites aren’t afraid of AI. They’re afraid of the people who profit from pretending it’s intelligent." Erik J. Larson reviews "The AI Con" by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-return-of-the-luddites/

@guyleonard.bsky.social et al. report a near-complete genome and transcriptome sequence dataset for green algae host Paramecium bursaria, an endosymbiotic model system. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf183 #genome #evolution

There's so much being researched and published about GenAI that I update the 'Against Generative AI' resource list almost every day. Check it out catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

Apply to our sister workshop now! It's a great follow on from the Workshop on Genomics, and in the same great town with even more great people!

Online today! De Novo Genome Sequence Assembly of the RNAi-Tractable Paramecium bursaria 186b: An Endosymbiotic Model System academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Online today! De Novo Genome Sequence Assembly of the RNAi-Tractable Paramecium bursaria 186b: An Endosymbiotic Model System academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...

Merce Montoliu brings us a presentation about wonderful #lichens at the #biodiversity25. Lichens are associations between mycobionts (fungi), photobionts (green algae or cianobacteria) and microbiomes. 38 different lichens were sequenced in DToL & ASH. Results show complex multiorganismal scenarios

“My life mission has been [to] work on a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return,” he said. Utterly deranged.

AI in education is the answer to a critical question: how do we provide bullshit education that will prepare students for the bullshit jobs they will do when they graduate?

Finally! About time.

The Renters’ Rights Act is NOW LAW! Soon S21 evictions, which have forced millions of people out of their homes for no reason & with just 2 months notice, will be a thing of the past. This is what our movement can achieve when we stand together.

Katrien Beuls: "When ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, the then rector, Rik Van de Walle, swiftly announced that students could use the chatbot for their master's thesis. A bad move. Or at least the beginning of a lot of trouble.” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

Just nuked my Spotify account. If they're going to invest in AI to kill people, donate money to Trump and run ICE adverts then I want nothing to do with them!

"provokes strong responses in people" an interesting way to write "lactose intolerance" :p

This 👇

🧬 Now published in Bioinformatics Advances: “Advances and challenges in understanding evolution through genome comparison.” Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbaf223