Kansas has, overnight, invalidated the drivers’ licenses of trans people, a pointless cruelty that upends their lives If Brits think “it won’t happen here” think again! Groups in the U.K. who want the same thing are routinely invited to consult with Labour and normalised in our press!

Mm hm. No mention of the sexism Franklin was constantly forced to endure in this cosy little, “they were all respectful colleagues, actually” article.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

I like this piece a lot about Rosalind Franklin’s role in solving the structure of DNA. It really respects her as a full scientist - what she saw, what she didn’t appreciate, what could have been if she’d had true peers to support her, or had not died so young. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

If we let the paid employees of a small number of ethics-free AI companies dictate the directions in which our scholarship should develop and the ways in which researchers must go about their work now, we are indeed fucking ourselves over.

friend shared this, immediately updated my settings

The best way to counter this tactic is to familiarize yourself with the database of dogwhistles. The ADL is deeply problematic in so, so many ways, but they maintain the best and most solid database of symbolism: www.adl.org/resources/ha...

"Who decides what is normal development? Who decides what is natural biodiversity or pathological deviation? Who defines the distinction between defect and difference?" Eugenic attacks on people who are disabled, neurodivergent, queer, trans... They are all linked by fear of diversity

I suppose if the question here is 'why don't these fields produce new discoveries at the same rate as the sciences' the answer is a pretty obvious, 'because they're not funded like the sciences.' We could do a lot of archaeology with, say, a few billion dollars a year!

Who defines the distinction between defect and difference? This is an incredibly important conversation and one that is close to my heart. A moving and eloquent article, from top to bottom.

I wrote something on developmental biology and disability and put it up on the node last night: thenode.biologists.com/developmenta... I've been nervous to share because some of it veers a bit personal but they are thoughts that won't stay quiet. Would love to know what people think about it!

This, from the Quakers, is a pretty good example of how to resist pressure from bigot lobbying groups. Effectively “we legally can allow trans people to use the loo, we morally should, and we tried it and nothing bad happened”

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/

And in particular I was struck by how it is the ability to 'do' a field - or at least *feel* like you are 'doing' a field - *in plain language* which invites this kind of response. What LLMs have done to physics and many other STEM fields is brought the fake-doing-of-them into plain language. 3/

But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there *are* but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible. 12/

There’s a thing in games where people want skill to matter in a very specific way - they want it to be possible for them to beat better player, but impossible for a less good player to beat them. I feel like the same folks can only imagine a past where they are as well or better off than they are.

The thing to understand - which the people peddling these fantasies often don't - is that the desire here isn't the 'past,' but being an aristocrat in a tightly controlled, authoritarian society. They imagine a narrow hierarchy where they are, by dint of birth, at the top. Dreams of feudalism.

There is a difference between separating the art from the artist... and separating the transaction from the art. If your method of engagement with the art funnels funding to a hate group, or clout someone will weaponize it, the art is not the issue.

Turning online archives into resources for training data not only exploits and devalues the archived works, but also renders these archives literally unusable. Like all extractivist business models, #genAI ultimately threatens to destroy its own foundations. It's not generative, but destructive

It benefits those in control of society to have everyone think that it's impossible - physically, spirituality, biologically - to subvert the current order. Tudor social mores told people a commoner couldn't wear velvet, and patriarchy tells us that male and female are exclusive categories of being.

There have been places and times where you couldn't wear certain fabrics if you weren't of the right class. Your place in the social hierarchy was seen as immutable as terfs think gender is today. It's all an imposition to serve the interests of power.

And I do think it's helpful to think of queerness as part of normal human variation (because it is) but not as a defence of it specifically. I don't give a shit if people *do* choose to be queer. It would still be okay.

"Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat" is my new motto.

Irony is out. Joy is in. Find a niche thing to love and then love it unreservedly.

So what do we learn from this all this? I think the paper is devastating for the notion that these systems have general reasoning capacities, in the sense of being able to develop and deploy simple algorithms to solve combinatorially difficult problems.

Worth a read

The publisher has cut their costs by outsourcing to this company, the company has cut their costs by using AI/low-paid staff instead of paying for a proper job, while I’ve spent hours & hours fixing the manuscript, so all the extra labour from cost-costing has fallen on me, the unremunerated author

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

My plans for a major retail emporium are being threatend by wholesalers who won't let me steal the stock.

Labour can only do one thing to stop Reform and it's make positive material changes to people's lives. That's it. That's all they have to do.

Felt incandescently angry, might delete later. enewman.co.uk/rage-rage-ag...

I swear this was the short version.

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

alright i have my laptop, guess i'm livetweeting the dire wolf preprint. so a quick reminder: this is not yet peer-reviewed, so there's some different expectations re: quality. also let's be clear, i'm a hella biased reader, bc i don't trust the hype they're courting

We all agree that this is bad, right? Peer reviewed studies should not have AI summaries that go unchecked by either the original authors or the reviewers...

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

The long-term unintended effects of novel synthetic compounds are quite high in my list of potentially serious risks to the well-being and viability of human civilisation. It is extremely difficult to reliably assess even single chemicals, and almost impossible to predict their interactions.

everyone replying to this post needs to log the fuck off and touch grass. Machine learning was a part of T&S for decades before you ever heard the term "generative AI". If you've ever complained about "all the bots on Bluesky, they should do something", the "something" you're asking for is ML.

There is this thing rampant in sf where the absolute worst, inaccurate, numerically illiterate bullshit is celebrated as hard sf and anything that has an accurate depiction of actual human beings is considered not merely squishy but actually a betrayal of the art form.

This is a Ponzi scheme. Fight the slop at every level. We all can make a difference! I threw a fit at our last dept meeting and shamed everyone there. Dept policy is now NO AI unless students are studying AI usage as part of their dissertations. If everyone did this, we can fight it.

Until real support and help for people can be provided I can't support assisted dying - despite knowing that in so many cases it's right and appropriate and what the person wants. Because it gives an out. A quick solution, to a system that decides some people are too difficult or expensive to help.

Hello, I've officially moved the Content Scrapers blocklist to its own dedicated account. The old list will stay for the time being, but you'll need to manually re-subscribe to the new list if you want to stay up to date with the latest additions to the blocklist.

PSA: MODERATION LISTS ARE MIGRATING FROM THIS ACCOUNT to @skysentry.bsky.social If you're subscribed to any of the lists, please re-subscribe to them at the new owner by November 30th, after which I will no longer be maintaining them, and the lists will be removed from this account. Thank you.

@jlowin.dev <- you might wanna block this account which is creating tools that feed your account's skeet history to an AI toy. he blocked replies on his post advertising the toy which is a sign that he won't hear feedback from people who want to opt out

As someone who relies on alt text to process what I'm seeing I would just like to say as long as you're being descriptive of the image, PLEASE be funny or add little jokes into it. I shouldn't be in no fun zone bc I need alt text. I want the humor of the description to match the humor of the post.

if i've learned one thing from doing union stuff while also doing other forms of organizing, it's that you're better off with people you disagree with who are nevertheless trying to do the same thing as you than with people you agree with who aren't trying to do anything

Had someone ask if I knew of any "intro to Bluesky content moderation systems" for the new folks, and I realized I don't actually know of anything that covers the full range of the systems that are available, so let me take a stab at it!

One of the responses this thread (on the Bad Place) got, a few times, ran roughly "if magic is common, magicians become engineers" or variations of that theme - the assumption that magic would be rapidly systematized by fictional pre-modern societies. And I don't think this is right. 1/