Electricity now costs 267% more (!!) for 1 month vs. what it cost 5 years ago near data center hotspots. Awesome reporting from Josh Saul @dinabass.bsky.social Leonardo Nicoletti @naurtorious.bsky.social Demetrios Pogkas (gift link) www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

words have (different) meaning(s according to which discourse communities are deploying them and to what rhetorical purposes)!!!

8% of US adults say they have no close friends www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

September’s post in the APA Blog’s “Teaching and Learning Video Series” is a very fun consideration of our intuitions about the threshold for moral status by way of an iconic scene from “The Good Place.” Thanks @profprof.bsky.social! blog.apaonline.org/2025/09/17/c...

fellow loud music enjoyers: ho99o9's new album is fantastic.

4S folks: if you are looking for something to do post conference, Ada’s technical books is worth a visit. adasbooks.com

Aaaaand the main business case for consumer LLMs is revealed. It's for gathering data on users, creating profiles, and targeting us with ads and propaganda. Hooray -- it's Web 2.0 with chatbots!

What is it going to take to get companies to care about this and do something? It's been a tough day reading this great report by @kashhill.bsky.social on the risks of chatbots. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Called it guard.io/labs/scamlex...

7. The paper looks at how researchers might hand off boring "drudge work" such as data collection and cleaning to AI agents, and what could (and IMO will) go wrong as they do so. Here's a key passage.

5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...

Increasingly, what makes sense to me is framing a class as a *dialogic community* and assessing students on their contributions as members of that community. Such contributions can be and should be as spontaneous as they are regulated. +

So apparently we are within the last 60 days of dial-up AOL being a thing. help.aol.com/articles/dia... ht @mat.tl

NEW: In a likely first, security researchers have shown how generative AI agents can be hijacked to cause physical consequences. They tricked Google's Gemini AI into turning off smart home lights, opening windows, and turning on a boiler. They hid instructions to the AI in a *calendar invitation*

The full-day, hybrid workshop is "Matters: Ethical Challenges in Research with Online Communities" led by Matthew Zent plus @schancellor.bsky.social, @cfiesler.bsky.social, @sarahagilbert.bsky.social, @estellesmithphd.bsky.social and more. sites.google.com/umn.edu/cont...

Applications are open for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you’ve recently earned a Ph.D. in any scientific field and want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research, consider applying. Deadline: October 1, 2025 Apply here: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

We may have the chance to hire an outstanding researcher 3+ years post PhD to join Tarleton Gillespie, Mary Gray and me in Cambridge MA bringing critical sociotechnical perspectives to bear on new technologies. jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

***Job Opportunity in History*** Assistant Professor, Science, Technology, and Society, Harvey Mudd College 19/ networks.h-net.org/jobs/68862/h...

New OA pub day! Given the dwindling of local newspapers, folks are turning to social media. Platforms are discursively constructing local community groups as a new kind of hub. But local volunteer mods are the ones who are charged to realize these visions. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

GWU IDDP organized a Council to reflect on the comments submitted to NTIA’s Request For Comment (RFC) regarding Ethical Guidelines for Research Using Pervasive Data. Check out the findings here: iddp.gwu.edu/ethical-use-...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the world may be on the precipice of a "fraud crisis" because of how artificial intelligence could enable bad actors to impersonate other people. Read more: cnn.it/3GVwPg7

NEW FROM ME: new research has found millions of ex's of personal info, including credit cards, passports, résumés, birth certificates etc in 1 of the largest web-scraped datasets used to train image generation AI models. It's a major privacy violation. www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...

Turns out people are less trusting of doctors who use AI. Color me shocked. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

“We should treat the chain-of-thought the way a military might treat intercepted enemy radio communications. The communication might be misleading or encoded, but…it’s being used to pass along useful information, and we’ll probably be able to learn a lot from reading it.” www.ft.com/content/b349...

Unlike medical algorithms, insurance AI tools are largely unregulated. They don’t have to go through FDA review, and insurance companies often say their algorithms are trade secrets. There’s no outside testing to see whether they’re safe, fair or effective. theconversation.com/how-artifici...

Exclusive: Microsoft and OpenAI executives are feuding over 'AGI' and other clauses in their blockbuster contract. Read more from @aaronpholmes.bsky.social, @stephpalazzolo.bsky.social and Amir Efrati 👇 www.theinformation.com/articles/ope...

We introduce the concept of label indeterminacy which arises in scenarios where labels are fundamentally unknowable for some instances, with no principled way to resolve ambiguity in the process of estimating them.

We should declare a moratorium on AI discourse and let everyone take a week to read the Phaedrus. Otherwise we'll just rewrite the whole thing piecemeal 100,000 times.

Philosophy of Science job at University of Bristol! Lecturer in Philosophy (Fixed term) AOS: Philosophy of Science or Philosophy of Mathematics AOC: Philosophy of Science, Phil Mathematics, & Logic Deadline: June 30, Start: September 2025 #PhilJobs #PhilSky #PhilSci philjobs.org/job/show/29241

Kind of wish academic papers could come with 1980s style sword and sorcery cover images.

"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

“‘You think you are talking to an objective confidant or guide, but actually what you are looking into is some kind of distorted mirror — that mirrors back to your own beliefs,’ said Matthew Nour, a psychiatrist and researcher in neuroscience and AI at Oxford university.”

The suit includes the legal definition of Shrek

This lawsuit is brutal. One of the exhibits is the letter Universal sent to Midjourney, including a quote from a 2022 Forbes interview that I bet midjourney regrets

the thing is, it turns out they can bring in players from outside indiana and oklahoma to play for these teams. some of them are quite good

This is a hell of a thing to read.

Scoop: Internal documents show Meta is replacing human reviewers with automation for assessing potential real-world risks in 90% of its products with @shannonbond.bsky.social www.npr.org/2025/05/31/n...

ICYMI - Research has shown that alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops consume 46% of the water that is diverted from the Colorado River www.latimes.com/environment/...

Honestly anyone who wants to get away with LLM use and not get caught should just insert random typos.

People keep plugging AI "Co-Scientists," so what happens when you ask them to do an important task like finding errors in papers? We built SPOT, a dataset of STEM manuscripts across 10 fields annotated with real errors to find out. (tl;dr not even close to usable) #NLProc arxiv.org/abs/2505.11855

A new study details the evolutionary change of Anna's Hummingbirds, finding their beaks have grown longer and more tapered to get the most from common feeders.

I always mispronounce it as “Rothko’s Basilisk” which is, of course, a very different thing to worry about.

The Veo 3 generated videos are absolutely incredible! So good a part of me wants to think it's fake because.. holy shit. @fofr.ai is posting them on twitter. Drop what you're doing and go look right now.

Nice commons you’ve got here, really would be a tragedy if something happened to it.

"There are a growing # of AI bots crawling repositories[; they're] sufficiently aggressive [to] cause service disruptions + outages... As a result, some repositories have started to block machine access to their collections, which is also inadvertently blocking other desired network services..."