'All the evidence points to a healthy, world-class research community underpinning a key innovation pipeline from which future transformative technology and breakthrough science will emerge.Yet, despite all this success, 30% funding cuts have been proposed for UK astrophysics research" ☄️🔭

When I say I won’t read your Substack this is what I mean:

Join us on a trip to NGC 3981 🚀 This galaxy has an outlying spiral structure, some of which appears to have been stretched outwards from the galaxy, presumably due to the gravitational influence of a past galactic encounter. Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1830/ 🔭

I discovered @offprint.app recently and subscibed to it, frankly this is so good for people who love to write long text or articles and share them on #Bluesky. It feels so natural & I don't think there is a need anymore to go to #substack.

No you don't have to migrate your CMS. No you don't have to put your full content on protocol (though we should talk about that too). But you can get better branding, publish dates on your link cards (fight context collapse!), and better paths to subscriptions, donations, etc. It's a no-brainer.

Hello journalism friends. Do you want your news organization's links on Bluesky to look fancy like this? Get in touch, I can help. blog.euphonos.studio/3lyfwrx7zn222

The AT Protocol SDK for Python now supports @standard.site lexicons! 🐍 You can now read and write publication, document, and subscription records. The same long-form schemas powering @leaflet.pub, @pckt.blog, and @offprint.app. atproto.blue

so it turns out the new papal encyclical has a pretty good diagnosis of why the fediverse and the atmosphere keep struggling to govern themselves. guess were doing catholic theology in a protocol blog now connectedplaces.online/reports/fr16...

It's official, @bsky.app has integrated @standard.site into the app! This means posts from @pckt.blog, @offprint.app, and @leaflet.pub get a richer treatment in the app. More details about how this works on the atproto blog: atproto.com/blog/standar...

Floating point numbers would be AMAZING to have on the atproto for scientific data - a huge amount of data is floating point, and not being able to have them here adds a lot of complexity to posting things. This is a great proposal from @vmx.cx that demonstrates how they could be added:

🔭☄️

I miss getting chances to do live scicomm (ie posting about what I'm working on) because I've been doing too much Top Secret stuff recently But next week (or in three weeks) I want to do the data analysis for a paper, and since it isn't Top Secret, maybe I'll live-post what I'm doing!

come to the linkedin replacement you can log in to with your Atmosphere/Bluesky account it syncs with your orcid profile!

Sometimes I imagine a world in which European leaders like @president.europarl.europa.eu spent as much time supporting the European model of tech as they do cosying up to foreign oligarchs with openly anti-democratic projects and anti-European foreign interference activities. 🧵

... and the award for most absurd headline of 2026 goes to:

“Why are women less bullish overall on AI than men” is not actually that mysterious of a question

Emails I got this weekend from a major astronomy journal: 🔭 - Saturday: request to review a paper - Sunday: a repeated request to review the paper - Monday (public holiday in most countries): email complaining that I never replied A great way to solve the shortage of reviewers is to piss them off!

"Anthropic is the clean coal of AI. And clean coal doesn't exist" - Karen Hao speaking at Hay yesterday.

Reviewers in two groups were given identical resumes for Emily Clarke and James Clarke and told they had used AI. Emily's was 2x as likely to raise doubts about competence. "She can't even write a CV herself." But James "just needed a bit of help." fortune.com/2026/05/10/i...

This isn’t even about AI - this is just straight-up misogyny.

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Pedantic physicist: The cup is, at best, only instantaneously half full. At room temperature and 50% humidity, a glass of water loses ~1 mg of water per second to evaporation, meaning that by now it is already less than half full.

I feel like this has always applied to the entire internet, and microblogging in particular. 300 characters lends itself to context collapse and bad-faith arguments. Other platforms with lots of short-form discussion (Twitter, Reddit) aren't exactly famous for having great comment sections

the pure irony of accusing millions of people of living in a bubble while disabling replies

the anti-trans bathroom ban is very bad—it's also a sign uk democracy is failing my latest with @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-t...

Considering big tech is now trying to force the public to use GenAi summaries rather than web searches, god knows how that’s going to impact the public’s ability to actually find real-time disaster information. A competent government would be making policy about this, but we don’t have one.

this is why all the software is so bad, imo. not even because like "men are bad" but just imagine how gnarly the social dynamics would have to be to get an outcome like this, and then those people were put in charge of designing the mediums for doing socialization on..........madness

No, he really, really doesn't.

Testing it out of curiosity, I feel like Google's new AI search mode sides with whichever papers make the strongest claims (regardless of whether or not they're true.) This has major, shit implications for information retrieval - the most hyped claims are rewarded with AI search rating you higher

The new Google search does not pass the "does not credit my own papers to a man" test! We live in great times!

The UK is an absolutely miserable country to get around by public transit. Buses are almost your only option outside of London for getting around cities, and they spend so much time stuck in traffic. Trains are expensive and unreliable. Even as a pedestrian it's just often not very nice.

One of the weirdest stars in our galaxy! A great writeup by @astrobites.bsky.social

introduce yourself with 10 bands you've seen live Alvvays Slowdive Japanese Breakfast Nubya Garcia Arooj Aftab Magdalena Bay The Hotelier Margaret Glaspy Julien Baker Snail Mail

tomorrow I will trial a new presentation strategy, in which I call my entire audience nerds after 30 minutes and change topic to talk about why the AT Protocol is important to astronomy. wish me luck

The Austrian government has proposed hitting universities with an €800 million / year budget cut (after inflation). This could lead to redundancies for up to 20% of staff. 🫠 Quite ironic after the last year of advertising Austria as a "safe haven" for researchers impacted by Trump.

ChatGPT was never Google’s biggest threat; it was always its own hubris. With Search now being sacrificed on the altar of AI dominance, the time has come for users to get serious about moving off Google services. It’s not only destroying its products; it’s trying to further degrade the web itself.

just arrived in london, and I immediately got confronted by a pick-up artist this city 😅

dead internet theory goes brrrr I dread to think how many not-very-clued-in consumers will be so easily misled by these

I finally got around to reading this piece by @mariafarrell.eurosky.social and @robin.berjon.com, and it's fantastic. Drawing comparisons to ecology, it's a superb manifesto for the open web.

Rewilding the Internet >>>> walled gardens www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-r...

terrible. 20 years ago, the internet was full of hobbyist blogs and forums. over time, these have been replaced by paywalled substacks and private discord channels, each a walled garden. google's decision to prioritize AI just makes it less likely people will create free, public info

there has never been a better time to get a @kagi.com subscription

Verification on open social media should be for everyone - but it shouldn't require you handing over your ID documents to a private company. We put this doc together to outline that vision, what's possible on atproto already, and what's left to be done:

addicted to this 2000s-era personal website about the wobbly table theorem that I found with @kagi.com

welp, I was about to start making a scipy PR today but somebody already did it 😅 maybe they saw my post

the search continues! I've looked through R now and still nothing =( I found some R code from 2004 (by @schtepf.bsky.social! who is on bluesky!!) that called an R stats function which DID have a log option! But I found the source code for that but it still isn't high precision enough ☹️

there is nothing more satisfying than starting the day with an O(n²) problem and finishing the day with it optimized into an O(n) problem

I'll be talking about @astrosky.eco's nebra package, which makes it super easy to post & stream scientific data on the AT Protocol - including the two month-long tech demo of doing this that we've been running with NASA's astronomical transients feed!

It's quite shocking how many more satellites are visible by eye now than just a few years ago, especially as Starlinks are in much more light-polluting orbits. 🔭 You can now usually see a few in the sky at the same time, and it's only going to get worse. 🫤

This video is great, and is also exactly why @tangled.org is amazing - it is such a nice middle ground between centralized and decentralized git workflows. People who have never heard of apps on the AT Protocol would probably really like what we have going here. Getting the word out is a big job