My house is the best

Rstudio wrapped bsky.app/profile/sal....

“A program with a 0.5% success rate is not elite. It’s wasteful. Thousands of highly trained scientists will sink dozens of hours into writing proposals with vanishing odds of success. This is not just inefficient — it’s disrespectful of scientific labour.” Very well said @kamounlab.bsky.social!👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

From @benjedwards.com in @arstechnica.com, this piece on Anthropic’s “blackmail” story and the company’s habit of presenting totally expected behaviors as totally unexpected behaviors: arstechnica.com/information-...

Relatable Corvid

People who are not interested in politics are being radicalized into rightwingdom by refrigerators. Late stage capitalism, y'all.

Looking forwards to Europe passing laws saying that putting ads inside someone's house is illegal. Then the capitalists will have to remove all ads from all your apps and browsers as long as you're connected to your home wifi. Everyone's life will get exponentially better.

This Pluribus ad on a fridge caused a schizophrenic woman named Carol to be hospitalized.

A Japanese research team has produced induced pluripotent stem, or iPS, cells safely and efficiently by adding artificially synthesized ribonucleic acid to human blood cells.

Sometimes I do a comic just to confirm that I am not in any way optimizing for social media algorithms. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sim-3 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

I initially thought the joke was funny (maybe because I don't even drink coffee...) but he makes such a good point

Our #ALIFE2025 paper is out! 🎉 We show that even when two circuits produce the same output, their evolutionary potential can differ greatly. #Evolution at the smallest scale. “Parameter Evolvability in Gene Expression Models Drives Phenotypic Adaptation” 🔗 direct.mit.edu/isal/proceed...

More parsimonious is that you're just a brain in a sous vide. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/vat PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

"They're trying to change our habits, because all of the projections rely on people becoming truly dependent on the technology. Whether or not it's actually a good thing for society isn't considered to be a factor."

The interface for editors/reviewers for this npj journal is incredibly deceptive and just sends messages on its own with info that is just wrong, possibly on purpose, to pressure editors into expediting the review process even without enough reviews.

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

This is partially the fault of credentialism. 1/10 Boomers, 1/3 Millennials, & 1/2 Zoomers has a post-secondary degree. Degrees are needed for entry-level white collar work. So many people need a degree instead of just wanting one. It's turned college into grades 13-17 instead of higher learning.

Most of us don't realize how many objects (payloads and debris) are in orbit around Earth. orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/protection/

I just became aware of this incredibly relatable drawing by John Singer Sargent.

should we be concerned about the authors and their objectives?

@franzanth.bsky.social you may already be aware of the existence of this, but I felt like it needed to be brought to your attention if not: store.steampowered.com/app/2053910/...

Hi everyone! We are the Evolutionary Modelling Group! We are interested in many topics, from the evolution of microbial mutational robustness to the evolution of language and culture in humans. We rely on a variety of methods, both computational (evolutionary simulations) and mathematical.

And we've come to learn of many other girls with different forms of encephalitis, and my daughter seems to be the only one with a direct connection to a vaccine. It's a maddening, awful disease, that makes no sense other than one day your body decides to attack your brain. www.encephalitis.info

My daughter is fighting a rare and serious side-effect of the HPV vaccine called autoimmune encephalitis 14 months after her first shot, and still, this vaccine is doing so much good. Get your shots if you can. You're far more likely to get cervical cancer than a serious side-effect from a vaccine.

Brazil approves the first vaccine against dengue. The disease killed 6000 Brazilians in 2024. This is a really remarkable achievement. I got dengue in 2015, and even with the mild case I had, it was a really miserable experience.

A town in Japan has retracted its warning of a bear sighting after discovering that a picture it had received showing the fearsome creature was generated using AI. 👉 ebx.sh/sq9eVt

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

1. Pausing new submissions about AI topics for 90 days. That is, papers about AI models, testing AI models, proposing AI models, theories about the future of AI, etc. We will make exceptions for papers that are already accepted for publication (or published) in peer-reviewed scholarly journals /2

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps: /1

🔭 Comet Lemmon and the Milky Way Image Credit & Copyright: Lin Zixuan linzx23 at mails.tsinghua.edu dot cn) (Tsinghua U.) apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25112...

Extrapolate & don't make bsky your main or only social hangout Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation A week of political content can bring about a shift in views that previously would have taken t3 years www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Memes of the decade: - Torment nexus - Faces, leopards

“.. This is X in 2025: Potentially fake accounts crying at other potentially fake accounts that they aren’t real, all while refusing to acknowledge that they themselves aren’t who they say they are — a Russian nesting doll of bullshit.” @cwarzel.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

ALIFE 2025's proceedings are officially published (open-access) on the MIT Press's website! direct.mit.edu/isal/isal202...

I hate LLMs rather more than the average person but it's surreal seeing so many bad takes about how 'AI' was created with nefarious humanity destroying goals by sociopathic techbros from day 1. That's what LLMs exemplify right now, but taking that as AI's origin story is just conspiracist thinking.

The Human Genome Project's Ethical Legal and Social Implications program dedicated more than 3% of its research budgets to this focus. Imagine 3% of public- and private- sector AI research budgets devoted to its societal impacts.

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"We will show that the torment nexus can be used for predicting [crime/employability/IQ] from ID photos" ... a long-standing, undying obsession of academics

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. [....] Academic: Our project, if funded by the government, will considerably improve the efficiency of the existing Torment Nexus,

"It's ok if I post disinformation because it could be true" "It's ok if I misrepresent a thing as happening now even if the article is 5 yo, because it's probably worse now" It's ok if I mislead people, because I'm on YOUR side. Rings a bell? Unfollow and block them. Poison to your community.

How do the genetics work on that crisp straight line?

One order today so far!

So there you have it, twin study estimates were greatly inflated, and molecular data sets the record straight. I walk through possible counter-arguments, but ultimately the uncomfortable truth is that genes contribute to traits much less than we always thought.

How do the genetics work on that crisp straight line?

"It may be uncomfortable to conclude that a widely used study design has been producing spurious results. But the evidence is in, and telling uncomfortable truths is a part of doing science." Problems with twin studies. theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missin...

This was really good. I learned a lot and I particularly liked the pet peeve section youtu.be/xtx7x_WaZhI?...

Scientists from the Netherlands and @bluemarblespace.bsky.social discovered a new way that molecules copy themselves with fewer errors, using “selective binding.” #SciComm #SciNews #ALife #evosky #molevol sciworthy.com/how-molecule...