Sebastian Ahnert
@sebastianahnert.bsky.social
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Physicist with interdisciplinary interests.
https://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~sea31/
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Ruth Ahnert
4 months ago
Scottās response is perfect. You saved me time writing a thread!
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dag
6 months ago
Immensely significant - and worrying.
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Carl T. Bergstrom
6 months ago
Far from the whole story but we wrote about the grant proposal contest component a few years ago. Thinking about other elements of your question this summerā¦.
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
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Contest models highlight inherent inefficiencies of scientific funding competitions
Scientists waste substantial time writing grant proposals, potentially squandering much of the scientific value of funding programs. This Meta-Research Article shows that, unfortunately, grant-proposa...
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000065
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The Guardian
7 months ago
When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus
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When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus
The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/10/billion-dollar-ai-puzzle-break-down?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=bsky_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Bluesky#Echobox=1749552993
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John Garrison Marks
7 months ago
Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.
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Alt National Endowment for the Humanities
7 months ago
It is RIF separation day at NEH. More than 100 of us lose our jobs today. Our hearts are heavy and broken. None of this had to happen. Fellow NEHers, we cross this threshold together. One we hoped would never appear. We will continue to stand as tall as we can. š¤
#NEH
#Resist
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Carl T. Bergstrom
7 months ago
Our op-ed in the Guardian addresses the danger of Trump's "Gold Standard Science" executive order. with
@cdelawalla.bsky.social
@vambros.bsky.social
Carol Greider
@michaelemann.bsky.social
@briannosek.bsky.social
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Trumpās new āgold standardā rule will destroy American science as we know it | Colette Delawalla
The new executive order allows political appointees to undermine research they oppose, paving the way to state-controlled science
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/29/trump-american-science
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Gary Marcus
7 months ago
Fascism knows no bounds.
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/u...
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Trump Administration Halts Harvardās Ability to Enroll International Students
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-harvard-international-students.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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The English Historical Review
8 months ago
Steven Gunn reviews 'Tudor Networks of Power', By Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert
@ruthahnert.bsky.social
@sebastianahnert.bsky.social
academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-...
@oxfordacademic.bsky.social
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Tudor Networks of Power, By Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert
In many areas of historical research, the rise of digital resources has had an accelerative, rather than a transformative, effect. Historians look at simil
https://academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ehr/ceaf089/8116017
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Emily M. Bender
8 months ago
LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.
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southpaw
8 months ago
This is the right thing to do, and itās a profound shame that he had to do it.
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/b...
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What a magnificent piece of writing.
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8 months ago
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Jolyon Maugham KC
8 months ago
I've been reflecting some more overnight on the For Some Women Scotland case. š§µ
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Dr Duncan Robertson
8 months ago
Wooah.
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Timothy Snyder
8 months ago
"the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man mistakenly sent to a gulag... and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps. This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped"
snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror
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State Terror
A brief guide for Americans
https://snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror
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Timnit Gebru
9 months ago
In this Op-ed for Scientific American, Asmelash Teka Hadgu and I discuss one of the many reasons the idea of replacing US federal workers with so-called generative AI systems should terrify us. š§µ
www.scientificamerican.com/article/repl...
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Replacing Federal Workers with Chatbots Would Be a Dystopian Nightmare
The Trump administration sees an AI-driven federal workforce as more efficient. Instead, with chatbots unable to carry out critical tasks, it would be a diabolical mess
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/replacing-federal-workers-with-chatbots-would-be-a-dystopian-nightmare/
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Timothy Snyder
9 months ago
1/4. On the White Houseās theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.
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Janelle Shane
9 months ago
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages donāt exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
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Richard Branson
10 months ago
(1/3) It needs repeating: in 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons to Russia in return for the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteeing Ukraineās sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.
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kottke.org
10 months ago
How a pediatrician persuades vaccine-hesitant parents. āShe has found *tremendous* success by just letting the families know she will have to document the higher risk of specific, and often fatal illness, in the chart of their child.ā
[kottke.org]
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How to Persuade the Vaccine Hesitant
I loved this short thread from Andrew Miller about how his pediatrician wife helps parents who are skeptical of vaccinating their children change their minds. So my wife is a pediatrician and works in some hospitals wit
https://kottke.org/25/02/how-to-persuade-the-vaccine-hesitant
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And also, why current Artificial Intelligence isnāt intelligent.
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10 months ago
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The Strategy Behind Trumpās Defiance of the Law
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
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The Strategy Behind Trumpās Defiance of the Law
His violations follow an old playbookātrigger lawsuits, giving the Supreme Court a chance to declare statutes unconstitutional.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-strategy-behind-trumps-defiance-of-the-law
10 months ago
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kottke.org
11 months ago
Judith Butler: āOnce you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, youāre operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one youāre willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?ā
[english.elpais.com]
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Judith Butler, philosopher: āIf you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logicā
A leading figure in feminism and gender studies, the thinker welcomes EL PAĆS in California after being voted one of the most influential minds in the world
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-12-15/judith-butler-philosopher-if-you-sacrifice-a-minority-like-trans-people-you-are-operating-within-a-fascist-logic.html
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This document feels historic already. The constitutional crisis of this moment in a nutshell.
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11 months ago
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Ida Bae Wells
11 months ago
A lot of people who have no idea what government actually does for their lives are about to apparently find out real quick.
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Alessandro Rigolon
11 months ago
I was just told that I have to remove āclimateā from the title of an ongoing grant if I want to keep it. And publications from that grant cannot include āclimateā and other forbidden words. I canāt believe Iām writing this from the United States of America.
#AcademicSky
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Oh. My. God.
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11 months ago
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Gennady Rudkevich
11 months ago
The left map shows the parts of Germany with the highest percentage of Syrian refugees. The right map shows public support for the anti-migrant AfD. Something to keep in mind when reading stories that posit a direct link between refugee numbers and support for the far-right.
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Carole Cadwalladr
11 months ago
This is what should be on every front page right now. What's happening in the US right now is an illegal power grab by a private citizen. IT'S A COUP. It's a digital coup. It's Musk who's leading it. The consequences are terrifying. And it's coming for us next. 1/
open.substack.com/pub/broligar...
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IT IS A COUP
This is what should be on every front page in 150 point banner headlines. All I have is this Substack but I lay it beneath your feet and pray to a higher power that I'm wrong.
https://open.substack.com/pub/broligarchy/p/it-is-a-coup?r=nv9u6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
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Katie Mack
11 months ago
I think some people hear āgrantsā and think that without them, scientists and government workers just have less stuff to play with at work. But grants fund salaries for students, academics, researchers, and people who work in all areas of public service. āPausingā grants means people donāt eat.
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White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion
The Trump administration has put a hold on all federal financial grants and loans, affecting tens of billions of dollars in payments.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/27/white-house-pauses-federal-grants/
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Carl T. Bergstrom
11 months ago
Here are just a few of the NSF review panels that were shut down today, Chuck. This is research that would have made us competitive in computer science that will now be delayed by many months if not lost forever. AI is fine but right now the top priority is keeping the lights on at NSF and NIH.
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Gary Marcus
11 months ago
Five things most people don't seem to understand about DeepSeek. ⢠It's not smarter than earlier models, just trained more cheaply ⢠It doesn't solve hallucinations or problems with reliability. Rest of post at
open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...
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Five things most people don't seem to understand about DeepSeek
DeepSeek r1 is not smarter than earlier models, just trained more cheaply
https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/five-things-most-people-dont-seem?r=8tdk6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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Stephen Bush
12 months ago
So many of their problems in government, and so many of their problems in opposition have the same root: by the end most ministers just werenāt across the detail and many of them have no experience of anything resembling functional policymaking.
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Gary Marcus
12 months ago
Impeccable logic?
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Josh Marshall
12 months ago
worth noting that you don't need to be on a fancy rights holder site to be copyrighted. whatever you write is under your copyright by default Mark Zuckerberg gave Metaās Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims
techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/m...
via @techcrunch
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Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta's Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims | TechCrunch
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta's Llama team approval to train on copyrighted documents, according to a new court filing.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/mark-zuckerberg-gave-metas-llama-team-the-ok-to-train-on-copyrighted-works-filing-claims/
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Such a great thread!
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12 months ago
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Brendan Nyhan
about 1 year ago
Why we fund basic research
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A legendary investor who correctly bet against the dotcom bubble is now betting against the AI bubble. āThe Lonely Skepticism of a Bull-Market Skepticā
www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...
This provides support for the arguments of
@garymarcus.bsky.social
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The Lonely Skepticism of a Bull-Market Skeptic
Investorsā enthusiasm for A.I. has converted some longtime Wall Street bears into optimists. Jeremy Grantham is still waiting for the bubble to pop.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/jeremy-grantham-is-still-waiting-for-the-bubble-to-pop
12 months ago
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