Scott’s response is perfect. You saved me time writing a thread!

Immensely significant - and worrying.

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 summer…. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus

Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.

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. 🤍 #NEH #Resist

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

Fascism knows no bounds. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/u...

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

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.

This is the right thing to do, and it’s a profound shame that he had to do it. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/b...

What a magnificent piece of writing.

I've been reflecting some more overnight on the For Some Women Scotland case. 🧵

Wooah.

"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

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. 🧵 www.scientificamerican.com/article/repl...

1/4. On the White House’s 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.

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t 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.

(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 Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.

How a pediatrician persuades vaccine-hesitant parents. “She 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.” [kottke.org]

And also, why current Artificial Intelligence isn’t intelligent.

The Strategy Behind Trump’s Defiance of the Law www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Judith Butler: “Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?” [english.elpais.com]

This document feels historic already. The constitutional crisis of this moment in a nutshell.

A lot of people who have no idea what government actually does for their lives are about to apparently find out real quick.

I was just told that I have to remove “climate” from the title of an ongoing grant if I want to keep it. And publications from that grant cannot include “climate” and other forbidden words. I can’t believe I’m writing this from the United States of America. #AcademicSky

Oh. My. God.

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.

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...

I think some people hear “grants” 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. “Pausing” grants means people don’t eat.

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.

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...

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 weren’t across the detail and many of them have no experience of anything resembling functional policymaking.

Impeccable logic?

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 Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/m... via @techcrunch

Such a great thread!

Why we fund basic research

A legendary investor who correctly bet against the dotcom bubble is now betting against the AI bubble. “The Lonely Skepticism of a Bull-Market Skeptic” www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin... This provides support for the arguments of @garymarcus.bsky.social et al.