On the tube

New blog post on why nobody is average, and what happens when institutions design everything as if someone is.

How can this be a real article and not satire? 😳

“Speed and volume of code generation are not the same as correctness, security, or verifiability—and in domains where all three are non-negotiable, the calculus looks very different.” #GenAI #SoftwareEngineering

Pretext for the next war, same as pretexts for the last wars. Some old story, same old song and dance.

If you use an LLM to help write a paper, you're responsible for the outcome. Obviously. I just doubt that this will applied equally. Junior researchers, minorities, and non-native speakers will be held to a standard that senior names with institutional protection quietly won't be.

Please sign this. Nottingham's Physics & Astronomy department is one of the best in the UK, and 56 of its staff have just been told their jobs are at risk because university management blew money on vanity projects. If this can happen at Nottingham, it can happen anywhere.

Professor Defended a Postdoc Who Was Deported. Now His Lab Has Been Suddenly Locked Down. www.chronicle.com/article/a-pr...

Doctors say that fluoride helps build strong teeth. A guy who snorts cocaine off toilet seats and takes raccoon penises home for “further study” says it causes autism. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

"the data we stole from you to profit off wasn't good, do better"

JK Rowling is now represented by a trans person in the Scottish parliament. Absolutely incredible.

don't worry everyone, chuck is on the job!

Six months ago, the federal government indicted me, my friend Andre, and four others for protesting ICE. Our trial is this month and we are facing up to $250k in legal debt. Please help us win our case and protect all of our rights by donating to our legal defense: tinyurl.com/katandre

"Prestigious fellowship opportunity" is sometimes just a funny way of spelling "networking event for people who already know each other"

More proof that these guys have got to meet students from places other than Harvard and Yale.

Remember when in 2015 the Boomers were telling us to stop buying avocado toast

Just finished Schild's Ladder by @gregegansf.bsky.social and I think I need to lie down for a while. Ultra hard sci-fi where the physics is the load-bearing wall of the plot. Take the math out and there's no story left.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

remember that dumb time in the aughts when richard dawkins was like, The Smart Guy

Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:

Captured SN2026kid in NGC 5907 (the Splinter Galaxy) last night from my backyard! Only 3 minutes of exposure with my Seestar S50 were enough to pick it up. The core collapse of a massive star about 40 million light-years away, caught with a smart telescope from my driveway. 🧵

CJ Cherryh has announced retirement, everyone, raise your cups to a legend of the game. Thank you for your service www.facebook.com/groups/Balti...

Congratulations to the U.S. for building an educational and economic powerhouse envied around the world and then dismantling it because colleges were so bold to give lip service to non-discrimination efforts. academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

the missing scientists conspiracy is just three body problem for people who didn't read three body problem. if aliens wanted to cripple earth science they would simply continue to defund the NSF. much more efficient than whatever this is supposed to be

Our brave Stephen Miller is using his pregnant wife as a human shield.

Breaking: Trump has fired the membership of the National Science Board, which is oversees NSF. I have confirmed separately with multiple now-former members of NSB.

Not sure who needs this today, but here it is. Mary Oliver, "I Worried"

The greatest threat to journalism right now is the complete normalization of Israel murdering journalists. Authoritarian governments learn from each other: this started in Gaza but will not end there.

Today we remember the Armenian Genocide, and alongside it, the Pontic Greek and Assyrian genocides carried out by the same hands. My mother's family are Pontic. This history lives in us. Δεν ξεχνώ. We remember.

I'm actually trying to imagine my career if I never sat at dinner or had drinks with creepy men. (To be clear, once I know someone is a creep I try to steer clear. But sometimes you've just got "vibes too late" or someone is... directly in the path.)

To be clear: These people want us dead. Erasing us from history makes erasing us from the present easier, because if we don't have a past or a heritage, how real can we possibly be?

Well, wonder no more, my friends.

When the president is a heinous abuser, when many of the most popular celebrities are heinous abusers, when the richest people in the world are heinous abusers, when the people developing new technology are heinous abusers, well that’s how you get a culture that incentivizes abuse

Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality is finally out in the world! Combining nationwide survey evidence, state administrative data, and 111 interviews with patients, physicians & others, it tells the long-overdue story of coverage barriers and their deepening of burden an inequity.

and unlike the former, politics provide lots of direct evidence of the latter

As a reminder, NASA's entire budget, *including* human spaceflight (which is about half of it), is already less than 0.4% of US federal spending. As a comparison, defense spending, even when NOT actively starting wars, is more than 10% (with a huge increase proposed for FY2027).

Cartoonish evil will always be with us. But we must change things so that people like this are typing whiny manifestos to each other, not running the world.

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

From Tori Bonidie and Skylar Grayson: The president’s budget requests for NASA and the NSF were released last week. We summarizes the major cuts and their impacts while providing resources to help fight back against this attack on science. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/04/16/budget-request-fy2027/

I don't recall any previous transformative technologies that had to be sold to the public so hard. No one in 1999 was going, "Guys. Cell phone? It's coming, whether we like it or not. I think it's important, FOR WOMEN ESPECIALLY, to learn about cell phone. So that we're not left behind!!"

This is what happens at concentration camps

It's pretty dumb to see people still going after the bluesky team about yesterday's outage over them using AI for coding, when this had all the signs of a DDOS attack. I also have HUGE concerns about the use of AI in society & software, but shouting at someone for the wrong reason persuades nobody.

babe, wake up, new form of mansplaining just dropped

AOC: “The mistake that I made, you know, from all the movies that we see growing up about heroes & villains — is that I thought that fascist takeover attempts were going to be architected by evil geniuses — I was not expecting how unearned, nepotistic, mediocre, & just dumb the architects would be”