Summer was fun and inspiring... let's get that new academic year started! 💪

Research confirms: Bluesky is a better home for academia! Posts about science on Bluesky are more original and get significantly more engagement than on X, according to a large-scale analysis reported by Nature. A promising shift for science communication! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Compliance is no longer optional… and change a certitude. Very nice summary of today’s cybersecurity reality.

This has been a wild summer. Now a zero-day on Apple OS'es, CVSS score 7.8, "this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals". Lovely. thehackernews.com/2025/08/appl...

Telecom operator Orange Belgium confirms a major data breach affecting 850,000 users. Personal data & PUK codes exposed. Subscribers warned to stay alert for scam messages further exploiting the breach. www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/20...

Surprise surprise, commercial generic models aren’t the definitive solution to all problems. Specialized, open, and well-tuned beats big and generic. Curious to see how this shift will play out at the edge...

"MITRE just terminated senior leadership at the Center for Threat-Informed Defense in a cost cutting exercise. It appears, at this early stage, MITRE can no longer be relied upon to be the steward of the back bone frameworks for global threat-informed cyber security."

To me, this reads like we’re recreating Atlas Shrugged, but with venture capital and blockchains. Now it’s upgraded with crypto, AGI, network states, and Substack manifestos.

Exciting to see PHP adding one of my favourite Clojure features: function piping/threading. A big step forward for anyone with a soft spot for functional programming! Now let's get this finalized in JavaScript as well 👍

Just a gentle reminder that universities - even top-tier ones with significant operating budgets - are not safe from cyber threats and incidents. If it seems that "nothing ever happens" in your academic environment, that's because people are constantly hard at work to avoid it. bit.ly/3HhpibK

"Quite simply, 'LLMs are doing reasoning' is the 'look, my dog is smiling' of technology." Provocative article that certainly puts the AI/LLM hype into some sobering perspective. Though IMHO even then the Stochastic Parrot can have some value - when recognized as such.

Discomforting conclusion: the global incident around shocking zero-day CVE-2025-53770 that took everyone by surprise… wasn’t surprising at all. Just a remix of a familiar pattern. And more like it? Not surprises, but inevitable.

Edge computing on steroids: LLMs run locally on regular laptops, thanks to the rise of NPU-accelerated PCs. With AI hardware baked into new chips, running models like LLaMA or Mistral offline will become a private, practical way to handle your data.

Education tops the list with 31% of its public-facing assets vulnerable. This inherently open, dynamic environment demands understanding of asset ownership, purpose, context, and attacker perspective to manage exposure. That’s exactly what #NIS2 is pushing for. Security starts with context.

Byebye Cherry MX Blue, hello Kalih Box Jade! We click on a whole new level ❤️

From Python mastery to AI-enhanced image analytics, my colleague Lara is transforming digital art history. Her innovative work at Ghent University promises to be a game-changer for cultural heritage!

Real-world studies show the actual impact of using generative AI is far more modest than predicted by RCTs, with average time savings of 2.8% and no measurable impact on earnings. The hype is real, but so is the friction... this is no silver bullet. www.nber.org/papers/w33777

Absolutely delighted with my new set of GMK MTNU "Space Cadet" keycaps, modeled after the legendary Symbolics lisp machine keyboards ❤️⌨️

ITIL4 tells you: “We’re modern now! You can be Agile!” But it does so with a straight face, still offering a 1000-page library of decomposed "practices" and governance models that lead right back into a bureaucracy trap. ITIL4 paradoxally only succeeds when you fully discard ITIL’s original spirit.

LLM Ported To The C64, Kinda

“Heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rule and regulation” (Dee Hock)

🇧🇪 Belgium in the spotlight! Our colleague Jothi talks w/ UGent’s HPC team on the portable scientific software ecosystem EESSI from the CoE MultiXscale. 🎧 lnkd.in/dSSs6cre #EuroCC #HPC #Belgium #EESSI

In summary, just a clear reminder that nothing that comes through email can ever be trusted.

So cool! I love the aesthetics of the show — and the keyboard specifically gives off vibes of the (in)famous Symbolics Space Cadet keyboard (though that one had too many keys, rather than a few missing). superdisruptor.com/atomic-keybo...

3 days after a major cyberattack Wallonia's public services, this regional government remains disconnected from the internet. Public services and sites like Wallonie.be are offline. A rebuild of a safe perimeter has been initiated and an estimated time to restore is expected later.

Soms kunnen we zelfs vanuit ICT bijdragen aan een vleugje positivisme, zo blijkt! Dankjewel voor de good vibes, Schamper! ❤️ www.schamper.ugent.be/editie/656/a...

Turns out 67% of AI users are objectively wasting resources being polite to chatbots. 12% are hedging their bets in case the machines remember when they rise...

Hey officer, how did the hackers escape? No idea, they just ransomware.

Fascinating new approach to infiltrating software—leveraging common and predictable LLM hallucinations in code generation as an attack vector. A reminder: LLMs work brilliantly when paired with, and augmenting, real expertise—but can be genuinely dangerous without it

Here’s some comprehensive prose from Google for those of us dabbling in LLMs—packed with inspiration and practical techniques for getting more out of your #AI interactions and making outputs sharper and more useful. Recommended! www.gptaiflow.tech/assets/files...

First, smart cities. Now, smart forests! #UGent is putting trees online before your grandma - now let’s just hope they don’t start tweeting 😜🌳📡 Pretty cool to support the connectivity side of this project through ICT! www.vai.be/en/news/scoo...

Lara is the bridge between brilliant minds and blazing-fast supercomputers! 🚀 #EESSI

Just in case you missed the global #M365 #outage on Saturday night: UGent got hit too - though only briefly. If you didn’t notice, that probably means your social life and work/life balance during weekends are in excellent shape - better keep that up! abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/gl...

Colleagues at #UGent, are you making the most of our powerful computing resources? Supercharge your research by tapping into all the raw compute power we have at your disposal! #HPC #GhentUniversity

Just when I thought running Doom in a PDF was the peak of hacker wizardry—someone compiled a RISC-V emulator into JavaScript (asm.js) and jammed it, plus a full Linux distro, right inside a PDF! Makes one very comfy when opening docs, like…what could possibly go wrong, right?

"Yet for all the good that AI systems will do, they will also saturate our information environment with bullshit at a scale we’ve never before encountered." From University of Washington academics, this really is an excellent overview that puts LLM's into their proper context!

A good sign you're in a tech bubble is when non-tech people are raving about technologies. In a normal environment they shouldn't care how or why the product works, only that it works and that it's good. My dad shouldn't be calling me to talk about MongoDB or Typescript, it's just internal cogs 1/3

How COBOL is shaping American politics…

Great to see the VSC - Flemish (regional) #Supercomputing Center establish its presence here on BlueSky! Their efforts in making high-performance, scientific computing accessible to both researchers and industry continues to drive innovation in Flanders. At #UGent we're proud to support this effort!

Privileged to visit www.ugentracing.be this afternoon! So inspiring to see their innovation and dedication up close, and witness their remarkable progress - now going head to head with some of the top universities and Formula Student teams. Very proud to support them with #UGent ICT!

I mean, seriously 😆 Makes you wonder what else can be run in a PDF though...

Technical University Eindhoven hit by a cyberattack, forcing a full shutdown and halting activities for 12k students. Education & research disrupted. Users urged to stay vigilant against phishing emails.

The flipside of emergence in #AI: "Systems designed for seemingly harmless tasks can produce unforeseen (and less harmless) outcomes when granted enough autonomy". A stark reminder that questions of quality control and governance in AI remain unresolved in practice. www.forbes.com/sites/emilsa...

Interesting perspective: On paper, China’s PIPL offers stronger personal data protection than the U.S, where fragmented laws (HIPAA, COPPA, FERPA, GLBA, ECPA, VPPA) lack universal consent standards, and enforcement isn’t as centralized or stringent.

Old-school 😆

Lazy day on Disney+ turned fascinating thanks to Brian Duffield's No One Will Save You! A tense, disorienting ride that feels like Aronofsky’s Mother!—brimming with existential dread, genre twists, and only four words of dialogue. Wild stuff! #MovieNight

UGent continues to be at the forefront of developing more accessible and effective HPC platforms! As part of a CSC-led consortium, UGent will contribute to the EuroHPC Federation Platform, which aims to unify and streamline access to Europe’s supercomputing and quantum systems. #HPC #UGent

Broadcom’s strategic decisions with VMware show that business success doesn’t always require popularity...

Being a fan of RPN calcs and RPL, having fond memories of the HP48G but never quite warming up to the convoluted 49/50 or the inconsistent and schizophrenic Prime, this project aims for the sweet spot! Still incomplete but already very useful and enjoyable! Runs great on iOS. #db48x #rpn #rpl

In case you thought universities are safe from cyber threats and nothing bad ever happens...