40%. FORTY percent.

What we'd like to see is people protesting in their own homes, quietly, about once a year. You can register your interest to protest on our new government website, and a Protest Officer will be round to verify that you're protesting against something protestable.

We can really see how he earned his Royal Society fellowship spot.

Software Carpentry Python Workshop – Join Us This November! We’re excited to invite you to our free workshop, open to all! 📅 : 4-6 Nov ⏰ : 9 am-2 pm Eastern Time (UTC -5) 🛜 : Online This workshop is interactive and hands-on, providing basic lab skills for those in research computing roles.

LLMs cannot replace software engineers and never will, because software engineering is the process of understanding, maintaining and executing code to produce functional software. LLMs do not “learn,” cannot “adapt,” and break down the moment things get complex. wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...

“In a new report, management consultants Bain & Company found that despite being ‘one of the first areas to deploy generative AI,’ the ‘savings have been unremarkable’ in programming.”

"No single study on AI in the workplace is going to be definitive, but evidence is mounting that AI is affecting people’s work in the same way it’s affecting everything else: It is making it easier to output low-quality slop that other people then have to wade through."

Lmaooooooo

Antifa terrorist.

@zdnet.bsky.social thanks for writing this! > The authors urge educational leaders to act "to help us collectively turn back the tide of garbage software, which fuels harmful tropes and false frames to obtain market penetration and increase technological dependency." www.zdnet.com/article/stud...

Despite the overwhelming evidence of Trump's criminality, his fascist policies, his support of Israel's genocide, his links with sex trafficking and his views that domestic violence isn't a crime, what were the standout looks of the state visit, BBC News?

🔵 The Carpentries have recently published a new version of Building Better Research Software, a lesson in The Carpentries Incubator designed to serve as a “next steps” workshop after Software Carpentry. Find out more about it and how to get involved at: www.software.ac.uk/news/calling...

Help us put the final touches to the future of Carpentries membership. Share your feedback on programs, services, and community in our survey today. Learn more and take the survey 👉 www.carpentries.org/blog/2025/09...

AI is the wrong tool to tackle complex societal & systemic problems. AI4SG is more about PR victories, boosting AI adoption (regardless of merit/usefulness) & laundering accountability for harmful tech, extractive practices, abetting atrocities. yours truly www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/ai-...

🌱 From surviving to thriving: 5 leading open science orgs – The Carpentries, OLS, @ropensci.org @pyopensci.org & @prereview.bsky.social – are convening to build sustainable, connected futures for our communities. Read more: www.carpentries.org/blog/2025/09... #OpenScience #Sustainability #Community

Bear with me, I anticipate your disagreement. There is a clear pattern to the advice given to those who want to press back against rising racism. What it boils down to is that if you point out that racism is often being dressed up as “legitimate concerns” you will alienate people. /1

A friend of mine was on Charlie Kirk's "watch list" of Black professors. She received so many death and rape threats that her university offered her a security detail for the walk to class. This is Kirk's legacy. You would never know it from reading all of these legacy newspaper op-eds about him.

This science story has everything: - a superheroic scientist who has the condition she is battling to drive work on - a riveting scientific breakthrough story (I was gasping) - an absolute gutpunch about whether her work will be defunded www.science.org/content/arti...

What

I increasingly wonder if this is down to so many government people still using X and mistaking that for an actual measure of public opinion. Poll after poll after poll has shown that British voters don't like small boats but they hate street violence and open racism much more.

NOTHING will prepare you for this 45-second story arc. From "I'm just doing this because I love the flag, it's totally grassroots, and I'm not part of anything political"... to who actually gave him the flags the night before. Anyone who believes it is an innocent movement needs to see this.

Remember this is a classic grift. Generate slop content, calling others luddites for being critical. Provide statistics that there is significant engagement, which will be AI bots. Investors invest, grifters grift, money disappears. Repeat. They're not looking for real listeners.

"83.3% of LLM users were unable to quote even one sentence from the essay they had just written"

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business

This thread is really worth a read. Matthew has done the hard work not only of diagnosing the problem but of providing a potential solution in "detokenizing" the classroom. Suspect this would involve a period of loss and mourning if implemented, but it might save learning.

"Gullibility gap" is so accurate. At every stage, we're being told that this is a revolution and yet 95% of people understand first hand that it isn't. This gap, when used by AI companies to disrupt labour markets, government, and anything else volatile, will be very problematic.

The more cynical amongst us might take this for what it is - a literal land grab of the modern age. They know the data centres won't last, but the land will.

ICYMI: Authors of 'Building Better Research Software', a Carpentries Incubator lesson designed to provide “next steps” for learners after a Software Carpentry Python workshop, are looking for workshop hosts and Instructors to teach the lesson and provide feedback: carpentries.org/blog/2025/08... 🙏

I often find myself saying "what a time to be alive" but friends, today, defector.com/it-took-many...

I haven’t been this excited for a bubble to burst since I was a toddler.

Replace "coding" with anything else with "vibe" before it, you start to realise the issue. "Of course the chicken is cooked - I used vibecooking" "I'm a very safe driver - I wasn't taught how to drive, I just vibedrive" "Ready to climb Everest? Oh sure, I'm an expert on vibemountaineering"

I don't think children should have phones. They should have huge beige desktop computer with "Windows 9x Operating System", "Dedicated 3D accelerator", and "SoundBlaster compatible sound card"

My generation had to deal with datasets where Excel had autocorrected gene names to dates. Future generations are going to have to deal with the hallucinations of slopbots.

The Internet was once a shining beacon of potential and opportunity. Then it was destroyed. My latest newsletter is over 10,000 words about how it happened, who's responsible, and how we can build a better, fairer Internet. whatwelost.substack.com/p/how-the-in...

This includes you fellow humanities people! If you do anything with data and/or code do consider applying for an SSI Fellowship. The community is a rich resource for ideas and inspiration. And as a Fellow myself, I'd be very happy to offer advice on applying.

📢 The Carpentries is in Forbes! Our Directors @drkariljordan.bsky.social @erinstellabecker.bsky.social were interviewed by @jdrakephd.bsky.social for Forbes on The Carpentries' decision to withdrew from the $1.5M science grant due to new federal DEI rules: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

If you're interested in just one of the reasons why I believe The Carpentries is a community for good, please read this recent article about why we won't buckle in the face of fascists, autocrats, or difficult decisions: www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

🧭 We are pleased to announce that applications for the SSI Fellowship Programme 2026 are now open! The deadline to apply is Mon 6 Oct. Find out more and access further resources at www.software.ac.uk/news/ssi-fel...

My latest post on @carpentries.carpentries.org blog is a call to action for the community to engage in curriculum development for workshops about genAI. How can we help our target audience make more informed choices about when and how to use it? carpentries.org/blog/2025/08...

I hear this claim a lot, from people who don't actually code. I do write code. "AI" does not write code; it plagiarizes existing code. If you have a boilerplate coding task to do, it can plagiarize code for you, which may or may not work. The code it produces then needs to be checked and fixed.

The most recent survey on the use of AI in programming showed a decrease in production speed by 19%, though the programmers thought it increased their speed by 20%. The success of AI is to make people think it helps when it just makes things worse. arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

Good. People have gone to jail, or experienced worse, for far less.

interesting how some tech bros claim college is overrated and people should drop out but “Ph.D level” is a marker of expertise

Goddamn. What a sobering and poignant piece of conceptual art. What an amazing artist.

Some personal reflections on this post. 1. I expect some @carpentries.carpentries.org community members will not like the idea of workshops teaching the use of genAI. To them, teaching any usage of megacorp LLMs at all is equivalent to endorsement. This is not far from how I felt until recently.

This sounds true to me

I don't think anyone is really prepared for what will happen when this bubble bursts. And when it does, because it will, it'll be a binfire of epic proportions. This is the hype cycle to dwarf all other hype cycles.

DuckDuckGo has added a feature to filter out AI images from search results.