So, I heard a certain German political party doesn't like Bauhaus, just like it's predecessors 90 years ago. On that occasion, the 1913 "Colour Study" by Wassily Kandinsky, one of my favourite painters and, yes, a teacher at Bauhaus (until the end, i.e. until 1933).

New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...

What happens to software copyright (in the EU) if agents take over? What if software copyright functionally disappears? This, and one Star Wars Easter egg, in my paper that has just appeared as advance article in GRUR International. Enjoy, it's open access! doi.org/10.1093/grur...

To see how important US science is, consider measurements of changes in ocean heat content. US data are ~53% of the total. Over half! But removing the US data is worse than randomly removing 80% of the total data, because unlike other countries, the US makes measurements everywhere. 🧪🌊

Nothing has changed and this (and other climate-related stuff) remains the most important issue of all. But nowadays, such news barely event make it into the news cycle, and the policymakers/polititians keep blabbing about 'competitiveness' and 'removing red tape'.

New study finds the "canary in the coal mine" for the #AMOC: a consistent decline of the western overturning circulation, down from 20 to 15 Sv during 2004-2023 at 26° N. 🌊 AMOC "could be at or near a critical tipping point, potentially leading to its collapse". www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I've updated my El Niño forecast plume with the latest April data (ECMWF, NMME, CFSv2, Canadian models). Its now looking like it might end up giving 2015/2016 a run for its money in terms of strength, with a peak of ~2.6C in the ENSO3.4 region by end of year: dashboard.theclimate...

BOBER!

The algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects.

I have just written a sentence in what may become a journal article that paraphrases Darth Vader's description of the Force in "A New Hope". I am at the same time proud of myself (and the scholarly terror I've constructed), afraid noone will get the reference, and amazed how cheezy the sentence is.

The interoperability of email is very similar to the existence of libraries in that it would be considered a utopian dream if we didn't already have it

🇵🇱⚖️ We've reached a crucial point in the Polish rule-of-law crisis: a court found a divorce null and void due to a "neo-judge" presiding over the proceedings. Given how quick, easy, and fast access to divorce is in the country, this story will make waves. 1/

Przeczytałem w końcu zostawiony tydzień temu "w zakładkach na później" tekst @benstanley.eu i bardzo polecam. Przemawia do mnie dużo bardziej, niż przerysowany tekst redaktora naczelnego KL, na który odpowiada. kulturaliberalna.pl/2025/12/30/b...

I'm starting to get the emails. Reporters: please see my comments below.

30 years ago today, Netscape announced a new programming language, one that emerged from a frantic, week-and-a-half-long sprint. It ended up sticking around far longer than anyone could've expected.

Iceland is right to consider this an existential threat. www.dagens.com/news/iceland...

We have reached 1.4 degrees celsius #globalheating according to NASA data (smooth black trend line). Breaching 1.5 is now inevitable. From now on the fight is to keep overshoot as small and short as possible.

Unexpected laughs thanks to the gargantuan opinion in Getty v. Stability AI (the stuff below concerns the application of the standard of average consumer in trademark law)

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong". Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

On this day 44 yrs ago (Aug 29 1981) the New York Times editorialised "7 scientists from NASA claim to have found evidence that C02 has already been warming the Earth for a century. They predict it will produce ”unprecedented” warming in the next century." 1/n allouryesterdays.info/2025/08/28/a...

Surely if we invest more in AI, we will solve it, won't we.

NEW CHART: Trump's "big beautiful bill" & other efforts to dismantle climate policy means the US will add an extra 7bn tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere from now until 2030, compared to meeting its former climate pledge under the Paris Agreement 🫠 www.carbonbrief.org/...

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

🚨 Friday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the *lowest* on record (JAXA data) • about 340,000 km² below the 2010s mean • about 1,020,000 km² below the 2000s mean • about 1,640,000 km² below the 1990s mean • about 2,270,000 km² below the 1980s mean More: zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

"If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the AMOC collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off." (@doctorvive.bsky.social). Exactly, this.

Read the story behind our new study published yesterday in Nature, unfiltered straight from the scientists: 🌊 theconversation.com/unprecedente...

How about this - total butterfly abundance in the USA fell by 22% across the 554 recorded species within 20 years. 20 years! Obviously it's not only about butterflies, but everything that depends on them. And here we are, discussing growth, deregulation, blah-blah. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I only just noticed the title of the show in the 'Hackers' which Zero Cool stops after telling the racist anchor 'Yak, yak, yak...get a job'. My brain apparently still lives in the 1990s and it's hard to get used to the fact that the tech-savvy racists actually pretty much run the show now.

On the same day, I read about EU wanting to "cut the the eco-related red tape" and this. Crystal blue lakes in Greenland turning brown and becoming CO2 sources, not sinks. Just like that, abruptly. But yeah, let's keep worrying about "competitiveness" and "red tape". www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My lukewarm reaction to all the debates around "making Europe competitive again", "listen to Draghi" and "why so much regulation" are pretty much summed up by this - in a not-so-long run, it's just not gonna matter.

A Polish court claims that if you grant access (via freedom of information laws) to source code of a program that pseudo-randomly matches judges with new cases, it leads to a "real and highest level of threat". More in this post by @infzakladowy.bsky.social informatykzakladowy.pl/realny-i-naj...

In line with my rebellious nature, I finally deactivated my 'professional' X account. Which leaves me with only one more, the one used solely to follow Polish politics (what this says about my nature, I don't even want to know).

Simulated reconstruction of December #Arctic sea ice thickness since 1901. Large interannual variability, but watch what happens in recent years... Information about this data: doi.org/10.1175/JCLI.... Data set only available through 2010.

47 stars on 25 December in #AdventOfCode - I think this is my personal best or close to it. One more task to go, but it's gotta wait for another day. I should say that I wasted a lot of hours in December on this, but it makes no sense to call this effort a waste. Better than any crossword puzzle!

I still haven't solved today's Advent of Code, so I must post about law :( What's the status of text and data mining of code under EU copyright law? The article may or may not include words such as 'lexer' and 'tokenizer', and only a very small part is about genAI. academic.oup.com/grurint/adva...

Still in the game! #AdventOfCode

Arctic sea ice extent at record low. 🧪 Hudson Bay practically ice free.

So far so not that bad, but as always, something is going to kick the crap out of my "skills" pretty soon #AdventOfCode Now back to lawyering...

By the way, I will never stop laughing about the origin story of the 60% GDP/3% GDP criteria for debt and deficit. In Poland, the 60% ceiling is even in the constitution and some people (established scholars among them!) are treating them with an almost religious appreciation.

I see this huge influx of IP-law people, but still 90% of my feed comes from the climate science bubble. I wonder if it's the way algorithm works here, or the climate group has migrated here earlier, left Xitter for good, got established here and just posts more?

The next US president says global warming is a hoax. If you think this is crazy, given 2024 will again be the warmest year, welcome to reality. Rough times for climate and science, not just in the US. In the old days, things were simply not known…. (Thread 1/12)

Here are some thoughts about AG Szpunar's opinion in C-159/23 Sony, including how the whole communication to the public jurisprudence will (probably) not be extended over other exclusive rights in EU copyright. Many thanks to Alina Trapova and @jpquintais.bsky.social!

With half the month now behind us, June 2024 is very likely to be the warmest June on record. It is on track to beat 2023's record by nearly 0.2C, and may represent an ominous sign that global temperatures are not falling very quickly despite the fading of El Nino conditions.

AG Szpunar's opinion in Sony v. Datel is out. Variables in RAM aren't protected under the Software Directive. Which is good! The rest of the opinion seems to describe the scope of © protection of software a bit narrowly. Then again, maybe I need to re-read it more carefully...

Let the record show that a minute ago I deliberately decided not to write the phrase 'without delving into...' in the paper I'm struggling to write, because if someone accused me of generating it with a LLM/ChatGPT instead of just saying it was unoriginal crap, I would just lose it.

Strategic conditions have changed along the Transalpine frontier (...) That is why we have decided to decimate the 9th. (...) Your HR Prefects will be meeting with your teams later today to draw lots.

Shoutouts to @technollama.bsky.social and @jpquintais.bsky.social who are cited in a position statement that we (i.e. the research team at Jagiellonian Uni that I'm part of) have just filed in the public consultation of the draft CDSM implementation. You made it easier to criticize our government ;)

I wrote about googling as a social practice: it’s shady past, turbulent present and AI-influenced future (in Polish, but, apart from a few local context-specific jokes, should be easily translatable). jeczjan.substack.com/p/w-poszukiw...

Poland hasn't implemented the DSM copyright directive yet, but we have a new draft and: 1) it does not include the contentious provisions on remuneration paid by streaming/VoD platforms 2) it explicitly says that TDM would not be allowed to train genAI. No other EU country did that, right?

The unheralded disruption caused by generative AI - I have to spend additional time checking if the footnotes in the essays and theses that I grade point to actually existing, i.e. not hallucinated sources. Yay, 21st century magic.