another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

So it seems this is actually a refinement of a previous research that won the ignobel in 2005: improbable.com/2020/07/03/p...

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Risky click, but surprisingly wholesome content. They were clearly baiting an ignobel though...

“The main way the genocide has been actively supported by our democracies is less the flow of weapons and intelligence to Israel, than the organised repression and punishment of everyone who dared to call attention to events in Gaza or offer criticism of Israel’s conduct.” — Bruno Maçães

chants against the most evil military institution provokes legal investigation while Israel kills Palestinians everyday

To be honest, this is actually a plus. Nothing of substance has really changed in american foreign policy, only the veil is lifted.

Public service announcement: this @firefox.com extension seems to work as intended: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo... If anyone knows of a similar workaround for google search on android, please let me know.

Human beings are the only animals on earth with the capacity and willingness to troll. And it can be glorious.

Contrary to what is often assumed, most (but not all) technological improvements have been bringing *diminishing* returns since the industrial revolution. E.g. the internet and mobile phones brought important changes, but not as much as the printed press, hand washing, and vaccination.

I caught myself vaguely hoping for a better 2026, but then I remembered there will be a world cup...

Speechless.

Very depressing read. I really like telling people about the cases in Oliver Sacks' books, which I have always found fascinating. Knowing that it might be embellished is such a huge spoiler. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Double blind proponents are blind themselves.

Can people organizing academic conferences in the US please get a grip?

🚨 Come join @ceu-dnds.bsky.social as an 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿! 🚨 We are looking for a young and coming researcher in 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 and 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲. If that sounds like you (or someone you know), check out the call & apply (or share the link): careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-A...

Hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Can't get over the fact that in the ML literature the act of *sampling* from an inferred model is now called “inference.” We really are in the worst timeline.

I wrote a blog post about the often stated but never explained assumption that communities in graphs should always be connected. This is inconsistent with statistical significance and null models that underlie the most widely employed methods. skewed.de/lab/posts/co...

University is only fee free in a small handful of countries. Source: buff.ly/PAuDqrF

🎯 statsepi.substack.com/p/the-review...

I wrote a blog post about the often stated but never explained assumption that communities in graphs should always be connected. This is inconsistent with statistical significance and null models that underlie the most widely employed methods. skewed.de/lab/posts/co...

All super rich guys sound the same now. It’s all “I sleep four hours a night and spend the other twenty hours a day developing a product that’s going to bring us the best widespread poverty anyone’s ever seen.”

Just a thought: how about substantial investment and subsidy for mass transportation instead?

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

The UN General Assembly resolution against torture was rejected by only three countries: the US, Israel, and Argentina, who remind the world that they oppose even the most basic principles of humanity.

“Then you tell the model, 'Can you please fix the bug?' [...] And it introduces a second bug. Then you tell it, “You have this new second bug,” [...] and brings back the first bug, and you can alternate between those. How is that possible?” Because it's a fucking Markov chain on word tokens.

So, the ”age” of scaling was about 3 years or so?

“Are we the baddies?”

Getting journal rejections like

I don’t want to seem out of touch but I don’t actually understand the economy anymore.

And so the genocide continues in hushed silence, with the rest of the world lulled into a false sense that it has ended... www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

This level of blatant dishonesty baffles me. I'm seeing this more and more. Do people *want* to ruin their reputation?

You know what they say about academics... "causal" in the streets "preliminary and hypothesis-generating" in the sheets

“Metros reduce car use in European cities but trams do not” The conclusion says: “Although cities with a metro tend to have a higher share of B, it is unclear whether the presence itself causes people to shift to B, and no causal claims can be made.” Then, why make a causal claim in the title? 🤷‍♂️

A statistic that concentrates the mind: In the first 6 months of 2025, China installed 250 GW of solar power capacity. This is around 150% of France's aggregate electricity production...

Firing a BBC director for *leftist* bias is like punishing a pig for taking a bath.

A team of 42 researchers lead by Oxford finds that bears do, in fact, defecate in the woods. www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...

James Watson is perhaps the greatest cautionary tale of where the competitive narcisism that poisons science can lead. www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...

Very good post. I very much agree with the overall position.

Nowadays, often the justification for choosing M$ is that it claims to be GDPR compliant, which just means that M$ can afford getting sued for any breach, which of course happens all the time. And universities don't care about potential breaches themselves, only about liability, which M$ absorbs.

lol

Double feature, just out on @royalsocietypublishing.org: "Uncertainty quantification and posterior sampling for network reconstruction" Previous explainer thread here: bsky.app/profile/tiag... Code here: graph-tool.skewed.de/static/docs/... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Just out on @royalsocietypublishing.org: "Scalable network reconstruction in subquadratic time" royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... Previous explainer thread here: bsky.app/profile/tiag... Code here: graph-tool.skewed.de/static/docs/...

The work conditions in academia are rapidly deteriorating, but at least we still have academic freedom. 🫠 www.theguardian.com/education/20...

The first (1955) Danish edition of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. Later editions did not convert the title, so this is the only SI-compatible edition! 🎢

FFS, why did the ML literature decide to abolish *plots* in favor of tables?

Today I learned that there are bacteria and fungi in clouds, and I'm having a hard time processing this. www.bbc.com/future/artic...