A rare hope-giving move by the US administration: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposes to get rid of the requirement for nuclear plants to ensure that radiation exposure is “as low as is reasonably achievable.” thehill.com/policy/energ...

"Groningse kansen" -- fijne column van @studioenergie.bsky.social over Groningen en kernenergie. www.linkedin.com/posts/remcod...

Some hoped that AI for academic writing would make things fairer by levelling the playing field between native and non-native speakers. What's happening is volume has increased, attention is scarce, and only contributions from prestigious institutions are taken seriously to begin with. Seems bad.

Great article with a devastating verdict on the empirical (in-) adequacy of the Everett interpretation now an Editor's Choice article in BJPS.

This issue's Editors' Choice article: Conquering Mount Everett: Branch Counting Versus the Born Rule – Jake Khawaja Abstract in alt text or read it for free here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/726282 #philsci #philsky

Good piece by Aronson on the "possibly last days of human relevance": scottaaronson.blog?p=9782 His students were understandably morose when news broke about the AI-result on the unit-distance conjecture.

Blair's criticism of net-zero targets is worth taking seriously. Ignoring the collective action dimension of emission reduction is shortsighted, not virtuous.

Check out the digest of this 📃 by Edward Roussel and @lodelauwaert.bsky.social: moralweights.substack.com/p/the-selfis... Subscribe to moralweights.substack.com for monthly philosophical reflections on technology & #AI from the Chair Ethics and AI at KU Leuven! #philsky #philtech #HPS #mathsky

In the near future, it will often be difficult to decide whether humans or AI systems deserve credits for achievements. @jonsymons.bsky.social and I made a proposal for how to deal with this: link.springer.com/article/10.1....

The OpenAI announcement could be very bad news for universities: The problem was solved by their internal model. External experts with university affiliations were still needed to check, but that process will surely also be automated. Power shifts from universities to AI companies.

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...

OpenAI's internal model has solved an important problem in mathematics -- more specifically, has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry: openai.com/index/model-...

My PhD student Mritunjay Tyagi and I derived a new version of the Schrödinger equation. It's in terms of the Glauber-Sudarshan and Husimi quasi-probability distributions. We think that it may be useful to explore sharp values for all dynamical variables. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's not difficult to understand: Fossil fuels have made our lives vastly better than those of previous generations. Millions of children would have died without them. Abandoning them is genuinely hard.

AI capabilities are advancing way too fast. I support the call for a pause.

I really, really enjoy working with Claude -- in particular having it identify holes in my arguments and calculations -- but it also fills me with grief to experience how it gets stronger and stronger. I can't help hoping that this progress will somehow stop.

"The pathology arrives when those governing from the upper floors lose the ability to perceive the importance of the foundations [...], and begin making decisions that erode that base in the service of ideological commitments the foundations had made affordable." www.decouple.media/p/europe-for...

The combination of the NVidia-chips decision and the EO creates the impression that the biggest concern is not China winning the race to AGI/ASI, but not getting to AGI/ASI at all, unless it's done very quickly.

Why philosophers of physics should look more into Anti-Wick quantization -- and quantization in general. New paper in Physics Letters A: Sharp values for all dynamical variables via Anti-Wick quantization sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This new peer-reviewed theoretical physics paper, in a good journal, is, according to its author (on X) based on an AI-generated research idea: arxiv.org/abs/2511.15935 The research is probably not very original. Still, I find it depressing how close we are to being superseded by the machines.

Is er in de Nederlandse wetenschap nog ruimte voor tegendraads onderzoek? Ik sprak er vrijdag over bij het symposium Open debat in de wetenschap! aan de @unileiden.bsky.social Lees hier een bewerkte versie van mijn voordracht op Substack: open.substack.com/pub/hofhuis/p/…

Statement that, as things stand, superintelligence should not be developed: superintelligence-statement.org I have signed.

Yes, and 2. is correct, even though I often wish it was false.

@leol.bsky.social reageerde zaterdag in NRC samen met zijn broer op mijn opiniestuk van een week ervoor. Helaas voldoet zijn betoog niet aan serieuze standaarden voor goed debat – en dat is geen incident. Lees hier mijn reactie op Substack: open.substack.com/pub/hofhuis/...

The EU wants to ban words like “burger” + “sausage” from plant-based foods. So get ready for “protein tubes” + “alternative discs.” 🙃 Nobody’s confused — except Brussels. Consumers + the planet deserve better. #NoConfusion substack.com/home/post/p-...

🚨 Next week the EU votes on banning words like burger, sausage & chicken from plant-based foods. This is nothing short of government engaging in cartel behaviour with the meat industry right as we need to transition away from animal agriculture to fix the climate crisis. Act now!

I just got a copy of this new book from Emily Adlam (with whom I did my masters, so this is the first book I'm reading written by a former classmate!). I'm going to try the thing where I tweet about it as I go.

AGI is not inevitable, and if you are American, you may consider getting active to stop its development. Great piece by @garrisonlovely.bsky.social. In contrast, crying "AI hype" makes people complacent and only plays into the hands of the industry.

Again, so much for "AI hype": An OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has performed at gold medal level at the International Math Olympiad (IMO): x.com/alexwei_/sta... (To be clear, I personally find this quite depressing.)

So much for "hype": 'Ono says. “I don’t want to add to the hysteria, but in some ways these large language models are already outperforming most of our best graduate students in the world.”' www.scientificamerican.com/article/insi...

Nodig is: minder inkomensverschillen, meer ontmoeting in de publieke ruimte en meer onbevangenheid, aldus @tkupp.bsky.social @rug.nl #werkaandewinkel

The AI revolution is underhyped -- perhaps not everywhere, but certainly on Bluesky. www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4Y...

New paper, in Ergo: To the extent that we are sometimes cluelessness about the more indirect consequences of our actions, this speaks against a longtermist orientation, not in favour: journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article... (The thesis may seem banal, but Hilary Greaves argued the opposite.)

It seems to me that as educators we will have to do two things 1 Do evaluations of students without AI (paper and pencil tests) 2 Teach students how to use AI to be more productive The notion that we can totally shun AI in higher ed when it will be so important is misguided.

Are there any other academics here on Bluesky who are also very worried about AI, in particular AI-driven power concentration, who do *not* think that the technology is overhyped?

For academics that are skeptical about AI's ability to provide perceptive & useful results, a fast way to test your assumptions is to give one of your papers as a PDF to o3 (or Gemini 2.5 but it lacks some tools), with the prompt: "critique this paper" I have found very good accuracy & insight...

Fantastic piece by @ednewtonrex.bsky.social: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... AI companies aim at automating the entire economy, preparing to take away all our bargaining power. They may well succeed unless we coordinate to impose restrictions on AI capabilities.

Bluesky is a much nicer environment than X, but the AI conversations seem much more superficial here. The very stimulating new contributions on AI as normal technology, gradual disempowerment, and the intelligence curse, to name just a few, have been discussed more lively on X. Very sad.

Unsolicited advice for making progress in quantum foundations: 1) If there were a gentle tweak or simple idea that would make clear sense of quantum theory, beyond the for-all-practical-purposes-level, it would certainly have been found by now.

Waar is de tijd dat progressieven nog in vooruitgang en verlichting geloofden! Zoals Kamagurka ooit zei: "Vroeger was de toekomst beter". Maar tegenwoordig is 'vooruitgang' bijna een vies woord voor links. Hoog tijd voor een progressieve beweging die haar naam wél weer waarmaakt! Nu in de winkel.

In our latest editorial, we express our sincere thanks to Guido Bacciagaluppi for his editorial work since 2021 & bid him a fond farewell as he concludes his tenure. We also warmly welcome @simonfriederich.bsky.social as our new Co-Editor-in-Chief! link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #philsky

Latest version of my work on entanglement with @kenwharton.bsky.social. We propose that entanglement is a kind of selection artefact. This was a talk at @griffith.edu.au, and the slides are accessible here: bit.ly/4h9dMeo #philsky #PhilSci #quantum #entanglement

Toen Don’t look up uitkwam bedacht ik hoe de metafoor tot vervelens toe misbruikt zou worden in opiniestukken. Ik keek neer op mijn toekomstige zelf. Is er nog íémand bekommerd om de gevaren van AI? www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20250...

Elon Musk’s terrifying vision for AI; short, urgent new piece at Marcus on AI. I can’t remain silent - and hope you won’t, either. open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

Just published in the Cambridge Elements of Philosophy of Physics: Foundations of General Relativity, by Sam Fletcher! Open access for two weeks. Get it for free while you can! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Increasingly capable AI systems create dramatic challenges for academic writing norms. How should we react? Together with Jonathan Symons from Macquarie University I argue in a new paper in Digital Society (open access) that minor fixes will be insufficient: rdcu.be/dp9h8 1/

My review of The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, edited by Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen is now published in Mind. Apparently this link should provide free access.

My piece ‘Quantum Mechanics and the Puzzle of Subjectivity: Solving Husserl’s Crisis of the Sciences’ just appeared at the Institute of Art and Ideas website: iai.tv/articles/aui...