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Dr. SkySkull

@drskyskull.bsky.social

15K followers 4.9K following 22K posts

Professor of optics, blogger of physics, history, & pulp fiction. Generally tries to keep things light-hearted, in spite of *waves hands at everything* (he/him) blog: https://skullsinthestars.com/

skullsinthestars.com

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · Nov 15

It seems like my last introductory pinned post disappeared, so: I’m a full professor of physics, specifically theoretical optics, who also like horror fiction, guitar, RPGs, videogames, and cats. Written a couple pf popular science books. Spends more time than is healthy worrying about politics.

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The Ass is the father of the legs @internethippo.bsky.social · 3h

A bunch of grandmas standing and hooting for Nuremberg 2? Something for the opposition party to think about

Graham Platner for Senate @grahamformaine.bsky.social · 3h

We have armed secret police kidnapping people off the street based on the color of their skin.

When we win: we will haul them before a Senate committee. The masks will come off. There will be consequences.

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 14m

Me when someone asks why I spend so much time paying attention to indie musicians:

Marge holding potato labeled “indie musicians” and saying “I just think they’re neat!”

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 1h

May or may not have spent time today trying to find parts to make a LEGO minifig of a friend

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 1h

So a horror game

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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 1h

My friend @geoffreygolden.bsky.social made a game that's this EXACT mood.

geoffreygolden.itch.io/fymp

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 2h

Why does HP suck so bad. Just spent 45 minutes fruitlessly trying to set up a wireless printer for my mom that my sister bought her. Finally gave up - could not get it to connect to the wifi no matter what I did.

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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 8h

‼️ CHATTANOOGA - Public school kids outperform voucher kids AGAIN

As @GovBillLee steers more and more taxpayer funds away from public schools to private (mostly Christian) schools for wealthy families who are already there.

More: www.timesfreepress.com/news/2025/oc...

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 3h

Niiice!

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Queen Karma and Lily Bug @dogsareperfection.bsky.social · 7h

Misinterpreted signs are our jam! 😂🤣

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Steven Santos @stevensantos.bsky.social · 3h

This is mind-numbingly stupid, but the response Alan Moore is likely crafting right now for this will hopefully be glorious.

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 8h

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 4h

Pritzker: "If the Constitution means anything -- and I guess we all are questioning that right now -- the Insurrection Act cannot be invoked ... they just want troops on the ground because they want to militarize especially blue cities in blue states."

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 4h

Another horrific mass shooting, this one in SC. www.fox5atlanta.com/news/south-c...

At least 20 hurt, 4 killed in shooting at crowded South Carolina bar

www.fox5atlanta.com

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Pam Spaulding @pamspaulding.bsky.social · 4h

At this point, the evasive, foolish non-answers tell us all we need to know. "Five Fingers" Homan made off w/the $50K.

📺 bsky.app/profile/atru...

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5h

STEPHANOPOULOS: Did Tom Homan give the $50,000 back?

VANCE: He did not take a bribe. It's a ridiculous smear

STEPHANOPOULOS: You didn't answer the question

VANCE: Did he accept $50,000? I'm sure that in the course of Homan's life, he's been paid more than $50k for services.

(So, no, he didn't)

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5h

Pritzker: "You just heard a tidal wave of lies from the VP. It's a bit shocking. And you heard over & over him just making things up. There's a reason why the judge here in federal court said that they admin lacks credibility and why even the Nobel committee chair said the admin lacks integrity."

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Hal 10000 @hal10000.bsky.social · 8h

Our increasingly deranged President doesn't remember who was President on January 6.

(Also, those agents were sent after the rioting started.)

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 5h

We effectively already don’t have a democracy because we have one political party that just 100% brazenly lies about everything all the time

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 6h

Mike Johnson: "Republicans are the party that are fixing healthcare. We just demonstrated that in the one big beautiful bill."

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Hyperlexic @hyperlexic.bsky.social · 5h

I think the best end to the shutdown is for the GOP to invoke the nuclear option.

Pass this budget without a single Dem vote, fully own the healthcare crisis that’s about to happen.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 6h

Mike Johnson: "Republicans are the party that are fixing healthcare. We just demonstrated that in the one big beautiful bill."

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 5h

Nuthin sexier than using an algorithm as your Cyrano de Bergerac

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 5h

I don’t think we give chatbots enough credit for creating what appears to be an entirely new form of mental illness

C. Buckthorn @cbuckthorn.bsky.social · 12h

This is amazing. I laughed out loud www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

As 32-year-old Rich points out, though, "it's not like using ChatGPT guarantees success".
When he met someone in a bar one Friday night and swapped social media handles, he asked AI what his next move should be.
ChatGPT discerned that sending an initial message on Monday midmorning would set the right pace. "Then it gave me some options for what the message could be," says Rich.
"Keep it light, warm, and low-stakes so it reads as genuine interest without urgency," the bot advised. "Something like: Hey Sarah, still laughing about [tiny shared moment/reference if you've got one] - good to meet you!" Rich went back and forth with ChatGPT until he felt they'd hit upon exactly the right message ("Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you") but sadly she never replied, he says. "It's been two weeks now."

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 1d

seems like a non-insignificant percentage of rage against the machine's fanbase are young republican men driving SUVs bopping their head to anti-oil, pro-immigrant songs thinking the lyrics are about how they wish their suburban parents would get off their back

Tom Morello tweets: "Fascinating that all those “don’t tread on me” posers and their AR-15’s are nowhere to be seen and government tyranny is instead being opposed by a guy in an inflatable frog suit."

Someone named Manny replies: "@grok
why do some people say Tom Morello and band mates are RAGE FOR THE MACHINE and not against ?"

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Tom Joscelyn @tomjoscelyn.bsky.social · 8h

“I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney.” - George Retes, U.S. citizen and veteran.

I’m a US citizen and a veteran. ICE arrested me for no reason.

Jailed for three days without an explanation or ability to notify anyone, George Retes argues the only path to healing starts with the government taking accountability for its actions.

newsletter.ofthebrave.org

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 6h

Impressively frank from Bash.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 7h

JORDAN: Comey is where weaponization all started. 9 years ago he took the dossier--

BASH: But that's not what he's being prosecuted for

JORDAN: I'm just saying, you want to talk about weaponization, that's where it started

BASH: So this is retribution then

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 23h

🧵 regarding the shutdown:

The Democrats aren’t being clear enough about this but we can be: this shutdown is about saving lives.

If we don’t reverse the Medicaid cuts (and the ACA subsidies on insurance bought through the exchanges) that Republicans made this year, people will die.

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Kashana @kashana.blacksky.app · 7h

So thankful that dudes without game now have the option of driving all of our energy bills up to come up with devastating lines like it was nice to meet you

C. Buckthorn @cbuckthorn.bsky.social · 12h

This is amazing. I laughed out loud www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 2d

important on LLMs for academics:

1️⃣ LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems

2️⃣ we can't automatically detect plagiarism

3️⃣ LLMs automate plagiarism & paper mills

4️⃣ we must protect literature from pollution

5️⃣ LLM use is a CoI

6️⃣ prompts do not cause output in authorial sense

5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics,

Either way, even if
the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow
these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher
et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because
it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents,
but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes
(ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to
protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from
pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections
play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using
chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company
who owns the bot (see Table 2).
Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic
in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The
input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like
input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles
and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors
wrote those, not the search query!

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