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Patrick McCray @patrickmccray.bsky.social · Sep 17

If you're having a rough day, remember that in 1991 Tim Berners-Lee's paper for the World Wide Web was rejected and he was relegated to the poster session.

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The Pleasure Vice Principle (he/him/his) @hannibaltabu.bsky.social · 5d

I saw the dot coms crash from a front row seat. AI is running out of money way faster.

The evangelism is insecurity from people who made the wrong bet. I’ve seen it before. futurism.com/future-socie...

AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought

An investment manager realized he made a crucial mistake — and that his grim prediction about AI investments may not have been cynical enough.

futurism.com

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Dr van Tilburg @drvantilburg.bsky.social · 14d

The Trump administration has stopped funding of PubMed, not considering a vital service.

Your doctor will not know the newest information that affects your health. This will cost lives.

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Andrea Murillo @andreamurillo.bsky.social · 11d

"Science communication isn't about dumbing it down, it's about meeting people where they are with curiosity, care and clarity."

Great read in Development, and I will definitely try some of these challenges to practice science communication. doi.org/10.1242/dev....

Speaking science in a fractured world: making truth land when facts alone cannot

ABSTRACT. Scientific misinformation is a defining challenge of our time. As public trust in science declines and falsehoods spread faster than facts, the scientific community must rethink its role in ...

doi.org

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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 20d

Reminder: It's always good to stay humble!

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Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · Dec 27

I've shared this quote before but I'll share it again, as it's one I've been thinking about a lot as I've watched how our oligarchs have been behaving over the past few months.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.” Enough. I was stunned by the simple eloquence of that word—stunned for two reasons: first, because I have been given so much in my own life and, second, because Joseph Heller couldn’t have been more accurate. For a critical element of our society, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us, there seems to be no limit today on what enough entails.

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Tim Kendall @timkendall.bsky.social · 26d

League One football always offers surprises. Not Luton playing badly and losing away at Lincoln this afternoon. That's expected. But direct-to-consumer marketing of asbestos is not something I've seen before.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Tim Kendall @timkendall.bsky.social · Aug 25

www.theregister.com/2025/08/25/o...

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Opinion: Are tech giants getting nervous? They should be

www.theregister.com

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Alexander Luckmann @aluckmann.bsky.social · Aug 20

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

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Carol Atack @carolatack.bsky.social · Aug 16

This is both funny and acute…might assign it to my incoming students as an introductory exercise…

Stephen Collins @stephencollins.bsky.social · Aug 15

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

It’s all Greek to me – Plato and Socrates tackle a Captcha test: the Stephen Collins cartoon

Tick all the images with chariots …

www.theguardian.com

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Dr. Sabrina Mittermeier @smittermeier.bsky.social · Jul 9

I did this before in German but I guess today is a good day to compile English resources on why AI isn‘t actually intelligent and also a real danger: 🧵

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Albert Vilella, PhD. @albertvilella.bsky.social · Jun 21

@andywatson on the NGS Sequencing market and the prisoner's dilemma

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Tim Kendall @timkendall.bsky.social · Jun 12

It was good to make the case for the molecular testing we need to help patients with cholangiocarcinoma in Scotland to @jennimintomsp.bsky.social and the Scottish Government. Hopefully this will stimulate a solution. Thanks to @benmacpherson.bsky.social for hosting.

AMMF - The Cholangiocarcinoma Charity @charityammf.bsky.social · Jun 12

#AMMF was at Holyrood last night! Professor @timkendall.bsky.social highlighted the need for a comprehensive molecular testing programme in Scotland to prevent some #cholangiocarcinoma patients missing out on treatment opportunities.
#RethinkLiverCancer #FairerDealFaster

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Ben Ansell @benansell.bsky.social · May 17

As Jon says this is absolutely fascinating and a stark warning to science journalists that if a result looks too good to be true it probably is.

Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · May 17

Fascinating deep dive into the MIT economics/AI paper scandal/clusterf***.

thebsdetector.substack.com/p/ai-materia...

AI, Materials, and Fraud, Oh My!

The red flags we should have seen earlier for a too-good-to-be-true paper on AI tool adoption at a materials research firm

thebsdetector.substack.com

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · Apr 28

Newsletter: I am sick and god damn tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing. The media is complicit in accepting fantastical nonsense - both in the numbers put out by OpenAI and the silly jobs created by Anthropic - and it has to stop.
www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Reality Check

I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this day, people are babbling about the "AI revolution" as the sky rains blood and crevices open...

www.wheresyoured.at

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Matthias C. Rillig @mrillig.bsky.social · Apr 25

Interesting opinion in Science suggesting to replace 'scientific consensus' with convergent evidence.

Because it is less easily derailed by quoting one dissenting opinion.

Seems like a good idea!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Convergence and consensus

In these days of political instability, geopolitical tensions, and social discontent around the world, there are continued threats to the principles, conduct, and findings of science. This assault on ...

www.science.org

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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · Apr 12

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

David D. Levine @daviddlevine.com · Apr 12

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'

www.theregister.com

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Masud Husain @masudhusain.bsky.social · Mar 6

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

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Tim Kendall @timkendall.bsky.social · Mar 2

If LiverTox has gone, my reporting of ?DILI will be far less nuanced.

John Knebel @hurdleboss.bsky.social · Mar 2

LactMed, LiverTox, DailyMed, PubMed. Use at least one of these almost daily at work and they are gone. All my saved PMIDs for topic discussions. If this was intentional the only goal is to cause harm

Shematologist, MD @shematologist.medsky.social · Mar 2

This is going to be a big problem.

Not typically on pubmed (a free online database of medical literature) on Saturday nights but heard it was down and had to check for myself.

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Dorian Lynskey @dorianlynskey.bsky.social · Feb 26

Love the energy of young Shostakovich. He looks like a Harry Potter who will fuck you up

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Annie Waldman @anniewaldman.bsky.social · Feb 22

Amy Paris was hired to help modernize the nation's donor organ network, which ensures critically-ill people get the organs they need.

She was also let go.

"We had alignment from Democrats and Republicans on the Hill, we had funding, and they were hiring more of us.”

For more than a decade, Amy Paris worked for federal agencies as a problem solver: retooling overly bureaucratic and cumbersome processes to make them easier for the public to navigate.

Last year, she was hired to help reform the nation’s organ procurement and transplantation network, a public-private partnership that connects organ donors to patients in vital need of a transplant.

The program had recently come under fire. As thousands of patients were dying on waitlists, some donor organs weren’t even being used. Multiple kidneys had to be thrown out because of transport delays — couriers not picking them up in time or airlines misplacing them. One was accidentally left on an airport luggage trolley.

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Andy Williams @llantwit.bsky.social · Feb 21

Two Weeks In The Death Spiral Of Cardiff University, by an anonymous academic.
This is truly shocking read.
The Cardiff executive board should hang their heads in shame.
voice.cymru/two-weeks-in...

Two Weeks In The Death Spiral Of Cardiff University -

Reading Time: 4 minutesBy an anonymous academic. Cover image by Adwitiya Pal On the second day of classes…

voice.cymru

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Stephen Curry @scurry.bsky.social · Feb 15

More than 500 signatures added in the past 24 hrs. Please keep signing and sharing.

Stephen Curry @scurry.bsky.social · Feb 14

Tally just ticked past 1900 signatures. Please keep spreading the word about the letter & asking people to sign. It's important to make the Royal Society aware (at their meeting on 03 March) just how much the scientific community wants them to speak up for their values. forms.gle/SfsDemyS8QhP...

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