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Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · 2d

First experience of having to review an AI generated 'academic' paper... how bleak.

Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · 4d

Research and innovation funding in Europe is broken. But, there is an alternative!

Together with @jaromil.bsky.social I'm working on an idea for continuity funding, for long-term, sustainable, and non-precarious R&I

Check it out here: news.dyne.org/rethinking-r...

Rethinking R&I Funding: Opting for Continuity

There is a widening consensus that research and innovation (R&I) funding in Europe is not working the way it is supposed to.

news.dyne.org

Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Raven Onthill @ravenonthill.bsky.social · 19d

I note this one in particular.

Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.

mikelovesrobots.substack.com

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Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · 28d

I think, if anything, it shows how little universities are really 'ours,' as consultants often have more influence than collective decision-making.

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Brett Scott @brettscott.bsky.social · Sep 9

Want a simple foundation from which to understand confusing topics like trade deficits, tariffs, and stablecoins? Check out my new video where I explain the international monetary system in under 15 minutes www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRHT...

The entire global monetary system explained in under 15 minutes

YouTube video by Brett's Altered States of Monetary Consciousness

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

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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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Brian D. Earp, PhD @briandavidearp.bsky.social · Sep 2

New post 🚨 The Risk of More Reliable AI briandavidearp.substack.com/p/the-risk-o... -- Maybe hallucinations are good?

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Brett Scott @brettscott.bsky.social · Aug 21

A typical financial market has *fundamental* traders who watch the world and *technical* traders who watch other traders. A striking feature of the Bitcoin market is the almost total absence of the former. This has increasingly serious implications for all of us www.asomo.co/p/the-whale-...

The Whale of Mass Destruction

How a fundamental weakness in Bitcoin might (technically) crash our economy

www.asomo.co

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · Aug 20

🤖 In other news, it seems all those influencers telling you your workplace HAS to get on the AI bandwagon or will be left behind don't wholly know what they're talking about.
fortune.com/2025/08/18/m...

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.

fortune.com

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · Aug 19

This is in the replies and it demonstrates a real issue which is if you find profundity from an AI, you’re responding to something profound a human being wrote that was vacuumed up and what ends up happening is you thank AI and not only don’t thank the person, you have no idea they were involved

Michael Love@elkmovie.bsky.social • 6m
I thought this sounded familiar and it turns out it literally just found an old George RR
Martin quote and wrote a short story out of it:
George R.R. Martin > Quotes > Quotable Quote (?)
"I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners.
The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing
designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect."
ALT
- George R.R. Martin

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Bert Hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 @berthubert.bsky.social · Aug 17

Many EU member states are arguing for forcing WhatsApp to inspect all our photos w/AI. If the AI is in any “doubt” if it might be child pornography, your photo, location & other details get reported to Europol and a local police force. This is a terrible plan: berthub.eu/articles/pos... #chatcontrol

Chatcontrol 2025 edition in Brief - Bert Hubert

In short, led by Denmark, many EU member states are arguing for forcing WhatsApp/Signal/etc to inspect all our photos and links, using AI. If the AI is in any “doubt” if this might be child pornograph...

berthub.eu

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Anna-Verena Nosthoff @annanosthoff.bsky.social · Aug 1

Das sechsteilige Feature "Tech Bro Topia" über die Ideologien der Tech-Milliardäre (von Musk bis Andreessen, vom Longtermism bis zum #eacc) ist nun online @deutschlandfunk.de.web.brid.gy. Es war eine Freude, dabei zu sein – vielen Dank für die Einladung: www.deutschlandfunk.de/tech-bro-top...

Podcast "Tech Bro Topia" (1/6)

Sommer 2025: Die USA vollziehen den Schwenk zum Autoritarismus. Mittendrin die Tech-Bros aus dem Silicon Valley.

www.deutschlandfunk.de

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Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · Jul 29

I've just tried Google's NotebookLM and though I've never been too impressed by ChatGPT and the like, this seems to change a lot.

It can write original papers, grant applications, you name it; accurately because it only cross-references the texts you add.

How to deal with this?

Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Ingrid Robeyns @ingridrobeyns.bsky.social · Jul 20

In what kind of world do we live when we are not even sure whether billionaires exists or not??? Source: Forbes newsletter.

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Cheshire Cat ᓚᘏᗢ, @autismsupsoc.bsky.social · Jul 14

News paper clipping:

'There is no ethical way to use the major Al image generators.
All of them are trained on stolen images, and all of them are built for the purpose of deskilling, disempowering and replacing real, human artists.
- MOLLY CRABAPPLE,
artist and activist

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Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · Jul 15

Interesting that the article frames this as "women are being left behind in the technological revolution" instead of, maybe they're just more thoughtful and not jumping on a senseless hype.

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METR @metr.org · Jul 10

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.

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Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Marijn Sax @marijnsax.bsky.social · Jul 8

De UvA rolt nu de 'eigen' AI Chat uit. Alle medewerkers hebben nu toegang, studenten binnenkort ook. Inclusief UvA-logo's voor vertrouwelijke feel. Het wordt echt een drama, hele simpele feitelijke vragen (bijv. wat staat in artikel 25(1) van de DSA) leveren meermaals totaal foutieve output op.

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Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · Jul 8

This is very funny.

futurism.com/companies-fi...

Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes

Companies that rushed to replace human labor with AI are now shelling out to have IRL workers to fix the technology's screwups.

futurism.com

Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · Jul 5

In a horrifying article about the dangers of Teslas, one point stands out: Teslas automatically disengage self-driving mode <1 second before an imminent crash--not enough time for the driver to react, but enough for Tesla to deny responsibility for fatal crashes, since self-driving "wasn't engaged."

$The real surprise came after the experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.$

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Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · Jun 30

Joe Rogan talking with Bernie Sanders is strangely heart warming.

They genuinely make an effort to bridge ideological differences to have a meaningful conversation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYVz...

Joe Rogan Experience #2341 - Bernie Sanders

YouTube video by PowerfulJRE

www.youtube.com

Reposted by Wessel Reijers

Scott James @drscottjames.bsky.social · Jun 24

But arguably shadow money for shadow banks:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · Jun 24

Having a bit of a Trump appreciation moment, what's going on?

Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · Jun 24

That too, yes!

Wessel Reijers @wesselreijers.bsky.social · Jun 24

The problem with the idea of "stochastic parrot" is that, while it denies the (false) claim that Ai is something like a human being, it leaves the door open for the (false) claim of it being something like an animal.

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