ABrockwell @aebrockwell@qoto.org

@davidho I don't understand how the Royal Society doesn't realise how much damage it did to their reputation to admit him in the first place.

Even before all of the fascist stuff, he was not a scientist, not a researcher. His contributions to science and engineering were that he was a rich person who funded some work.

Making him a FRS made it very clear that it's not an institution for scientists, it's an institution for plutocrats.

It used to be that being a FRS was something to aspire to an a scientific career. Now it's an easy decline if offered, because who would want to be associated with an institution like that?

They could just kick him out.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/e13fc48e-0fe8-4152-be78-3e0348adf3ff?shareToken=edf6ab74b3fc80be6c2fa41774e91f54

I need to be very clear, that the push towards "vibe coding" - that is, deliberately deskilling people - is because AI code assistants are an (increasingly expensive) subscription service.

If you know how to code, you can just write Python, C, Java, R, PHP, whatever for free and make things. You may not own the tools of production, but at least you're not renting them.

If you have been deskilled so you only know how to vibe code, you will be paying for that privilege forever.

This also goes, by the way, for researchers who are starting to be convinced they don't need to learn how to be scientists anymore, because "the AI" can just do the science for them. Nope.

Humans independently edit Wikipedia for humans. They don’t have any Ads or cannot be bullied into removing content. Wikipedia is free from AI slop. No wonder tech bros with AI companies want to eliminate it so that their fake AI text generator can show or push propaganda. Please do not let Wikipedia die. It is an independent source and far more reliable than Gen AI companies. It is a real shame that it comes to this.

Dear Canada

You are going to be given every excuse not to vote.

You'll be told there is already record turn out. You'll be told, the polls already favor the conservatives, losing. You will be told, that exit polls favor someone else. You may even be told, that it looks like someone else has won, before the election is over.

The same thing happen in the United States, and people felt confident, Donald Trump was going to lose. Do not make our mistake.

#Election #Vote #Canada

Spotted in the backyard. Nothing to see here. Just a branch. Definitely not a tawny frogmouth. Everyone move along. Go about your business.

Serious Business People in Suits flummoxed as car company run by friendless open neo-nazi who also routinely calls people "retard" on his online Klan forum and works as an unelected, unaccountable lord chancellor to materially destroy the U.S. as an economy and as a republic sees profits drop 71%.

Folks, if someone in the US wants to study a group of people with a a certain condition, they go to an IRB to get permission. They have to decide if the research will use identifiable information. If the data contain identifiers, you essentially always have to get permission from each and every patient, and that permission has to be specific to the exact use of their data.

You don’t “make a registry” of everyone with a disease. Bad people do that. Nazis. Insurance execs. Bad people.

This is who we are now?!

Vaccines are one of the greatest scientific success stories of our time. Vaccination has saved more than 154 million lives in the last 50 years — more than six lives every minute of every year.

Our technical ability to develop vaccines has outpaced our social, political, and financial systems for ensuring their use. Recent moves to strip funding from vaccine-related research are shortsighted and self-harming. As is the use of precious resources to revisit debunked claims of links to autism.

The best vaccine isn’t useful if it is not distributed, or not socially accepted. Vaccine equity and hesitancy remain great challenges. Globalizing antivaccine activism could become our greatest hurdle.

We should not allow misinformation, disinformation, ignorance and defunding to hinder vaccine development, deployment and use.

It is not time to defund, but rather invest in vaccines.

Read our latest editorial in @PLOSBiology: Vaccines work… and do not cause autism

#vaccines #vaccination #immunization #WorldImmunizationWeek #measles #outbreak #vaccinehesitancy

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003143

This is the President of the United States saying in a social media post that not everyone should be given a trial.

That is a violation of the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

Trump should be impeached and removed from office.

It couldn’t be any more straightforward.

Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/larry-david-hitler-dinner.html

The fact that we, as a society, tolerate the lies that LLMs systematically output is quite telling of how used we've become to untruth in the public sphere. We're not even complaining anymore. We take lying for granted. It's immensely sad.

David Tennant is a fucking LEGEND.

I’m not even convinced the net productivity change from LLM coding is •positive• if we’re talking about bringing code all the way to production, much less maintaining it. Maybe this time the silver bullet is real, unlike aaaall the past times, but I sure am skeptical.

Yet…here I really •am• seeing those kinds of many-fold gains, gains that (unlike LLMs!) come with •increased• code reliability and maintainability — and from what?

From the slow, hard engineering work of tool improvement we’ve doing all along:

4/

The fact that I know more about Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez’s 11-minute space trip than I do about Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s decades-long crime spree shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.

Tell me this:

Why does Silicon Valley keep churning out basically mind-control weapons, one after another?

Social Media algorithms were bad enough, but these language models pretending to be Artificial Intelligence are just out of the ballpark!

Their insatiable hunger for data - and not caring about the quality - is basically the largest attack surface for public opinion manipulation ever.

#security #technology #ai

I’m seeing a lot of people making fun of their incompetence for this, but that’s not what this is. This whole regime is a gang of bullies, headed by a bully, and like all bullies, they’re cowards. Stand up to them, and they whimper away. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/business/trump-harvard-letter-mistake.html

Autism isn’t an epidemic. It's not a disease. It’s a natural variation in how people think — which, frankly, is a relief in a world where a lot of people don't think at all.