tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

Starlink, annoying people looking from space at earth, and from earth at space.

My students are often surprised to learn that LLMs aren’t answering their questions. Rather, an LLM answers the question “what would a reply to this look like?” It’s one of the first things I explain in the “Should I use LLMs?” portion of my syllabus.

Nu har jag läst klart ”Fuskarna” av Natalia Kazmierska. Det borde egentligen vara omöjligt men boken lyckades göra mig ännu argare på marknadsskolan än vad jag redan var. Sågningen av Academedia är briljant. Köp/låna den och tipsa icke-arga vänner och kollegor om att läsa den.

A judge rejects Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement over concerns that class lawyers are striking a deal behind the scenes that will be forced on authors (Annelise Levy/Bloomberg Law)

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/anthropic-judge-blasts-copyright-pact-as-nowhere-close-to-done
http://mediagazer.com/250908/p20#a250908p20

More on from the Global Sumud Flotilla:
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Footage from another boat of our Flotilla shows the exact moment the Family Boat was struck from above.
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For context (apart from everything earlier in this thread):
In the current version of the Reuters article (linked to earlier):
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Tunisian authorities said the explosion originated inside the vessel, and Tunisia's National Guard spokesperson told Mosaique FM radio that reports of a drone attack on the flotilla "have no basis in truth".
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But in the video you can see that their statement can not be accurate, since an object apparently on fire strikes the boat straight from above.

Vår tid i en postning och en rättelse.

Here is a very good disease treatment story. It's about the successes in the fight against African sleeping sickness.

The layout and narrative of the reporting is beautiful, as well. (It is written in French.)

Many takeaways: A big one is the need for community involvement, trust, acceptance, and training.

(Key in the story is that humans are the reservoir of the disease.)

((On a personal note, I played a minor and indirect role in the development of acoziborole))

https://dndi.org/stories/2025/elimination-maladie-sommeil-en-guinee/

#arXiv The Perfect Host: JWST Cepheid Observations in a Background-Free SN Ia Host Confirm No Bias in Hubble-Constant Measurements https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01667 Cepheids in JWST (19 hosts, 24 SNe Ia) and HST data (37 hosts, 42 SNe Ia) yield H0 = 73.49 ± 0.93 km/s/Mpc. cc @pcoffeebreak

In May 2022, an Israeli sniper shot and killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Last week, Israel targeted and killed five journalists in one attack. In between those dates, Israel became the largest killer of journalists in the world. https://continent.substack.com/p/the-worlds-greatest-killer-of-journalists

All the cool kids are going floppy

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Swampland

A very comprehensive review article has appeared on arXiv with the title Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Swampland: The Cosmologist’s Handbook to the string-theoretical Swampland Programme by Kay Lehnert (who just happens to be my PhD student). The paper is 170 pages long and contains over 1,800 references, which gives some idea of what a large field this is and how much work Kay has put into writing it!

This is Figure 3 from Kays paper. If you would like to know more of what it is about, turn to page 50…

The abstract reads

String theory has strong implications for cosmology: it tells us that we cannot have a cosmological constant, that single-field slow-roll inflation is ruled out, and that black holes decay. We elucidate the origin of these statements within the string-theoretical swampland programme. The swampland programme is generating a growing body of insights that have yet to be incorporated into cosmological models. Taking a cosmologist’s perspective, we highlight the relevance of swampland conjectures to black holes, dark matter, dark energy, and inflation, including their implications for scalar fields such as quintessence and axions. Our goal is to inspire cosmological model builders to examine the compatibility of effective field theories with quantum gravitational UV completions and to address outstanding cosmological tensions such as the Hubble tension. This comprehensive literature review presents clear definitions, cosmological implications, and the current status – including evidence and counterexamples – of the following swampland conjectures: the anti-de Sitter distance conjecture (AdSDC), the completeness conjecture (CC), the cobordism conjecture, the de Sitter conjecture (dSC), the swampland distance conjecture (SDC), the emergence proposal (EP), the Festina Lente Bound (FLB), the finite number of massless fields conjecture (or finite flux vacua conjecture (FFV)), the no global symmetries conjecture, the no non-supersymmetric theories conjecture, the non-negative null energy condition conjecture, the positive Gauss-Bonnet term conjecture, the species scale conjecture, the gravitino swampland conjecture (GSC), the tadpole conjecture, the tameness conjecture, the trans-Planckian censorship conjecture (tPCC/TCC), the unique geodesic conjecture, and the weak gravity conjecture (WGC), including the repulsive force conjecture (RFC).

This is essentially the literature review part of Kay’s thesis; the aim of his research is to study the implications of the string-theoretical swampland programme for cosmology. He’s particularly interested in the predictions string theory makes regarding inflation, dark energy, and dark matter, and the impact this has on the Hubble tension. The point of writing this review was to suggest projects that might be undertaken to bring string theory into the realm of testability, thus suppling material for the rest of Kay’s thesis, but I think it is also a very good guide for cosmologists of all types to what the swampland conjectures are and what they do and do not say about the Universe we actually live in.

#arXiv250902632 #Cosmology #KayLehnert #MaynoothUniversity #Swampland #swamplandConjectures

"The Pentagon’s 2026 budget – and climate footprint – is set to surge to $1tn thanks to the president’s One Big Beautiful Act, a 17% rise on last year.

Military emissions are closely tied to military spending.

The budget bonanza will push the Pentagon’s total greenhouse emissions to a staggering 178 Mt of CO2e, resulting in an estimated $47bn in economic damages globally, according to new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), a US-based thinktank."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/17/trump-pentagon-emissions

"[A new] study found that global carbon storage capacity was 10 times less than previous estimates after ruling out geological formations where the gas could leak, trigger earthquakes or contaminate groundwater, or had other limitations.

That means carbon capture and storage would only have the potential to reduce human-caused warming by 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.26 F) — far less than previous estimates of around 5-6 C (9-10.8 degrees F), researchers said."

https://apnews.com/article/carbon-capture-storage-research-climate-change-c5ebd4f7c2d23e20526512e1ef338bef
CCS

Living organisms are assumed to produce same-#species #offspring.

But this is not the case for Messor ibericus, an #ant that lays individuals from two distinct #species.

In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste.

As a result, males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago.

The evolutionary history of this system appears as sexual parasitism that evolved into a natural case of cross-species cloning, resulting in the maintenance of a male-only lineage cloned through distinct species’ ova.

#biology #evolution
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09425-w

Since 1 September, French energy actors such as aggregators can get rewarded not only for reducing demand, but also for increasing it. This enables hot water tanks, room heaters and EV charging to help absorb midday solar energy.

https://www.cre.fr/actualites/toute-lactualite/la-cre-approuve-les-regles-nebco-notification-dechange-de-bloc-de-consommation-qui-viennent-remplacer-les-regles-nebef-notification-dechange-de-blocs-deffacement-et-entreront-en-vigueur-au-1er-septembre-2025.html
#flexibility

Government’s decision to approve the expansion of Glencore’s Ulan coal mine until 2035, revealed today, is a dangerous step backwards that undermines efforts to shield Australians from worsening climate harm

The Ulan extension would produce an extra 18 million tonnes of coal, which when burnt, will release more than 41 million tonnes of climate pollution in Australia & overseas – equivalent to taking over 500 million flights from Sydney to Melbourne

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/new-coal-approval-undercuts-2035-climate-goal/

#Australia #Climate

#Sciop hit a Petabyte (actually a Pebibyte but nobody knows that word) of total proven capacity a week or two ago. That's all the seeders * the size of the things they are seeding. All volunteers, zero dollars in funding, piggybacking off existing resources wherever we can, run on a donated VPS. This is before we even get into federating archives and are still nailing down the basics of the site.

Peer to peer archives are real and they work, period. 216TiB of threatened cultural, climate, queer, and historical information held in common. That's a people powered archive, and you're welcome in it - to take from, to add to, and help sustain if you can.

Edit: if this is the first you're hearing of sciop, it's at https://sciop.net