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The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news.

Today our report is published!
www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n...

1/11

Here are my published articles in each year and the number of times each was rejected before publication

We are pleased to offer a number of Diversity Travel Grants to support early-career academics and PhD students from under-represented groups to attend the IRTF meetings co-located with the IETF-125 Meeting in Shenzhen, China, in March 2026.

irtf.org/travelgrants/

Submit nominations for the 2026 award period of the Applied Networking Research Prize until November 17, 2025
www.irtf.org/anrp/

📢The SCOttish Networking Event (SCONE) have their next meeting @abertayuni.bsky.social

Date: 29 October
Time: From 12pm
Venue: Abertay cyberQuarter

Register to give a talk or to meet with other networking and systems researchers in Scotland ⬇️

scone.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/meetings-2/s...

Strangely compelling

AI Darwin Awards 2025 - Celebrating Spectacularly Bad AI Decisions aidarwinawards.org

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

here's my controversial take: i’m finding some sensational predictions about when the AI bubble will burst as unhelpful and unrealistic as some of the AGI predictions. hear me out

1/

“Where wizards stay up late” is generally regarded as one of the best and most accurate

AOL To Discontinue Dial-Up Internet
theonion.com/aol-to-...

The computers will cease screaming. All will be quiet for a while. With the unease of a quiet toddler, you just know something is about to happen and it's not good.

A policy for the use of LLMs in government is much needed 👇

#AgeVerification: what's the harm?

In which I distill a lot of casual pub chats I've had with friends into a layperson's guide to the #OnlineSafetyAct. What it is, the problems it causes, and why you should definitely care.

www.girlonthenet.com/blog/age-ver...

Accordingly, I'd argue that if politicians find LLMs useful, governments should run private instances of the models, trained in a known way with known data, such that the limitations and biases of the model can be quantified. They shouldn't use ChatGPT or similar public services. 6/6

You also have no way of knowing whether the LLM you're interacting with is the same as that provided to other users of the service or whether it has been modified to provide targeted disinformation to affect your decisions – modifying a service to target a high-value individual is possible. 5/

Second, as a user of these services you have no way of knowing how they were trained, what data was used in their training, and what biases they may have as a result. You don't know whether the responses they give are aligned with your values or based on accurate data. 4/

Further, the authorities in the jurisdiction where the LLM hosting company is based, and where the data centre running the particular LLM instance used, can also request access. Encryption cannot protect here, since the request must be decrypted before it can be processed by the LLM. 3/

First, due to the way these technologies work, the company operating the LLM unavoidably has access to the questions asked and the answers the LLM provides. That information is potentially sensitive even if it's not directly related to national security. 2/

Putting aside the debate about the value that LLMs may provide, there are strong arguments that politicians, or others in senior leadership or policy setting roles, should not be using public cloud-based LLMs. 1/

"Plagiarism-as-a-Service"

This is a cracking long read.

Your occasional reminder that VPNs are just someone else's internet connection and are riddled with their own risks. If you're going to use a consumer VPN, at the very least use a paid-for one that might be a bit less likely to collect loads of data and sell it on.

“to honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”