Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 29m

I wonder if some enterprising politician or activist should sponsor and organize red state tourism in blue cities.

Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 9h

genuine question: does anyone in America actually believe this

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d

Bondi: "We've been living through a horrific cycle of political violence in this country ... night after night antifa wrecks havoc on the streets of our cities. In Minnesota, a gunman murdered a state lawmaker and her husband."

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 1h

bsky.app/profile/duhe...

Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · Sep 1

They’ll be especially bad for non-native speakers with rich vocabularies.

Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social · Aug 31

Kid has an English assignment, where school has kids first submit essay to an "AI checker." Kid did not use AI. AI checker says the use of the word "devoid" magically turned essay into 18% AI written. Changing "devoid" makes it drop to 0%. We're spending time "un-AI-ing" an essay that has no AI.

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 10h

Another is the rapid rollout of AI writing detection tech that is biased against non-English native writers - which was well documented as a problem with Turnitin years ago hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-dete...

AI-Detectors Biased Against Non-Native English Writers | Stanford HAI

Don’t put faith in detectors that are “unreliable and easily gamed,” says scholar.

hai.stanford.edu

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 1h

Remarkably, he used the same approach we would use to today, and tried to study how they behaved when given leaves they have not encountered before, and presumably didn’t have an evolved strategy for.

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Greg Priest @gregpriest.bsky.social · 1d

OTD in 1881, Charles Darwin published his last book, on earthworms.

It reflected a long interest in animal minds: “One alternative alone is left, namely, that worms, although standing low in the scale of organization, possess some degree of intelligence.”

🧪 🌱🐋🦋🦫 #HistSTM #philsci #pschsky #cogsci

Caricature by Edward Linley Sambourne from Punch in 1882 titled “Man is but a Worm,” depicting human evolution, commencing with Chaos, through worm, monkey, culminating in Darwin himself.

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 1h

Tangential: MDs are among the least likely to understand evolution.

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 16h

Was reminded of a neuro-surgeon who, on hearing I was a political philosopher, told me that society needs wars every couple of generations to ‘get rid of the riff-raff’. People like him are in charge of things now.

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 1h

We all eyeball sometimes, but don‘t tell anyone… looks great!

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Jeff Lockhart @jwlockhart.bsky.social · 6h

Sometimes you just can't tell people things. You just have to sit back and let them find out for themselves. Usually those people are children.

Nate Silver
@NateSilver538 • 5h
•.°
I'm just one person, and my programming needs are somewhat unusual (building various kinds of statistical forecasting models). But I'm just not seeing the consistent productivity gains from LLMs that I would have expected if you'd asked me 6 months ago.

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 1h

We are at the point where the only way to verify you are who you say you are is to see the kind of scientific revolution you bring forth.

Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 1h

Looking forward to reading. One thing that occurred to me when I thought of this issue was that roughly speaking in humans it’s first interaction and embedded, and then semantic and statistical connections, whereas in LLMs the order is reversed: first statistical and then interactional.

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Morten H. Christiansen @mh-christiansen.bsky.social · 6h

Human language acquisition and use is fundamentally interactive. By contrast, LLMs are generally assumed to be passive learners that merely soak up vast amounts of data, like a sponge. In this opinion piece, we argue that the picture is more nuanced 1/2

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

LLMs highlight the importance of interaction in human language learning

Recent years have seen large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance with core linguistic abilities. This can be taken as a demonstration that, contrary to long-held assumptions about in...

www.degruyterbrill.com

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 1h

When I thought about how machine learning can help with brain computer interfaces this is not what I imagined. This is terrifying. I hope that the places my mind went to will not occur to the people building this. Wishing the patient all the best, and hoping that black mirror and Leo are on it.

Laura Jedeed @laurajedeed.bsky.social · 7h

I am straight-up going to have nightmares about this

In the video Smith posted online, he said Neuralink engineers had started using language models including ChatGPT and Grok to serve up a selection of relevant replies to questions, as well as options for things he could say in conversations going on around him. One example that he outlined: “My friend asked me for ideas for his girlfriend who loves horses. I chose the option that told him in my voice to get her a bouquet of carrots. What a creative and funny idea.”

These aren’t really his thoughts, but they will do—since brain-clicking once in a menu of choices is much faster than typing out a complete answer, which can take minutes.

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D. J. Hicks @danhicks.bsky.social · 14h

Suddenly realizing there's a big overlap between the reasons I like cats and the reasons I like teenagers

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 16h

With these views, he should be on bsky. youtu.be/U9bfuM7YR2U

Saudi Comedy Festival, Charlie Kirk - Between the Scenes

YouTube video by Trevor Noah

youtu.be

Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 18h

Excellent book.

Tony Durham @rhamdu.bsky.social · 18h

Excellent book by @neurograce.bsky.social , accessible but not dumbed down. The math takes a back seat during a tour of important historic and current research in neuroscience. Even if you know parts of the story you may find new insights and connections. GL has a good nose for neurononsense.

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Kristina Šekrst @epiphenomenal.bsky.social · 20h

Accurate.

#academia #academy #philsky #philosophysky #philosophy #science

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Alan Richardson @alanrichardson.bsky.social · 1d

If you’d like to read a paper about World War One, history and philosophy of science—especially Sarton’s New Humanism and Reichenbach’s logical empiricism—, and scientific humanism, I wrote one!: www.cambridge.org/core/books/s... #philsky

Scientific Humanisms (Chapter 5) - Science and Humanism

Science and Humanism - October 2025

www.cambridge.org

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Aron Ambrosiani @aron.ambrosiani.se · 21h

The LisaDesk code serves as an example. Ca 40 % of the code is developers’ comments (including ASCII art!) offering useful insights for the historian exploring the development process #shot2025

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Aron Ambrosiani @aron.ambrosiani.se · 21h

How can source code be used as a historical source? That’s the theme of the ”Code Histories” series of panels here at #shot2025. Titaÿna Kauffmann at @c2dh.uni.lu presenting on the Apple LISA computer and its programming languages.

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Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com · 1d

For some context the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report in addition to being just a good read, to quote wikipedia, "is the main vehicle for publishing public health information and recommendations that have been received by the CDC from state health departments. "

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 1d

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 23h

My contribution would be ”how ai criticism may favor illiberal institutions and practices“ bsky.app/profile/duhe...

Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 23h

I’m on board with many of the criticisms of AI in education, the arts, and all the rest of it. What I can’t stand are self-satisfied, privileged views that take it is self evident that pre-AI status quo is awesome. You can object to AI in schools without accepting that schools are marvelous places.

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 1d

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 1d

This is AI.

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Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 23h

AI and Ideologies: Navigating between Digital Capitalism and Illiberal theories.

This may lead to interesting discussions. calenda.org/1299607

AI and Ideologies: Navigating between Digital Capitalism and Illibe...

Over the past decade, scholarship on digital authoritarianism has rapidly expanded, highlighting how governments and political actors increasingly appropriate digital technologies to surveil, disci...

calenda.org

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Dorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social · 23h

As someone who thinks about standards of evidence for detecting research misconduct, I found this lecture by Frederick Schauer on his 2022 book The Proof very thought-provoking. He approaches it from perspective of a lawyer looking at use of evidence in everyday life. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB6q...

‘The Proof’ With Frederick Schauer

YouTube video by University of Virginia School of Law

www.youtube.com

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