Peter Jacobs | Lightnews

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 11h

But also as a separate point, he was clearly ASD in addition to whatever else was going on.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 11h

God, someone was talking about him the other day, and it struck me how his whole adult convert Opus Dei, Clinton-conspiracizing, sexual deviancy schtick would have worked to his benefit with certain Theil orbit folks, to say nothing of the Russia angle.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 12h

🤔

@DavidSacks
According to today’s WSJ, AI-related investment accounts for half of GDP growth. A reversal would risk recession. We can’t afford to go backwards.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 19h

Column integrated total water vapor reveals the evolution of #Melissa from Tropical Storm to record-breaking Hurricane to extra tropical cylone in the North Atlantic, from October 21st to 31st. Data from NASA GSFC's GEOS-FP near-real-time analysis product. 🧪⚒️🌊🌀

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 22h

bsky.app/profile/pjac...

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 22h

You can appreciate the scale of the unusual polar warming in Oct 2025 when you look at both poles at once. Antarctica was not just warmer than average on net, it was anomalously warm almost everywhere & by quite a bit (& this is with a rel. warm ref period, '86/15). Similar for the high Arctic. 🥵🧪⚒️🌊

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 22h

You can appreciate the scale of the unusual polar warming in Oct 2025 when you look at both poles at once. Antarctica was not just warmer than average on net, it was anomalously warm almost everywhere & by quite a bit (& this is with a rel. warm ref period, '86/15). Similar for the high Arctic. 🥵🧪⚒️🌊

A spatial map of both poles showing the temperature difference between the month of October 2025 and the average of all Octobers from 1986-2015, using the GEOS-FP near real time analysis and MERRA-2 reanalysis respectively. Warmer than average values are reds and cooler values are blue, the reds cover almost all of both poles.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 1d

Tell your peepaw that the bards* still sing** of his glory days and hit him with a thumbs up for me

* internet dorks
** skeet about

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 1d

People have pointed this stuff out for ages to no avail but the median non-farm household income in like 1955 was around $4700 which translates into around $57,000 in 2024, compared to actual 2024 incomes which were like $84,000. Obviously some important nuances, but as a first approximation...

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 1d

You'll nev— eh, I'd actually put this at 50/50 whether you can guess what this is in response to.

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1d

My infantry Bn had a really hard time parsing the gender and sexuality issues of Southern Helmand.

When people say, "you wouldn't want a 'purple haired gender studies major' in the Marines" I reply "YES we desperately needed them!" We had teams of anthropologists who published studies for us.

Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 1d

Industry-academic collaborations are usually justified under the argument that some data is better than none, but does this hold when the company knows and can guide what you find?

Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 1d

By the time the dust settles on this suite of collaborations we’ll have a dozen or so null findings in the literature, after 6-8 years, at odds with internal research because scientists weren’t permitted to look where the problems were.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research

Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to ...

arxiv.org

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 1d

Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican reggae singer, actor and cultural icon, dies aged 81

Star of The Harder They Come had hits including You Can Get It If You Really Want and I Can See Clearly Now

www.theguardian.com

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 1d

My infantry Bn had a really hard time parsing the gender and sexuality issues of Southern Helmand.

When people say, "you wouldn't want a 'purple haired gender studies major' in the Marines" I reply "YES we desperately needed them!" We had teams of anthropologists who published studies for us.

Steph Henson @stephhenson.bsky.social · 1d

🌊 We’re hiring! Permanent position for an assistant research scientist in marine autonomous systems at NOC Southampton. Do you enjoy developing python tools and data workflows? And have an interest in marine science? Apply before 10 December! careers.noc.ac.uk/vacancy/assi...

Careers | National Oceanography Centre

careers.noc.ac.uk

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 1d

Twitter accounts are based in Russia. BlueSky accounts are based in homes with, frankly, too many books, plants, obsolete cables, and pieces of rustic pottery, that could do with a bit of a tidying up, to be honest.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 1d

we're uncancelling Ignition (Remix) for this

Elizabeth Kolbert @elizkolbert.bsky.social · 2d

Boast from EPA chief Lee Zelda: “We will do more deregulation in one year than entire federal governments in the past have done across all federal agencies combined.”

In One Week, Trump Moves to Reshape U.S. Environmental Policy

www.nytimes.com

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 2d

There are incredible uses of reinforcement / deep learning that have been relatively underfunded for decades. When you understand the scale of time, money, compute, & training data that these companies have thrown at the problem and also genuinely know how & where their flagship models fall short? 😒

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 2d

I think people most impressed by what tech companies are selling as "AI" also tend to be unaware of: the history & trajectory of machine learning prior; the difference btwn LLMs or diffusion image generation vs. other kinds of machine learning; the scale of resources thrown at "AI" now vs previously

Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 2d

“Once you’ve seen how these systems are cobbled together – the biases, the rushed timelines, the constant compromises – you stop seeing AI as futuristic and start seeing it as fragile,” said Adio Dinika... “In my experience it’s always people who don’t understand AI who are enchanted by it.”

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

www.theguardian.com

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 2d

"Marco Rubio’s mistakes are now Foreign Office’s rewards."

Many such cases, unfortunately.

Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss.bsky.social · 14d

New: We've translated in full a 1988 KGB training manual on how to infiltrate U.S. government facilities in the Middle East and North Africa. Something of a Russian growth industry these days, you might say. open.substack.com/pub/macspaun...

How Russian Spies Infiltrate U.S. Institutions

Read a 1988 KGB textbook on how to recruit agents working for the U.S. government abroad.

open.substack.com

Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 2d

“Once you’ve seen how these systems are cobbled together – the biases, the rushed timelines, the constant compromises – you stop seeing AI as futuristic and start seeing it as fragile,” said Adio Dinika... “In my experience it’s always people who don’t understand AI who are enchanted by it.”

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

www.theguardian.com

Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 2d

As the planet warms, what was temperate is becoming tropical, and with that comes the corresponding species.
You have biodiversity effects, but biogeochemistry is also altered, with increased nitrous oxide production. 🧪🌊

Link: aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Diagram of reef systems showing the net nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes under different temperature conditions based on an ecosystem shift from carbon-capturing kelp to Herdmania grandis via tropicalization (white arrow) in midshelf reefs in the Solitary Islands region (eastern Australia). The scenarios show the amount of N2O emitted by Herdmania-dominated reefs where N2O values represent the upper and lower range in the region. These values are compared with other habitats in the region, such as estuarine areas calculated from rates by Murray et al. (2015) and marine sediment calculated from rates by Kelly et al. (2021). All values are displayed in tons of N2O per habitat per year (y−1).

lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 2d

The damned in hell are not more powerful for the fact that the fires do not consume them; it is part and parcel of their torment.

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · 2d

it is absolutely the tech companies fault that people now assume they’re doing something evil and sneaky even when they actually aren’t (regarding the latest Google kerfuffle)

like, no kidding that people have zero willingness to cut big tech the benefit of the doubt anymore

Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 2d

That Oswald killed Kennedy, acting alone, is comprehensively proven beyond all reasonable a doubt, well beyond most historical facts we'd never question. The conspiracy theories did do a lot of real harm, but belief in them is essentially unfalsifiable. It wasn't a failure of the investigation.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 2d

This shit SLAPS.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 2d

4 out of 5 Intelligence Directorate candidates in 1986 could not correctly identify the non-USS Kitty Hawk slide in this series.

An image from the CIC of the USS Kitty Hawk in the 1980s.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 2d

I would expect that the surface instrumental records for October 2025 are going to understate things, as the GHCN coverage is missing some of the highest values in model world and extrapolating lower (though still very high) nearby values in their place.

Peter Jacobs @pjacobs.bsky.social · 2d

I think I have a stereo polar version somewhere but you can to some extent still get the gist.

A spatial map of temperature anomalies from GEOS-FP, with anomalously warm values in red and cool values in blue. The red areas are far more prevalent than the blue, especially at the poles

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