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generalising.bsky.social
Andrew
@generalising.bsky.social
190 followers 70 following 580 posts
Not another one to try and remember. We'll see.

Librarian. Scholarly communications, historic MPs, Wikipedia, inter alia other things. Misplaced Scot.
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generalising.bsky.social
arXiv announcement last month: we get so many LLM-generated review papers we've stopped taking that type of submission entirely. blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

arXiv paper today: good news, here's a tool to write them even faster arxiv.org/abs/2511.17689
November 25, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Andrew
sifu.tweety.fish
y'know, if tech companies weren't so fired up to call every single thing "AI" it would be a lot easier to distinguish "ML spam filter that is well-sandboxed and tuned on your emails" from "giant context and IP-eroding foundation model that makes people paranoid and unhappy"
sifu.tweety.fish tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish · 2d
since the "google is now training gemini on your email contents" thing keeps bumping around here: it's _not happening_. I say this not to defend google but because I know a lot of people that have broken their filtering and made their lives much more annoying from sheer misinformation.
awest.uk Andrew West @awest.uk · 3d
The malwarebytes Google opting-your-emails-into-ai-training thing is not true. The post is based on one bad tweet.

I know anti-tech lamenting is a Bluesky core principle, but please use the same judgement you would for any other clickbait.

www.theverge.com/news/826902/...
November 23, 2025 at 12:58 PM
generalising.bsky.social
"St Benedict repairs a Broken Colander through Prayer", fresco, 1502, by Giovanni 'Il Sodoma' Bazzi.

Yes, that's the subject.

Yes, that's his name.

Yes, the central figure with a sword, expensive robes, and badgers on a leash is a self portrait.
Renaissance fresco showing (left) a woman weeping over a broken tray, the colander, and a man praying over a repaired one; on the right, a richly dressed handsome young man with pet badgers (the artist) and a crowd admiring the miracle or, more likely, him
November 23, 2025 at 10:21 AM
Reposted by Andrew
singlecrow.bsky.social
Eight Days is a fantastic, Hugo-winning podcast, & this episode features me as special guest! Becca and Emily are the smartest people around, & kindly invited me to talk about my fave, The Lives of Christopher Chant, & also bureaucracy, & colonisation of mind, & a bit about cricket. do check it out.
November 22, 2025 at 4:02 PM
generalising.bsky.social
The future, invariably stupider than we could ever predict
Move over fillers - here's why people are having facial injections made from fish sperm Health 12h How can you tell if your new favourite artist is a real person? Culture 11h
November 22, 2025 at 12:22 PM
Reposted by Andrew
carlbergstrom.com
I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.
November 21, 2025 at 2:49 AM
Reposted by Andrew
asls.org.uk
“But the most absurd & preposterous of all… was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’”
—Charles Mackay (1814–1889) on the South Sea Bubble, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
nytopinion.nytimes.com New York Times Opinion @nytopinion.nytimes.com · 5d
What if the A.I. bubble “is an inevitable part of developing and adopting a revolutionary tool that will fundamentally improve productivity and growth?” Mohamed El-Erian writes.
Opinion | A.I. Is a Bubble. Maybe That’s OK.
Investors’ excitement rightly reflects the potential transformation of the entire economy.
nyti.ms
November 20, 2025 at 8:23 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Preacher outside King's Cross coming up with an exciting new theology - "if you celebrate Christmas you are shaming the name of Jesus"

I think he was disputing the accuracy of the 25th as the date rather than going for full-on Puritanism, but who knows
November 18, 2025 at 6:22 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Oh, *now* they admit it
Google boss says trillion-dollar AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality' Don't blindly trust what AI tells you, says Google's Sundar Pichai
November 18, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Andrew
hetanshah.bsky.social
I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight
www.cityam.com/the-british-...
The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care?
The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity
www.cityam.com
November 18, 2025 at 6:27 AM
Reposted by Andrew
harold.bsky.social
back again to share a new preprint from me and @mantzarlis.com! “What did Elon Change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia” arxiv.org/abs/2511.09685

I had seen many spot analyses of individual grokipedia pages, but I was curious: how was grokipedia made? what did Elon change from wikipedia?
abstract of the paper "What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia" Elon Musk released Grokipedia on 27 October 2025 to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia and compare it to a dump of Wikipedia, with a focus on article similarity and citation practices. Although Grokipedia articles are much longer than their corresponding English Wikipedia articles, we find that much of Grokipedia's content (including both articles with and without Creative Commons licenses) is highly derivative of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, citation practices between the sites differ greatly, with Grokipedia citing many more sources deemed "generally unreliable" or "blacklisted" by the English Wikipedia community and low quality by external scholars, including dozens of citations to sites like Stormfront and Infowars. We then analyze article subsets: one about elected officials, one about controversial topics, and one random subset for which we derive article quality and topic. We find that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and Grokipedia version than other pages. The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia focused rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biographies, politics, society, and history. Finally, we publicly release our nearly-full scrape of Grokipedia, as well as embeddings of the entire Grokipedia corpus.
November 17, 2025 at 4:11 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Interesting numbers here on the profit of a Twitter account scam: 130 accounts hacked, gaining around $110k. One in ~800k people who saw it fell for it and paid up, averaging $260 each www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Once inside the Twitter accounts of famous individuals, they pretended to be the celebrities and tweeted asking followers to send Bitcoin to various digital wallets promising to double their money. As a result of the fraud, an estimated 350 million Twitter users viewed suspicious tweets from official accounts of some of the platform's biggest users, including Apple, Uber, Kanye West and Bill Gates. Thousands were duped into believing that a crypto giveaway was real. Between 15 and 16 July 2020, 426 transfers were made to the scammers of various amounts from people hoping to double their money. A total of over 12.86 BTC was stolen which at the time was worth around $110,000 (£83,500). It is now worth $1.2m.
November 17, 2025 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Andrew
bldigischol.bsky.social
What's available online from the British Library? This guide lists resources including digitised books at Google Books, items from the Endangered Archives Programme, International Dunhuang Programme and the Qatar Digital Library

https://bl.libguides.com/currently-available
Guides: What's currently available: Introduction
This guide provides up to date details of which services are currently available following a cyber-attack, and which aren't.
bl.libguides.com
November 17, 2025 at 11:48 AM
generalising.bsky.social
Minor delays due to trespassers on the line
Fox on a railway line, train hesitating in the distance Fox on a railway line
November 16, 2025 at 1:02 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Today's odd footnote: a tiny neutral condominium on the Belgian-German border, drawn up in 1816 to avoid conflict over a mine, finally abolished at Versailles.

(After the mine ran out they tried to run the economy on stamps, gin, gambling & ... Esperanto?) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral...
November 16, 2025 at 10:58 AM
generalising.bsky.social
those modern London ways of living with their fancy coffee (1955 edition)
"London coffee bar" for Rugeley A coffee bar incorporating some Of the features of the mese up-todate coffee bars is to be opened in Horse Pair, Rugeley, within the next few months. It will not, the owners, be a cafe or _a It will sell ; 's, really good cup of coffee," light snacks and takes. The owners feel that a bar of this type is needed in Rugeiev, and they hope the DOW pr emi ses will, with their imolai layout and decoration, be moletic and attractive. At present building contractors are making the necessary structural alterations. A buffet will rim along the length of the back wan; there will be a corner bar, bar stools and a number of tables and chain. These are the main items of furniture, but the =decorations have still to be
November 15, 2025 at 11:14 PM
generalising.bsky.social
"...well, we like to think of it as really more of a Second *Suggestion*..."
November 15, 2025 at 11:12 AM
generalising.bsky.social
My phone somehow cached a copy of the BBC News homepage in March and likes to display it when I don't have signal.

If it wasn't for Carney, I'm not sure I'd always realise.
Headlines on the Ukraine war, welfare spending changes, a murder, Canadian politics and Italian flooding
November 14, 2025 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by Andrew
stephenharrison.com
Key points in new Cornell Tech research:

56% of Grokipedia entries carry the Wikipedia CC license, suggesting wholesale ingestion

Grokipedia’s top 100 sources include fewer news outlets and more UGC (e.g. LinkedIn scraping)

Grokipedia has fewer citations overall, making it harder to check sources
Grokipedia cites a Nazi forum and fringe conspiracy websites
A site-wide comparison with Wikipedia sheds light on what Elon Musk is trying to do
indicator.media
November 13, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Reposted by Andrew
stephencollins.bsky.social
Every ad now
[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]
November 13, 2025 at 5:38 PM
Reposted by Andrew
dsquareddigest.bsky.social
It is crazy that there is no testing or licensing regime for these things, dozens of deaths later. A drug which had such serious mental side effects would have been withdrawn instantly
counterhate.com Center for Countering Digital Hate @counterhate.com · 13d
🚨OpenAI’s new “safer” version of ChatGPT actually allows more harm.

We tested GPT-5 and GPT-4o to see if GPT-5 was safer & found that actually GPT-5 gave MORE harmful responses.

Read our new report ⤵️
https://bit.ly/3JgW9OP
November 12, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Reposted by Andrew
asls.org.uk
Hamish Henderson (1919–2002) – poet, soldier, intellectual, activist, songwriter – was born #OTD, 11 Nov. A hugely important figure in Scottish culture, Henderson fought in WW2. A 🎂🧵

There were no gods and precious few heroes…
—“Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica”
#poem #poetry #RemembranceDay
1/10
Hamish Henderson from Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica FIRST ELEGY End of a Campaign There are many dead in the brutish desert, who lie uneasy among the scrub in this landscape of half-wit stunted ill-will. For the dead land is insatiate and necrophilous. The sand is blowing about still. Many who for various reasons, or because of mere unanswerable compulsion, came here and fought among the clutching gravestones, shivered and sweated, cried out, suffered thirst, were stoically silent, cursed the spittering machine-guns, were homesick for Europe and fast embedded in quicksand of Africa agonised and died. And sleep now. Sleep here the sleep of the dust. There were our own, there were the others. Their deaths were like their lives, human and animal. There were no gods and precious few heroes. What they regretted when they died had nothing to do with race and leader, realm indivisible, laboured Augustan speeches or vague imperial heritage. (They saw through that guff before the axe fell.) Their longing turned to the lost world glimpsed in the memory of letters: an evening at the pictures in the friendly dark, two knowing conspirators smiling and whispering secrets; or else a family gathering in the homely kitchen with Mum so proud of her boys in uniform: their thoughts trembled between moments of estrangement, and ecstatic moments of reconciliation: and their desire crucified itself against the unutterable shadow of someone whose photo was in their wallets. Then death made his incision. There were our own, there were the others. Therefore, minding the great word of Glencoe’s son, that we should not disfigure ourselves with villainy of hatred; and seeing that all have gone down like curs into anonymous silence, I will bear witness for I knew the others. Seeing that littoral and interior are alike indifferent and the birds are drawn again to our welcoming north why should I not sing them, the dead, the innocent?
November 11, 2025 at 12:55 PM
Reposted by Andrew
dsquareddigest.bsky.social
The automated problem factory!
acjsissons.bsky.social Andrew Sissons @acjsissons.bsky.social · 16d
‘A new service called Objector is offering “policy-backed objections in minutes” to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes.’

Another reminder that AI can be used for things you don’t like as well as things you like…
November 9, 2025 at 4:26 PM
generalising.bsky.social
The company that does this is valued at a billion dollars, incidentally, what an excellent allocation of resources www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Mothers say AI chatbots encouraged their sons to kill themselves
In her first UK interview Megan Garcia speaks to Laura Kuenssberg about the death of her teenage son.
www.bbc.co.uk
November 8, 2025 at 2:27 PM
generalising.bsky.social
Here we see the rare feral phone, resting after shedding their old cases. Vulnerable after a moult, they only emerge in darkness.
Four mobile phones with the backs torn off left on top of a street cabinet
November 4, 2025 at 9:29 PM