Seeadler
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seeadler.bsky.social
Seeadler
@seeadler.bsky.social
Ex-RM from NI with a PhD. Author and professional editor. "Bluesky elder," apparently. #BSMRGUK

To my Ukrainian friends: вдачi і вдалого полювання
Pinned
I spent a decade arguing with antivaxxers on X. Showing them papers. Explaining their errors. Correcting their disinformation.

I've done my bit for "dialogue with people I disagree with".

I'm here to hang out with people I like. For everyone else, I have no guilt about using the block button.
I keep returning to my metric, which is "AI is roughly Cliff from Cheers," and asking people to consider exactly what tasks they would cheerfully and confidently entrust to him.
Again if AI is the equivalent of a shit research assistant it has some, extremely limited, kind of annoying, value
February 12, 2026 at 3:13 PM
Reposted by Seeadler
The High Court will hand down judgment tomorrow in the judicial review against the Home Secretary’s proscription of Palestine Action.
February 12, 2026 at 2:28 PM
The Chaos House, and more particularly the way Madeline narrates these threads about it, pretty much justifies Bluesky's existence all on its own.
Things have progressed to the point where I can tell you about them so would all y’all like to hear about the latest Chaos House nonsense?
I am not going to explain this for at least a couple weeks for Reasons but lmao the chaos house sure is chaosing right now!!! So if I’m a bit distracted that would be why
February 12, 2026 at 2:21 PM
British Rail Class 66 enters the chat.
February 12, 2026 at 12:42 PM
Reposted by Seeadler
In fairness there are good reasons why a Head of Government may say nicer things about the USA than Johan Citizen does.

Zelinskyy's public utterances about US leaders are quite flattering. I suspect his private comments are unprintable.
February 12, 2026 at 9:52 AM
And they're incredibly holistic about it. I edited one paper that said "we need high-capacity electrical lines running from power generation centres like wind and solar farms to urban centres. So what's the greenest way to manufacture those power lines?"
For a "communist" state, China is the most ruthlessly mercantile in the business and have been building green infrastructure, and filing green patents, at a basically unparalleled rate because it is the future.

One estimate is that 90% of green tech patents have been filed in China.
NEW ANALYSIS: China's CO2 has now been 'flat or falling' for 21 months

* Down in 2025
* Still below Mar 2024
* Clean energy wave a key factor

If this is China's peak (TBC) it's the climate story of the century so far…

www.carbonbrief.org/...
February 12, 2026 at 8:49 AM
It is now clear that the only sin in an elected official that Republican Americans will not tolerate or excuse is being a Democrat.
Any one of these would have ended any other presidency.

We have a party of enablers in the GOP.
February 11, 2026 at 7:04 PM
Would watch.

(Read the thread)
I once had a dream about a Star Wars TV show that didn't (to my knowledge) exist and then I woke up and wish it existed.

Maybe that's a fitting metaphor for Star Wars.
February 11, 2026 at 3:00 PM
Genuinely thought this was Eva Green for a second.
This is a photo of me doing stand-up sixteen years ago to the very day and I don't understand why it needs to be so menacing.
February 11, 2026 at 9:50 AM
It finally happened!

The paper I'm editing just cited Dunning and Kruger!
February 10, 2026 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Seeadler
“Titan Submersibled” come on down, you’re the next induction to the bluesky lexicon
Anyway I don’t believe there will be a moon base in under ten years but I DO believe that there’s a chance that inside ten years Jeff Bezos, Nikki Minaj, and Kyle Rittenhouse will get Titan Submerisbled on the maiden voyage because Musk fired all the “woke” engineers
February 10, 2026 at 4:11 AM
Reposted by Seeadler
The people pushing the social media moral panic the loudest genuinely believe it because it is a simple, reductive explanation for a complex, nuanced, and multifaceted problem that also allows them to blame people they don't like
February 10, 2026 at 11:47 AM
"It became necessary to close down an entire university in order to preserve free speech" is the far-right's new "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

Perhaps they should reflect on exactly how well that went.
Reform's Sarah Pochin (the one who complained about brown people being in adverts) wrote to Bangor university's student debating society asking to be hosted. They said 'no thanks, you're a bit of a racist, we don't like those' & now Reform are threatening to shut down the entire university!
February 10, 2026 at 2:14 PM
"No one will ever learn pronunciation from AI-written materials, because no AI has ever spoken" sounds weirdly sad and profound.
I once went to a *really* interesting lecture about how people study this. Mixture of linguistics, what we know of subsequent versions, but the most fun and touchingly human thing was how you can tell from people's spelling errors.
February 10, 2026 at 11:15 AM
Reposted by Seeadler
Plans to invade Greenland have just been cancelled after this
February 9, 2026 at 6:42 AM
I edited some of the published research on AI in healthcare settings. There is some stuff that the evidence suggests it is legitimately good at (I recall one paper finding that it more reliably found small tumours than radiographers did), but "AI can do medicine" is too broad a claim to be correct.
usually medicine requires you to publish research and meet a bunch of boring scientific evidentiary standards before you can bring something to clinical practice, but I guess AI is a very special boy
February 10, 2026 at 9:39 AM
They're trying to *import* religious intolerance to Northern Ireland?
American conservative Erika Kirk is expected to visit Northern Ireland as part of a tour to recruit young people to Turning Point, the organisation founded by her murdered husband.
Widow of murdered US activist Charlie Kirk to recruit students on NI visit
Ex-DUP MP Ian Paisley backing plan to launch branch of Christian-right group Turning Point here
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
February 10, 2026 at 9:24 AM
Reposted by Seeadler
BREAKING: “in my 24th year of my quest to settle the planet Mars, I have just been informed of a basic fact of celestial mechanics.”
February 9, 2026 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Seeadler
Recently wife and I stunlocked a guy who works in the bleeding edge of AI (San Francisco) and asked him if, instead of putting AGI in a brain implant, he can just start with a consumer printer that works reliably. Genuinely he did not know what to say.
Even former Thiel Fellows are starting to realize that the tech industry hebben een serieus probleem
February 9, 2026 at 4:28 PM
Editing one of these could be fun. "Screws A through G were unnecessary and have been removed; I feel you need to add buttressing at point M..."
February 9, 2026 at 5:19 PM
By quite a long way, Trump is the most incoherent and illiterate user of English on the world stage. This is why translators hate him. He has no sense of structure or style in narrative; on a very fundamental level, he is incapable of telling stories, which is also why he's so unfunny.
Nobody understands a word Trump says, either, but here we are
President Trump denounced Bad Bunny over his Super Bowl halftime show, complaining that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying” after the largely Spanish-language performance.
February 9, 2026 at 2:31 PM
This looks like something from Doctor Who. Quite extraordinary.
What you're watching here is a remarkable transformation in a northern white-faced owl (Ptilopsis leucotis).

If confronted by a similar-sized threat, it puffs up to appear larger, but for very large-sized threats, it does this, which is supposed to make it resemble a tree branch.

#SuperbOwlSunday
a white and black owl is perched on a branch
Alt: a white and black owl is perched on a branch, with Japanese characters flashing on the screen. It becomes suddenly very thin, turning to the side in profile, and the face even appears to form a V shape.
media.tenor.com
February 9, 2026 at 12:44 AM
This applies to academia too. If your paper is AI authored, you have no recourse if someone else plagiarises it.
I cannot stress this enough: court case after court case has ruled that AI does not count as an author when it comes to copyright. Any minute now an AI bot is gonna start reskinning and reselling AI slop and the "authors" will have zero legal recourse because they didn't actually author shit.
February 8, 2026 at 10:22 PM
Reposted by Seeadler
Train near Newcastle railway station, 1937, by Bill Brandt.
December 16, 2024 at 7:15 AM
Reposted by Seeadler
well there’s an instant switch
Mozilla will allow Firefox users to entirely block current and future generative AI features on the browser after user feedback revealed many who wanted an AI-free browser experience.
New Mozilla Firefox version to allow AI features to be blocked
Mozilla will allow Firefox users to entirely block current and future generative AI features on the browser.
www.siliconrepublic.com
February 8, 2026 at 10:22 AM