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Reposted by Bethan Clark

Sonya Widen @sonyawiden.bsky.social · 8d

Who defines the distinction between defect and difference?

This is an incredibly important conversation and one that is close to my heart. A moving and eloquent article, from top to bottom.

Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

I wrote something on developmental biology and disability and put it up on the node last night:

thenode.biologists.com/developmenta...

I've been nervous to share because some of it veers a bit personal but they are thoughts that won't stay quiet. Would love to know what people think about it!

Developmental Biology and Disability - the Node

Hopeful monsters. Morphospace. Mutation. Natural variation. Mutagenesis screens. Polymorphism. Deformity. Phenotype. Disease. Adaptation. Anomaly.

thenode.biologists.com

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Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

Thank you Naomi! Glad it is interesting 😊

Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

Thank you - it's a relief to hear positive responses after my hesitation to share!

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Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

So glad to hear it resonates!

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Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

Thank you, that's so nice to hear!

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Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

I've been a bit quiet on here - mainly using bluesky for non-science things atm and mainly just lurking - but it's nice to dip in to share some thoughts sometimes :)

Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

I've had these thoughts rattling around for a while now and I finally got them onto the page thanks to the node's writing challenge (always handy to have deadline)

@the-node.bsky.social

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Bethan Clark @bethanclark.bsky.social · 8d

I wrote something on developmental biology and disability and put it up on the node last night:

thenode.biologists.com/developmenta...

I've been nervous to share because some of it veers a bit personal but they are thoughts that won't stay quiet. Would love to know what people think about it!

Developmental Biology and Disability - the Node

Hopeful monsters. Morphospace. Mutation. Natural variation. Mutagenesis screens. Polymorphism. Deformity. Phenotype. Disease. Adaptation. Anomaly.

thenode.biologists.com

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Reposted by Bethan Clark

Alexandra Lanes @ajlanes.bsky.social · Aug 28

This, from the Quakers, is a pretty good example of how to resist pressure from bigot lobbying groups. Effectively “we legally can allow trans people to use the loo, we morally should, and we tried it and nothing bad happened”

www.quaker.org.uk

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Sachaaaargh Coward 👻 @sachacoward.bsky.social · Aug 15

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/

The Guardian @theguardian.com · Aug 14

John Boyne says LGBTQ+ fiction prize backlash brought him ‘close to the edge’

Gender critical novelist urges writers to reenter prize they boycotted and may ask judges not to shortlist his novella The gender critical Irish novelist John Boyne has said he has been brought “very close to the edge” by the backlash to his inclusion on the longlist for a literary prize for LGBTQ+ authors. Ten authors and two judges withdrew from the Polari prize and more than 800 writers and publishing industry workers signed a petition calling on Polari to remove Boyne’s novella Earth from its longlist. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · Jul 25

And in particular I was struck by how it is the ability to 'do' a field - or at least *feel* like you are 'doing' a field - *in plain language* which invites this kind of response.

What LLMs have done to physics and many other STEM fields is brought the fake-doing-of-them into plain language. 3/

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · Jul 25

But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there *are* but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible. 12/

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Rob Donoghue @rdonoghue.bsky.social · Jul 21

There’s a thing in games where people want skill to matter in a very specific way - they want it to be possible for them to beat better player, but impossible for a less good player to beat them.

I feel like the same folks can only imagine a past where they are as well or better off than they are.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · Jul 21

The thing to understand - which the people peddling these fantasies often don't - is that the desire here isn't the 'past,' but being an aristocrat in a tightly controlled, authoritarian society.

They imagine a narrow hierarchy where they are, by dint of birth, at the top.

Dreams of feudalism.

Craig Harrington @craigipedia.bsky.social · Jul 21

Quick question: Are people insane?

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · Jul 21

The thing to understand - which the people peddling these fantasies often don't - is that the desire here isn't the 'past,' but being an aristocrat in a tightly controlled, authoritarian society.

They imagine a narrow hierarchy where they are, by dint of birth, at the top.

Dreams of feudalism.

Craig Harrington @craigipedia.bsky.social · Jul 21

Quick question: Are people insane?

Neoconfederates on Twitter whining about how we lost the bygone slavery era and replaced it with convenient and delicious Ethiopian food.

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Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · Jul 3

There is a difference between separating the art from the artist... and separating the transaction from the art.

If your method of engagement with the art funnels funding to a hate group, or clout someone will weaponize it, the art is not the issue.

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · Jun 27

Turning online archives into resources for training data not only exploits and devalues the archived works, but also renders these archives literally unusable. Like all extractivist business models, #genAI ultimately threatens to destroy its own foundations. It's not generative, but destructive

Michael Socolow @michaelsocolow.bsky.social · Jun 24

Just went looking for something at the excellent Hagley Digital Archives, and was greeted by the message below.

They're being overrun by bots, as "AI systems increasingly target sites like ours to train machine learning models."

The web is being murdered. So aggravating.

digital.hagley.org

"The Hagley Digital Archives is currently offline due to a sustained bot attack" begins a message from the archive, explaining that AI is using bots to train machine learning learning models.

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Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social · Jun 28

It benefits those in control of society to have everyone think that it's impossible - physically, spirituality, biologically - to subvert the current order. Tudor social mores told people a commoner couldn't wear velvet, and patriarchy tells us that male and female are exclusive categories of being.

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Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social · Jun 28

There have been places and times where you couldn't wear certain fabrics if you weren't of the right class. Your place in the social hierarchy was seen as immutable as terfs think gender is today. It's all an imposition to serve the interests of power.

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Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social · Jun 28

And I do think it's helpful to think of queerness as part of normal human variation (because it is) but not as a defence of it specifically. I don't give a shit if people *do* choose to be queer. It would still be okay.

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Amanda Watson @amndw2.bsky.social · Jun 22

"Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat" is my new motto.

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · Jun 21

This article is going to turn me into the Joker. Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat 😩😩😩

But A.I. can also simplify: if you’re struggling with the opening of “Bleak House,” you can ask for it to be rewritten using easier, more modern English. “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”

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Jay Hulme @jayhulmepoet.bsky.social · Jun 10

Irony is out. Joy is in. Find a niche thing to love and then love it unreservedly.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Jun 9

So what do we learn from this all this?

I think the paper is devastating for the notion that these systems have general reasoning capacities, in the sense of being able to develop and deploy simple algorithms to solve combinatorially difficult problems.

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Juliet E McKenna @julietemckenna.bsky.social · Jun 3

Worth a read

Michael Tamblyn @mtamblyn.bsky.social · Jun 3

Lots of questions about Kobo, #kobowritinglife and how, when and why we are using AI. Putting "AI" in the same sentence as "authors", "books" or "publishers" makes a lot of alarm bells go off, and for good reason. 1/

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Annalisa Nicholson @apuddleofmuddle.bsky.social · May 27

The publisher has cut their costs by outsourcing to this company, the company has cut their costs by using AI/low-paid staff instead of paying for a proper job, while I’ve spent hours & hours fixing the manuscript, so all the extra labour from cost-costing has fallen on me, the unremunerated author

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Annalisa Nicholson @apuddleofmuddle.bsky.social · May 27

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

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