I'm not saying I'm like one of those old people who read the obituaries, but after I read the one about Major Oak, I had to read about Oliver Tree. I thought the tree was a person and the person was a tree, but it turns out both were very different human tragedies. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:...
Dispiriting, candid look at the “civic education” movement which makes me feel that the real crisis of the humanities rn is utter collapse of belief that they can produce new knowledge—replaced (on the right and sometimes the left) by a belief that they are morally or politically good for you
www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/lena...
Pew Research published several new polls today on how Americans view AI. Several results struck me as interesting…
Read the results and Joe’s opinion on them:
Conclusion agentic search is coming for library/academic search and is going to be crazily disruptive
Big news: after we demanded they stand down, the Trump admin stopped its plans to rip out 80% of our nation's ocean research equipment.
This proposal should never have seen the light of day. Our coastal economies deserve better than being treated as collateral damage in an ideological crusade.
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LLMs learn narrative from their pretraining data but what narrative content is actually in there? It turns out narrative is wildly unevenly distributed across sources and topics. New preprint with @andrewpiper.bsky.social @elliottash.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social:
Powerful piece from two former NIH staffers
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...
Schneier on opening the Pandora's Box of AI capabilities: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Stuart Russel sharing hopes that we don't need a huge disaster to do what we already know we should do re: AI: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Biomedical advances such as lenacapavir depend on years of publicly funded basic research