I had an unexpected experience with a live LLM chatbot when I was trying to cancel a hotel booking by phone. This seems like a place where an LLM might be more useful or quicker than a standard decision tree. Anyway after talking to it, and it appearing to understand, I got kicked to a decision tree

one anecdote: I was searching for a link to one of my old papers on Google, and the automated Gemini summary attributed all of my lab's work to my husband

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Don’t trust LLMs with your literature searches. Horrible gender biases as found in this paper (from later in the thread below) arxiv.org/abs/2508.02740 🧪🔭

Who Gets Cited? Gender- and Majority-Bias in LLM-Driven Reference Selection

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted as research assistants, particularly for literature review and reference recommendation, yet little is known about whether they introduce demogra...

arxiv.org

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

The increase of the precision of science this paper will allow is legitimately worth billions. If you use JWST data at all, read this.

Shashank Dholakia@astroshashank.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Thread on our new paper on arxiv today! We stumbled across a weird sinusoidal systematic that we think appears in every observation from the NIRISS instrument on JWST. We derive a correction and see how much it impacts exoplanet spectra. (1/N) #astro #exoplanets 🔭🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2606.11983

Thread on our new paper on arxiv today! We stumbled across a weird sinusoidal systematic that we think appears in every observation from the NIRISS instrument on JWST. We derive a correction and see how much it impacts exoplanet spectra. (1/N) #astro #exoplanets 🔭🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2606.11983

Calibration of an Analog-to-Digital Conversion Nonlinearity in JWST/NIRISS

We quantify an unusual flux-dependent systematic which is periodic in raw counts in flight data from the James Webb Space Telescope's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (JWST/NIRISS), used...

arxiv.org

It takes modern academic leadership to do this. Western Sydney University’s pro vice-chancellor for quality and integrity used AI to write SMH opinion piece urging students to avoid using tech to ‘cut corners.’ www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Sydney academic used AI to write SMH opinion piece urging students to avoid using tech to ‘cut corners’

Sydney Morning Herald removes piece by Cath Ellis, despite Western Sydney University saying her use of AI was ‘appropriate’

theguardian.com

Happy to say that my second paper “Astrometric exoplanet detection survives solar-like stellar contamination” has been accepted by MNRAS and is now up on the arxiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2605.18953 Takeaway: Missions like TOLIMAN and SHERA could find earth-twins assuming solar like noise.

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

From Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social and Jayde Willingham @jaydewst.bsky.social : Literally and figuratively, Australia is closing its eyes to the future of astronomy. Where does that leave its next generation of students? ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/05/01/a...

Australia is closing its Very Large eyes to the Universe

Literally and figuratively, Australia is closing its eyes to the future of astronomy. Where does that leave its next generation of students?

astrobites.org

This 👇🏽 “Astronomy does more than deliver discoveries. It inspires students, engages communities, and builds the pipeline of future scientists. Stepping back from a flagship international collaboration at the very moment the world is looking up risks dimming that inspiration for a generation”

Sarah Kendrew@sarahkendrew.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The Australian Academy of Science posted this reaction to the government's decision to withdraw Australia from ESO (which I had not heard about?!) 🔭 science.org.au/news-events/...

I had a Yeltsin-esque reaction in a Michigan grocery store after seeing hard to find and expensive bottles of liquor being cheap and readily available in the US. I don’t think it is possible to buy any mezcal in Aus for less than $100aud, but a nice bottle of it was $40USD here. End sin taxes!

I see no reason for TACs to not randomly select 5-10% of the time from the submissions (or the top half of submissions). The only reason would be the tacit agreement that ranking proposals is somewhat arbitrary

if you tell claude not to make mistakes then how would it learn

Seriously though, if you journal clubbed or astro-coffeed about one, you should also do the other. Both super interesting and meta.

Dr. Jessie Christiansen@aussiastronomer.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I hope everyone who checked out @hogg.bsky.social’s white paper on the implications of LLMs in astronomy and shared it across slack channels similarly perused and amplified this white paper of best practices for broadening participation in astronomy!

Astronomers: highly recommend this thoughtful opinion piece by @hogg.bsky.social on how to think about our field in light of the development of large language models. whether you agree with him or not it’s vital to discuss the principles behind our science. 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181

Why do we do astrophysics?

At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...

arxiv.org

Hey, my name is in the Epstein files! I've told the story before, but should probably re-up. TLDR: never met the guy, never took (or asked for) any money from him, never visited the island. I was invited to the island, and said no. It's not that hard to just say no.

the Premier should resign after the disgraceful actions of the NSW police today

The only time I’ve ever had a package stolen was when it was a book. I wonder what they did with that book.

Happy to say that my paper “Inferring hemispheric asymmetries of stellar active regions through the information content of astrometric signals” is on the archive: arxiv.org/abs/2601.11707 It’s about what degeneracies are present (and importantly, what aren’t) in stellar surface mapping

Inferring hemispheric asymmetries of stellar active regions through the information content of astrometric signals

Photometric light curves suffer from fundamental degeneracies that limit surface information recovery. We demonstrate that astrometry enables access to complementary information through photocentre va...

arxiv.org

I am creating some Bayesian statistics documents for phds students at UNSW and I thought it would be fun to look at the history of Jeffrey’s and Fisher. Goddamn Fisher was an awful person - Professor of Eugenics, and wrote in favour of nazi eugenicists AFTER Nuremberg 😕

Mulder is a Bayesian and Scully is a Frequentist.

I was reading a paper that got a bit of buzz a little bit ago about the adult literacy crisis. Ironically, the paper itself seems to lack numerical literacy, reporting basic percentages incorrectly…. 😕

I find it funny that when reading books on SETI, many authors describe the inherent chauvinism in assuming intelligence as an “evolutionary goal”, but to describe the pinnacle of technology they all invariably put the peak at radio telescopes. Perhaps radio astronomers are also chauvinists lol

War doesn’t just destroy buildings—it erases places where children learn, play, and grow. Bellingcat and journalists from @afp.com bureaus in Paris and Kyiv take a look at the lost spaces of youth in Ukraine. www.bellingcat.com/news/2025/12...

How Russia’s Invasion is Impacting Ukraine’s Youth - bellingcat

Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainian educational facilities and spaces used by children have been damaged in air strikes or closed because of them.

bellingcat.com

Very concerning that these guys were armed and not under surveillance.

Possum@pollytics.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Very few politicians are willing to state the obvious - a failure of Australia's intelligence apparatus. Father/son terrorist attack, with long links to Islamic State characters and IS flags in the car? Nothing to see here apparantly.

I am concerned about the literacy rates in the adult population.

Sick and twisted massacre today. Had never imagined that this could happen here, like this. Solidarity to the Jewish community, solidarity to Bondi.

Confirmed: the attack at #Bondi was targeting the Jewish community. It’s a terrorism event. Awful for all involved. Thoughts are with Australia’s Jewish community and everyone who was on Bondi who had to witness such horrific events. This is so sad and not what our country is about. Devastating.

I don’t know how these people have gotten guns, but there needs to be a crackdown. We cannot be like the US and allows this shit to happen. It’s unclear how many victims there are, but I hope for a speedy recovery for them. Fuck those shooter cunts.

❗️Shocking footage. A passerby disarmed the shooter "with bare hands" at Bondi Beach in Sydney.