Emily Hunt
@emily.space
Postdoc @univie.ac.at working on star clusters & machine learning Passionate about a better future for science communication via @astrosky.eco 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️ (she/her), Ⓥ Website: https://emily.space GitHub: https://github.com/emilyhunt
DO IT Seriously. DO IT. Trump and Vought are actively and viciously trying to turn US science into what it was in 1950s USSR. DO IT
Stand Up for Science!@standupforscience.net · 18h agoBREAKING NEWS! The Senate has paused the OMB rule that would put Trump appointees in charge of federal spending. Next step - Contact your MoC and tell them to permanently REVOKE THE RULE: zurl.co/1SXEN Article: zurl.co/23mF8
So this year, Austria's all-time June temperature record, all-time July temperature record, AND now all-time August temperature record have been broken. The highest of these today was the highest temperature ever measured in Austria.
Neuer österreichischer Hitzerekord: 41 Grad in Wien-Stammersdorf gemessen
Der österreichische Allzeit-Temperaturrekord von 40,5 Grad in Bad Deutsch-Altenburg wurde nach 13 Jahren überschritten
derstandard.at
A lovely interview with the newish Bluesky CEO, @toni.bsky.team! I'm optimistic for the future of the platform and for AT Protocol as a whole. I think their support of devs and other projects on the ecosystem is only getting better, which is awesome.
The Verge@theverge.com · 2d agoCEO Toni Schneider on protocols, community, and control. www.theverge.com/podcast/9743...
I think the Costa Coffee I'm sat in is playing AI-generated music 🫠 I guess that way they don't have to pay royalties
The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund (NBIM) lent Meta money so that they could build this Louisiana data center.
Kashmir Hill@kashhill.bsky.social · last wk.This is some incredible in-the-room reporting from @elitan.bsky.social and Maureen Farrell on how Meta got its vast, six-square-mile data center cooking in Louisiana www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/t...
England received only 7% of the long-term average rainfall for July. Southern England, just 1%. Factoid: There has been a weather station in Kew Gardens for 155 years. This July was the first month ever to record 0mm of rain. Tomorrow, London will again hit 30C+ www.theguardian.com/environment/...
July set to be driest on record for England and Wales after relentless heatwaves
Climate scientist urges better planning as southern England had just 1% of long-term average rainfall last month
theguardian.com
For me, LLMs are clearly powerful machines, but everything about their construction and deployment in society by the people constructing them appears oriented around achieving a political project that deeply conflicts with my values or a vision of a future I want to live in and dont have a choice in
NERV IRB Coordinator@professormusgrave.bsky.social · 4d agoThis is what is driving me nuts. So many posters around here keep haw-hawing about R’s in strawberry and clearly have NO idea that these are extremely powerful machines *already* that we have not yet figured out how to utilize fully. If we stopped development today, they’d still be astonishing
“Not to know what’s beyond is like spending your life in the cellar, being completely oblivious of all the wonderful things around us.” Astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was born #OTD in 1905. She was an authority on variable stars and globular clusters, and a sci-com pioneer. 🧪 👩🔬 🔭 Image: U. Toronto
Astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was born 121 years ago today. Respected by the astronomical community for her work on globular clusters, she was beloved by the wider world for her articles, books, and television appearances bringing the wonders of the sky to the people. #AstroSky tinyurl.com/38b7runy
Before There was Sagan: How Helen Sawyer Hogg Brought Astronomy to the People
Before, ‘The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be,’ there was, ‘The stars belong to everyone,’ the watch-phrase of a woman who spent three decades in energizing the wider...
tinyurl.com
One of the most important issues of our time is that the future of humanity is presently being authored by people who have nothing but total contempt for humanity and seek the erasure of everything that gives being a human meaning. It’s not just annoying. It doesn’t just suck. It’s existential.
My Saturday morning run to the supermarket was full of elderly people struggling in the heat 🫤 these heatwaves are awful, especially in a city not built for them
The latest Anthropic announcement reads like a big advert for new military contracts for AI-powered hacking. The only other entity in the US with the kind of money that AI companies need to keep going is the US military, and I wonder if they'll try and get big contracts to make AI hacking weapons
Anthropic's Claude AI escapes tests to hack three organisations
It comes just days after rival OpenAI said rogue AI agents had breached other firms' networks.
bbc.com
There is no meaningful use case for Google’s new “faking satellite imagery with AI” product.
Doremus Schafer@doremus-schafer.bsky.social · 5d agoGoogle put out a five-point bullet list of supposed use cases, it is, uh, not wildly convincing. My 'favorite' is 'have the stochastic parrot show your students what historical sites looked like in olden days'. blog.google/products-and...
Absolutely nuts: Google Earth now has a feature that lets you convincingly fabricate satellite imagery www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-pla...
avocados are woke, cancel them
Kat Kerlin@katkerlin.bsky.social · 7d agoSome avocados are female in the morning and male in the afternoon, while others are on the opposite schedule. This helps them avoid self-pollination. How do they do it? A @ucdavis.bsky.social study explains. www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/st...
PSA: please do not touch W Social. It's closed source, for-profit, and has already had numerous critical security vulnerabilities that sometimes took >1 week to patch. More context:
The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals
A deep dive into the origin story of W Social, an analysis of the strategic arguments they have been using to appeal to government officials, media companies and advertisers... and the discussion of c...
blog.elenarossini.com
I think that calling out AT Protocol projects that you don't like is catty and divisive, but the fact that W Social is my one exception to that rule should tell you everything
Emily Hunt@emily.space · 6d agoPSA: please do not touch W Social. It's closed source, for-profit, and has already had numerous critical security vulnerabilities that sometimes took >1 week to patch. More context:
PSA: please do not touch W Social. It's closed source, for-profit, and has already had numerous critical security vulnerabilities that sometimes took >1 week to patch. More context:
The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals
A deep dive into the origin story of W Social, an analysis of the strategic arguments they have been using to appeal to government officials, media companies and advertisers... and the discussion of c...
blog.elenarossini.com
☄️🔭
Sloan Digital Sky Surveys@sdssurveys.bsky.social · 6d agoBig day for us today at the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: it's Data Release Day! Our twentieth(!!!) data release will go out later today, with lots of spectra and catalogs of stars, galaxies and quasars, and some new webtools! Our DR20 paper has all the details: arxiv.org/abs/2607.26149 #DR20
There's an organic exceptionalism at work: I'm a good consumer because I eat only organic eggs / pasture-fed meat etc. In many cases these have a higher, sometimes MUCH higher, environmental impact. The worst of all farm products are organic beef and lamb. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb
Analysis: You may be amazed by that answer, but the area of land used for grazing is vast compared with the meat and milk produced
theguardian.com
It's a point I've been trying to make for a long time: there is no good way to meet even 10% of current demand for animal products. They trash the living world, whichever way you do it. If you want to reduce your impact, switch to a plant-based diet. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Organic eggs have worse impact on climate than eggs from caged chickens
Adopting organic free-range model in UK could lead to greenhouse emissions equivalent to 2,316,000 tonnes of CO2, study suggests
theguardian.com
One of my favourite little Python packages now has an associated paper! The IMF library is absurdly useful for any and all mass-function work 🔭☄️
The IMF package: a toolkit implementing mass functions and statistical tools to analyze them
Mass functions are used in all areas of astrophysics. The stellar initial mass function (IMF), in particular, plays a central role in modeling stellar populations in galaxies. However, few dedicated t...
arxiv.org
tech CEOs are misogynistic creeps and the current mainstream of AI is absolutely awful for women I cannot IMAGINE what it would be like to be a teenage girl right now and have to deal with deepfake porn of you being created by your classmates. It's already a problem and will only get worse
MPR News@mprnews.org · last wk.Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is suing Minnesota over a first-in-the-nation law banning technology that allows users to create and post deepfake videos or images of people naked without their consent.
the account activity labeller continues to be such an incredibly good tool - signals like "no break greater than 4 hours yesterday" or "made 50+ replies yesterday" are such good signals that an account is inauthentic
bsky.app
Researchers tested top image editing models on Hugging Face and found they could easily create explicit deepfakes—and 1,000 image editing prompts show how people use the software. www.wired.com/story/huggin...
Hugging Face Has a Deepfake Nudes Problem
Researchers tested top image editing models on Hugging Face and found they could easily create explicit deepfakes—and 1,000 image editing prompts show how people use the software.
wired.com
