Sebastian Ahnert
@sebastianahnert.bsky.social
Physicist with interdisciplinary interests. https://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~sea31/
We’re hiring a two-year DH postdoc for our HAVI project, to work on a new type of knowledge graph architecture for the humanities (and beyond). Deadline soon (18 Jan)! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...
Research Assistant/Research Associate (Fixed Term)
Applications are invited for a full time post doctoral researcher to work on an international collaboration to develop AI-based solutions for research on archival materials as part of the Humanities
cam.ac.uk
Brexit has deepened the British economy’s flaws and dulled its strengths. The question is what to do about it econ.st/4qwSix0 Photo: Magnum
Uh… check out what ChatGPT allegedly told a man before he killed his mother and then himself. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Scott’s response is perfect. You saved me time writing a thread!
Immensely significant - and worrying.
Liza Goitein@lizagoitein.bsky.social · last yr.The Department of Defense has confirmed that U.S. Marines detained a civilian—reportedly an Army veteran who crossed a yellow tape boundary on his way to an office of the Department of Veterans Affairs. This is an apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. 1/16 www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...
Far from the whole story but we wrote about the grant proposal contest component a few years ago. Thinking about other elements of your question this summer…. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
Contest models highlight inherent inefficiencies of scientific funding competitions
Scientists waste substantial time writing grant proposals, potentially squandering much of the scientific value of funding programs. This Meta-Research Article shows that, unfortunately, grant-proposa...
journals.plos.org
When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus
When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus
The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus
theguardian.com
Worth noting today that the entire budget of the NEH is about $200M.
emptywheel@emptywheel.bsky.social · last yr.According to acting DOD Comptroller Bryn McDonnell it'll cost $134M for the deployment of the Guard to Los Angeles.
Our op-ed in the Guardian addresses the danger of Trump's "Gold Standard Science" executive order. with @cdelawalla.bsky.social @vambros.bsky.social Carol Greider @michaelemann.bsky.social @briannosek.bsky.social
Trump’s new ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it | Colette Delawalla
The new executive order allows political appointees to undermine research they oppose, paving the way to state-controlled science
theguardian.com
Steven Gunn reviews 'Tudor Networks of Power', By Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert @ruthahnert.bsky.social @sebastianahnert.bsky.social academic.oup.com/ehr/advance-... @oxfordacademic.bsky.social
Tudor Networks of Power, By Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert
In many areas of historical research, the rise of digital resources has had an accelerative, rather than a transformative, effect. Historians look at simil
academic.oup.com
LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.
Hank Green@hankgreen.bsky.social · last yr.There are a lot of critiques of LLMs that I agree with but "they suck and aren't useful" doesn't really hold water. I understand people not using them because of social, economic, and environmental concerns. And I also understand people using them because they can be very useful. Thoughts?
This is the right thing to do, and it’s a profound shame that he had to do it. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/b...
"the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man mistakenly sent to a gulag... and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps. This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped" snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror
State Terror
A brief guide for Americans
snyder.substack.com
In this Op-ed for Scientific American, Asmelash Teka Hadgu and I discuss one of the many reasons the idea of replacing US federal workers with so-called generative AI systems should terrify us. 🧵 www.scientificamerican.com/article/repl...
Replacing Federal Workers with Chatbots Would Be a Dystopian Nightmare
The Trump administration sees an AI-driven federal workforce as more efficient. Instead, with chatbots unable to carry out critical tasks, it would be a diabolical mess
scientificamerican.com
1/4. On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs.
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
David D. Levine@daviddlevine.com · last yr.LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."
(1/3) It needs repeating: in 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons to Russia in return for the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.
How a pediatrician persuades vaccine-hesitant parents. “She has found *tremendous* success by just letting the families know she will have to document the higher risk of specific, and often fatal illness, in the chart of their child.” [kottke.org]
How to Persuade the Vaccine Hesitant
I loved this short thread from Andrew Miller about how his pediatrician wife helps parents who are skeptical of vaccinating their children change their minds. So my wife is a pediatrician and works in some hospitals wit
kottke.org
And also, why current Artificial Intelligence isn’t intelligent.
The New Yorker@newyorker.com · last yr.To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.
