Easy. Just throw it for betazoids from Starfleet Academy.

Riker Googling@rikergoogling.bsky.social · 24h ago

how to throw a surprise party for a betazoid

The effective federal corporate income tax rate: 1950: 50% 1990: 25% 2020: 13% Stop asking "but how we will pay for it?" Restore the corporate tax rate. That is how we will pay for it.

Annual reminder to academic unit directors: If the agenda you've put together for your yearly "retreat" has no items of any value, you should just cancel the retreat or explicitly announce that retreat attendance is 100% optional. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.

Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts

Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.

nature.com

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

How long until Buc-ees goes after this poor company too?

I guess American Airlines missed a couple of these US Airways tags. Kind of a fun historical reminder.

The American military has to solve complex problems with solutions that are nuanced and not ready-made. Modern military academies must attract and retain the best civilian faculty and their academic freedom. See: "Academic Freedom Is a National Security Imperative" www.usni.org/magazines/pr...

Academic Freedom Is a National Security Imperative

Why should the military care about academic freedom?

usni.org

"Pentagon weighs eliminating civilian tenure at military academies and reviewing all curriculum, draft memo says" www.cbsnews.com/news/dod-pen...

Pentagon weighs eliminating civilian tenure at military academies and reviewing all curriculum, draft memo says

The Pentagon is considering a sweeping remake of military higher education, including an end to civilian tenure and a "line-by-line" review of courses, according to a draft memo obtained by CBS News.

cbsnews.com

Gotta be careful with your AI-generated images, kids. Eventually you'll get a job where there is no one else there to check your work -- and your efficiency-maxxing-self may lose that job! "US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference" www.reuters.com/world/africa...

US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at ‌a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screen...

reuters.com

US imports of robot vacuums soon banned. Ban includes "devices weighing more than two kilograms that use sensors, network connectivity and software to achieve autonomous navigation, including the avoidance of obstacles." "US bans Chinese and foreign-made humanoid robots" www.dw.com/en/us-bans-c...

US bans Chinese and foreign-made humanoid robots

The Trump administration has banned the import of humanoid and quadruped robots manufactured outside the United States, citing national security concerns. The ban could strain diplomatic tensions with...

dw.com

Glen Hansard, Oscar-winning Irish singer-songwriter, dies aged 56 in motorcycle crash

Glen Hansard, Oscar-winning Irish singer-songwriter, dies aged 56 in motorcycle crash

Frontman of chart-topping band the Frames had huge success as the star of 2007 romantic drama Once Glen Hansard, the Irish folk-rock musician and actor who fronted the band the Frames and had Oscar-winning success with the 2007 film Once, has died aged 56. He died in a motorcycle crash in Lucan on the outskirts of Dublin, early on Wednesday morning. Without naming him, Irish police said he was treated at the scene for his injuries but died a short time later. Continue reading...

theguardian.com

An 'illuminating' article! 🧪 "All living things emit a faint glow. Could this light be useful?" -- Ultra-weak ‘biophotons’ might be used to diagnose disease, or could even represent a new signalling mechanism in cells. by Jo Marchant (Nature [News Feature], 2026) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

All living things emit a faint glow. Could this light be useful?

Ultra-weak ‘biophotons’ might be used to diagnose disease, or could even represent a new signalling mechanism in cells.

nature.com

Episode 52 is beginning! Lava has started to overflow into the caldera. Fountain very soon! youtube.com/live/HggWKlZ...

[V1cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (west Halemaʻumaʻu crater)

YouTube video by USGS

youtube.com

Sadly, this book is not a reflection on the classic alrruism strawman argument from John Maynard Smith

I saw someone trying to take a selfie with one of these leaves. How vein.

"Threat seduction" is one approach to the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD). Drones/projectiles are used first to deplete the supply of defenses so that they won't be available for future attacks. Example: US forces are now starting to adjust under supply constraints. youtu.be/CCfa3vloIB0?...

U.S. military intentionally allowing some Iranian projectiles through defenses

YouTube video by NBC News

youtu.be

For students who look to LLMs for help with their code but run into usage limits, running an open-weight LLM locally doesn't use up that much storage space and may have similar latency as cloud solutions -- and easy to connect to Positron, VSCode, and others. www.xda-developers.com/self-hosting...

I started self-hosting an LLM, and it became my favorite productivity tool

I installed a local LLM for privacy, but the biggest surprise was how much faster it made my daily workflow.

xda-developers.com

Transactions on Verified Unicorn Sightings

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino.bsky.social · 2w ago

Academics: What's a journal in your field that's great? I feel like they are a dwindling breed. Criteria: (1) No APC. Supports green or diamond OA. (2) High-quality and relatively fast peer review. (3) Editors who provide real curational value and exercise purposeful agency in the decision process.

More transmissible cancer, this time in fish… in Vermont! 🧪 “Brown bullhead catfish melanoma represents a novel transmissible cancer” by Curd et al. (2026, Nature) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Brown bullhead catfish melanoma represents a novel transmissible cancer - Nature

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of tumour and matched non-tumour host tissues of the brown bullhead catfish reveals a type of naturally occurring transmissible cancer.

nature.com

What's the marginal value theorem? @tedpavlic.bsky.social has you covered.

MVT Explorer — Marginal Value Theorem — interactive explainer

Interactive explorer for Charnov's Marginal Value Theorem (MVT): drag the tangent to find optimal patch residence time and see how the habitat-wide rate R* acts as a temporal discount rate — a structu...

tpavlic.github.io

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

6. Our approach is to adapt a classic biological model in optimal foraging theory—Eric Charnov's beautiful marginal value theorem—to explore how scientists allocate their labor across projects. Instead of gobbling blackberries or whatever, scientists develop projects and eventually move on.

Increased productivity = increased opportunity cost, which means lots of downstream effects on how researchers will choose to spend their (highly valuable) time. A similar effect occurred with the advent of the search engine -- people stopped spending time on the web pages they had searched for.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

Preprint suggesting hallucinations are often more a function of bad context than bad models. The future of LLM-based AI will be better harnesses and establishment of best practices in context management. "AI Agents Do Not Fail Alone:The Context Fails First" arxiv.org/abs/2607.14275

AI Agents Do Not Fail Alone:The Context Fails First

Context engineering has become central to building reliable AI agents, yet it remains largely unmeasured. Agents do not fail in isolation: their behavior is shaped by the instructions, tools, memory, ...

arxiv.org

In high-stress conditions, species with higher growth rates have an advantage - leading to robustness in overall growth despite community deterioration. 🧪 "Predictable shifts in microbial species composition lead to community-wide robustness to environmental stress" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Predictable shifts in microbial species composition lead to community-wide robustness to environmental stress - Nature Microbiology

Environmental stress shifts microbial composition towards species with high growth rates, providing community-wide protection.

nature.com

A tornado *in* the erupting #Kilauea volcano caldera today! www.facebook.com/share/r/19JH...

#Kilauea volcano vents are now overflowing with lava. They expect fountaining to start today or tomorrow. www.youtube.com/live/HggWKlZ...

[V1cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (west Halemaʻumaʻu crater)

YouTube video by USGS

youtube.com

Lava is sloshing in Kilauea again -- fountain likely today or within a day or two. Pretty "cool" to see it slosh! Will be overflowing soon... then fountaining after. www.youtube.com/live/HggWKlZ...

[V1cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (west Halemaʻumaʻu crater)

YouTube video by USGS

youtube.com

I'm pretty sure #Kilauea lava fountaining will start within hours of posting this -- one vent is rapidly boiling now! Check out the live stream of this very active vent or back out to see the live stream #USGS has of both vents. 🧪 www.youtube.com/live/HggWKlZ...

[V1cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (west Halemaʻumaʻu crater)

YouTube video by USGS

youtube.com

Simplified template for manuscript reviews, supporting both MD & LaTeX. Template includes support for an LLM **scribe**, helping to organize repo and take down notes *you* give it as *you* read. It is NOT an endorsement of LLM actually doing the review. github.com/tpavlic/scho...

GitHub - tpavlic/scholarly-review-template: Template repository for writing and managing reviews (and re-reviews) of manuscripts (and revisions). Allows for reviews in Markdown or TeX format (with stu...

Template repository for writing and managing reviews (and re-reviews) of manuscripts (and revisions). Allows for reviews in Markdown or TeX format (with stubs of each for starting a new review). Or...

github.com

This is a massive screw up on Sony Pictures part. It's been this long and they still don't know how to spell "MARVEL"??!

Just in case you might have thought otherwise, we need to clarify that the gecco here is not a real person.