This is actually a place where those of us who have some seniority and no fucks to give can leverage their privilege. If someone posts a job to a list without salary info, I will IMMEDIATELY reply on-list to say “Before I forward this to great candidates who might be interested, what is the salary?

Matthew Noe@noethematt.bsky.social · 13h ago

My MLS students would like you to know that if you don't post a salary with your job posting, they aren't likely to apply.

The world is full of people who insist "AI is changing everything" but who - when pressed - have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI *will* change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources. 8/

(Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors.) 6/

#AI #LLM Something I've not seen commented on is the explosion of bot-impeding pages (e.g., via Cloudflare) that now appear before web pages load. The cumulative time waste for human users has got to be in the billions of person-hours. An immense burden imposed on everyone by the AI-bro assholes.

I kicked a can over yesterday, and that's that there are different definitions of the word "antibiotic" in use. Definition and usage of the term vary a bit between disciplines, between countries, in standardisation bodies, in regulatory/legislative definition, etc.

I keep seeing the suggestion that we (university lecturers) teach our students how to use genAI responsibly. I look forward to someone reducing our workload sufficiently that we can learn - or be trained - how to do that ourselves, before teaching it. genAI arrived precipitously.

From today, EU citizens have a legal right to know when they're talking to a bot or looking at a deepfake, backed by fines of up to €15m. Thanks to Brexit, we're missing out on this protection.

The Magician’s Burden is making Light of otherwise Dark secrets

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 3d ago

The greatest magic trick of them all is *lying*. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they *didn't* do the same trick three times in a row! 1/

"Flock cameras are just one part of a vast ecosystem," @lastweektonight.com's John Oliver warned his audience last night. "Check out resources like the EFF's Atlas of Surveillance, which catalogs each of the technologies used in your area." www.atlasofsurveillance.org/

From @maxstetina.bsky.social & colleagues in #OUP 's #DATABASE journal | The Asparaginase Database: a comprehensive resource and classification of L-asparaginases | #Bioinformatics #Genomics #OpenScience #Phylogeny | 🧬🖥️🧪🔓 ⬇️ academic.oup.com/database/art...

The Asparaginase Database: a comprehensive resource and classification of l-asparaginases

Abstract. l-Asparaginases have been essential anticancer biopharmaceuticals for nearly half a century, particularly in the treatment of acute lymphoblastic

academic.oup.com

We're recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow at ANU to help strengthen Australia's preparedness for wheat blast. The project spans plant pathology, genetics, breeding and biosecurity, with collaborators in Australia and Brazil. Apply here: tinyurl.com/25zcj9yy #PlantScience #Postdoc #Biosecurity

Postdoctoral Fellow - Canberra / ACT, ACT, Australia

Classification: Academic Level ASalary package: $91,546 - $114,906 per annum plus 17% superannuationTerm: Full-Time, Continuing (Contingent Funded) Note: This position will be primarily based at the N...

tinyurl.com

Recommended related reading from @doctorow.pluralistic.net bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 4d ago

“Bybee drove about two miles to a restaurant, picked up an order, and placed it in the Dot robot as it waited in the parking lot, she said. She took photos of each step to document the process, and the gig took five minutes, she said. DoorDash paid her about $5.”

Ultra-fast and customizable Python charts. If you have a lot of points, try it. I can think of usage for single-cell visualization. reflex.dev/docs/xy/

Farmer who supplies hay to me and many others yesterday said his pastures have only dried grass and without rain very soon he will have to start feeding his hay supply to his sheep, in an Irish summer -- something he has never had to in his farming life

Oisín McGann@oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 4d ago

The slow creep of stories like this. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

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

I think maybe if America just keeps relentlessly making Spider-Man movies everything will eventually be okay.

Nothing convinced me more of the importance of publicly funded basic research more than my time in industry.

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 5d ago

Love this idea that industry should subsidize basic research. Industry famously is great at prioritizing timelines longer than a year or two

Pls share. Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences - Genetics/Genomics at Smith College. apply.interfolio.com/190342

Proud to have been part of this - go Carpentries and everyone involved!

The Carpentries@carpentries.carpentries.org · 7d ago

🎉 The Carpentries has reached a significant milestone today: we have hosted our 5,000th registered workshop! 🎊 This monumental achievement is testament to the strengths and efforts of members of our incredible global community. None of this would have been possible without their inspired service! 🙌

It's incredible to think of the careers and discoveries enabled by 5,000 Carpentries Workshops, teaching probably well over 100,000 learners.

The Carpentries@carpentries.carpentries.org · 7d ago

🎉 The Carpentries has reached a significant milestone today: we have hosted our 5,000th registered workshop! 🎊 This monumental achievement is testament to the strengths and efforts of members of our incredible global community. None of this would have been possible without their inspired service! 🙌

New from 404 Media: Google Earth has introduced an AI feature that lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellite images. In our own tests, we added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles. This is a misinformation time bomb, will 100% be abused www.404media.co/google-earth...

No shit!

As I keep pointing out, the underlying premise of the index is wrong. The Big Mac is *not* a globally homogeneous product; it differs in salt content, calories and even weight across different markets according to local tastes. www.economist.com/interactive/...

Despite 40 years of our Big Mac index, currencies are still mispriced

Exchange-rate theory can be a lot to digest. Instead, take three trips to McDonald’s

economist.com

In the same way that if you have an improperly sealed ant farm then the ants getting out is not the ants exhibiting any kind of superintelligence

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 6d ago

Really important to note that in no way shape or form did Anthropic’s models in this incident “escape containment,” and not just in the word-policing sort of way. The model stumbled through an open, misconfigured gap. From Anthropic’s incident report:

@henkvaness.bsky.social is shocked and has more details on this Google move www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-pla...

How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

The question is: what on earth is Google doing?

digitaldigging.org

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 6d ago

Google Earth, a tool often used as a source of satellite imagery to verify photos and videos, has added a feature that allows you to alter satellite imagery with AI, for reasons. blog.google/products-and...

“Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive.When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are.Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half”

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)@doctorow.pluralistic.net · 7d ago

Today's threads (a thread) Inside: The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing; and more! Archived at: pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/p... #Pluralistic 1/

We’re so excited to share our new paper, where we tackle the wealth of structural and functional diversity of anti-phage sensors across bacteria (1/6)

Nature@nature.com · last wk.

Nature research paper: Diverse bacterial pattern recognition receptors sense the core phage proteome go.nature.com/45fpXCZ

Kids: 1 KIDS Act: 0

It's not hyperbolic to say that these companies are literally the enemies of humanity. novaramedia.com/2026/07/29/a...

AI Firms Are Buying up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them

The world’s biggest AI companies are buying antiquarian books en masse so they can be scanned to train their large language models (LLMs) before being destroyed.

novaramedia.com

Removing coordinate-defined regions from phylogenomic matrices is simple in principle, but editing errors can alter the matrix. NEXCISION provides exact, validated excision from transposed NEXUS matrices 🔗 github.com/RhysWhite/ne... Feedback welcome #Bioinformatics 🖥️🧬💻 #AcademicSky #MicroSky 🧪🧫🦠

GitHub - RhysWhite/nexcision: Precise region-based excision of coordinate-labelled rows from NEXUS matrices.

Precise region-based excision of coordinate-labelled rows from NEXUS matrices. - RhysWhite/nexcision

github.com

bioRxiv Bioinfo@biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social · last wk.

NEXCISION: exact, validated, and scalable excision of genomic regions from phylogenomic NEXUS matrices https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.26.740842v1