Antonio E. Porreca 🐳

Hello, nice to meet you! Here I talk about: • computer science teaching and research (my job), • why using generative AI is bad (still part of my job), • language learning (my hobby), • the fact that one must wear a f*cking FFP2-3 mask during airborne disease pandemics (my punishment, I guess).

Sorry to be the party pooper, but I’m really disappointed. In case the Tolkien analogy was too subtle: if you play OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s game, gather round and work on their ETH “papers” in any way, you’re a part of the problem. You’re just encouraging them. You’re selfish and naive. Do better.

Theoretical computer scientists did not ask for this work to be done.

Apparently joining the Association for Human Mathematics is “political”. OMG, like absolutely nothing else in life! They never told me that before I joined! 😱

So nice to see this out! > The five core principles – honesty, Scrupulousness, transparency, independence and responsibility – remain unchanged. www.nwo.nl/en/news/revi... Image from: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Sorry to be the party pooper, but I’m really disappointed. In case the Tolkien analogy was too subtle: if you play OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s game, gather round and work on their ETH “papers” in any way, you’re a part of the problem. You’re just encouraging them. You’re selfish and naive. Do better.

Saruman is not Sauron or directly working for him, but he was tempted by the Palantír, collaborated, got corrupted and ended up being one of the bad guys too.

Sauron has claimed a refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). Frodo, Sam and Pippin have been invited to Mordor and asked to organise a community-led effort to evaluate this claim. Should they accept?

I think it is important to say about this, that from all the data we have on long covid, that if these people have covid (currently high in the US) around 10% of these people are going to walk away with a chronic, possibly permanent disability, and that should not be an acceptable number to anyone.

"AI can draft an essay for you, especially if you give it a high quality prompt." Really? This is what MIT thinks high schoolers should learn? MIT's "Day of AI" dayofai.org provides materials for K-12 teachers and claims to have reached over 5,000,000 students to date. 1/2

Genuinely baffled that anybody at Boston Dynamics seriously thought they were building a death ray for peaceful purposes only.

Theoretical computer scientists did not ask for this work to be done.

Saruman is not Sauron or directly working for him, but he was tempted by the Palantír, collaborated, got corrupted and ended up being one of the bad guys too.

Sauron has claimed a refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). Frodo, Sam and Pippin have been invited to Mordor and asked to organise a community-led effort to evaluate this claim. Should they accept?

this is why we can't have nice things

“If AI continues to improve at present rate, then in a few years, there’ll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can’t do better” can professors please stop spreading doom. It affects undergrads & isn’t the whole point to keep future generations inspired & enthusiastic so fields dont die??

Moi je ne veux plus de Macron, si on en est à dire des trucs qu'on veut plus

BTW, @springernature.com routinely uses subcontractors that I’m pretty sure employ LLM toys to format your paper, so even when it’s accepted they introduce errors including in mathematical proofs, forcing you to review your own paper back. So yeah, why not use LLMs everywhere!

“We have a professional duty to use LLMs to proofread our work” – An anonymous 🤡

'On 23 October, the ERC released preliminary application figures for the call for early career researchers, revealing that it received 7,710 applications—up from 4,807 in 2026. In turn, the 2026 figure was 22 per cent higher than in 2025, when it was 13 per cent higher than in 2024.'

Mathematicians, listen. Listen. And if you worry that writing doesn't mean us, go read again the final peroration in A Room of One's Own, the only text that brings me regularly to tears.

10 000 signatures ! On vise maintenant les 100 000. petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/...

Les historien·nes, universitaires, doivent collectivement rédiger a minima une tribune, pour dire leur soutien total à tous les enseignant·es du secondaire qui ne feront que leur travail en rappelant la dimension fondamentalement anti-républicaine et antidémocratique de l'ED

"Schools need to figure out the best way to incorporate relevant technology to help people learn better." Do we? Why? Why is it our job to find a viable use case for these crap products?

Non mais quoi? seulement 9725 signatures… partagez, faites suivre… (oui, on sait, 2 millions ne suffisent pas, mais on s'en fout, comptons nous!) petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/...

ni bolsonaro ni vucic n'ont été battu que par les urnes Les deux pays ont vécu des mobilisations populaires colossales C'est ça qui fait que le résultat de ces élections risquent de tenir : sinon on risque la jacquerie nationale Voter ne suffit pas

📣Avec des collègues enseignant.e.s, des parents, et des spécialistes de l'éducation nous lançons une pétition sur le site de l'AN pour que les revendications de la jeunesse soient reprises par les parlementaires. Vous connaissez le chemin ✒️ petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/...

#VeilleESR Tribune par un doctorant en mathématiques à propos de l’usage de l’ #IAgen. En complément ? academia.hypotheses.org/66569

I ofc can't tell for sure, but I'm guessing it's one of two things: 1) Defensiveness against the batshit argument "If you don't use it you can't critique it" -or- 2) Dude does use LLMs for some things and so isn't ready to say they're all bad. >>

In general, I really like the article linked at the top of the thread, though the author kept going out of his way to say he's not a genAI/LLM "refuser". Whyever not? And why protest so much? >>

Exactly! No matter what you are claiming to measure, the results can't be meaningful if they are based on a false frame. The claim that peer review can be automated is a false frame. And unfortunately one that has some advocates in my own field (computational linguistics/NLP). >>

"I understand that there have been some experiments showing that LLM review may have similar outcomes to human peer review, but who cares? Either scholarship, research and publishing are human enterprises or they aren’t." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu... >>

No, you don't. That's kind of what I did for a living. A lot of the time the best way to incorporate a technology is to not incorporate it at all, because it isn't actually relevant. "AI" marketing is just setting a record in exploiting the assumption that the "I" means it must always be relevant.

“I am a stranger to my closest family members so ask AI basic questions about them.”

#VeilleESR Tribune par un doctorant en mathématiques à propos de l’usage de l’ #IAgen. Sa critique n’est pas centrée sur les usages spécifiques de ces technologies pour la recherche, et propose plutôt un pas de côté tenant compte du monde social, vivant et physique. academia.hypotheses.org/66569

As I've said before, it's only once I became a professor that I realized the entmoot, a meeting that goes on for three days and three nights, was a professor's joke about faculty meetings.

The Lord of the Rings is essentially a series of faculty meetings broken up by several long walks in the countryside.

Please share and sign: www.universitiesforjustice.eu/sign/ > We call on you, as our responsible university leadership, to join and extend this momentum by: > 1. demanding the suspension of Israel’s participation in Horizon Europe and the EU-Israel Association Agreement;

What we have done since 1980 is remove entry-level access goods in a variety of contexts (housing, education, health care), and then wonder why everybody is so worried about affordability. It is not a puzzle, guys.