Minas Karamanis

Absolutely worth reading.

Something I really love is the way the movie constantly contrasts Nausicaä's emotional, naive, feminine-coded objections with the Hard Men Making Hard Decisions, and then repeatedly shows us that Nausicaä is the only person who has actually done the research to understand the logic of the world.

He's also ruined "grok," using it as he does for an LLM that fundamentally fails, on multiple levels, the entire concept of "grokking." But this is the Billionaire Way, naming shit for things in their favorite books in ways that the original authors would likely look on in horror

AI companies: This technology we’re developing is dangerous and might destroy humanity and we don’t know how to stop it Other people: So we should strictly regulate it, create legislative guard rails, and monitor its development? AI companies: lol no the opposite of all that & give us more money

Unsurprisingly there's a significant overlap with that war on science book-slop author list

This data on self-censorship among U.S. academic scientists and engineers -- not even humanities people, this is STEM -- is so disturbing. theconversation.com/self-censors...

“Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”

Familiar from the other end of Europe. My undergrad physics department was overwhelmingly applied, and you could watch a professor's face fall when a student said they wanted astronomy for their thesis

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: Has NASA already found life on Mars? A controversial new assessment of half-century-old data suggests the space agency’s life-hunting Mars lander Viking 1 found exactly what it was looking for. By @nadiadrake.bsky.social. www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-...

Think of all the awesome science-ing we could do with an extra £20M......🧪

I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

turns out the reason he only does podcasts is that podcasters don't ask follow-ups

Ty Cobb, a former White House attorney under Trump 1, believes Trump’s speech is intended to justify declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections. Cobb suggests Trump aims to intimidate voters, seize voting machines, and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

My upcoming book is absolutely packed to the brim with em dashes—more em dashes than any well-adjusted human being could possibly need or want—and if any of you tries to claim they are the result of some soulless LLM rather than my own unhinged compulsion I will fight you.

ICE is engaged in a very large escalation nationwide, with the agency claiming to be hitting record arrest numbers amid the return of quotas. This has gotten very little attention from the media because ICE learned lessons from the chaotic disasters of Kristi Noem’s tenure. Keep a watch.

If you read just a few comments on any article about Graham Platner it should become crystal clear why victims don’t come forward earlier. The level of cruelty people direct at victims is gutting

I actually don’t care what the founding fathers would say about the present and I don’t think you should either

A delightful thread for those of you at Universities that prize Nature articles above all other... #cosmology 🔭

dammit.

After Nottingham, now Sussex: ~35% cuts proposed to Particle Physics & Astronomy. A world-class department, built over decades, gutted to patch a temporary budget gap. Reputation and talent like this don't come back. Add your name to the open letter: sussexphysics.github.io/Open_Letter/

The publisher Springer claims it can only discuss why it retracted Planck's paper with... Planck! But until they hold a seance, they are happy to sell you a completely redacted version: a blank page for $39.95.

Horrified to learn that the Particle Physics and Astronomy groups at Sussex University are facing a proposed 35% cut in staff numbers! That would be devastating to a high quality department.

oh? you think we can cope??? Let me introduce you to Venus. Thanks to the greenhouse effect, it is an inhospitable hell-hole, with temperatures over 400°C (750°F). The probes we've sent usually lasted mere minutes on the surface due to the heat. Venus is why fucking with our climate is a bad idea

Feels like endless bad news for basic science research funding in the US and UK these days. All to throw money at AI and other sectors that were nurtured by basic science in their infancy. www.science.org/content/arti...

The policy treats foreign STEM graduates as a drain. A sustained one-third drop in their numbers cuts US GDP by up to $481B a year, PIIE finds. Another of this administration's self-inflicted wounds

An associate editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience has resigned. He asked the editorial office to turn off the AI assistant, and was told it was "not possible". 😵 Read the whole thread!

This is such a bummer.

A24 announces that they want to put storyboard artists out of work. That's what the headline should be written as. Becuase we should be honest about what these AI "tools" are trying to do, and who it is trying to circumvent. variety.com/2026/film/ne...

Know what TV show actually wouldn’t get made today? The Twilight Zone. Half of these fuckin’ episodes are about fascism.

In spot tests I've done, I see this happen *all of the time*, such as with my own papers. The LLM would often rather hallucinate a male scientist than get my name right. 🤷‍♀️ It's kind of unsurprising that models trained unscrupulously on the entire internet are misogynistic

Demon-Haunted World reference ftw

They came here fleeing persecution; rather than give them refuge, Marco Rubio’s state department will send them to die in countries they’ve never been to. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/w...

Mon Mothma said what needed to be said in opposition to an evil, authoritarian regime.

In general relativity, a point mass just sitting there is inevitably a black hole. But that's when you're living in 3d space (and one dimension of time). In 2d space, a point mass creates a less drastic singularity: a 'cone point'. I've been studying these cone points lately, just for fun. (1/n)

If you tax a billionaire 8%, you know what they still are? Still a billionaire. Their kids' kids' kids' kids are gonna be rich. Maybe they could pay a little bit more so that all of our kids can go to good schools and travel functional roads and get good healthcare.

AI-based AI detectors do not work

IMO, senior faculty at top R1 institutions rushing to use AI to flood journals with papers before future students or early career researchers can have an opportunity is not just greedy, it's salting the earth of the discipline.

I've had so many conversations with non-technical friends & family who are completely duped by headlines like this. I also think it's sad to not tell the public about the huge range of AI/ML research. It would be so cool if the public knew how many cool new methods exist, LLMs are just the surface

Amazon will spend $200B this year on AI infrastructure — including data centers — while forging ahead with over 30,000 layoffs. And don't forget: the company paid nearly $8B less in taxes last year thanks to Trump's big ugly bill. This is what corporate greed looks like.