Tim Clancy

The deal would make Classiq the most expensive quantum company acquisition to date. www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/ar...

Solar now generates more electricity than all of the world’s nuclear power plants. www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

US Cities in Line for $500 Million to Upgrade Energy Systems www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

"[T]he agency, created in 1950 as an independent agency to support academic research, has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the current administration." www.science.org/content/arti...

BREAKING: Major shakeup in NSF leadership. Brian Stone, who has been performing the duties of NSF director since April 2025, is retiring on Dec. 31. Rebecca Keiser, who has been acting chief of staff, is also retiring, Oct. 31. Unclear who will replace Stone, since O'Neill's nom hasn't moved.

The famous “ice palace” in the film Doctor Zhivago was actually made of wax, and the set was located in the Spanish desert.

Literally never in human history has it been so easy to read such a dizzying variety of books either free or dirt cheap. And if you can make a relatively modest up-front investment in an e-reader, instantaneously. Cost is not the problem.

Just gonna repost this: You can’t “prove” anything isn’t conscious — a plant, a rock, your iPhone — but even without deeply understanding the nature of consciousness, we can say there’s no good reason to expect it to correlate with what LLMs are good at. juliansanchez.substack.com/p/dont-fall-...

Y’all, I hate to rain on the dead bot parade, but the Yandex data center destruction doesn’t seem to have significantly impacted social media bots. I made temporal graphs of X posts about AfD around the time of the attack and there’s no sign of a sudden dip or residual impact on that conversation.

“Emphysema enters the chat.”

The commingling of civ/mil critical infrastructure has been going on for some time but now it’s hyper scaled.

I will not only be relieved but truly *ecstatic* to be wrong, if more and better studies soon start showing that AI actually improves learning and cognitive motivation. But so far they all show the opposite, and that is consistent with the evidence that I and other educators are seeing on the ground

This is one of the most inane and useless threads of all time.

Mw=7.7, PANAMA (Depth: 12 km), 2026/10/09 17:56:05 UTC - Full details here: http://geoscope.ipgp.fr/scripts/seismes/fiche.php?seis=us6000u18k

RIP. Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90

Even when private foundations do a good job of supporting important work, they tend to be more narrow and rely more on networks and relationships relative to open calls and peer review. They can also be highly motivated, pushing preferred solutions and even ideologies. 

Most computer models of socio-technical systems are garbage without the deep understanding of social systems that SBE provides.

Like I am very shamelessly pro-human on this; it simply does not matter to me if a computer can think. It is not an interesting question to me, because it is not a factor whatsoever in how I see the morality of interacting with it.

Apparently unprompted by its programmer, an AI agent performs research by emailing academic experts -- and several SME's replied. www.science.org/content/arti...

The National Science Foundation has withheld $1.4 billion in research funds appropriated by Congress during Fiscal Year 2026. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/u...

Supply chains

NEW: Chinese hackers impersonated former White House + State Department officials and a senior Anthropic employee in attempts to break into the cloud accounts of AI policy experts, cybersecurity company Proofpoint said today. www.nextgov.com/cybersecurit...

What's playing youtu.be/Wf02V8AtMag?...

Is this bad? Seems bad.

This is correct - the truth value of an LLM output is essentially zero. Errors are not "hallucinations" they're probabilistic results given when the system runs out of data or has poor data. The system is performing as intended. Even at 90+% probability, that means *a lot* of answers are wrong.

And a lot of data-to-decision tools are lousy because they’re based on poor or incomplete underlying theory.

Congress is not hamstrung in regulating complex technologies like AI or biotechnology because they pound foolishly killed off OTA 30 years ago.

Virtual event: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, 4:00 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Sept. 23 events.fairfield.edu/event/sven-n...

Rest in power Duncan Sheik youtu.be/LX3vsw2F_DA?...

For those interested in this topic see: www.nist.gov/artificial-i...

Joe Romm gave one of the most memorable talks I’ve ever heard at Columbia many years ago. Among other things, he said, “Sustainable development is like teenage sex. Everybody says they're doing it, very few people actually are, and those who are doing it are doing it badly.” RIP legend.