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@paulb3017 I second short-eared owl
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This is a fine example of *my* concerns about the dangers of #AI: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-chinese-ship-over-hallucinated-ai-arms-report/ Many people freak out about "the bots are going to take over the world!" I'm dubious -- that's panicking about a scenario that doesn't have a clear road to get there. This, on the other hand -- AI accidentally sparking a war that could potentially go nuclear -- has been the more-va...
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Speaking of prescient, @harris just pointed me to this excellent article: https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260 This posits the notion of the "moral crumple zone": using humans to take the blame when a complex system like #AI does something wrong. The "prescient" is because it dates back to 2019, early in the AI age. The problem is that we're trying to find humans to take the blame for collective failures. We define companies as &...
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Oh, this looks neat: https://structural.chat This is the latest product from the #Unison team (who I knew from the #Scala world back before they founded Unison). Haven't read my way through the papers yet, but the (very reasonable-sounding) theory seems to be that #LLMs are actually a pretty lousy way to build chatbots -- they're achingly slow, non-deterministic, and dangerous from a security POV. They've instead come up with a technology that provides a similar look-a...
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*snrk* — quote: “... what might be called #Trump’s iron-clad Law of Military Achievement: The number of times the president claims victory is inversely proportional to the actual extent of American military success” From https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/09/houthis-yemen-iran-trump-saudis/688768/?gift=E_ZnjFDVDXw07BX6pvgvVID1Xzk9l1PtT9kJ-B0vms0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share #USPol
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“Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines”: https://www.frogandtoad.ai tl;dr — this is a cute, quick little children’s story that also serves as a pretty accurate summary of the HuggingFace Incident. Well worth bookmarking for anybody who is trying to figure out what the hubbub was all about. #LLMs #AI
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Really excellent take on the bloody “Lesbian Bar Mask Mandate” story that’s taken over the internet the past few days: https://awardsforgoodboys.substack.com/p/lesbian-bar-mask-mandates This one’s hard to summarize into a tl;dr — the article’s a little long, but worth reading for a bit of properly nuanced perspective. It echoes nicely with my own feelings about the whole thing, which is that I have a good deal of empathy with all of the people who are actually *involved* in that situation (on...
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The #enshittification of #Google continues apace. I’m going to be staying at a hotel soon. I want to put that in my Saved list in Google Maps. Nice and straightforward you’d think, right? No — when I put the address into Google Maps on my laptop, it shows me *all the hotels in that area*. (Of which there are many, because it’s in the middle of a city.) Worse, while the desired place is top of the list, it is in no way clearly highlighted on the map, so it’s impossible to find in that sea o...
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For a long time, I’ve been applauding _The Boys_, the raucous and gory but brilliant political satire that involves a deeply psychotic superhero committing, essentially, a Christo-fascist coup of the US. One of the most marvelous things about it was how blatantly clear the parallels to the #Trump regime were. (For about a year there I was *sure* he would find some pretext to shut the show down before its finale.) So much of what it portrayed closely mocked the current right wing. So I suppose...
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Epic and delightful game of 20 Questions that I just learned about for the first time: https://www.tumblr.com/thestoryofaslut/829053719115071488?source=share (Vague content warning as kink-related, but the post itself is entirely SFW.)
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For the #comics fans: I just got introduced to the Sweet Shop app, a new platform for digital comics that seems to get the details right, including: * Bootstrapped instead of VC-funded (so much less prone to #enshittification) * Leans towards DRM-free when they can (although they allow creators to ask for DRM) * Provides PDF downloads * Already has a considerable stock of good comics More immediately, for the next week or so, Iron Circus Comics ( @IronSpike ), one of the best queer-friendl...
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Ah, neat -- #YourLocalEpidemiologist's NY branch is now formally expanding to the whole northeast: https://yourlocalepidemiologistny.substack.com/ For anyone who doesn’t know it, YLE has been a sensible, calm source for public-health information since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s pretty much my go-to for coverage that is well-informed and neither panicky nor denialist.
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RE: https://social.growyourown.services/@homegrown/117354728907764529 Seriously, folks — it’s way past time for the #SCA to get the hell off #Facebook, but this looks to be the nail in the coffin…
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RESEARCH | Asteroid (44) Nysa reveals a three-lobed shape and has a mini moon 🔭 ⭐ An international team of astronomers has unveiled new evidence that asteroid (44) Nysa may possess a unique trilobate structure and is accompanied by a previously unknown moon. The study combines high-resolution adaptive optics imaging with high-precision photometry to provide the most detailed view of Nysa to date. 👉️ https://www.cometa.uliege.be/cms/c_13702092/en/asteroid-44-nysa-reveals-a-three-lobed-shape-an...
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NEUROSCIENCES | L’analyse du sommeil pour mieux repérer les personnes à risque de développer #Alzheimer 💤🧠 Une équipe de l’Université de Liège (GIGA Neurosciences) a analysé le sommeil de plus de 500 personnes afin d’explorer le lien entre sommeil et risque génétique de maladie d’Alzheimer. Chez les participants âgés de 50 à 69 ans, un risque génétique plus élevé était associé à une fréquence accrue des micro-réveils nocturnes... 👉 https://www.giga.uliege.be/cms/c_13703369/fr/le-sommeil-pourr...
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PALAETONLOGY | Climate change decided who ruled as top predator 35 million years ago 🐺 🦷 A new study published in Biology Letters challenges the idea that competition alone determined which predatory mammals dominated after the extinction of the dinosaurs. 👉️ https://www.eddylab.uliege.be/cms/c_13705536/en/climate-change-decided-who-ruled-as-top-predator-35-million-years-ago #science #research #biology
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CARTE BLANCHE | L'adaptation ne suffira pas, il nous faudra une révolution Depuis la révolution industrielle, nous avons ouvert une ligne de crédit à charge de la biosphère. Aujourd'hui, la facture tombe : des canicules meurtrières (78 % de surmortalité cet été en Wallonie) et des incendies inédits jusque sur le plateau des Hautes-Fagnes ! La santé des milieux est aussi la nôtre. Il nous faut réinventer les formes collectives capables d'en prendre soin. https://www.lal...
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A 700-tonne crane, a huge vacuum chamber (100 tons) sliced into three sections. A few centimeters of clearance through the roof. On 25 August, the CSL (Centre Spatial de Liège) pulled off one of its most delicate lifts ever: installing FOCAL7, soon one of Europe's largest vacuum chambers. 🛰 FOCAL 7 will serve both Earth-observation missions and purely scientific missions, across a wide range of wavelengths. 🎥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfL3FRinEZ8 👉️ https://www.news.uliege.be/c...
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RESEARCH | Why does Mercury wear a crust of graphite? 🛰️ 🌑 As the BepiColombo mission enters the final phase of its journey toward Mercury, researchers at the University of Liège and KU Leuven have used experimental petrology to reconstruct the earliest evolution of the Solar System's innermost planet. 👉️ https://www.sciences.uliege.be/cms/c_13721964/en/how-mercury-formed-its-graphite-crust-and-core @Nature #astronomy #ESA #space
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RESEARCH | Predicting response to biologics for severe asthma through breath analysis 🫁 👄 A study shows that a signature of volatile molecules present in breath can be used to predict how patients with severe asthma will respond to biologics targeting interleukin-5. 👉 https://www.sciences.uliege.be/cms/c_13723711/en/predicting-response-to-biologics-for-severe-asthma-through-breath-analysis #asthma #pneumology #biotherapy #health @plymuni
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RESEARCH | Inflammatory Bowel Disease A team led by researchers at the University of Liège has taken an important step forward by establishing functional links between numerous IBD risk variants and the genes they regulate in immune and intestinal cells. 👉️ https://www.giga.uliege.be/cms/c_13721377/en/inflammatory-bowel-disease-genetics-paving-the-way-for-new-treatments #health
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RESEARCH 🐟 🎶 | How reef fish evolved their sounds How does acoustic communication diversify over evolutionary time in fishes? A new study led by Marine Banse and Eric Parmentier addresses this in Holocentridae, a family of nocturnal reef fishes comprising soldierfishes and squirrelfishes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oswBZjkryZo 👉️ https://www.sciences.uliege.be/cms/c_13725238/en/in-soldierfish-and-squirrelfish-evolution-diversifies-sounds-without-reinventing-the-instrument #biology #evolu...
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PODCAST 🎧 | Et si observer le ciel nocturne à dix ans pouvait donner envie de consacrer sa vie à comprendre les étoiles ? Dans ce nouvel épisode du podcast « À la source », rencontre avec Valérie Van Grootel, astrophysicienne et maître de recherches FNRS au sein du laboratoire ASTA à la Faculté des Sciences de l'ULiège. Qu'est-ce qui l'a amené à l'astrophysique ? Qu'est-ce qui la passionne dans sa recherche aujourd'hui ? 👉️ https://www.podcasts.u...
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RESEARCH 🌳 | Climate subtly shapes carbon stocks in mature tropical forests An international study shows that, in mature tropical forests, climate influences carbon stocks primarily through stand structure. As its effects on the various components of this structure tend to cancel each other out, the relationship between climate and carbon remains difficult to detect and varies significantly from one region to another. https://www.gembloux.uliege.be/cms/c_13732742/en/climate-subtly-shapes-carbo...
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RESEARCH | Spotting plant stress from space #ESA has launched FLEX, a satellite mission designed to measure chlorophyll fluorescence from orbit. ULiège was involved in the development of the satellite’s measuring instrument and will carry out reference drone flights to link the orbital signal to ground measurements. The resulting data are expected to support crop-yield forecasting and to improve the representation of the carbon cycle in climate models. 👉️ https://www.sciences.uliege.be/cms/c_...