Stuart Grieve

Ignore the smears: I was never a close friend of Peter Mandelson. And I fully understand the lessons we must learn Wes Streeting I knew him but not well, and worry now that he thrived in our political culture. It was not just failed vetting: there was a failure of moral seriousness

It’s practically a work of art that he thinks we’re all that stupid.

ITS FINE TO LAUGH AT SOMEONE WHO THINK'S A MARKOV CHAT BOT IS SUPER INTELLIGENT, ITS OK TO MAKE FUN OF THE TENDENCY TO OFF LOAD ANY CRITICAL THINKING ONTO AN APP THAT IS GENERATING TEXT WITH NO INHERENT MEANING, ITS ACCEPTABLE TO FIND IT HUMOROUS THAT AN ENTIRE SEGMENT OF PEOPLE THINK THAT A SET OF D&D DICE REPLACES A SEARCH ENGINE, ITS ONE OF THE NICEST WAYS TO HANDLE THE SITUATION, THE WORLDS RICHEST PEOPLE DEVISED A WAY TO FORCE EVERY SKILLED WORKER OUT OF EMPLOYMENT AND TURN ALL ART INTO UNIFORM SLOP AND IF WE CAN LAUGH AT THEIR COLLABORATORS AT LEAST WE GET SOMETHING OUT OF THE DEAL - DA TEXT SAYS "ITS OK TO MAKE FUN OF AI USERS, THERE NOT ABLE TO READ WHAT YOU TYPED ANYWAY" - DASHARE.ZONE ADMIN

ITS FINE - dashare.zone ADMIN

The UK *is* losing a generation of scientists.

I know lots of brilliant people who have left their jobs / the country because of the limited jobs & funding.

Once lost, they cannot ever be replaced.

The UK government is overseeing the death of UK academic science, and it doesn't seem to care.

This is incredibly funny to try because even if it *was* true, then it would mean Streeting was defending Mandleson in September for the love of the game.

@Nick_Davidov Asked Claude Cowork organize my wife's desktop, it stated doing it, asked for a permission to delete temp office files, I granted it, and then it goes "ooops" Turns out it tried renaming and accidentally deleted a folder with all of the photos my wife made on her camera for the last 15 years. All photos of kids, their illustrations, friends' weddings, travel, everything. It's not in trash, it was done via terminal It's not in iCloud, it already synced the new file structure. She didn't have Time Machine. Disc recovery tools can't see anything. I called Apple and they pointed me to a feature in iCloud allowing to retrieve files that were saved before but are no longer on iCloud Drive (they keep them for 30 days). I'm now watching it load tens of thousands of files. I nearly had a heart attack.

Nick Davidov • @Nick_Davidov VC, founder, DVC.ai - backing repeat founders with a community of 200 engineers. e/acc/OSS. Perplexity, Higgsfield, Animation, Etched. Husband to @msdavidova

VC, founder, dumbass

I don't even think there's value there. Used in that way it just becomes a tool to deskill academic labour.

New chatbot ‘outperforms PhDs on literature reviews’ Cheap research round-ups by ‘hallucination-free’ OpenScholar model preferred by experts, says Nature study

So have we just given up understanding that the purpose of a literature review is not the production of writing, but rather the production of knowledge about a subject?

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/new-cha...

Maybe this will be the piece of pointless cruelty that will convince reform voters to like Starmer!

"All staff from both universities will be employed by the university group"

I will be interested to see if and how terms and conditions will change for all the staff being moved to new contracts.

AI does not magically infuse knowledge into people.

"We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand"

Surely not!

This shit is galling. 14k isn't a massive sum in the scale of running a university, but think of the *good* that it could do:

* Undergrad summer research projects
* ECR travel grants
* Student hardship funds

These things would benefit people AND the university by improving research and retention.

QMUL's poster removal: Management threatens staff with disciplinary action over posters and stickers No clarity is given about what is deemed antisemitic Management reduces all Jewish colleagues to one position Possible precedent of repression & censorship .Management refuses to engage meaningfully Management repeats the same statement they issued in February 2024 when they broke into the union office Management claims this is an established policy though they escalate from previous practice

Colleagues were interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about @qmul.bsky.social's sudden escalation in taking down posters & threatening disciplinary action.

It is a great explanation of what's happening & its dangers.

Listen from 22min in: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... or clipped: youtu.be/SJGnCrDaCf0?...

PM: I would never have appointed Mandelson had I known full Epstein links The PM says a due diligence process was gone through before Lord Mandelson was appointed US ambassador.

Starmer: I would never have appointed Mandelson if I had known full Epstein links.

This suggests that there is an amount of hanging around with a paedophile that is acceptable. I'd be interested to know where he places that line.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

If this is so great, take the human tutors away from the rich kids, give the human tutors to the poor kids and let the AI tutors "teach" the rich kids.

Physics is under the cosh, Astronomy and Chemistry in peril, Geography is losing territory, English, Modern Languages and History are among the many shrinking UK disciplines.

Surely it's time to have a concerted, structured conversation about universities and the national research base.

At this point we can only assume that all government ministers hate the very concept of a university.

My speculation is that the kind of person who becomes a government minister had a bad time at uni because they were too busy being a careerist dickhead (eg Streeting) and so are now lashing out.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

Using the language of inclusion to shill for AI slop is particularly distasteful. "women returning to work" can use the plagiarism machine that lies to you to get ahead.

Also, suggesting that businesses should use AI to speed up admin tasks is gonna be great for compliance.

Writing - and the thinking that comes with it - is one of the parts of my job I enjoy the most. If you asked me to make a list of parts of my job that I wanted to outsource to AI, the writing up of research would probably be bottom of the list by a very long way. It's a giant NOPE from me.

I can't disagree at all. The IBM PS/2 was my first computer, so on a personal level, it also has a lot to answer for.

LPSC 2026 - Lunar and Planetary Science Conference We’re excited to announce that the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) will take place March 16–20, 2026, at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott Hotel and Convention Center in The Woodlands...

It looks like ~1,000 accepted abstracts for #LPSC2026, down from >2,000 in 2023 (typical range seems to be ~2,000 ± 300 or so).

www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lps...

Who's secretly filming fake TikToks inside Londoners' homes? We tracked down the viral video account invading people's houses to spread false claims about immigrants.

This is one of the strangest and most screwed-up stories I’ve worked on. www.londoncentric.media/p/tiktok-lon...

Lol

A few years ago I was able to stay in our dispute thanks to strike pay. I've made a donation here, and encourage other folks to donate if they are able.

This brings back bitter memories of when I was in the same position with colleagues at @qmucu.bsky.social a few years back.

Absolutely horrible behaviour from Sheffield management.