Opinie | Hoe een mini-kabinet het hoger onderwijs sloopt Dit demissionair kabinet voert ingrijpende onderwijsbezuinigingen door, zonder benodigd mandaat. Dat moet stoppen, zeggen Rens Bod, Remco Breuker en Ingrid Robeyns.

"Het is een democratische absurditeit die we ondertussen bijna normaal zijn gaan vinden: een demissionaire regering die nauwelijks een zesde van de Tweede Kamer vertegenwoordigt, maar die wel doorgaat met beslissingen die diep ingrijpen in de toekomst van ons land. [..]"

www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Waarom dit uitmaakt?

In een echte delta (denk aan Mississippi of Nijl) bouwt het land uit naar zee dankzij enorme sedimentaanvoer vanuit het stroomgebied.
Maar bij ons komt het sediment dat ons land heeft opgebouwd juist voor een groot deel uit zee.

Countries meeting in Brazil for two weeks could manage ONLY a VOLUNTARY agreement to BEGIN discussions on a roadmap to an EVENTUAL phase-out of fossil fuels, and they achieved this INCREMENTAL progress only in the teeth of IMPLACABLE OPPOSITION from OIL-PRODUCING countries.
#ScienceUnderSiege

The President of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed. "HANG THEM", he posted.

If you're a person of influence in this country and you haven't picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.

Big Oil loves AI. It brings an enormous energy burden that renewable development can’t yet keep pace with, forcing a dramatic increase in fossil fuel consumption (just when we desperately need to reduce it). Great timing, humanity. Enjoy that fabulous new toy. 🌎

Cop30 live: ‘literally insane’ that we are letting global heating happen, says Al Gore This live blog is now closed. You can read the full Guardian coverage of the climate talks in Brazil here

"Disinformation is one of the major obstacles stalling climate progress"

- Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change was launched at #COP30, backed by 12 nations

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

In de nieuwste editie van het Nederlands Juristenblad pleiten Eva van Vugt (Universiteit Maastricht) en ik voor een verbod (in beginsel, uit voorzorg) op het gebruik van GenAI aan rechtenfaculteiten. Het stuk is hier te lezen: www.njb.nl/magazines/nj...

Financial Times headline says “critics accuse” Trump of extrajudicial killings

I’m sorry, why are we using “critics accuse” language here? These are factually, unambiguously, extrajudicial killings. It’s not an opinion. It’s not a disputed or disputable claim.

Stikstof geen bezwaar meer: met Wiersma’s plan kan de uitstoot bijna verdubbelen De versoepeling die landbouwminister Femke Wiersma voorstelt, betekent dat stikstof geen obstakel meer is voor boeren die willen uitbreiden. In theorie kan de uitstoot zelfs verdubbelen.

Een heel klein beetje stikstof erbij, dat moet toch kunnen? Als het aan landbouwminister Femke Wiersma (BBB) ligt, wel. Haar plan betekent dat stikstof geen obstakel meer is voor boeren die willen uitbreiden: op papier kan meer dan de helft van alle veehouderijen de uitstoot bijna verdubbelen.

Reminder: We spent YEARS reading thousands and thousands of articles on the Tea Party and how it was a true expression of the American people's will, and it never mounted anything nearly as big as Saturday's No Kings rallies. [1/3]

Shipping emissions levy shelved as countries bow to US pressure Long-planned charge on greenhouse gas emissions postponed as Trump officials accused of intimidation tactics

Plan for climate levy on shipping emissions shelved as countries bow to US intimidation and bullying

#IMO #climatecrisis

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I love motion-smoothing

On A.I. Remembering why we learn

Some reflections on my experiences of #AI in academia (tl,dr: too apolitical, too a-humanities). Hopefully of interest to anyone as ambivalent about tech zealotry as me.

intlegalcraft.substack.com/p/on-ai

You can joke about Pam Bondi’s ridiculous unprofessionalism all you want, but I’m deeply shocked by it: She acts as if she fears absolutely no consequences, convinced that there will be no more political power transfers. — This should shake everyone to their core.

Chronological:

Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg)
The New World [First Cut] (Malick)
The Happening (Shyamalan)
small roads (Benning)
A Touch of Sin (Jia)
Blackhat [Director’s Cut] (Mann)
Mad Max Fury Road (Miller)
The Trial (Notarnicola)
First Reformed (Schrader)
The Irishman (Scorsese)

nee, onzin, juist niet. Alle remmen los. Ze worden gesommeerd lak te hebben aan de grondwet, internationaal recht en het humanitair oorlogsrecht en zich bovendien te richten op binnenlandse veiligheid (democraten zijn de 'enemy within'). Hier wordt het fascisme van project 2025 uitgerold.

Deranged, un-American fascism. bsky.app/profile/atru...

Rules of engagement is what protects our forces, and American civilians, as well

Universities Can Abdicate to AI. Or They Can Fight. Too many school leaders have been reluctant to impose harsh penalties for unauthorized chatbot use.

Colleges and universities are going way too soft on policing AI, Tyler Austin Harper argues. “Institutions of higher learning can abandon their centuries-long educational project,” he writes. “Or they can fight.”

We must stand resolutely against political assassination and political violence of all kinds, and just as resolutely against everyone who exploits acts of violence as the pretext or excuse for political repression of political opponents.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Wierd Duk beschuldigt mij van ‘bijna doxing’ en zijn volgers leveren weer op commando.

Premier Biden

I often wondered what the world would look like if the most ignorant, dangerous & daft opinions of radio phone-in hosts/callers were permitted to prevail. I never expected to find out…

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/from...

Area man shouting at people from roof top.

(This would have led to months of “dementia” coverage in NYT if Biden would have done this.)

De plasticindustrie tracht op allerlei manieren een historisch akkoord tegen plasticvervuiling tegen te werken Plastictop: In Zwitserland begint deze dinsdag het overleg tussen 175 landen dat kan leiden tot een historisch akkoord tegen plasticvervuiling. Maar de industrie tracht dit te blokkeren, onder meer me...

Over de noodzaak van actie tegen plasticvervuiling bestaat amper discussie.

Plastic is gevonden in vers gevallen sneeuw op Antarctica, in placenta’s en in de diepzee.

Toch probeert de industrie een akkoord tegen plasticvervuiling tegen te werken: van overdadige nadruk op recycling tot intimidatie.