David Peter Wallis Freeborn

CRISPR as a microbial immune system In 2003, Mojica wrote the first paper suggesting that CRISPR was an innate microbial immune system. The paper was rejected by a series of high-profile journals, including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Molecular Microbiology and Nucleic Acids Research, before finally being accepted by Journal of Molecular Evolution in February, 2005.[3][4]

TIL the original paper describing CRISPR, by Francisco Mojica, was rejected by 4 journals and took 2 years to be published

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

My new paper has been accepted at Synthese!

I tackle an ongoing problem with the learning of compositional communication in conventional signaing games.

I build two new models to show that structured receivers can learn and retain compositional information.

philpapers.org/rec/FRECUI-2

The distribution of the Red-billed chough is absolutely bizarre.

Sometimes I look at my bibliographies and think... I bet these papers have never been cited together before.

STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

In our latest paper, we discovered a surprising result: training LLMs with self-play reinforcement learning on zero-sum games (like poker) significantly improves performance on math and reasoning benchmarks, zero-shot. Whaaat? How does this work?

YouTube video by Emancipations with Daniel Tutt A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (feat. Christoph Schuringa)

Check out this fascinating and detailed interview with NU London's Christoph Schuringa @schuringa.bsky.social, speaking about his new book A Social History of Analytic Philosophy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_iu...

Excited to be at Ford's innovation space in the Stratford Olympic Park, for a Conversations On AI event on how we can use AI to innovate for human benefit. The panel features NU London Philosophy's own Hossein Dabbagh, and the event series is organised by alumni from our MA Philosophy and AI

The games business is about games. If you’re in the games business, and somehow (as often happens) your company somehow is now focused on something else (AI, XR, “IP,” acquisitions, etc.) you’re in for a period of struggle. Everyone will wonder what’s wrong. But you know. It’s about games. Gameplay.

Anthropic Scores a Landmark AI Copyright Win—but Will Face Trial Over Piracy Claims While the startup has won its "fair use" argument, it potentially faces billions of dollars in damages for allegedly pirating over 7 million books to build a digital library.

Anthropic has scored a major victory in an ongoing legal battle over AI models and copyright, with big implications for the many AI lawsuits winding through the US legal system. By @knibbs.bsky.social: www.wired.com/story/anthro...

Headline of an article with a picture of some cells, it reads "Scientists have discovered `third state' between life and death"

There's no way scientists are only just now learning about grad school

I decided to become a journalist aged fifteen after reading ‘1984’ and being appalled at the thought that governments could rewrite history. Orwell knew the USSR did it. Now China pretends the Tiananmen massacre didn’t happen. It did. I was there, and saw it for myself.

Four charts showing the extent of cuts to NASA in the FY26 budget:

- Cuts to every science division
- Smallest science funding since 1984
- 19 active, inflight missions cancelled
- Smallest NASA budget since FY 1961

Delighted to be at the launch of the The Computational Philosophy Lab at Northeastern University London. Brian Ball is giving the welcome talk. Later we will hear from @alicehelliwell.bsky.social @dpwf0.bsky.social, @tessbuckley.bsky.social amongst others. Learn more here: cpl.sites.northeastern.edu

The Computational Philosophy Lab launch Join us for the launch of the Computational Philosophy Lab

Huge News: The Computational Philosophy Lab (CPL) is launching tomorrow at 10:00!

The CPL will be the UK's first and premier centre dedicated to computationally-enabled & AI-enhanced philosophy.

Location: Devon House 58 Saint Katharine's Way, London, E1W 1LP

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-comput...

I think there are plenty of annoyances that might also drive away right wingers. E.g. the top 50 replies to any post being braindead bluetick slop. The insane 'for you' feed. Insofar as you can decouple the contemporary political right from this rubbish, it must still be grating to many.

It would be hard to overstate the ongoing costs of the public sector's use of Big IT vendors. Stunning that it's still ongoing, 15 years after GDS started the fight to escape. I'm thinking, e.g. major systems provided by CGI, Accenture, et al, that are 20+ years behind today's digital services. 1/n

This is a view from the surface of Comet 67P.

The busy particles in the foreground are cosmic rays or bits of dust and ice.

The dots moving in the background are stars.

Well worth reading to get a sense of the scale of the cuts to public science funding in the US. It might take decades to recover from this damage.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Moderna withdraws application for COVID-flu combination vaccine Moderna said on Wednesday it has withdrawn an application seeking approval for its flu and COVID combination vaccine candidate after discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

This is absolutely terrible news.

With the shifting regulatory climate (i.e., antivax ratfuckery), Moderna has withdrawn their application for their eagerly anticipated COVID-flu combo vaccine. This vaccine offered better protection than getting each shot separately.

h/t @merz.bsky.social

Clearly I have more influence than I thought! xAI claim they will now publish Grok's system prompts openly on GitHub.

The Computational Philosophy Lab launch Join us for the launch of the Computational Philosophy Lab

Join us for the launch of the Computational Philosophy Lab, the UK's first and premier centre dedicated to computationally-enabled and AI-enhanced philosophy.

Date: May 30 • 10:00 am

Location: Devon House 58 Saint Katharine's Way, London, E1W 1LP

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-comput...

Grok is an extreme example, but in general the lack of transparency means we don't know what biases major LLMs are picking up implicitly, or probably in this case being explicitly given. I think there's a good case for making system prompts public (whilst keeping model weights private).

If you wish to train a large language model from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

They’re here 🎉
@versobooks.bsky.social

The philosopher versus the physicist: Eddington’s rejoinder to Stebbing A number of recent papers or monographs have examined Susan Stebbing's criticisms of Arthur Eddington's scientific-philosophical writing. These papers focus on Stebbing's critique of Eddington's at...

My paper 'The philosopher versus the physicist: Eddington's rejoinder' has just been published with the BJHP (@thebshp.bsky.social):

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Wow. It must be nice to be able to get paid to write error-filled polemics in turgid prose on topics you're almost entirely ignorant about. I don't think there's a claim in this that isn't false. Endlessly tossing-off lazy culture war screeds is a cushy way to make a living.

Very close to the some arguments put forward in "Explaining Postmodernism" by Stephen Hicks and "The Once and Future Liberal" by Mark Lilla! I'm sure you'll enjoy these comparisons...