Bohdan Widła

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

The algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects.

This is what I love about the German courts. You may paste 4 sentences or 4 paragraphs or 4 pages and they might amount to the same volume of text! 😍

I have just written a sentence in what may become a journal article that paraphrases Darth Vader's description of the Force in "A New Hope". I am at the same time proud of myself (and the scholarly terror I've constructed), afraid noone will get the reference, and amazed how cheezy the sentence is.

The interoperability of email is very similar to the existence of libraries in that it would be considered a utopian dream if we didn't already have it

🇵🇱⚖️ We've reached a crucial point in the Polish rule-of-law crisis: a court found a divorce null and void due to a "neo-judge" presiding over the proceedings. Given how quick, easy, and fast access to divorce is in the country, this story will make waves. 1/

Może do tamtego państwa się nie wybierali, a do tego chcą kiedyś dostać wizę?

Brytyjczycy w przeciwieństwie do Polaków ufali państwu. Niepotrzebnie Ben Stanley, Brytyjczyk od lat mieszkający w Polsce, odpowiada na esej Jarosława Kuisza o polskości.

Przeczytałem w końcu zostawiony tydzień temu "w zakładkach na później" tekst @benstanley.eu i bardzo polecam. Przemawia do mnie dużo bardziej, niż przerysowany tekst redaktora naczelnego KL, na który odpowiada.

kulturaliberalna.pl/2025/12/30/b...

I'm starting to get the emails. Reporters: please see my comments below.

In 1995, a Netscape employee wrote a hack in 10 days that now runs the Internet Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all.

30 years ago today, Netscape announced a new programming language, one that emerged from a frantic, week-and-a-half-long sprint. It ended up sticking around far longer than anyone could've expected.

Iceland declares ocean-current instability a national security risk Iceland has classified the potential collapse of a major Atlantic current system as a national security threat, citing new scientific warnings that such a change could radically alter the country’s cl...

Iceland is right to consider this an existential threat.
www.dagens.com/news/iceland...

We have reached 1.4 degrees celsius #globalheating according to NASA data (smooth black trend line). Breaching 1.5 is now inevitable. From now on the fight is to keep overshoot as small and short as possible.

Unexpected laughs thanks to the gargantuan opinion in Getty v. Stability AI (the stuff below concerns the application of the standard of average consumer in trademark law)

Stop giving Ridley Scott ideas for another presequel.

YouTube video by Weebl's Stuff Narwhals : animated music video : MrWeebl

Which, again randomly, reminds me of this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwq...

I should get back to work.

a drawing of a purple pony with a unicorn horn ALT: a drawing of a purple pony with a unicorn horn

Which randomly reminds me of a certain (failed) attempt to convince a court in Warsaw to grant an injunction prohibiting the sale of toys depicting "ponies with distinctive colorful manes, fancifully outlined eyes, and tails with long colorful hair".

I wonder if the unicorn:
- just gave up
- consulted a lawyer and gave up upon advice
- lost the case ON COPYRIGHT GROUNDS

The worse problem is that any of those is plausible.

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong".

Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

Very fine people on both sides!

<approvingly gnaws on wood>

To be fair, the article says it quite directly and lists all the names of killed journalists.

August 29, 1981 - New York Times editorial “Heating up the Atmosphere” - All Our Yesterdays Forty four years ago, on this day, August 29th, 1981, a week after a front page story “Study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels,” the New York Times editorialised For years there have bee...

On this day 44 yrs ago (Aug 29 1981) the New York Times editorialised

"7 scientists from NASA claim to have found evidence that C02 has already been warming the Earth for a century. They predict it will produce ”unprecedented” warming in the next century."

1/n
allouryesterdays.info/2025/08/28/a...

Surely if we invest more in AI, we will solve it, won't we.

NEW CHART: Trump's "big beautiful bill" & other efforts to dismantle climate policy means the US will add an extra 7bn tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere from now until 2030, compared to meeting its former climate pledge under the Paris Agreement 🫠

www.carbonbrief.org/...

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Line graph time series of 2025's daily Arctic sea ice extent compared to decadal averages from the 1980s to the 2010s. The decadal averages are shown with different colored lines with purple for the 1980s, blue for the 1990s, green for the 2000s, and white for the 2010s. Thin white lines are also shown for each year from 2000 to 2024. 2025 is shown with a thick gold line. There is a long-term decreasing trend in ice extent for every day of the year shown on this graph between May and August by looking at the decadal average line positions.

🚨 Friday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the *lowest* on record (JAXA data)

• about 340,000 km² below the 2010s mean
• about 1,020,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 1,640,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 2,270,000 km² below the 1980s mean

More: zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

If they have entrenched opinions, I feel there's nothing I can do. If they just repeat something that they may have heard somewhere, but don't really care that much, I just say "I wish what you said were true, but sadly it is not" and sincerely explain my own fears. Does it work? I wish I knew.

‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther

"If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the AMOC collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off." (@doctorvive.bsky.social).

Exactly, this.

Unprecedented heat in the North Atlantic Ocean kickstarted Europe’s hellish 2023 summer. Now we know what caused it Parts of the Atlantic Ocean are again much warmer than normal, priming Europe for more extreme heat this summer.

Read the story behind our new study published yesterday in Nature, unfiltered straight from the scientists: 🌊
theconversation.com/unprecedente...

Zomgwtfbbq. Well that's a phrase I've not seen in a sentence in a long time.

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century Numerous declines have been documented across insect groups, and the potential consequences of insect losses are dire. Butterflies are the most surveyed insect taxa, yet analyses have been limited in ...

How about this - total butterfly abundance in the USA fell by 22% across the 554 recorded species within 20 years. 20 years! Obviously it's not only about butterflies, but everything that depends on them.

And here we are, discussing growth, deregulation, blah-blah.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...