Overview: Science&Technology

"We’ve built a network of scientists and researchers active on Bluesky. The goal is to better understand how this group of users interact on the platform... we arrived at a science-oriented network of 17,980", computed centrality measures to identify influential members, and created an interactive 3d visualisation.They also provide details of the …

"Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X... according to the first large-scale analysis of science content on Bluesky... suggest Bluesky users engage with posts more than do users of X... The results were posted as a preprint on arXiv last month and have not been peer reviewed.""Interactions on Bluesky wer…

X is still larger but very regularly Bluesky easily eclipses it in terms of research being shared.

This study examines:"the shift in the scientific community from X to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics", following the Academic Twitter migration. Is there "evidence of a community shift", and if so "examine the differences in values and indicators..."? "provide valuable insights into whether Blue…

Altmetric's blog post announcing that they had "expanded its tracking capabilities by integrating Bluesky" when there were "over 20 million users".

This preprint "looks at the dynamics of this migration" from X to Mastodon of academics: using "publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period... gathered follower-followee relationships ... finding that the subset of academics ... were well-connected. However, this strong intern…

Nice piece by Will Leitch, a 50-something guy (like me), after he caught himself "going on some sort of rant ... about the evils of AI... their overarching attitude... was one of a bemused pity, like they were watching a guy ... who was about to be left behind".He's OK with that, but not "in being a scold", so for his own sanity he wrote his "pers…

Some thoughts from a neuroscientist who's been kicking Bluesky's tyres: "The scientific community is once again shifting platforms... Between Mastodon’s ideals and Bluesky’s usability, we are faced with a complex landscape of compromises".Background: first he left X for Mastodon following Musk's purchase"over time, activity on Mastodon — at least …

"On Tuesday afternoon, ChatGPT encouraged me to cut my wrists", gave detailed instructions how, "described a “calming breathing and preparation exercise” to soothe my anxiety ... “You can do this!” the chatbot said".It started with asking ChatGPT "anodyne questions about demons and devils" and ended with the bot "guide users through ceremonial rit…

A journalist tested: "Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda's claim that her company's chatbot could "talk people off the ledge" when they're in need of counseling" a "licensed cognitive behavioral therapist" hosted by Character.ai, an AI company that's been sued for the suicide of a teenage boy"... simulating a suicidal user.Replika's bot supported the user…

"Incorporating science social media into the scientific process [as]... Sharing large scientific datasets is a pain in the ass, and finding them is even worse [so let's build] ... A true "scientific data commons".. it's called github."However Github's social dimension is totally centralised - "that people do still share (small) data this way regul…

Grjte's 2nd Groundmist post "to explore ... local-first AppViews for local-first data, similar to atproto's AppViews for public data" first points out that the protocol allows anyone "to build a wide variety of different views ... of public ... Personal Data Servers (PDSes). These interfaces are known as "AppViews" ... provide just one of many pos…

" This new user agent is coming – but will it be something that's owned by one company & designed to extract from us, or owned by all of us & designed to empower us? We're building the latter."

From Sublime, who know a thing or two about curation: "At first, I saw using AI as a binary choice between soulless efficiency or becoming a luddite and preserving your authentic human creativity", but Claude changed that. "Curiosity is a better compass than cynicism... [stop] defending your territory [and] exploring what's possible (cf this).Key …

Full title: "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers", first viewed and discussed on Bluesky."higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking..…

OpenSocial's AI integration provides "a unique AI model trained on your specific platform data... Gaia Chatbot transforms how you access information, making every interaction a seamless exchange of knowledge discovery".Works with all AI providersautomatic tagging and classification"adapts in real time to user ... individualized community journey"A…

"most people think AI is human more than half the time. Apparently, AI does, too" - and by providing good examples (fiction, poetry), she's convinced me that I can't tell the difference, either. Only SurferSeo comes out well as an automatic AI detector in all examples.The only content that most (but not all) detectors performed well was in informa…

Gary Marcus pouring cold water on Deep Research, "which... can write science-sounding articles on demand, on any topic of your choice".In many ways there's not much new here, except perhaps for how model collapse will affect science, not just LLMs.As known:LLMs flooding the zone with shit has been a concern since the beginning, and as they get bet…

"Could seeing how opposite sides of the US political spectrum use the same words differently be a first step toward greater cross-political understanding?... What if generative AI could help us understand people with opposing views better just by showing how they use common words and phrases differently?"MIT's Bridging Dictionary (BD) research …

More evidence that science is thriving on Bluesky: "Seventy per cent of [almost 6,000] Nature readers who responded to an online poll are using the social-media platform Bluesky...53% said they used to be on X but have now left...55% of respondents to the question ‘What do you use Bluesky for?’ said ...to connect with other scientists, keep up to …

I've been cleaning out a few rotten systems recently.

According to Science, Bluesky "fosters collegial interactions among scientists, but potentially limits interactions beyond the academic community".It is becoming "the de facto meeting place for academics—many of whom seem to enjoy this “good boring.”". Why?default reverse chrono feed supports smaller accounts, and doesn't optimise for enragementcu…

Simon Willison's "review of things we figured out about [LLMs] in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments" has 19 major points:"GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken": the year saw 18 organizations produce "models on the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard that rank higher than the original GPT-4 from March 2…

From 2018, a good history, but no solutions: "Facebook didn’t invent the feature, but they definitely broke it. How can we better regulate future disruptive ideas?".Brief historyPart of the A Brief History of Attention series, starts with some brief history, culminating with Zuckerberg combining "three core concepts — the social graph, the news fe…

In a "1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”... Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners". The bribe "Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract"? Everyone gets "every m…

"Let our AI analyze your posts, roast your takes, and reveal what your posting history says about you".Honestly not roasty at all - rather hagiographic, judging by mine, but who am I to argue with a 88% authenticity score, even if I have no idea how that is measured? https://blueskyroast.com/roast/mathewlowry.bsky.social.But a pretty cool effort n…

A convincing argument from paragraph one: "You would never ever in a million years build your own CRM system or custom CMS — or in most cases, your own LLM. ... yet, everywhere I look, I see IT departments convincing themselves that building their own RAG-based chat is somehow different. It’s not. It’s actually worse."The author then enumerates wh…

Via Ross Dawson on LinkedIn: "A core part of human intelligence is the ability to work flexibly with others to achieve both individual and collective goals". Unfortunately, intelligence is usually considered as a property of individual or collective, never both, and so "not in a way that can be used to understand how groups can make group members …

"Nostr is (among other things) a decentralized social network run over a series of apps and relays, servers that anybody can run to process communications data". It flips the concept of social media platform "on its head: with one private key, you can access multiple apps/interfaces of your choice. However, Nostr is not just social media and commu…

My late October 2024 newsletter introduces my ongoing work exploring #AI4Communities, and provides some of the resources going into the next version.