Overview: Science&Technology

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert: "Looking back, the most important things I learned weren't really about software. They were about people, scale, and what it takes to build something that lasts. Twenty-five years, twenty-five lessons."I won't list them all here, just reflecting on those that resonate with and/or surprise me the most:"Growth and gene…

"enables Obsidian users to seamlessly add additional semantic structure to their notes, including specified page types and link types that model scientific discourse, to enable more complex and structured knowledge synthesis work, such as a complex interdisciplinary literature review, and enhanced collaboration with others on this work."

"an information model that enables everyone to map their ideas and arguments in a modular, composable graph format... allow researchers to break the scientific research process into its atomic elements in a way that can be shared, remixed, and updated... Like Lego™️bricks... a decentralized knowledge exchange protocol designed to be implemented…

A 34 minute read: "Gas Town helps you with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances", or its competitors. It's unpolished, 100% vibe coded, and only for those at Stage 7 of the 8 stage AI-assisted coding journey, "or maybe Stage 6 and very brave", because "Gas Town is an industrialized coding factory manned by superintelligent chimpanze…

"a year filled with a lot of different trends":"“reasoning” aka ... Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) ... Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks, execute on them and continue to reason about the results such that they can update their plans to better achieve the desired goal... also exceptional at p…

How to study the ATmosphere, which "consists of multiple layers: Layer 4: Social phenomena (communities, discourse, norms) Layer 3: User behavior (posts, follows, moderation) Layer 2: Applications (Bluesky, various clients, Feeds) Layer 1: Protocol (AT Protocol, DID) Layer 0: Infrastructure (servers, networks) Each layer falls under different acad…

Good example of ATScience: "Paper Skygest is a personalized research feed that shows posts about papers from accounts in your following network."

"Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere" - by the makers of leaflet, pckt & offprint - a good example of how builders can just collaborate on the ATmosphere without drama: "The standard grows when builders identify shared needs and ali…

Necessity is the mother of invention, which is why innovation comes from the edge: here's Rudy celebrating a year of Blacksy with some quite remarkable announcements."I need to live in a world where I can privately send that friend money for anything from groceries to car repairs without it being woven into some CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY NARRATIVE and w…

Articulates what I was saying in Berlin, but makes a better case from the researchers' perspective:"Researchers' identities are fragmented. Grant IDs, ORCID, institutional email addresses, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and various social media platforms... The core of "who I am" depends too heavily on institutions and platforms."Instead of thinkin…

NotebookLM co-founder has until now "described NotebookLM as a tool for understanding and exploring the information you need... But we also think NotebookLM could be an AI-first distribution platform, amplifying expert knowledge on a wide range of topics... a preview of that vision: Featured Notebooks...the backstory... We’re going to be able to b…

"tools like NotebookLM only answer from your uploaded files. No making stuff up. No “convincingly wrong” summaries... isn’t about AI writing for you. It’s about AI helping you think through what you already collected... transforms research from a filing system into a conversation".After a brief description of how it works and what it doesn't do - …

No, the article's not dead, but "the real question ... whether it remains the primary way people encounter journalism".If "Personalization is coming to journalism... who controls it", and what sort of journalism will it affect? Most news is not "high-end, high-quality investigations, analysis, and commentary", which will probably not be personalis…

A Guest Post from a couple of scientists from the Thomas Kuhn Foundation, created to "give science the means to see itself". They've created "a working system that can map how knowledge changes in real time... KGX3 detects and classifies the epistemic function of research papers... provide a complete understanding of what a paper does: confirm, st…

"Large organisations need dedicated tools and processes to manage their Bluesky presence and get the most out of ATproto".A repost onto Medium of version 4 of a wiki page I've been developing for most of the year.

Barry's call to "find collaborators to experiment with AT Protocol and explore new ways for researchers to publish, share, and collaborate". As he points out, there's real potential for AT4Science:"Open standards ensure transparency and long-term accessibility...Data interoperability makes it possible to connect tools, repositories, and datasets w…

"When infrastructure is too centralized, gatekeepers gain new powers to capture, enshittify, and censor."Short, link-rich piece on the many ways science is being undermined by gatekeeping scientific publishers and "Large intermediary platforms... inserting themselves between researchers and between the researchers and these published works—through…

Yet another longform ATproto writing app, "built for creators in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), art, and business... designed to help you stay focused on the work itself... Our editor uses Markdown plus extensions designed for writers in specialized fields."Includes maths, code, visualisations (maths plots, mermaid), ar…

"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…