the genuinely evil JD Vance here just outright announcing what is, of course, already very obvious from everything he has done in office - that his politics are entirely devoid of morals of any kind.
oh hey that's me! tldr; the US is really stable and fine and normal right now, don't even worry about it
"We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for," says our new overlord Sam Altman, as we happily urge users to sign up to ChatGPT pro so they can search databases more quickly or whatever
here we are cheering on OpenAI and Anthropic as they work to convince the world that they and only they should provide the starting point for all of your research
Wild to me that on the one hand we can be having all these constructive conversations about how dangerous the global over-reliance on US-based research infrastructure is (see the justifiable panic around the domino damage of a potential loss of PubMed), while at the same time -
MCP connectors for academic research really give off the vibe of an abusive boyfriend who'll only let you see your friends as long as they're also present to supervise. "What's that, you want to see your buddy PubMed? Sure, how about I talk to him for you and tell you what he says 🙂"
just gets worse and worse. The lying and the sheer stupidity is staggering. "the investigation was prompted by their discovery of Men Who Hate Women, saying: “the content was inappropriate for children and even challenging for adults to access”.
www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/grea...
I loved being a Guide. This move makes it a less safe space for everyone. It's typical of anti-trans policies generally, which are never about protecting girls, but about imposing misogynistic limits on who we can be, what we can do, and what we can achieve. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
They asked an AI to determine which books were inappropriate and among many other dumb outputs it flagged Reni Eddo-Lodge and Michelle Obama because their books deal with racism.
Why are we letting these people dictate the future of research. I feel like I'm going crazy
Undermind's FAQs state that they search Semantic Scholar - no other sources mentioned. Last I checked, Semantic Scholar is yet to have indexed the sum total of all human knowledge.
recently had the joy of reading the Undermind creators' whitepaper on benchmarking the tool. It is absurd.
"Because Undermind is likely truly exhaustive, if Undermind provides no relevant results, one can be reasonably certain nothing exists on the topic." Pardon?? www.undermind.ai/whitepaper.pdf
So if using AI actually does erode human cognition the way studies suggest, then it's a feature instead of a bug?
The world is gross enough without "take away people's ability to think so we can sell it back to them" being on the list.
Well at least we've got the Ides of March to look forward to.
Announce ☺️
Great article on how to un-garbage-ify google. Would also recommend putting -ai after your searches to get rid of the irritating AI summaries too. open.substack.com/pub/cardcata...
Hey, I'm doing a webinar for the CILIP info lit group on Information Literacy, data and evidence removal in the US, with a particular focus on healthcare research. It'll be super fun and not at all depressing, honest www.tickettailor.com/events/cilip...
February is LGBTQ+ History Month! Borrow any book from the displays at Forum & St Luke's Libraries and discover more via the LGBTQ+ History Reading List: bit.ly/ExeterUniLibLGBTQHistoryList. Recommend books you'd like to see in the Library via the form on the Libguide: libguides.exeter.ac.uk/lgbtq
Well whatever you say must be right :)
I just think dogmatism, with some reservations and provided everyone agrees with me, is probably a bit good, sometimes?
Now I don't wish to alarm anyone, but it seems that it's currently not (as far as I can tell) (at this precise moment) (external confirmation needed) (could be wrong) raining????
I think a bit of ark-building is a perfectly rational response to the present horrors
Friends I fear this endless rain may be starting to render me Somewhat Unusual
You know you're totally one of the good guys when you're actively trying to (and let me quote here) "narrow the definition of 'inhuman and degrading treatment'". www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
diabolical that in order to be able to find where you've put your glasses, you must be wearing them so that you can see to search. Truly the world is unjust
🎯
I have now got all 20, though there was googling and some heavy hints on a couple from a friend. This was necessary for my blood pressure because some of these answers are utterly unacceptable and because I am a very impatient person full of hate hiddenbooks.nationalbooktokens.com?competition=...
From the German National Library of Medicine, beta version of site for tracking additions and deletions to PubMed now available #medlibs
