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Larry Hunter

@proflhunter.bsky.social
5.5K followers 4.4K following 1.8K posts

Knowledge based biomedical data science, artificial intelligence for discovery in molecular biomedicine, computational bioethics, theory of mattering. University of Chicago / Big Island HI

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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 10h
Rage now leavened with a little laughter. Billionaire *incompetence* is legendary, yet it seems only to have consequences for the rest of us, never them.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 10h
Amnesty International is calling for the abolition of a US government agency (ICE) for human rights violations. I am so ashamed of my country. www.amnesty.org/en/documents...
amnesty.org
USA: "We had whistles, they had guns": Human Rights Violations in U.S. Immigration Enforcement Operations and the Case to Abolish ICE - Amnesty International
Amnesty International has documented that, since taking office on 20 January 2025, the Trump administration has subjected migrants, asylum seekers and refugees to a wide range of human rights violatio...
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 16h
It's gotten to the point where even just the signatures of our billionaire overlords fills me with rage.
The signatures of Donald Trump, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 22h
I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️
cls-lab.com
CLS Lab — Culture, Language, & Systems | University of Colorado Boulder
The Culture, Language, & Systems Lab at CU Boulder studies the language systems that transmit and shape modern culture, from internet platforms to literary archives to language models.
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James Petruzzi @hawaiianimages.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
So, who wants to come work with us at the summit of Haleakala? Good with altitude? 20/20 (corrected is fine) vision? Some computer and astronomy experience? We are hiring folks! One position for a Laser Ranging Safety Tech: www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=1...
indeed.com
LASER RANGING SAFETY TECHNICIAN – ID# 226372 - Pukalani, HI 96788 - Indeed.com
Apply for the LASER RANGING SAFETY TECHNICIAN – ID# 226372 job in Pukalani, HI! Learn more about the job description, salary, and job details to see if you qualify on Indeed today.
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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"When we invented and deployed our Critical-Infrastructure War-Crime Leopard, it never occurred to me that the Critical-Infrastructure War Crime Leopard would blow the head off my own teenage son" "Yeah, sure, dad, go on crying, we're fretful about the price-of-diesel over here" #modernity
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
i hope that men notice how whenever a rape story gets widespread coverage, women use it as an opportunity to vent about how fucking disgusting we think many of you are and how many have made our lives measurably worse, and take a few moments to deeply process that.
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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"The big problem with AI is that Grandma, Dad, Sis and the dog are not upbeat enough about our nerve-shredding wails of pain next to our titanic Moloch" *The AI Age is growing old just like the Space Age and the Atomic Age. How do you off-the-wall weirdos expect this situation to play out
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Looks like humanity may have invented beer before bread. 🤣
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Amazing to me that the Catholic Church is one of the few institutions in this country that has remained steadfast and undaunted in the face of Trump
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Andrea Lathrop @cabernet.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
It's so absurd that we've created a society that has no choice but to be dragged into the whims of whatever insanely rich people choose to throw piles of money at.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I love our Mantas! And our spotted eagle rays, too. bigislandnow.com/2026/09/23/m...
bigislandnow.com
Mysterious manta rays from Kona Coast’s small familial group captivate 80,000 annually | Big Island Now
"Lefty" was the first identified manta ray living off the Kona Coast, in 1979, and since then researchers and divers have identified only about 317 more of the creatures who rarely leave the area.
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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The problem isn't rogue #AI models, it's *negligent companies*. If a biomedical firm put their product in public water supply because they wanted to test it 'in the real world', they'd be treated as criminal at corporate & individual level. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue
Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways
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Astra Taylor @astra.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare. In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”
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Carceral Abolition @carceralabolition.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Not the Hawaiʻi from postcards: Community invited to exclusive premiere of ‘Kūpuna ʻĀina' bigislandnow.com/2026/09/26/n...
bigislandnow.com
Not the Hawaiʻi from postcards: Community invited to exclusive premiere of ‘Kūpuna ʻĀina’ | Big Island Now
RSVP now for the Humanity Hale event Oct. 2 in Kailua-Kona that features new Science & Nonduality's latest film that doesn't try to explain what is Hawaiʻi; it listens to its heartbeat.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Enforcing the legal accountability of chatbot owners works.
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Roger Allan Ford (he/him) @rogerford.org · 27/09/2026
This is the perfect newspaper feature story. A-plus. Five stars.
nytimes.com
The Viral In-N-Out Spatula Hero Is Exactly Who You Imagined He Was (Gift Article)
It started as a bizarre late-night standoff behind the counter of a fast food joint. It ended with no injuries — and free burgers.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
For comparison, NIH spends ~$50B a year. Teslo's idea is good. But I worry about overall governance "Because the foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI, it is now be on track to become the richest charitable organization on the planet, potentially sitting on $250 billion in stock value."
Last year Ruxandra Teslo, a policy analyst who focuses on clinical trials, posted an idea for supercharging medical AI systems: Use data from failed biotech companies.

By bidding at their bankruptcy proceedings, she proposed, it might be possible to obtain detailed regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data—types of information usually considered trade secrets. She called these documents “biotech’s lost archive” and said they could be used to help train AIs that would act as powerful copilots in the often opaque drug approval process. 

Today the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit parent of OpenAI, said it would fund her idea as part of a new effort it calls Public Data for Health, which aims to help artificial intelligence make big leaps in
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Chris Klausmeier @chrisklausmeier.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/s...
nytimes.com
In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life (Gift Article)
A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.
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Greg Folkers @gregfolkers.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Murray, Baldwin Lead Colleagues in Demanding Vought Abandon Any and All Plans to Exert Political Control Over NIH Funding bit.ly/3TTU0h 💥 @baldwin.senate.gov @murray.senate.gov
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Natalie Christie Peluso 🧠 @nataliepeluso.com · 26/09/2026
Many-to-many mappings is exactly what faces do in the wild. Congratulations to @katiehoemann.bsky.social @lisafeldmanbarrett.com & team for helping to build a more veridical understanding of facial movements during development 👇
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Lisa Feldman Barrett @lisafeldmanbarrett.com · 26/09/2026
I’m thrilled to share that we have a new paper out, led by the brilliant @katiehoemann.bsky.social and Vanessa LoBue. In this paper, we analyze - for the first time ever - the facial movements that infants see in their everyday interactions with others. 1/3
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Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I’m glad I know such a wide range of fucking weirdos
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
David Quammen's essay in The New York Times today closes with this paragraph. It's both a scientific falsehood, and an incredibly dangerous narrative. If you're willing to give me five minutes of your time, I'd like to explain why.
The Ebola virus doesn’t need to spill back. It abides in its reservoir host, and awaits its next opportunity. A virus can’t climb out of a bat or a monkey and fly off in search of human prey. It can only spill over. If humans left the reservoir host alone — not hunting it, not capturing it, not eating it, not exporting it live, not disturbing its forest habitat — the virus wouldn’t re-emerge in humans. It would remain where it is, harming no one. But of course that’s not what happens. And when viruses spill, they often spill into us, because the human population is such a big, busy target.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
There is good evidence Covid had widespread cognitive sequelae. This is really under-appreciated. Not only doesn't it show up in the media, but I find many of my scientific colleagues are unaware. Citations in thread...
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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
An acute reminder that we don’t live in a free country as long as American tech oligarchs continue to maintain their power.
hollywoodreporter.com
The Major Social Media Platforms Are All Rejecting Paid Ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ (Exclusive)
YouTube, TikTok and Meta have all turned down the trailer for the Oct. 9 doc, citing "political" content. X won't even take Bleecker Street's calls. The distributor is appealing.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
"Counterintelligence concerns"?? 🙄🤯😠 Cybersecurity of the US government is collapsing. The same just happened to the FBI, see link. There's no fixing this, you'd have to start over from scratch (which probably isn't going to happen). www.yahoo.com/news/article...
yahoo.com
Exclusive-ShinyHunters hackers say they stole psychiatric and medical records of FBI staff
WASHINGTON, Sept 25 (Reuters) - FBI personnel data recently stolen by the ShinyHunters hackers includes sensitive psychiatric and medical evaluation records, according to the hackers and documents rev...
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Wouter Kool @wouterkool.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The deadline for this is in 1 week! Please apply, or circulate to people whom you think should apply!
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David Picard @davidpicard.eurosky.social · 24/09/2026
"There were 30709 valid paper submissions with a PDF to the NeurIPS Main Track this year, of which the program committee accepted 7900 (25.7%) papers in total, with breakdown of 7496 as posters, 292 as spotlight and 112 as oral." This is getting ridiculous, guys...
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Sherry Turkle is *still* such a valuable thinker about AI. truthout.org/audio/artifi...
And we’re still kind of on that path that we’re dealing with a technology that has no moral or ethical or it hasn’t lived a life. It’s not part of our community. So it can’t have a moral or an ethical or a humane sense. So that’s very important, I think, to cover this entire conversation is to make the point again and again that there is no there there. There is no there there. We’re imagining it and it’s amazing. I mean, all credit to it. It’s amazing, but it is going to get us into trouble if we treat it as a person.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is such a "canary in coal mine" moment bsky.app/profile/prof...
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Identifying bots by looking at fine details of response time might be useful in some applications, but I'm sure it's possible to train to match human performance if necessary. See also training LLM attention with eye gaze data, e.g. arxiv.org/html/2410.01...
arxiv.org
Seeing Eye to AI: Human Alignment via Gaze-Based Response Rewards for Large Language Models.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Excellent advice not only for journalists, but also bsky posters <ducks>
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I'm not a Catholic (or even a Christian), but this Pope rocks.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
There's an "uncanny valley" for thinking. The closer LLMs get to sounding like a real person, the creepier it becomes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny...
en.wikipedia.org
Uncanny valley - Wikipedia
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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man’s blessings. Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
—Albert Einstein, remarks to students at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, Feb 16, 1931
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
As you call members of Congress to raise concern about a Vought-led grant review panel, encourage them to sign onto proposed legislation that could help: 1) Follow the Science Act by @degette.house.gov would remove political appointees from the grant-making process: www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...
congress.gov
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Hackers got personnel data on the entire *FBI*? My goodness, that's a hell of an indictment of the current state of USG cybersecurity
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Someone in the administration (not at NIH) ordered NIH's eRA electronic research administration system shut down. That's a pretty heavy handed intervention, especially in the last week of the fiscal year. Does not bode well.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
My first computer? Technically, I suppose it was an IBM System/360, although I never actually saw it. First one I touched (I helped build it) was an IMSAI 8080. Both now more than 50 years ago.
An IMSAI 8080.  A blue case with a black frontpiece.  Frontpiece has a row of red and blue toggle switches with three rows of red LEDs above.The control panel of an IBM System/360 sitting on a table, with a black office chair in front of it.  To the side is a hardcopy terminal with a blue keyboard.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Sobering. The combination of commercial pre-implantation genetic testing with polygenic risk scores has significant consequences for everyone. Even for people who have no intention of ever doing it themselves.
Despite these risks, there is a lack of clear guidance on the implementation of PGT-P, and existing regulations for prenatal testing differ widely across countries4,5. The central question is, therefore, whether societies should accept a future in which reproductive opportunities, parental obligations and children’s life chances are increasingly organized around genetic optimization, private purchasing power and corporate profit. In our view, leaving PGT-P to the market is not a neutral policy choice, but an active decision to allow commercial actors to shape the future of reproduction.
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WIRED @wired.com · 21/09/2026
WIRED asked 634 women what they really think about working in tech. They told us about harassment, bias, unequal treatment, and the everyday indignities that still shape life in the industry. 🔗 www.wired.com/story/women-...
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laserhedvig @laserhedvig.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Interdisciplinary research is great and necessary, and also has consistently lower funding success www.nature.com/articles/nat... #academiclabourmarket #academia #research
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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
It really is striking how many authoritarian states have ended up in this exact same place, where the leader seizes control of scientific inquiry. Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, Aryan Physics in the Third Reich, Great Leap Forward (also related to Lysenko) in China.
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I am sad to share that Project Implicit, my first non-profit and foundation of my career, is closing. The IAT website will continue, managed by the next generation of leaders in implicit bias research. Here's the statement I posted to LinkedIn. It didn't vibe right as a bsky thread.
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Allison Gill @muellershewrote.com · 21/09/2026
NEW: The Trump Administration is planning to slash human subject research regulations by redefining informed consent. My latest: www.muellershewrote.com/p/trump-plan...
muellershewrote.com
Trump Plans to Redefine Informed Consent for Human Research Subjects
The Department of Health and Human Services has noticed a forthcoming rule on the OMB regulatory information site to redefine what undue influence means for vulnerable human research subjects
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Abdul El-Sayed @abdulelsayed.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This is about one thing and one thing alone. Steering our research dollars for cancer, heart disease, and new infectious diseases to Trump’s political allies and friends.
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Larry Hunter @proflhunter.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
"Intentionless intelligence" is a good framing.
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#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
*Flybrain slop is distinct from other forms of AI slop because the AI you are using is an objet trouvee. A map of connections in a fly brain is not the fly's "intelligence." But it's an interesting found-object, and can be put to other purposes, like with music sampling, or carving driftwood.
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
28/ Astonishing post by Shengyu Liu, a Chinese Deepseek engineer: "In particular, I do not want Anthropic to control the world's most advanced artificial intelligence of AGI. To put it dramatically, I consider the stakes comparable to Hitler obtaining atomic-bomb technology before the Allies."
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