Peter K. G. Williams

Likely the most important thing I've ever written — if you're an academic and the AI mania unsettles you, here's my best shot at presenting some intellectual tools that might help you articulate why. arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251

Congrats Yvette!

I'm excited to announce that I've been selected as a winner of the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications (@scicommexcellence.nationalacademies.org)! Learn more: www.nationalacademies.org/news/nationa... #scicomm

Idly wondering if after Gutenberg's printing press got running people were like "Ok yeah it's got some problems but can you imagine how *good* printing presses are gonna be in a few decades?"

The next thing I want to spend some time thinking about with AI is how commoditization interacts with the enclosure perspective. I *think* that it mainly means that labor gets squeezed by a million small-fry capitalists instead of a handful of behemoths?

@lioneltrolling.bsky.social I wrote an article that's primarily aimed at scientists, but I hope you might find it interesting too.

@lu.is Finally pushed this out of the door:

Had a dream last night that the administrators at work got mad at me for spending too much money on books and, well, new goal established.

over the weekend, leon went rogue and compromised six or maybe seven miller high lifes that were in the fridge. the incident occurred on saturday night and also involved a red baron frozen pizza. we are conducting a thorough investigation into how this happened

Here’s LL Cool J trying to explain Clausewitz’s “remarkable trinity” to an uncomprehending Joe Rogan

Faculty position in Astronomy open to all topics. osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/OSUCar...

Incredible. IYKYK.

AI does useful and important things but it is important to understand that it *also* threatens to more or less destroy many systems upon which society relies

If you asked me what Mike Tomlin has been doing as a hobby for the past 12+ years, never in a million, billion guesses would I have come up with "Building a meticulously detailed Minecraft city along modern urbanist design principles"

We made the NY Times!!! 🤩 🔭🧪🎢

If @science.org is covering it, I guess I should share something here- we have for the first time definitively detected radio emission from a planet around another star! 🔭🧪🎢 What does this mean? Details in thread! (But TL;DR- still not aliens) 🧵 www.sciencenews.org/article/exop...

Yes! It’s an amazing group of cross-disciplinary experts we’ve assembled. Come work with us on some really cool projects! 😎😶‍🌫️🤩

My "NSF's continued support of physical and mathematical sciences" email has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the email

Today on the #arXiv: @kortizceballos.bsky.social, Berger, and @whereisyvette.bsky.social 2026, "Discovery of radio emission from the exoplanet β Pictoris b" - arxiv.org/abs/2609.16720. Beta Pic b shows up quite neatly in L- and S-band radio, with bursts that imply a kilogauss (!) magnetic field.

Writer's block in my experience also often means you don't have your thoughts in order. The block means we don't get to see your words. I suspect that many people now work around their writer's block by getting an LLM to do the writing. And thus we get a lot of half-baked thoughts in document form.

Amazing result from my old research group! arxiv.org/abs/2609.16720

The American Astronomical Society today announced that Dr. Emily Levesque (University of Washington) has been confirmed as the next Editor in Chief of the AAS journals. 🔭https://aas.org/press/emily-levesque-named-editor-chief-aas-journals @publishing.aas.org

Now I'm asking myself whether this image is AI or not. I think the "handwritten" addition is way too neat?

Thoughts and prayers to CFD folks today... Source: r/CFD

Do I know anyone that works at OpenAI? Looks like Tectonic is now bundled in the ChatGPT desktop app, which is nice but surely related to the ~30× increase in traffic to my humble webservers

I can't even imagine how batshit this is going to be

ASTRON is excited to advertise two positions: the Bell Burnell Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher in Space Weather. Both positions are due 6th of November. Let me know if you have any questions! Bell-Burnell Fellow Ad: aas.org/jobregister/... Radio Star Postdoc Ad: aas.org/jobregister/...

Today in lolcomputers: mysterious Fortran program crash only when its stdout is redirected to /dev/null (!?) Eventually traced *its PID number having too many digits* — a corner of our Intel runtime kicks in in this case and apparently assumes PIDs won't exceed 999999. Beautiful, no notes.

Today is the 25th anniversary of this episode

I'll just mention that in my career I've had to rescue several scientific software projects and the root cause has always been that there was no one that actually understood how the project worked anymore. I do not believe that LLMs will remove that need.

Remember tomorrow to vote against Decker and/or for Burhan (if you live in a particular sliver of Cambridge, both!)

The future of low frequency radio astronomy is space! It is only in space that we can unlock the last part of the electromagnetic spectrum that has yet to be explored. I am fortunate to play a minor part in this team lead by Joe Lazio for the MegaWave Radio Surveyor space mission.

Various pictures of the Roman launch. Definitely one of the coolest moments I’ve gotten to see in my career.

Hive mind: anyone have experiences to share about bunny.net and/or AWS FrontDoor flat-rate plans? This could make a big difference for your friendly local cloud-backed embeddable LaTeX compiler. github.com/tectonic-typ...

Hive mind: anyone have experiences to share about bunny.net and/or AWS FrontDoor flat-rate plans? This could make a big difference for your friendly local cloud-backed embeddable LaTeX compiler. github.com/tectonic-typ...

Sure do love spending my weeknights trying to figure out how to combat bot traffic overrunning something I built out of love

We are advertising a Lecturer in Radio Astronomy continuing position at @sydney.edu.au! Looking for someone to broaden and complement our existing research in #RadioAstro, and teach undergraduate #Physics. usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E... Deadline October 11th

MIT is hiring in planetary science! There is a deep pool of talent out there, especially in exoplanets, so I'm hoping for a flood of applicants to this (these) Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Science positions. eaps.mit.edu/about/employ... I am hoping we can get two hires out of this.