Tootfinder

Good morning all! A rare day without any real meetings, and only one calendar entry (and that's a fun one, a networking thing to talk about how social media research can go forward in Germany). I'm not sure I can be trusted with that much freedom from time constraints #academicChatter

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In an earlier post I introduced the principle that there were four categories of side hustle. Let’s now talk about the fourth and final category.
4️⃣ 𝐈 – 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐬: 𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮
The ultimate level of financial freedom? Investing (I quadrant) – where your money generates income instead of your time.
🔹 Examples: Stocks, real estate, cryptocurrency, digital assets, angel investing.

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In an earlier post I introduced the principle that there were four categories of side hustle. Let’s now talk about the fourth and final category.
4️⃣ 𝐈 – 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐬: 𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮
The ultimate level of financial freedom? Investing (I quadrant) – where your money generates income instead of your time.
🔹 Examples: Stocks, real estate, cryptocurrency, digital assets, angel investing.

The more time goes on, the more conflicted I get about #AI. (or, more specifically, generative AI. I like causal AI a fair bit)
On one hand, I hate so much about it:
the needless environmental and electronic parts waste, the impact on labor, the monopolistic nature of main organizations driving it, the endless conversations about AGI and other absurdly utopian (or dystopian) futures, the widespread theft of IP and human work, the devaluation of labor and craft… so much of it is not okay at all.
On the other hand, I kinda get it?
I like to test software for myself, so I've been dipping my toes into some popular AI tools over the past couple of years. I have a paid subscription to ChatGPT (which I don’t feel great about, I know), and I have found genuine utility in it.
More so, I feel so conflicted when I talk to people I respect and who I think are very smart and creative and they tell me how in love they are with all of these AI tools, about the complex workflows they build, about their experiments with agentic AI and integrations... These people seem so excited, so alive, so joyous about the things that this technology allows them to do. They often wouldn't have had the skills / knowledge / financial capital to do some of those things with human efforts alone. And now I see them coding their own tools, doing complex data analysis, trying creative experiments with graphics / text / video...
And I feel like a total jerk going "BUT ACTUALLY THIS IS UNETHICAL AND INEFFICIENT AND YOU SHOULD STOP IT BECAUSE AI SUCKS".
The technology behind all these gen AI models does have real utility, and it has kicked off a lot of creativity from people who wouldn't have dabbled in those kinds of projects otherwise.
So I don't know how to feel. Because I can't let go of the guilt and the real problems and the awareness of how much empty hype there is.
#technology #artificialintelligence #genAI #ChatGPT

Sorry to miss it in person and that I cannot stay for the panels on: teacher, gender, inclusion, decolonisation, and future action. Lovely to see and hear so many wonderful colleagues even from a distance.
My fun memory was the cartoon by the talented (then PhD student) Kalifa Damani during my talk on silent exclusion at the REAL Centre in January 2020 before the world shut, and many fun moments with Pauline Rose over the years.
Congratulations! The achievements are remarkable.

Academic conferences often pick talk submissions on the basis of 2 or 3 review scores, which I guess has no real statistical power, especially without any of the balancing usually done with things like likert scales when they're treated properly.. different people treat the scores very differently and that should be accounted for or it's really just down to chance. Researchers can be very unscientific sometimes!
Better to just ask
- does this properly address the topic of …

Join Adrien Grand and Luca Cavanna at this year's Berlin Buzzwords as they share the fascinating journey to the release of version 10.0 of the popular Java search engine Apache Lucene, discussing the ups and downs, the team effort it took to get there, and much more.
Learn more: https://

It makes me really happy to see that already more than 1.5k people watched my talk from last month’s @… on YouTube! 🥳🙏 I take it as a sign that it was useful to many of you and that real-world, independent conferences are still valuable and relevant – just like the long tail of YouTube when it comes to the visibility and impact of conferences. I’m so glad I can con…

Join Adrien Grand and Luca Cavanna at this year's Berlin Buzzwords as they share the fascinating journey to the release of version 10.0 of the popular Java search engine Apache Lucene, discussing the ups and downs, the team effort it took to get there, and much more.
Learn more: https://

Time to Talk: LLM Agents for Asynchronous Group Communication in Mafia Games
Niv Eckhaus, Uri Berger, Gabriel Stanovsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05309 ht…

Time to Talk: LLM Agents for Asynchronous Group Communication in Mafia Games
LLMs are used predominantly in synchronous communication, where a human user and a model communicate in alternating turns. In contrast, many real-world settings are inherently asynchronous. For example, in group chats, online team meetings, or social games, there is no inherent notion of turns; therefore, the decision of when to speak forms a crucial part of the participant's decision making. In this work, we develop an adaptive asynchronous LLM-agent which, in addition to determining what to s…

As #UKLabour flounders and talk of u-turns and leadership challenges abounds, here's a reminder that there's a ready-made lifeline:
https://gettingreal.org.uk/full-report/

Full Report | Getting Real about the Crises Facing the UK
Read the full report The pdf version will open in your browser or pdf reader. Or Download the print version Complete wit