@DeblockBlock
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Philosopher. "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
Leuven, Belgium
Joined December 2013
- Tweets3.3K
- Following738
- Followers2.4K
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Pinned Tweet
Stop funding research
(the way you do)
Because it is wasteful, unethical and unscientific
A thread (1/16)
Andreas De Block retweeted
Academia is filled with people who constantly talk about how busy they are, but never seem to complete anything
Andreas De Block retweeted
AI is finally taking over economist's job. It's all over.
AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries ‘most of the time’ ft.trib.al/KxRXFO6
Andreas De Block retweeted
Mensen die de academische vrijheid van Cofnas verdedigen zijn volgens Verhoeven “nuttige idioten”.😳
Wie de academische vrijheid ernstig neemt aanvaardt dat er af en toe iemand die zij idioot vinden op de universiteit werkt; dat is geen idioot standpunt.
standaard.be/opinies/is-acad…
Andreas De Block retweeted
I’ve given Claude Opus various published papers (and my own unpublished ones) and asked it to review them. (Don’t panic—I’m not uploading confidential manuscripts.)
The reviews it produces are excellent. It finds statistical errors, internal contradictions, and conceptual confusions that human reviewers miss; it provides useful suggestions; it has a good sense of what counts as significant and novel and what doesn’t; and it’s generous in its appreciation for what the authors get right. And it doesn’t suffer from the strong “myside bias” humans have; it doesn’t recommend rejection because the author didn’t cite it enough; it doesn’t insult the authors; and it doesn’t agree to write a review and then never send anything in.
As a journal editor, I’m not sure what to do with this. If I gave up on human reviewers and used GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus instead, my bosses would fire me, probably rightfully so. The only constructive thing I can recommend is that, before submitting something to a journal, researchers and scholars use this tremendously valuable resource. (Just don’t tell the models that it’s your paper, because they do suffer from sycophancy.)
Andreas De Block retweeted
Ook in de Oostendse haven liep het al mis met Charlotte Verkeyn.
Toen verschillende fouten en constructies aan het licht kwamen wou het havenbestuur een forensische audit (een onderzoek naar fraude) bestellen bij PWC, na druk vanuit het stadsbestuur werd het afgezwakt naar een gewone audit.
Volgens deze audit zou Charlotte Verkeyn ondermeer buiten de raad van bestuur om afspraken hebben gemaakt met toenmalig CEO Dirk Declercq. Hij kreeg in zes jaar tijd vijf verhogingen van zijn vergoeding, samen goed voor 7.800 euro extra per maand zonder dat de raad van bestuur daarvan op de hoogte was. Ook de bedrijfswagen die Declercq van de haven kreeg, was niet gekend door de raad.
De raad van bestuur wou na het rapport het vertrouwen in haar opzeggen maar dit blokte ze zelf af.
Uiteindelijk kondigde Verkeyn haar ontslag enkele dagen later aan maar in ruil voor haar vertrek eiste Verkeyn dat er werd afgezien van verder onderzoek, rechtstreeks of onrechtstreekse juridische acties. De bestuurders waren razend én terecht.
Een zuivere doofpotoperatie.
Met wat nu aan het licht komt is een forensische audit de enige juiste keuze.
Andreas De Block retweeted
This can be a little misleading. Economists overwhelmingly donate to Democrats, but that doesn't mean they're all progressive. It means they don't see anything of value in the Republican Party. Why would an economist see anything of value in the Republican Party today? The GOP rejects basically all consensus economists' positions on trade and immigration.
Similarly, Princeton conservatives may see nothing of value in Trump's GOP. Why would they? There's very little conservative about it. Princeton conservatives tend to be more socially conservative, and Trump has offered very little. If you care about character and honor, there's not much to like
Princeton has conservatives, a small minority, but they exist. And yes, none of them donate to Republicans, and for very good reason.
Princeton is the latest university to achieve academic nirvana: not a single faculty member contributes to a Republican candidate or campaign. Conversely, 98% of political donations went to Democrats or Democrat-affiliated groups...jonathanturley.org/2026/09/1…
'Insightful' is an understatement. Do yourself a favour and watch this.
New episode with @johnschulman2, @oneill_c and @BerenMillidge.
I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies, because I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next.
0:00:00 – Steelmanning the case against RSI
0:18:39 – What’s driving the Chinese labs’ progress
0:28:06 – How will automated AI researchers be trained
0:33:51 – Will long-horizon RL elicit AGI?
0:45:24 – The sim-to-real gap
1:00:33 – How much progress is explained by data?
1:18:03 – Why is RL working so well?
1:24:54 – Move 37 and entropy collapse
1:28:31 – Rapid-fire timelines
“Er was veel politie op de been, maar het protest verliep wel wreedzaam.”
hln.be/gent/kijk-shame-on-yo…
Andreas De Block retweeted
This is an insanely important report about how completely, utterly and totally unprepared Europe is for the arrival of transformative AI.
A single data centre in Malaysia will soon have a third of the AI computing power of *all* of Europe combined. Two data centres in the US will have more than our entire continent.
And that's just page one...
More than 60 of Europe's top minds (including two Nobel laureates) have just published "A Transformative AI Strategy for Europe", an independent report about how dire the situation is. As the world gets darker, we risk being squeezed and trampled by the US and China. On the current path, the report warns, even Europe's richest economies could slide toward middle-income status in a world run from Silicon Valley and Beijing.
Here's where we are right now:
→ The EU hosts just 5% of the world's AI compute. The US: 75%.
→ Not one of the ten most valuable AI companies in the world is European.
→ And this year, Europe got locked out of the world's most powerful AI model, twice, by American export rules. The EU's own cybersecurity agency had to negotiate for weeks to get in, and still doesn't have the latest version.
For years the comfortable story was: America innovates, Europe regulates. Well, that story is dead. You can't regulate what you can't access. And you can't protect 450 million people with second-rate cyberdefence against first-rate attackers.
The good news is that we have some leverage: Europe holds the single biggest chokepoint in the global chip supply chain (ASML). And this report sketches a plan to increase our leverage massively. Here's what we need to do:
1. Build a member state alliance for supply chain security – Netherlands, Germany and France at minimum – founded before the end of 2026.
2. Recruit many more frontier AI experts inside European governments ASAP.
3. Aim for at least 15% of global AI compute on European soil by 2030, built so local communities actually benefit.
4. Make Europe the world leader in AI assurance: hardware that can prove how AI is being used.
5. Prepare for crises and emergencies, such as engineered viruses and highly advanced automated cyberattacks.
It's too late to catch up with the US and China. But it's not too late to build leverage .
Read the full report here --> transformative-ai.eu/part-a#…
Andreas De Block retweeted
A McDonald’s burger has actually gotten steadily less expensive:
How things have changed. Everything gets smaller and more expensive.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The comparison photo misrepresents Big Mac sizes, which nutrition records show have stayed consistent, and lists inaccurate prices for the meals shown.
snopes.com/fact-check/big…
snopes.com/news/2026/05/2…
menupricetracker.com/mcdonalds-menu…
au.news.yahoo.com/mc-donalds-res…
Andreas De Block retweeted
In the 1500s people would go to an anatomical theater to watch a dissection like we go to the movies
Andreas De Block retweeted
"Waar zitten al die koene ridders van de vrije meningsuiting, nu Theo Francken een politieke vijand afdreigt?" @barteeckhout 🎯
Wie vandaag niet spreekt mag voor altijd zedig zwijgen over "vrije meningsuiting". #HypocrietTenTop
demorgen.be/ts-b98a8271/
Andreas De Block retweeted
In plaats van de vorige, links geïnspireerde, opiniedelicten af te schaffen is het eerste wat deze regering deed er eentje, rechts geïnspireerd nu, bijstemmen.
Absolute schande.
Andreas De Block retweeted
Met Boyan Slat today. The Ocean Cleanup is already catching about 5% of the total amount of plastic flowing into the sea from all the rivers in the world, and within a few years they hope to catch a third. Impressive that a single organization could have such impact.
Andreas De Block retweeted
Jullie mogen best verder ruziën over Cofnas, PISA-cijfers en verkiezingsuitslagen in buurlanden. Maar neem ook af en toe de tijd om naar een jonge fuut in een regenbui te kijken.
Andreas De Block retweeted
It's genuinely amazing, and almost entirely ignored, what a central role Gloria Steinem (RIP) played in amplifying and legitimizing perhaps the most destructive moral panic hoax of the past several decades: “Satanic ritual sex abuse”
And in particular: CHILD "ritual sex abuse"
She personally funded a frantic 1990 "archaeological dig" expedition at McMartin pre-school in Southern California, where mobs of rabid parents were desperately trying to excavate the non-existent underground child sex torture chambers that their four-and-five year olds had purportedly identified.
She wrote a best-selling 1992 book demanding that authority figures "believe the children" when they make these fantastical claims of ritualized sex abuse (after being induced to do so by blinkered adults, of course)
She popularized crank concepts of "recovered memory" and "multiple personality disorder" that fueled the nationwide craze — which destroyed countless lives, ripped apart families, and fomented some of the most deranged paranoia imaginable.
She championed a fraudulent "psychologist" who went around convincing mentally disturbed women they had hundreds of different personalities, and were "High Priestesses" of a secret Satanic child sacrifice and cannibalism cult.
She peddled this tremendous bullshit on the cover of her widely-hailed "Ms. Magazine" — publishing a gruesome (and preposterously fake) 1993 cover-story in which an anonymous author claims to have recovered long-lost memories of witnessing, as a four-year-old, her newborn baby sister savagely decapitated, and then being forced to drink her blood.
As late as 2017, during Peak MeToo, Steinem was still chanting "Believe the Children!" — the same slogan she chanted in the early 90s to demand that everyone believe the McMartin pre-schoolers, who had been coaxed by delusional adults into imagining fantastical subterranean sex torture tales.
This led to the longest and most expensive criminal proceeding in US history! Nobody was ever convicted, no serious evidence of any sex crime ever produced. One of the biggest prosecutorial fiascos of all time — and cheered all the way through by Steinem!
But perhaps MOST incredibly, she appears to have NEVER expressed an ounce of remorse about any of this. Totally unrepentant until the day she died.
This despite being interviewed constantly for a never-ending stream of ass-kissing Netflix and HBO specials, glitzy Vanity Fair profiles, dopey celebrity podcasts, etc. Her formative role in pumping out this nutcase hysteria just never seems to have come up.
Disturbingly, these concepts of "recovered memory" and grotesque hidden child sex abuse networks have made a big comeback lately. In no small part thanks to the storied "legacy" of Gloria Steinem.
Why has all of this been just totally omitted from her avalanche of reverent obituaries over the past week?
READ MORE:
mtracey.net/p/gloria-steinem…
