Randi Saunders

Teaching Faculty @ UTSA. Sociologist studying stress, relationships & health, incl IPV & health. Avid reader, amateur cook, political nerd. All views my own

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Honestly, i don't understand this economy when nursing homes are so expensive they bankrupt our grandparents but nursing home aides need to use food banks.

daycare is so expensive it eats up one parent's entire paycheck and yet daycare providers only make $10/hr and need second jobs.

college costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and puts students into debt for life and yet we have thousands of professors living in their cars.

everything we need is astronomically expensive and yet almost none of the money we pay is going towards the people actually doing the work and providing the services.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Opened Google Scholar today and was immediately hit with “AI can now summarize academic articles.” Bro, it’s called an abstract and it already exists.

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

“The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”

[Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold]

University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students:

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics”

“The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

[Matthew Cole @mattbencole]

I barely survived “telling writers they have to read is gatekeeping,” I don’t think I can live through “telling writers they have to write is gatekeeping”

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.

Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.

They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks.

The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory.

Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word.

Then it got worse.

The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else.

It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors.

One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked.

Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted.

Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher.

That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites.

Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights.

This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

[jezz @JezziiB]

Women don't enter trades like men do because the working conditions almost guarantee a lifetime of sexual harassment and sexism, not because they're too weak to learn carpentry.

[ProPublica @propublica]

New: Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available. https://t.co/UD5CqAr17X

[Emily Galvin-Almanza @GalvinAlmanza]

I don't get how people are planning to sidestep the very basic problem that if you don't have junior hires right now, you won't have experienced people 5 or 10 years later.

[Kareem Carr, Ph.D. @kareem_carr]

As a statistician, I keep asking myself how all these AI people are dealing with the massive potential for catastrophic errors in critical analyses, and the answer keeps being they either didn't think about it at all, or they don't care.

[Dr. Catharine Young @DrCatharineY]

We were told NIH funding cuts were about eliminating DEI.

But the data now shows grants are down across nearly every field of medicine: cancer, diabetes, mental health, brain disorders.

With the greatest cuts hitting Alzheimer’s research, down more than 50%.

[Dr. Catharine Young @DrCatharineY]

The pipeline that drives discovery - new knowledge and treatments for diseases that affect us all - is collapsing in the United States.

New NIH funding opportunities are down 91% this fiscal year.

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Addiction to short-form videos reduces brain activity in the frontal lobe weakening the ability to focus.

[Texas Tribune @TexasTribune]

Misinformation and disinformation are especially common during election times, and the spread of AI-created content has only made it harder to discern fact from fiction.

Here’s what you need to know if you spot a suspicious image, video or audio about elections. https://t.co/BjwBdvw7pl

[Randi Saunders @RandiSaunders24]

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so this is important: *intimate partner homicide* specifically is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US #DomesticViolenceAwarenessMonth #DVAM

[PBS News @NewsHour]

In the U.S., homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women. In states with abortion restrictions, that homicide rate is 75% higher. https://t.co/NUIYFhy06g

[PAA @PopAssocAmerica]

Join letter to congressional leaders rejecting USDA's decision to halt data collection & release of food security reports, restore funding of Food Security Supplement in the Current Population Survey.
Individuals: https://t.co/XR5HpeGr6Y
Organizations: https://t.co/eP9rmoOrIU

[Icona @iconawrites]

Reading fiction is not just a pleasant pastime. It teaches us empathy. It puts us in the shoes of those who are different from us. It’s a form of resistance against the forces of ignorance and bigotry and lack of imagination that tear our world apart.

[Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25]

Just a casual dismissal of domestic violence as a crime.

[sarah lugor! @sarahlugor]

planned parenthood is not just abortions btw.

They provide cancer screenings, wellness checkups, std/sti testing and treatment, birth control, pregnancy tests abortion services, as well as access to prenatal care, AND post partum care.

[Dr. Catharine Young @DrCatharineY]

“A generation of scientific talent is at the brink of being lost to overseas competitors by the dismantling of the National Science Foundation, with unprecedented political interference at the agency jeopardizing the future of US industries and economic growth”