J.D. Fleming

EM lit/sci. AI skeptic. Gadamer, Feyerabend. *Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand* (Routledge, 2024).

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

https://t.co/Woh682C5C4

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

@axios "Rename," like "name," is transitive. No need for a preposition. We don't ask "what did you name your kid to?" Neither "what did he rename the lake to?" You're welcome.

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

How it's going

[Nathan Cofnas @nathancofnas]

I am grateful to Rector Petra De Sutter for allowing me to stay at Ghent University. I look forward to continuing to work on the project, “The Future of Liberalism,” for 60% of my working time for the remainder of my one-year postdoc.

I wish to personally thank Ambassador @BillWhiteUSA. It was beyond my imagination that such a person would take an interest in the fate of a postdoc. The Ambassador responded with great support which helped to bring about a just outcome. Thank you, @USAmbToBelgium and @StateDept for defending American values. I am proud of my country.

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

@TheEconomist @harari_yuval @zannymb Boo. Fugn. Shi.

[Abu @abuchanlife]

AI did not suddenly discover a cancer vaccine. That is engagement bait.

Moderna and Merck reported positive Phase 3 results for Intismeran plus Keytruda in 1,137 melanoma patients after surgery. This is a real and important scientific result.

But the vaccine entered human trials in 2017, and Moderna was already using internal bioinformatics algorithms to select each patient’s tumor targets.

AI helps analyze mutations and choose up to 34 neoantigens for the personalized treatment. It did not independently invent the vaccine or cure cancer.

The full Phase 3 numbers have not been released. Overall survival is still unknown. The treatment is not approved, not a universal cancer vaccine and was tested with Keytruda, not alone.

BioNTech, Roche, NEC, Transgene and Evaxion have used similar computational or machine learning approaches for years.

This is a breakthrough in genomics, immunology, mRNA, manufacturing and clinical science. Rebranding all of that as “AI discovered a cancer vaccine today” is pure AI hype.

[Nathan Cofnas @nathancofnas]

I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.

The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

@Saganismm A comment of stupefying historical ignorance.

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

watch this space

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

The unraveling of OpenAI sure looks like it has begun: https://t.co/ByY0Tgg9hL

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books and followed it across the country to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas. Inside, Amazon employees cut the spines off books, scan the pages for AI training data, and destroy the originals. Workers describe the job as receiving massive shipments and cutting bindings all day. The facility's logo is a dinosaur holding a book. Amazon confirmed it "purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve products." A court ruled that destroying the original copy strengthens the fair use argument for scanning.

My Take
Amazon is buying books from every marketplace it can find, at any price, in bulk orders of a thousand at a time, and booksellers say the buyers never haggle. The internet has already been scraped. Pre-2022 printed books are one of the last sources of clean human-written text guaranteed free of AI contamination, and the companies know it. Amazon isn't paying for the books because it wants books. It's paying because the text inside them is training fuel and there's less of it left than people think.

Most used books end up destroyed anyway, shredded by Goodwill or pulped by publishers who can't sell them. That's been true for decades. The difference is that Amazon is buying specific books it doesn't already have, working through the global ISBN list, scanning the text for AI training, and gutting the originals because a court said destroying the copy strengthens the legal case. Booksellers say these aren't collectors or libraries, they're companies on a systematic hunt for every printed book they haven't scanned yet. There's something about physically destroying books to train a chatbot that I can't get over, even after more than a year of covering this industry.

Hedgie🤗
https://t.co/URkpw1SbCw

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

noises off

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔OpenAI lost its chief revenue officer, its COO, its product chief, its VP, its head of marketing, its head of ethics, its head of safety, and its chief futurist in the span of a few months. The CRO, Denise Dresser, left after eight months and walked away from what would've been a huge IPO payout. OpenAI is valued at $852 billion and filed its IPO paperwork in June. Investors told CNBC they were surprised by Dresser's exit.

My Take
People leave companies all the time, but they don't usually leave right before the biggest payday of their career. Dresser came in from Salesforce in December, took on expanded responsibilities in April, and quit in August with the IPO months away. Whatever she saw from inside the revenue operation convinced her the payout wasn't worth staying for. Lightcap was there eight years and left the same week. These aren't junior employees cashing out early. These are the people who ran the business side, and they chose to go.

Now think about who else is exposed to OpenAI. Nvidia just offered to guarantee $120 billion of OpenAI's data center and is negotiating a separate $350 billion chip deal on top of it. Oracle bet its whole AI capex strategy on a $300 billion compute contract with OpenAI. Microsoft has poured tens of billions in. If the executives who had the closest view of OpenAI's revenue and operations didn't trust the company enough to wait for their IPO shares, I think that's a question Nvidia's investors, Oracle's investors, and Microsoft's shareholders should be asking too. A lot of the AI buildout we've covered this year runs through OpenAI, and the people who ran OpenAI's business just walked out the door.

Hedgie🤗

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

@libbyemmons This terrifying argument is quite common and has been made by CAIR. 1 Muslims don't murder therefore either 2 their murder = their apostasy or 2a it ain't murder.

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

@GaryMarcus (tree-climbing, actually, but same diff)

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

Yeah amma bet infinity dollas no.

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

@OMTorah The geopolitical equivalent of "Satan made the fossil record"

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

I see my own work as an attempt to deploy relevant bits of history and philosophy against the hegemonic, even Orwellian tendencies that are immanent in the modern natural sciences. The Covid episode displayed them. Fauci's diaries illuminate them.

[Fania Oz-Salzberger 🇮🇱🕊️🟣 פניה עוז-זלצברגר @faniaoz]

On 6 February 1190, at least 17 children and adults were massacred in Norwich, England, perhaps by English Crusaders, and thrown down a well.

In 2004 archaeologists dug up their skeletal remains.

In 2020, BBC reported that researchers now had the technology to sequence the victims’ genome. The findings were published in that year’s issue of the journal Biology Today. The victims were found to be, genetically, Ashkenazi Jews. A very recent group, formed by tricklimg migrations of Jews northward from the western Mediterranean.

In 2026, my own DNA was analyzed by a nonprofit DNA research lab.

This week they let me know that three of the Norwich Massacre victims, three piles of bones pulled out of the well, a man, a young girl and a toddler boy, were my own very very distant relatives.

I find this stunning. Also far too awe-inspiring and subtle for facile jokes or simplistic politics.

Just one remark: state of the art genetics and identity politics, not to mention postcolonialist theories, are embarking on a roller coaster. New findings will affect not only our collective histories, but change the very texture of the stories we individually tell about ourselves.
For the sadder, perhaps, but ultimately - as new vistas open for every aspect of our past - for the better too.

https://t.co/x9zFEOoIaa

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

I just learned that Sir Francis Bacon fabricates a Biblical quotation (Habbakuk 2: 2) on which he leans quite heavily and I am tickled.

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

My favourite bit of Odysseus's processing is when he threatens to strangle his old nurse if she gives him away, what's yours

[Gareth Harney @OptimoPrincipi]

Emily Wilson after watching the Odyssey:

‘The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he's done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrised way – and needs drugs to do so! He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring ... Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer's Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory.’

[J.D. Fleming @pertransibunt]

As a long, longtime reader of @TheEconomist, I must say this week's leader, "The Man Who Could Change Russia," very impressively exceeds the already strong expectations for their journalism-with-commentary stuff. Well done, chaps.