Kaz Skubi
kazskubi.bsky.social
Kaz Skubi
@kazskubi.bsky.social
Radical chemist and sometimes also a radical chemist 😉. Assistant Professor at Carleton College. He/Him.
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Elementary school kids can learn to play the glockenspiel or understand Roman numerals or speak French.

These skills won't be helpful for them anytime in the rest of their lives but sometimes just learning something different is rewarding.
November 20, 2025 at 6:49 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
We can teach people things that they aren't ever going to have any use for later in life! That's an okay thing to do!
November 20, 2025 at 6:41 PM
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My new favorite kind of meme is "here are detailed instructions on how to turn off AI". 🔨
November 19, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Is there a hashtag for STEM internships?

Merck is accepting applications for internships in cell biology and assay development, immunogenicity, protein metabolism, biostatistics, vaccine communications, DMPK, and discovery and process chemistry.
Merck is accepting applications for its 2026 Future Talent Program - these are internships and co-ops in a variety of areas including drug discovery, vaccines, clinical trials, biostatistics, epidemiology, HEOR, data science, regulatory affairs, and more
#chemsky 🧪⚗️
jobs.merck.com/us/en/search...
Your job search results | Merck Careers
jobs.merck.com
November 5, 2025 at 10:15 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Good morning! AI is being force-fed to you by a handful of billionaires who will lose a bunch of money if they fail to convince you that you need it. You do not need it 🫶
November 6, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL
The boyfriend of a friend of my son's has spent several weeks in a psych ward due to Chat GPT induced psychosis. He isn't suicidal but AI encouraged him down a toxic and paranoid wormhole until he became completely delusional. Evil stuff.
1.This is not the only known example we know of ChatGPT cheering on a vulnerable young person to die by suicide, this time it is a recent Texas A&M grad
2. Every single university that has invited OpenAI into our midst should be asked to account for their choices.
www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...
November 7, 2025 at 12:51 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
If you (or an undergraduate in your life) is thinking about graduate school in Chemistry, I want to share that Stony Brook Chemistry will be holding two virtual info sessions in about 2 weeks on our PhD program! Register: forms.gle/exxMufpr2dLv...
November 3, 2025 at 1:35 AM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Hi. I wrote an essay about AI slop: How it feels like an invasive species for the internet. How its boosters describe building a future that’s devoid of craft. How frictionlessness can be nihilistic & how this stuff seems to leach part of our shared humanity out of the world. I hope you'll read it.
AI’s Invasive Species
The slop is winning.
www.theatlantic.com
October 20, 2025 at 10:47 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
October 9, 2025 at 4:42 AM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Imagine studying a technology whose presence in the classroom is so detrimental to the development of writing and research skills (including even the will to know the sources behind claims!) that mitigating its effects becomes a central goal of course design, and concluding with tips on adopting it.
October 9, 2025 at 11:53 AM
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It is morally wrong to want a computer to be sentient. If you owned a sentient thing, you would be a slaver. If you want sentient computers to exist, you just want to create a new kind of slavery. The ethics are as simple as that. Sorry if this offends
October 5, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Bryn Mawr College is looking for an analytical chemist! #chemsky www.brynmawr.edu/inside/acade...
August 6, 2025 at 6:49 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Are you a DFL voter in MN? Do you dislike transphobia? Consider signing this letter to stand up against transphobia in our party.

docs.google.com/forms/d/1D9m...
Sign On to "Open Letter to State DFL Leadership in Response to Transphobic Behavior by Leadership of the Feminist Caucus"
Please fill out this form to have your name added as a signatory to the letter "Open Letter to State DFL Leadership in Response to Transphobic Behavior by Leadership of the Feminist Caucus." Please en...
docs.google.com
September 12, 2025 at 10:30 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
a selection of US scientists and foreign collaborators:
September 11, 2025 at 3:45 AM
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Give me your favorite Treachery of Images derivative meme. I’ll start.
August 25, 2025 at 11:07 PM
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My department at Colgate University is hiring a tenure-stream assistant professor in Organic Chemistry this fall. Please feel free to reach out with questions, and please repost. We're an undergraduate university with a strong focus on research. @chemjobber.bsky.social

apply.interfolio.com/170152
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
July 21, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Andrea Gibson, Colorado’s poet laureate who attracted praise and a large following by writing about social issues and queer identity, died Sunday of ovarian cancer at age 49. www.instagram.com/p/DMGo2skM1Ve/
July 14, 2025 at 9:56 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏

openletter.earth/open-letter-...
June 28, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
When we intentionally changed the course to help out our students, we ended up helping *all* these students – even the ones who were already performing well in the course.

This is a common effect for "DEI programs" in education. Education just gets better for everyone.
July 11, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
I'm excited to share the first publication out of the Brezny lab! We explored some unexpected reactivity of an indole with metalloporphyrins. Thank you to all my awesome students that contributed to this work.

pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...
Mechanism of catalyst activation in iron(porphyrin)-catalysed aerobic oxidative cleavage of 2,3-dimethylindole
Ferric porphyrins catalyse the aerobic oxidative cleavage of 2,3-dimethylindole, mimicking dioxygenase enzymes. The data herein suggest that the indole reduces the FeIII(porphyrin) to FeII(porphyrin) ...
pubs.rsc.org
July 7, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
Cannot emphasize enough that, if you dislike doing the things academics do (reading, writing, developing and expressing opinions about things you've read) enough to try to make a chatbot do them for you, there are lots of actual humans who would be happy to take that unpleasant job off your hands
Got gossip from a managing editor pal of a journal that a few reviewers used ChatGPT to write their assessments for them, and didn't even conceal it. I'll say it again - it won't be the neoliberal administrators that take down the humanities. It'll be humanities professors who've stopped reading.
July 1, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Reposted by Kaz Skubi
I just saw a good example of what I was talking about with chatgpt being a crackpot generating machine.

A guy had started Wheeler's Spacetime Physics, and had a problem on page 2.

Wheeler expressed a square root as a power of 1/2.

√a = a^1/2. This is basic algebra, not physics.
May 21, 2025 at 7:38 AM