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Soil Scientist 🇺🇦 @dylanbeaudette.bsky.social · 53m

Feels like a stain that you can’t wash off. Nasty.

We should be able to differentiate between statistical models and LLMs.

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Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 59m

Grrr at having to add shit about AI to teaching statements now...

Double Grrr at not being able to be relentless negative about it.

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 5h

kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

The Naming of Stats
June 19, 2023 • Obiter Dicta • R
The Naming of Stats is a difficult matter, It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a stat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all are the names where usage is informal, Such as Median, Estimate, Average, or Range, Such as Variance, Quartile, or else Standard Normal All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names that may be better-tasting, Some for the frequentists, some for the Bayes:
Such as Skew, or Kurtosis, Metropolis-Hastings-But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a stat needs a name that's obscurer, A name that's misleading, and hard to construe,
Else how can it keep on confusing the reader, Or frustrate professors, or pass peer review?
Of names of this kind, there are many examples, Like Hierarchical, Robust, or Omega-hat,
Such as Marginal, Confidence, or just Weighted Sample, Names that always belong to more than one stat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over, And that is the name that you never will guess;
The thing that no human research can discover-
But THE STAT MIGHT JUST KNOW, and be made to confess.
When you notice a stat getting quite widely cited, The reason, you see, is whatever its flaws, Its user's engaged, or enraged, or excited
At the prospect of pinning the root of all laws:
That inviolable, friable
Unidentifiable
Deep and inscrutable singular Cause.

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Colette Delawalla @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 2h

Being a woman on the internet, exhibit 739628949:

TLDR: “Consider letting someone more adult be the voice of your movement, you sound like a ditsy socialist liberal”

A man telling me to consider having someone else as the voice of my movement.

A man telling me my voice sounds like a ditsy socialist liberal (“and I honestly don’t mean to insult you”) and I should let someone who is a real adult step in.

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Matt Round @mattround.com · 3h

OpenAI’s strategy is very clear, it’s trying to get people - especially young people - so reliant on its products intellectually & emotionally (& now sexually!) that going without them becomes unthinkable. And they need signs of that strategy working to keep the funding flowing in

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Soil Scientist 🇺🇦 @dylanbeaudette.bsky.social · 7h

Congress critters and their enablers seem giddy about the prospect of a protracted shutdown. We won’t forget.

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Dr. Nicole Gasparini (she) @nicolegasparini.bsky.social · 10h

Day 14 of President’s shutdown. Literally millions of people aren’t getting paid, won’t get paid. It’s barely in the news. What is happening?

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Anna E. Cook @annaecook.com · 8h

The casual ableism is so gross.

There is not a single person on this planet without "mental health" problems. Like all disabilities, it's just a part of human existence. Sometimes we have more or less.

To restrict interactions based on a perceived mental health "issue" is gonna go bad quickly.

Matt Burgess (WIRED) @mattburgess1.bsky.social · 8h

Oh good, ChatGPT is getting "erotica for verified adults" later this year

We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.

Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.

In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).

In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 7h

Sam Altman went from “AI will cure cancer" to "ChatGPT porn" in less than a month

ChatGPT boss predicts when AI could cure cancer

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Dr. Nicole Gasparini (she) @nicolegasparini.bsky.social · 9h

Hearing someone say that families with autistic members deserve support literally makes me cry.

That’s how bad it has gotten for some of us

Governor JB Pritzker @govpritzker.illinois.gov · 1d

Vaccines are safe and effective.

Autism isn't caused by vaccines, and autistic people and their families deserve our support.

When you want information, ask your doctor.

It's more important than ever for all of us to speak plainly, truthfully, and directly about public health.

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Yaroslava @strategywoman.bsky.social · 11h

We all live under the same sky.
We all belong to the same Earth.

We built the borders
and forgot
that we still live under the same sky,
that we still belong to the same Earth.

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Soil Scientist 🇺🇦 @dylanbeaudette.bsky.social · 11h

I think about this a lot. Is it time to fork https and the web browser paradigm? As far as I can tell, everyone hates using browsers and the internet of shit.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 18h

A new search engine is actually needed that works and combs out ai nonsense by default

　　　the　　　 ghostes @rem.bsjky.team · 1d

love how much of the stuff on the internet is essentially jsut. gone forever. unsearchable means unfindable means, in essence, gone

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coolbutuseless @coolbutuseless.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 17h

#rstats Dev Diary - Glitched 3D rendering of a signed distance field

This should be a stack of spheres. But it isn't. And I love it!!!!

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 18h

Why do all these monsters look like they're wearing homemade "uniforms" like literally anybody could cosplay this shitty. Maybe Americans should all dress up like this en masse and fuck with them. Not a serious suggestion but like this is so weird they are a hair's breadth away from jeggings

Jonah @anotherjonah.bsky.social · 1d

This morning I was filming ICE abducting sometime in Petworth. One of the agents told me "the last US citizen that did this he put in cuffs all the way to the courtroom".

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Kai Ryssdal @kairyssdal.bsky.social · 12h

Interviewing Senators/Representatives about the shutdown has zero information utility

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rubot @rubot.ie · 1d

the world's most evil people all in a room congratulating how evil they are.

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Des Fitzgerald @desfitzgerald.bsky.social · 1d

Seeing people nonchalantly post stuff like makes me feel like I'm going crazy honestly.

A post from an academic on blue sky that says: "I'm learning about "prompt engineering" when asking LLMs to extract data. I now add this to all instructions:

Style
Be concise, analytic, and specific (cite page/figure if provided). If essential info is missing, keep going but flag Unclear and exact data needed. Never invent data.

#academicsky"

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coolbutuseless @coolbutuseless.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 1d

#rstats Dev Diary - signed distance field rendering.

Balls!

Finite repetition of a sphere.

csg_sphere(5) |>
csg_repeat_finite(x = 10, lx = 2, y = 10, ly = 1, z = 10, lz = 2)

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Soil Scientist 🇺🇦 @dylanbeaudette.bsky.social · 23h

Absolutely

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Brandon Bishop @brandontbishop.bsky.social · 23h

Would be great if journalists on a tech beat actually talked to working scientists in relevant fields rather than AI researchers talking about the fields of other working scientists.

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coolbutuseless @coolbutuseless.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 1d

#rstats Dev Diary - signed distance fields can be constructed from arbitrary user-supplied functions.

* specified using signed distance field
* marching cubes to convert to mesh
* render mesh in {rayrender}

A 3d rendering of an organic (ish) shape.

Function defining the signed distance field of this organic(ish) shape.

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Reposted by Soil Scientist 🇺🇦

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 1d

"Geoengineering is inevitable; we better start preparing for it" and "AI is inevitable, we better start preparing for it" seem to both have extremely similar vibes.

In both cases, it *does not matter* whether something is inevitable. What matters is how its controlled, minimised and regulated

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coolbutuseless @coolbutuseless.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 1d

#rstats Dev Diary - meshed version of signed distance field now rendering nicely in {rayrender} !

Using the OIDN de-noising library really tidies things up!

Thanks @tylermorganwall

signed distance field of a stack of white balls, meshed to triangles using marching cubes and rendered in {rayrender} with OIDN denoising

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 1d

This is a great, detailed piece of work. There is really no secret here: OpenAI fully intend to use fossil gas to power their data centres.

All the crap about fusion, dyson spheres etc is misdirection. This is what they're *actually* doing:

www.desmog.com/2025/10/13/o...

John McCarrick, the company’s new head of Global Energy Policy, was a senior energy policy advisor in the first Trump administration’s Bureau of Energy Resources in the Department of State while under former Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.

As deputy assistant secretary for Energy Transformation and the special envoy for International Energy Affairs, McCarrick promoted exports of American liquefied natural gas to Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and advocated for Asian countries to invest in natural gas.

The choice to hire McCarrick matches the intentions of OpenAI’s Trump-donating CEO Sam Altman, who said in a U.S. Senate hearing in May that “in the short term, I think [the future of powering AI] probably looks like more natural gas.”

It also aligns with the company’s early moves toward powering new data centers, huge warehouses full of linked-up computers that require enormous quantities of water and electricity, to run with gas. OpenAI’s U.S. Stargate Project site in Texas, which is slated to become one of the largest data center sites in the world, is already installing off-grid gas turbines to power its operations.

“Big Tech’s collusion with the Trump administration’s fossil fuel agenda for artificial intelligence is evident in their massive investment in methane gas power infrastructure — as well as pro-gas political operatives like McCarrick,” Tyson Slocum, director of consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen’s Energy Program, said.

The “solution” of powering AI with gas is part of Trump’s AI energy policy platform. In a July speech to announce a $96 billion AI and energy funding package, Trump lauded fossil fuel and coal-powered data center development while flanked by oil and gas executives.

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