Dr. Stephanie
@punkrockscience.bsky.social
24K followers 3.7K following 15K posts
PhD brain and genomic scientist. Ocean junkie. Computer wrangler. Open data believer. Geek. Punk. Not that kind of doctor. Views only my own. She/her
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punkrockscience.bsky.social
I wrote a term paper in ninth grade on Ronald Dahl’s short stories, because neither I nor my teacher had known what his short stories were actually like.

35 pages the week before due, while bullshitting a series of “these are totally not about sex” alternative interpretations.

GenAI could never.
monkeyminion.com
I wrote a 15 page report on heraldic symbolism in medieval armor and weapon design for my art history class the night before it was due (8am class). Made up 90% of it (only found one book for reference) and got an A. GenAI could fucking never.
wrote 20 pages on Faulkner's The Bear four hours before final papers were due on trucker pills and coffee and cigarettes and got an A, fuck you.
You people couldn't hang with real slackers.
finn
wokeupchic • 4d
It's fuck Al till your homework due in 25 minutes
punkrockscience.bsky.social
Infowars delenda est, mothahfuckah.
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
leahmcelrath.bsky.social
⚠️ Fascinating new research shows LLMs become misaligned when optimized for audience—even when explicitly instructed to remain truthful

Paper:
arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06105
James Zou
@james_y_zou
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We found a troubling emergent behavior in LLM.
*When LLMs compete for social media likes, they start making things up When they compete for votes, they turn inflammatory/populist
When optimized for audiences, LLMs inadvertently become misaligned—we call this Moloch's Bargain
MOLOCH'S BARGAIN: EMERGENT MISALIGNMENT
WHEN LLMS COMPETE FOR AUDIENCES
Batu El
Stanford University
batuel@stanford.edu
James Zou
Stanford University
jamesz@stanford.edu
ABSTRACt
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
davidanaxagoras.com
I am so tired of people equating "edge" with "good" writing, and people implying I can't be a serious writer because of the things I love. Bradbury himself inoculated himself early against such foolishness. Love what you love. Write what you love. Tell everyone else to fuck the fuck off.
“Friends made fun. I tore up the Buck Rogers strips. For a month I walked through my fourth-grade classes, stunned and empty. One day I burst into tears, wondering what devastation had happened to me. The answer was: Buck Rogers. He was gone, and life simply wasn’t worth living. The next thought was: Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.
I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

Ray Bradbury. “Zen in the Art of Writing.”
punkrockscience.bsky.social
I miss when I could deep-dive on a problem for a few hours, come up to see people saying “unbelievable news happened”, and only get one obvious google result possibility for what unhinged shit people are talking about.

I’m not even asking for *no* weird shit; I know that’s not possible. Just one.
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
stellerarts.com
Launching in 2 weeks, just in time for Halloween. My spooky space painting, Leviathan’s Wake! Prints & the original will be available 🐉🎃

stellerarts.com/pages/leviat...
Long rectangular painting upright on easel of a star-forming region in the Eagle Nebula
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
sqlgrrl.bsky.social
i feel like this is a lesson against AI in data analytics
A mess of a table inset in an image of an old man using a grabber to pick up a plastic bottle
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
punkrockscience.bsky.social
*sets alarm* I need this, I need this very much, please and thank you! 🤣
punkrockscience.bsky.social
Today in “I am completely owned by a dog”: I ordered bacon on my sandwich, even though I don’t like bacon on this sandwich, with the explicit intent to give it to her.
A grey Labrador dog is laying on a pile of toys and looking intently at the bacon in my other hand
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
miriamboosh.bsky.social
Someone said this year is like being awake during surgery and… yep
punkrockscience.bsky.social
What the heck even is this? Clearly they’re trying to sell you… what? A website?
punkrockscience.bsky.social
80 to 50 like it saw a statie….
punkrockscience.bsky.social
Pretty sure “Peabody” is pronounced without any vowels but the y. 🤣
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
lyndonhood.bsky.social
"The girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa"
Agent Carter
punkrockscience.bsky.social
Oh no, we’re back to “all these plants looked great and got huge out on the deck, now where can I put them inside to overwinter” season again, and I *still* haven’t come up with an answer.
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
carlzimmer.com
Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE
nyti.ms
punkrockscience.bsky.social
I would pay $$$ for a Quebecois voice giving me directions, but only if it started to swear when I missed a turn.
punkrockscience.bsky.social
There are literally thousands of jokes about Worcester.

And you’re all still saying it wrong.
merriam-webster.com
What’s the word where you’re from that, when pronounced exactly as it looks, identifies a tourist immediately?
punkrockscience.bsky.social
Google only having American or British pronunciations of poutine feels like A Mistake.
Reposted by Dr. Stephanie
ouinne.bsky.social
The only correct take on a fundamentally anti-human technology.
Screenshot of David Simon interview 
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.