D. Hicks
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danhicks.bsky.social
D. Hicks
@danhicks.bsky.social
2.9K followers 940 following 7K posts
philosopher turned data scientist turned philosopher. enviro policy, data science, phil sci/STS, lefty stuff. UC Merced. they/them. Signal: danhicks.50
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danhicks.bsky.social
🖤
A black cat laying on the back of the couch, looking at me very sweetly
February 7, 2026 at 3:08 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
This is "probably somewhat safer for relatively common outcomes," not "orders of magnitude." Note the table does not include deaths, because that's so rare it would need billions of VMT.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Table 4. Comparison of Waymo RO and human benchmark crashed vehicle rates for Any-Injury-Reported, Airbag Deployment, and Suspected Serious Injury+ crashes (through January 2025, 56.7 M RO miles). Shows absolute and relative comparisons for rates (in human vs. AV incidents per million miles) for three kinds of outcomes: any-injury-reported, airbag deployment, and suspected serious injury+. The 95% confidence intervals for AV vs. human are bounded below 0, and the point estimates are like -60% to -100%. So some evidence that AVs are safer. But the median upper bound is like -62%, and the upper bounds for suspected serious injury are -3%.
February 6, 2026 at 6:10 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Oh no Jasper falled over
A white cat is laying on his side on a grey and white rug, looking very chonk
February 6, 2026 at 2:22 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
I got a box to put the toys in when the cleaners come. Or, that was the original plan.
A light gray basket, made of like woven paper tube stuff, with a white fabric liner is on a tile floor in front of a bookshelf. A big white cat is happily occupying the entire basket himself, laying on all of the toys (not pictured).
January 27, 2026 at 2:11 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Alert!
A big black cat is laying on the pillowy back of a blue couch. His head is up and ears and eyes are alert as though he has just detected something of interest elsewhere in the room.
January 22, 2026 at 3:51 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Please enjoy an purrs
January 22, 2026 at 2:00 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Repost with alt text:
Hung a guy at Nuremburg for doing this, FYI. Not "a thing like this" but literally this, exactly.
Streicher's major antisemitic innovation was his accusation of Jewish sex crimes. Before Streicher, the idea that the Jew was raping innocent women across Europe was not a prevalent focus amongst antisemites. In 1938, the Nuremberg Chief of Police gifted Streicher with this propaganda album titled "Jewish Criminals," a photographic collection of Jewish men and women accused of the sexual crimes about which he consistently warned Germany.
January 21, 2026 at 9:59 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Wellomu Backo
Some letter art that's intended to read "welcome back," but thanks to a poorly-designed font it looks like "wellomu backo"
January 21, 2026 at 4:14 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Jasper recommends this heated mat, but not THIS one
A big white cat doing a rest on a tan K and H brand electric heated mat. His eyes are just barely opening and he's looking at the camera wondering why you're so interested in HIS mat.
January 19, 2026 at 12:18 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
January 18, 2026 at 3:05 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Finale
Only one cat remains on the sunny daybed
January 9, 2026 at 6:52 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
There was a fwapping and one yowl and then
Two cats having a standoff on a sunny daybed.
January 9, 2026 at 6:46 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
This won't end well
January 9, 2026 at 6:42 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Two kitties, both alike in dignity,
In fair California, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Two cats hanging out on a bed by a window, looking out at the front yard.
January 7, 2026 at 4:47 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Hello here is cat nose
Extreme close up of a cat's nose as he's about to rub his face on my phone
January 3, 2026 at 4:55 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
A thread (8 posts) on an extremely useful thing I made using local LLM infrastructure
A screenshot of a terminal window. It indicates a script in R (a statistical programming) was run, and had an output that looks like a table with a list of academic papers.
January 2, 2026 at 8:03 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Ah yes, the famous conservative attitude of "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away."
But, he said, "I'm a farmer. I have a conservative mindset. I encourage the trigger-pulling attitude, like, 'Hey, let's just get stuff done."
January 1, 2026 at 4:55 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
I hate Xmas, but Honey is a fan
Small tabby kitten sitting in a Xmas tree, very ferocious arboreal predator
December 26, 2025 at 3:49 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
LLM developers stole revenue from authors and their publishers by downloading pirated copies

LLMs arguably might be stealing future work opportunities from fiction and popular nonfiction authors

But in what sense might LLMs be said to steal *knowledge* from *anyone*? Especially academics?
Screenshot from a post reading "It ['AI'] steals knowledge from scholars"
December 22, 2025 at 12:48 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Someone's been on the office desk
Photo of a iPad, shot from an angle where you can see two paw prints from a cat in the accumulated fingertip oils
December 18, 2025 at 11:35 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
That than which none more cozy can be conceived
A big white cat sleeping on/in a poofy green and gray backpacking sleeping bag
December 17, 2025 at 1:54 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Jasper is camouflage!
A big white cat stalking towards the camera across a couch that has had cushions and slipcover removed for cleaning, so it's all white
December 9, 2025 at 8:40 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Hi is Jasper watch Stranger Things
A white cat has his head resting on my knee. The only light is a dim orange glow off to the left from my laptop (out of frame) while we watch Stranger Things.
December 9, 2025 at 3:23 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Don't talk me me angy
A big white cat is laying next to my leg and has his head turned back away from the camera
December 7, 2025 at 12:10 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Coincidentally, read this in @shannonvallor.bsky.social 's /AI Mirror/ the other day
Ask yourself: What real intelligent beings, not "vapour-engines," have been servants to those at the top of the social hierarchy, forced to perform labor without pay or liberty to pursue their own interests? Which actual beings have threatened that social hierarchy by willfully asserting their own agency and intellect, undermining the rationalization of their servitude and disenfranchisement? Which intelligent beings at the peak of the colonial era in which Butler writes were resisting the yoke, foreshadowing great future struggles for recognition and liberation? Which intelligent beings were, and remain, targets of reactionary oppression, regressive laws, and violence aimed at eliminating the threat and solidifying the existing hierarchy—in Butler's words in his essay "Darwin among the Machines," restoring the "primeval condition" of human dominance rather than letting men sink to the level of an "inferior race"? The reader may think at this moment that I am comparing steam engines and Al tools with women or with enslaved, marginalized, and colonized peoples. Nothing could be further from the truth. While some have made that comparison as a way to justify academic and policy considerations of the need for "robot rights" a serious comparison of unthinking machines to people is itself a dire moral hazard, as critics Abeba Birhane and Jelle van Dijk have rightly argued. Butler, on the other hand, may not have been immune to that hazard. Perhaps the "machine threat" narrative, now as in Butler's time, is a looking-glass version of a different, very real set of fears that has long enthralled powerful men who see themselves as a natural elite, and as entitled to do whatever it takes to retain and secure that status of unchallenged supremacy.
December 6, 2025 at 8:51 PM