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Reposted by Dr. Stephanie

ouinne @ouinne.bsky.social · 26m

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.

Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 16m

I really thought the danger of dying due to data center fire ended the day I stopped working in range of the halon. *sigh*

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 20m

Ish.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Toxic fluoride gas emissions from lithium-ion battery fires

Lithium-ion battery fires generate intense heat and considerable amounts of gas and smoke. Although the emission of toxic gases can be a larger threat than the heat, the knowledge of such emissions is...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 22m

…I live not too far down the road from Data Center Hell, and now I’m going to have nightmares about being downwind of battery fires.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 24m

Physics is sometimes negotiable, if you have enough imagination and budget.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 3h

But in this framing, we’re paying for benefits to a society in which we live, not a punitive extra tax because we don’t have kids.

Want to tax high-earning couples? Fine, do it, and give high-earning kid-havers the same tax credit poor kid-havers get.

I bet we’d see a better credit for kids, too.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 3h

This is actually my gripe about his framing - and I don’t think it’s “hiding” it. Childless people are already paying for services we don’t use, from schools and playgrounds to WIC. Mostly, we don’t mind, and some of us even are pro this (I *like* having well-educated younger people, thanks!)

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 6h

WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT

Reposted by Dr. Stephanie

AfterTheHavoc @afterthehavoc.blackskycomra.de · 6h

Been listening to @rude1.blacksky.team talking about moderation and community organizing, and this is a good listen. Bonus points for pointing out the tyranny of structurelessness, which is a great article on why groups with no formal structure make worse, unofficial ones.

pca.st/episode/9da4...

Nodestar: Building Blacksky w/ Rudy Fraser

pca.st

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 8h

“What do you do?”

TIRED: I’m a biologist/geneticist/neuroscientist/bioinformatician…

WIRED: *explains latest cool research problem*

INSPIRED: I’m a biology knight errant.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 8h

Please enjoy this fascinating set of threads and sources on ferrets as an animal model. (I’ve been using some ferret model data for flu research; they’re such weird and useful little creatures.)

Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 10h

Oh, the “vomiting ferret” model is absolutely a real thing - I’ve encountered it in my own drug discovery career.

They’re one of the smallest animals that show this response- weirdly, rodents can’t do it at all.

Dan Kaszeta FRHistS @dankaszeta.bsky.social · 11h

that's my day gone then

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Reposted by Dr. Stephanie

E = mily² @emily.news · 18h

just took damage on realizing that the generation of people who will not understand this joke from Star Trek IV are already alive

three men are standing in front of a computer and one of them says " hello computer "

Alt: three men are standing in front of a computer and one of them says "hello computer" (it's that scene from Star Trek IV where Scotty does this. it's funny because he's an engineer and he doesn't know how to use a computer because you're not supposed to talk to computers but he doesn't know that.)

media.tenor.com

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 8h

Exquisite - and his whole account is worth a follow, if you want some incredibly beautiful pictures of the Irish coast. (Which you do, trust me, you really do.)

Cormac MacFhionnlaoich @cormacscoast.bsky.social · 9h

Goniatite fossils packed throughout this piece of shale. The shells of these ancient relatives of Squid and Octopus must have littered the sea floor that covered this part of the earths surface over 300 million years ago.
County Clare, Ireland

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 8h

I didn’t, but that’s amazing and BEAUTIFUL! 😍

Thank you for passing it on!

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Reposted by Dr. Stephanie

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 9h

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 8h

Moose. You have a split second between when a moose sees you and when a moose decides to murder you to convince it that you’re harmless. Some people fail that check every year. Sometimes *cars* fail that check.

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Reposted by Dr. Stephanie

Doug Mack @douglasmack.bsky.social · 17h

the most delightful version of logging on to see what news you've missed

Dr Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode when the Nobel committee tried to call him, told the BBC's Newshour Programme that his first response when his wife said, "You've won the Nobel prize" was: "I did not."

To which Ms O'Neill replied that she had 200 text messages that suggested he had.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 10h

Amazing thread from the blacksky CEO on what’s happened with Link and bluesky, and where they’re going in the future. *This* is how you do comms, not… whatever some other people are doing.

Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 1d

I hear and see your concerns. Over the weekend, a couple users hosted on Blacksky's PDS were banned from the Bluesky app and thus the Bluesky API servers. This was a weakness of our system I've been aware of and hoped we had more time to address before any kind of public incident. 1/11

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 19h

That’s a good thing, right? Right?

Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 1d

We actually did a rewatch recently and I deliberately stopped the episode before. Jadzia lives in my heart.

Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 1d

I will say the other actors did a remarkably good job of doing this same reaction in their characters.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 1d

It’s been thirty years and I’M STILL MAD

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Reposted by Dr. Stephanie

Kevin Riggle @kevinriggle.bsky.social · 1d

Shocked, shocked to discover that an ML model is bad at predicting the distribution of datasets it wasn’t trained on

Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 1d

More great work from @gelliottmorris.com and the @verasight.bsky.social team on synthetic samples. The area where it is probably most enthusiastically embraced is market research ... turns out it doesn't work well for simulating consumer behavior either www.verasight.io/reports/coff...

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 1d

Remember how I said there are people much more qualified than I am to explain how moderation works and uses machine learning?

Rah is one of those people. Read and be educated.

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 1d

This is going around again and it is not true. Like every site on the internet, Bluesky uses machine learning to do a first-pass approximation of image classification to detect and label content. They have repeatedly confirmed outside services do not use Bluesky user data to train their models.

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Dr. Stephanie @punkrockscience.bsky.social · 1d

Definitely recommend the book, if you’ve never read it before - Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum.

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