Leif Hancox-Li, PhD
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struthious.bsky.social
Leif Hancox-Li, PhD
@struthious.bsky.social
2.4K followers 1.3K following 4.9K posts
Applied scientist working on LLM evaluation and publishing in AI ethics. Formerly: technical writing, philosophy. Urbanism nerd in my spare time. Opinions here my own. he/they 🏳️‍⚧️. https://boltzmann-brain.github.io/
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struthious.bsky.social
gonna have to get mountaineering mittens if we’re gonna protest every week throughout the winter. my 45NRTH gloves are good enough for commuting length rides but not for standing around outside for extended periods
Photo of Anti-ice protest in the snow
January 11, 2026 at 8:52 PM
struthious.bsky.social
not a derby county fan in any way shape or form but let's be real this is the best english football crest
derby county fc crest. it is a ram with large horns in an aggressive stance
January 11, 2026 at 12:30 AM
struthious.bsky.social
Banger from @danhon.com about LLMs as LiteracyTech.

newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s21e...

a good way to empathize with the semi-literate, btw, is to learn to read a foreign language.
excerpt from linked blog post with text: 1.1 LLMs as LitTech, Their Use as Response to Mass Functional Illiteracy I will start with some of the interesting bits first to get your attention before diving into the story and thinking-out-loud. • I am calling generative AI for text (LLMs, Chatbots etc) LiteracyTech • LiteracyTech because they are assistive technologies for people with low literacy/low functional literacy • LiteracyTech itself is a symptom -- a response to the failure of education systems to prepare people to live in a world of complicated text • In other words, people use LiteracyTech because they have a functional literacy disability • This is horrifying
January 9, 2026 at 2:13 AM
struthious.bsky.social
the deeper I go the more absurd it gets: the moral panic spreader was going to insist that they not include their preprint in the research. I doubt he'll succeed in the request, because publicly available data is exempt from consent. www.ecfr.gov/on/2018-07-1...
Screenshot from the link with text: Secondary research for which consent is not required: Secondary research uses of identifiable private information or identifiable biospecimens, if at least one of the following criteria is met: (i) The identifiable private information or identifiable biospecimens are publicly available;
January 6, 2026 at 6:04 AM
struthious.bsky.social
the things you find on the indie web github.com/quasimatt/qu...
diagram from linked paper showing how various genders take up points on a sphere
January 2, 2026 at 11:11 PM
struthious.bsky.social
Reuploading the before and after pics here. The post is by Mike Masnick
December 23, 2025 at 4:58 AM
struthious.bsky.social
Based.
Photo of excerpt from “bonkers about beetles” with text: “Pennsylvania firefly females mimic the light signals of other fireflies to lure in romancing males of other species. Any poor firefly tricked by this cunning ploy is eaten alive. The males use this mimicry to their advantage, pretending to be prey species in order to entice females to them for mating.”
December 10, 2025 at 4:58 PM
struthious.bsky.social
December 8, 2025 at 4:36 AM
struthious.bsky.social
lol I posted this right before I saw that they are throwing a fit over paid parking. F them all.
photo of a anti-parking meter sign on the strip that strats 'stop the meter creep!' and ends 'keep the strip local, lively, and free!'
December 7, 2025 at 10:50 PM
struthious.bsky.social
Michael Harrington on the counterculture
Photo of a passage in the book “the conquest of cool” with text: “Michael Harrington described the counterculture in 1972 as a massifi-cation of the bohemia in which he had spent his youth, an assumption of the values of Greenwich Village by the decidedly nonrevolutionary middle class. "I wonder if the mass counterculture may not be a reflection of the very hyped and video-taped world it professes to despise," he wrote. Bohemia could not survive the passing of its polar opposite and precondition, middle-class morality. Free love and all-night drinking and art for art's sake were consequences of a single stern imperative: thou shalt not be bourgeois. But once the bourgeoisie itself became decadent-once businessmen started hanging nonobjective art in the boardroom-Bohemia was deprived of the stifling atmosphere without which it could not breathe.”
December 1, 2025 at 11:50 PM
struthious.bsky.social
so many bangers in this one
screenshot from the quoted article with text: "The phenomenon of people “hopping” from liberalism over the more orthodox and mass-action oriented democratic socialist Marxism to “ultraleft” political tendencies—sometimes anarchism, sometimes the more sectarian forms of Trotskyism, sometimes Maoist traditions, but styled in any number of ways (“I’m an anarcho-Gonzalo-ite!”)—is often just people taking the step from mainstream liberalism to ultraliberalism, but adorning this still essentially liberal politics with the aesthetics of more radical political traditions"
November 28, 2025 at 3:52 PM
struthious.bsky.social
Twisters is being sold
screenshot of facebook marketplace item. Twisters ice cream shop in Pittsburgh being offered for $450,000
November 26, 2025 at 7:33 PM
struthious.bsky.social
looking at the central plaza of this beautiful star fort and realizing that it's all parking 😭 (source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ae... )
wikimedia aerial photo of neuf-brisach star fort
November 18, 2025 at 11:30 PM
struthious.bsky.social
November 13, 2025 at 11:17 PM
struthious.bsky.social
We need better haters. Source: fly.io/blog/everyon...
Screenshot of text from the link. Text says: "People have wildly varying opinions about LLMs and agents. But whether or not they’re snake oil, they’re a big idea. You don’t have to like them, but you should want to be right about them. To be the best hater (or stan) you can be."
November 7, 2025 at 10:24 PM
struthious.bsky.social
the public already accepts that human-driven cars kill 40k people a year in the US alone

I'm not advocating that _anyone_ be killed by cars but idk how we can get ppl to care about one death if they don't care about 40k
screenshot of skeet with text "In San Francisco, anti-driverless car sentiment has been reignited by an incident in which an autonomous taxi killed a beloved local bodega cat. The taxi company, meanwhile, is like, “It is inevitable that one day one of our vehicles will kill a human being. The public will accept this.”
November 7, 2025 at 2:21 AM
struthious.bsky.social
This is Bad (source: network.fintechtakes.com/library/3d38...)
Image embedded in FinTech Takes newsletter. The image is of a tweet from a company called "Coverd" that includes the text: "Bet on your bills---OnlyFans, child support, and last night's Uber. Wipe them from your credit card by playing your favorite casino games all from the comfort of our app." Accompanying the text is an illustration of a lost machine.
October 31, 2025 at 10:22 PM
struthious.bsky.social
larger context of discussion.

critics could just say 'I object to harmful AI' but instead they have to do ridiculous back-to-nature stuff like 'technology is not human'. ok then stop wearing manufactured clothes and consuming manufactured food and vaccines
screenshot of discussion where Cat Hicks says that they are 'not so negative about the impacts of language as a technology', the interlocutor says 'i'm against anything that separates us from our unique humanity', I reply that 'technology is a human invention and part of our unique humanity', and the interlocutor says 'genAI is evil and separates us from humanity, this isn't a flexible opinion bye!'
October 29, 2025 at 2:07 PM
struthious.bsky.social
I'm not sure what the implications of a claim like this are. Humans are also not "designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions". In fact there's a long philosophical debate about whether/how evolution necessarily produces organisms with justified true beliefs.
screenshot of skeet saying "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"
October 27, 2025 at 6:34 PM
struthious.bsky.social
My skinny and peevish son
Photo of grey cat with tuxedo pattern on a cushion
October 24, 2025 at 3:00 PM
struthious.bsky.social
when even the AI art generator says 'upzone marin' www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancis...
screenshot from linked reddit thread. screenshot shows a comment that points out that the AI art piece depicts a nonexistent city in Marin County.
October 15, 2025 at 9:18 PM
struthious.bsky.social
beyond parody
screenshot from AlgorithmWatch newsletter with text: "In 2016, Elon Musk announced that one of his cars would drive from Los Angeles to New York entirely autonomously by 2018. He later changed the date to 2017. Earlier this month – for context, we are in late 2025 – two men attempted to make good on this promise. A YouTuber going by Bearded Tesla Guy, along with a friend, drove (manually) to San Diego, California, with a Tesla Model Y. There, they began the trip back in “self-driving” mode. About 100 kilometers later (that’s 2.5% of the planned journey), they saw something large on the highway lane. “Looks like roadkill,” one said. “No, it’s not,” he added, as the car, which did not brake, started flying after hitting the large piece of metal. Hours of YouTube videos from repair shops follow. In a subsequent video, the bearded guy said he’d continue the trip but added: “I’ll be a lot more conservative in what I consider something I’ll take [control of the vehicle] over for.” Hope dies last. Luis Prada. Tesla Bros Attempt Coast-to-Coast Trip in Self-Driving Mode, Crash Right Away, Vice, 25 Sept. "
October 9, 2025 at 7:28 PM
struthious.bsky.social
we can go to Mexico twice a year for HRT. so far, transphobia in my daily interactions is minimal, but once I stop feeling safe, I’m leaving
Screenshot of skeet with text “ I'm realizing a grim exercise/prompt may be in this ... If others want to share, I'm curious: Why aren't *you* leaving america (yet)? Asking for trans folks in particular, especially those of us on HRT and/or other very directly threatened in terms of our healthcare ... Reposts welcomed. Sigh.”
October 3, 2025 at 9:18 PM
struthious.bsky.social
Our so-called environmental activists have failed us.
Phot of excerpt from Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman with text: “ The hit parade of potentially worthwhile clean energy projects undermined explicitly or implicitly by the legacy of progressivism's Jeffersonian impulse is too long to list in full. But the most blatant examples make clear that the problem isn't just climate denialism. Progressives mo-bilized, for example, to fight a developer's plan to build a 690-megawatt solar plant northeast of Las Vegas, with the detractors claiming the new facility would imperil a desert tortoise habitat. The Audubon Society sued to block wind farms in California. The Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented project whose tagline is "We are the climate revolution," mobilized to fight solar projects in Amherst, Massachusetts, for fear that new paneling might lead to deforestation.* And the local chapter of the Sierra Club would play a crucial role in the fight against NECEC in Maine.”
September 28, 2025 at 3:31 PM
struthious.bsky.social
I think about this essay a lot cakezine.substack.com/p/a-baker-co...
"There’s a statistic that gets thrown around a lot—that asking an LLM to write one hundred words is like pouring an entire bottle of water on the ground6. By a conservative estimate, I’d drained two thousand, seven hundred, and ninety-six water bottles over the course of writing one recipe—no Chat GPT required. The time I spent composing this essay on my laptop and emailing it to the editors of Cake Zine cost about as much, in watt-hours, as asking Chat GPT over two hundred questions7. The dissonance between the performance of abstaining from AI and the acceptance of other, far more extractive behaviors has begun to feel profoundly unsettling to me. It would probably be more powerful, both ethically and environmentally, to abstain from chocolate. According to the Water Footprint Calculator, chocolate requires 129 gallons of water per ounce—14 more gallons of water per ounce than beef."
September 26, 2025 at 1:52 AM