Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 8h

There are MPs in parliament who have the personal lived experience of being part of the John Key administration that combined the sickness and jobseeker benefits. It ain't ignorance. Even if they aren't listening to advice, they were there on the day in the past.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 12h

With these numbers, it is not so much the tail, as the back half of the pantomime horse.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 12h

(This is a strategy for talking to small c conservative "just want a peaceful government they can ignore" voters to point out the insanity in the wings).

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 12h

I think a point to make to National voters who consider their party too led by NZF and ACT, is that currently 28% of government MPs are NZF and ACT, on present polling if the current government got back in it would be about 36% NZF and ACT. Then start explaining the current NZF party list.

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Reposted by David Hood

madison! @madepn.bsky.social · 23h

here is my first rendering of the bread scale of triviality (any suggestions welcome; I love thinking about bread)

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Dr Karaitiana Taiuru MITP, MInstD @ktaiuru.bsky.social · 13h

Sovereign computers, software and servers for home and office. Come and join me for this live webinar with an Open Source expert, noon October 22, Nau mai, haere mai koutou!

sovereign-computers.eventbrite.co.nz

Sovereign computers, software and servers for home and office

I talk with Tangata Tiriti Rob Elshire about his journey over decades setting up sovereign computers and data storage facilities.

Sovereign-Computers.eventbrite.co.nz

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 14h

An interesting comparison might be with a third measure- map distance.

David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 14h

And the constituency that votes for them.
bsky.app/profile/thou...

David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · Aug 21

I absolutely agree the Greens have pro-social collective values, but I also found that the 2023 NZES has a how much do you trust trust scientists question, and Green voters in 2023 exhibit the highest positive (lot + somewhat) trust with 98.9% of Green voters.

Black and Purple trust scientists as a general statement, orange and yellow mistrust. No opinion excluded.

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globe moment @pacifismenjoyer.bsky.social · 1d

It's so easy to not post assassination memes. Genuinely the only thing bad about this situation is that the mods ordinarily don't ban the big edgelord accounts for this stuff so a large constituency thinks it's normal to "it's just a meme bro" about shootings and "consequences".

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Paul Brislen @brislen.nz · 16h

And just like that... another cell tower burned down in Queenstown Lakes region.

That's five attacks in the past few weeks.

The irony is this puts people's health at risk. Almost all emergency calls go via mobile networks.

It'll be at least four weeks before a replacement tower can be deployed.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 16h

Need more prayers while the reign of frogs continues.

Missing The Point @missingthept.bsky.social · 17h

“Dear God, protect our officers from the frog.”

a guy in a frog costume standing facing a line of police and ICE agents in Portland

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 17h

While I really don't want to go back to being "the business confidence data guy" of 2019. It is about a 40 point difference in party in power given similar conditions.

bsky.app/profile/thou...

David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · Nov 30

It is scattered all over Twitter because it was an albatross around my neck for many years. But I think these are the 3 main graphs.

Every other country's Business Confidence is a better predictor of GDP

NZ Business Confidence is uniquely uncorrelated to GDP

It is about political reckons and what the past was like

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Te Ara Paerangi Com - Research Advocacy Capability @te-ara-paerangi.community · 18h

We'd love to have a huge turn out for Nic's talk. Please help spread the word. There are downloadable pdf adverts in the link below. They can be emailed or printed. If you work in a public space (e.g. Library) you could help by printing and posting one of the flyers. Ngā mihi nui!

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Nick Baker @nickbaker.digital · 18h

In my short reign as NZ's self-acclaimed premier Twitter pollster, I determined that for a small population NZ leads the world in unlimited flavours of pies, ice cream and bars of chocolate.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 18h

In Ōtepoti I had a choice of same day times with an online booking last week.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 18h

I did contemplate a walk to the Hocken Archive to consult the copy of Helen Leach's recipe index lodged there, but even with a look through papers past I began to get too many epiestemological questions about when is a pie a pie.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 18h

As I was flicking through papers past, I did see what might be a history of pies made from curried ingredients, so butter chicken would be a pretty natural progression of that.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 18h

There are around 2 million private dwellings in New Zealand, so without quibbling exact finer detail, 200,000 is ballpark 1 home in 10.

Ben Ross @benakl.bsky.social · 19h

Now then
Under the new Planning Regime there will be three categories:

Cat 1. Green. Tolerable. No intervention required nominally

Cat 2. Yellow. At Risk. Can be defended, preferably through Green Engineering but don't discount Hard Engineering.

Cat 3. Red. Catastrophic. Managed Retreat
Ctd.

RNZ News Feeds @rnzrss.bsky.social · 19h

$180 billion of homes sitting on flood-prone land, government report finds

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 19h

I did also find this very near cousin to a mince and cheese pie in the 1930s- a (tomato and egg and) mince and white sauce pie, though in modern terms I might call it more of a pastaless lasagna (because of the ingredients and layering).

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 178, 23 April

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 19h

Yes. Yes it is I'm afraid.

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David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 19h

While having a look myself, I did find this abomination of a quote "pie" unquote from the 1980s

The Press, 26 September 1983. via papers past

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Daryl Green @ilikeoldbooks.bsky.social · 6d

by the way, all those benign AI bots crawling the internet for for-profit LLMs, yeah it turns out when 9,000 hit your archive catalogue or image database all at once they break the system. This is an emerging sector issue.

The last weeks have literally seen humans labouring to feed the machines...

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rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 20h

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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Ira Hyman @irahyman.bsky.social · 1d

AI generated false references.

For a discussion with grad students, I asked ChatGPT for 10 academic papers with summaries on a topic I know well.

6/10 were made up citations that sounded possible (1 by me!).

Of the 4 real papers, the summaries all were over-general and included errors.

Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.bsky.social · 1d

And here we go. I never wrote this article, and yet it is cited here.

www.liberalbriefs.com/geopolitics/...

And of course, it sounds so plausible, I seriously checked whether I had forgotten it, or the footnote was slightly wrong.

#AIisnotresearch

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Our World in Data @ourworldindata.org · 23h

Does the news reflect what we die from?

The image presents a comparison of the leading causes of death in the United States for 2023 and the media coverage these causes receive from three news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fox News.

In the footer, it notes the data sources, indicating that the information is based on media mentions from Media Cloud (2025) and death data from the US CDC (2025) and the Global Terrorism Index, with a clarification that values are normalized to sum to 100%.

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