Jeff Parks
@accolade-jeff.bsky.social
NYC. Just doing data stuff. And music stuff. Interests include open protocols, knowledge graphs + learning, ai + society, predictive / probabilistic modeling and forecasting ..
Online shopping eliminated these gatekeepers and disintermediated the market, allowing consumers to express their desires more directly. And it turns out that what people really want is cheap disposable goods, not more expensive but higher quality stuff that lasts a long time.
yeah, like how are you going to keep track of who has got what’s coming to them, and who hasn’t yet?
Vibe coded software is free as in puppy not free as in beer. Even if writing code is now cheap, you still have to maintain it.
forgive me but all the people who are like "you can ditch the NYT word games there are tons of other word games" and posting links to the profusion of new free internet word/puzzle games that are extremely definitely 100% vibe coded is a LITTLE bit funny
Update: Google just sent me a statement saying it is “rolling back” this AI feature that let anyone make completely bullshit satellite images. Comes after our demos of the tool and those from OSINT researchers. One of the worst AI tools I’ve ever seen bsky.app/profile/jose...
Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · 5d agoNew from 404 Media: Google Earth has introduced an AI feature that lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellite images. In our own tests, we added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles. This is a misinformation time bomb, will 100% be abused www.404media.co/google-earth...
I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:
How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran
The question is: what on earth is Google doing?
digitaldigging.org
there's no need to get outraged by every single thing. book destruction is not some kind of sin. it's not like they're trashing rare editions. lots of books get pulped all the time. now you're just looking for ways to be mad.
Our lab just released our AI Behavioral Observatory open source. It lets you run statistically valid tests on how AI behavior changes under various types of prompts. We have been using it for our own studies & I think it could help others do similar work. gail.wharton.upenn.edu/research-and...
From building an AI research tool to prompting the research itself
gail.wharton.upenn.edu
When it comes to AI, the $64,000 question is: if you can test AI-generated code to perfection and the tests pass, does the quality and structure of the code even matter? In other words, can sufficiently capable AI replace human coders? Can we treat the generated code as a black box? 1/10
“Historically accurate Odyssey” is giving “women can’t be Ghostbusters”
"When Black Friday comes, gonna stake my claim / I guess I'll change my name" open.spotify.com/track/1kn4dN...
Black Friday
Steely Dan · Katy Lied · Song · 1975
open.spotify.com
Thrilled to share that I received POLMETH's Statistical Software Award for 2026 for the #rstats package geomander. It's a performant toolkit for working with spatial data, especially election and demographic data. Learn more about the package at christophertkenny.com/geomander/
Geographic Tools for Studying Gerrymandering
A compilation of tools to complete common tasks for studying gerrymandering. This focuses on the geographic tool side of common problems, such as linking different levels of spatial units or estimatin...
christophertkenny.com
NEW: DHS plans to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help ICE investigate “voter fraud”, according to documents reviewed by 404 Media.
ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125 Million to Find ‘Voter Fraud’
A new procurement record says ICE wants access to personal data, including names, Social Security numbers, and ethnicity, to investigate in part what the agency calls “voters fraud.” It also plans to ...
404media.co
Feels increasingly like the advent of AGI will be less of a divine revelation, and more of an "oh, is that all there is to consciousness?"
I forget who said it, but someone posted that some people use LLMs like vending machines and some people use them like sewing machines wrt software
"The design of the world is like a flood, sweeping all before it." -Meditations 9-29
The Elon Musk business turducken continues to grow. He’s hid the failing Twitter/X business in xAI, bundled the unprofitable xAI into SpaceX and now it looks like the next step is to shove SpaceX and Tesla together into a super meme stock. Really annoyed my 401(K) will have this nonsense in it.
On a meeting where someone is demoing some software that has AI integration to generate SQL queries to remediate issues and "help" someone who doesn't know SQL to do basic DBA tasks. And the AI query was wrong. You can't let someone that isn't trained to work on DBs loose w/ AI, you WILL lose data
A typical afternoon trying to get Claude to follow instructions.
It's 2036. There's no water, it's 105 degrees outside, your boss is an app, and you need to show ID before checking your email
Every week with AI I see productivity gains but also see new forms of organizational and morale costs as well. This is a technology that makes a few good people great and a lot of mediocre people even worse but with a larger blast radius.
EXCLUSIVE: Eli Lilly gave compassionate use access to retatrutide, their unapproved powerful obesity drug, to a 79-year-old man in April. The application was arranged by a top doctor at NIH, and cleared by the FDA. www.statnews.com/2026/06/23/e...
Eli Lilly gave extraordinary obesity drug access to a 79-year-old patient. Who was it?
Exclusive: STAT has learned that Eli Lilly and the FDA allowed a 79-year-old to gain extraordinary access to an experimental obesity drug through the agency’s “compassionate use” program.
statnews.com
“Wharton School researchers have dubbed this phenomenon ‘cognitive surrender,’ in which users shift from treating AI as a tool to treating it as an authority, accepting its answers rather than actively evaluating them.”
The hidden cost of letting AI choose your lunch
Relying on AI for decision-making could lead to "cognitive surrender," a weakening of critical thinking that makes people distrust their own judgment.
businessinsider.com
