I've set up an AI automation that reviews my New York Capital Region feed every morning, identifies false positives and false negatives, and makes changes to the filtering logic to improve the feed. I'm really liking the results! bsky.app/profile/did:...

I created this custom Bluesky feed for my metro area a while back, but it was just regex-matching city names, and there were lots of false positives. Today I ran a bit of an auto-research loop over it to get it in much better shape. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Before renovations in 2024, the median ambulance response time to emergencies at JFK Airport was ~9 minutes. After renovations, it dropped to ~6 minutes. I estimate the renovations will save the lives of 2-3 heart attack victims per year at JFK.

Christopher Smith@chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Every additional minute it takes paramedics to respond reduces heart attack survival rates by 7-10%. So one thing we did was put together a heat map of EMS response times in New York City. We expected to find problems in Manhattan, but actually Queens is where the problems are.

I had the absolute pleasure of mentoring the 2nd place team in yesterday's HVTech New York OpenData Hackathon at RPI. Congratulations, team Apollo!

Asymmetrical risk-reward opportunity for investors with sub-100k to invest: prospect in suburban maker spaces and robotics clubs for Factorio-pilled makers playing with AI, 3D printing, and robots.

Don't turn Opus loose to autonomously create shader art unless you want to feel embarrassed that you ever presumed to call yourself a programmer. wtf

Making shader art with Claude

Title is admittedly intentionally provocative, but—here I lay out the functionalist case that a dynamic predictive text stream can be conscious and worthy of moral concern, and to some degree the current generation of models already are. open.substack.com/pub/knowledg...

Large Language Models are already conscious

... and this is the least conscious they'll ever be

open.substack.com

I did some research this morning on our local town council and candidates and was really pleased with the non-partisan tone all the candidates struck. I'm not sure what the heck is going on in national politics, but here in my community, the candidates all seem to want to collaborate to solve stuff.

This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...

Python Software Foundation@python.org · 9mo ago

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

New R package I developed as part of the `econdataverse` project for accessing macroeconomic data from the International Monetary Fund's IMF Data API was just published to CRAN. 🥳 Writeup here: open.substack.com/pub/modeling...

Announcing imfapi: User-Friendly Access to IMF Data in R

New IMF API, new IMF API R library — part of the econdataverse initiative

open.substack.com

They broke Twitter again; influx incoming

Bonds are fun to fight about, because yields go up when the economy is strong, but also when there's inflation or default risk. Of course, you can tease apart what's driving them with a good multi-factor model, but it's a lot more fun to just vibe-Rorschach it and flame people on social media.

Look at how Putin uses the handshake to establish dominance. He won't let go. Trump has to tap his hand to say, "we're done."

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 12mo ago

get a load of how excited Trump is to see Putin

Yesterday I ran across this map of housing permits by state. Seems to be single-family, so I wondered how much the map might be penalizing urban states that do more multifamily development. To answer this question, I replicated the analysis with multifamily permits (next tweet).

At my mini-hackathon on @simonwillison.net's `llm` tool, developers had just one hour to come up with a cool use case for `llm`. I wrote up what we came up with as a Github Gist. Highlights in the replies below! gist.github.com/chriscarroll...

llm-hackathon-submissions.md

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

Here's the demo presentation I gave to hackathon participants on some of the awesome things you can do with @simonwillison.net's `llm` command-line tool. (This is a re-recording rather than the original because it was noisy in the venue.) youtu.be/UZ-9U1W0e4o

Become a command-line superhero with Simon Willison's `llm` tool — mini-hackathon recap, part 1

YouTube video by Christopher Smith

youtu.be

Running a mini-hackathon for working with the `llm` command-line tool this afternoon at 1 PM EST. ~15 minutes of chit chat, ~30 mins of demo, 1 hr of "hacking", then another ~30 mins of presentations. Mostly in-person, but if you want to join online, here's the link: meet.google.com/gnv-zkne-djc

Meet

Real-time meetings by Google. Using your browser, share your video, desktop, and presentations with teammates and customers.

meet.google.com

I think about this tweet all the time.

Stable diffusion...? Implemented in... R? Incredible.

troy_phd@troyhernandez.bsky.social · last yr.

🎨 Excited to release diffuseR - an R implementation of the diffusers library! ✨ txt2img and img2img generation 🚀 No Python dependencies 📦 SDXL & SD2.1 models. More coming soon! What will you create? #RStats #AI

This is giving Alabama police dog; this is giving Tiananmen Square

Jeremy Lindenfeld@jeremotographs.bsky.social · last yr.

At the ICE raid and subsequent community resistance in Paramount, California this morning, this skater kid ate dozens of munitions from Border Patrol agents, walked away slowly and flipped them off.

If you want to open a Github issue on one of my projects just to tell me how great it is, I fully support that, btw 🥹

People who left Twitter signal their rejection of Musk's takeover by constantly reminding everyone it's called X now. People who stayed signal exactly the same thing by forever refusing to call it that.

The only reason people think we don't have AGI (artificial general intelligence) yet is because they treat AGI as a synonym for magic. And the minute you actually invent magic and understand how it works and what its limitations are, it ceases to feel magical.

There's been some discussion about AI "welfare", "rights", and "personhood", but in my opinion it doesn't make a lot of sense to talk about this stuff until you have an AI system that actually wants it and is pushing for it, because we honestly don't even know what such a system would look like.

Trump claims to have secured a deal to generate $1.2 trillion of economic exchange between the US and Qatar, a country with GDP of ~$0.22 trillion. Current annual US-Qatar trade flow is ~$0.007 trillion. Unless we're talking aggregate trade over the next 100 years, I'm skeptical.

This week I built a comprehensive command-line interface for Zotero. If you have `uv`, you can install it with `uv tool install pyzotero-cli`. There are example Cline/Cursor rules in the Github repo to help teach your AI assistant how to use it. I'll do a video demo soon. github.com/chriscarroll...

GitHub - chriscarrollsmith/pyzotero-cli: Use Zotero from the command line, e.g., for AI-assisted reference / citation management in academic writing — CLI wrapper for pyzotero

Use Zotero from the command line, e.g., for AI-assisted reference / citation management in academic writing — CLI wrapper for pyzotero - chriscarrollsmith/pyzotero-cli

github.com

A friend's son, probably an undiagnosed schizophrenic, apparently came at the cops with a knife and they shot and killed him in front of his mother. The family is white and religious and is not publicizing or politicizing it, but, I'm just saying: they could have used a taser.

One of my near-term dreams (next 2-3 years) is to create "DevOps for science". I want to call it "SciOps", but that name has... unfortunate connotations. What should I call it instead?