Tessera

Cyberdyne Genealogy Dept @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 1h ago

Do you believe in eschatological parables Because you’re living in one

Again, as an atheist, I find it extremely annoying to have my non-belief in the antichrist tested in this way

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 13h ago

Tangentially related to this neat thread about broader grid efficiency, but this has been the neatest difference electronics-wise between living abroad in 2008-2010 & now. Almost everything is USB-powered now and it's glorious. No more buying a ton of those big blocky AC bricks with changeable tips

Stephen Judkins@stephenjudkins.bsky.social · 14h ago

Remember how power bricks used to be bigger, heavier, hotter, and less powerful than power modern power supplies? The SNES power supply can provide 8.5W and this much smaller GaN USB-PD can supply 65W, at greater efficiency. Well, the same thing is probably going to happen to grid transformers. 🧵

Stephen Judkins @stephenjudkins.bsky.social · 14h ago

Remember how power bricks used to be bigger, heavier, hotter, and less powerful than power modern power supplies? The SNES power supply can provide 8.5W and this much smaller GaN USB-PD can supply 65W, at greater efficiency. Well, the same thing is probably going to happen to grid transformers. 🧵

Stan Pham @thisisspiffy.bsky.social · 21h ago

Your first look at the #Murderbot season 2 cast. Aka, what I did on my summer non-vacation. #PremiumQualityEntertainment

Henry Mance @henrymance.ft.com · 21h ago

Woah.

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · yesterday

successfully(??) ordered two midi keyboards and an organ pedalboard and didn’t get banned from WhatsApp again and now we’ll see how shipping works (holy moly $$$$ tho)

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · yesterday

Does anyone out there in #databs #rstats have an OpenIntro teacher account who can invite me as a teacher to OpenIntro?

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

looool a little tree fell on our house days before it’s supposed to go on the market

A tree on our house, with a broken gutter

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

My latest attempt at an AI/LLM policy in my intro to social science stats class. Basically two rules: 1. Everything human-facing must be human-generated 2. You are responsible for understanding, verifying, and citing everything an LLM generates quantf26.classes.andrewheiss.com/syllabus.htm...

Generative AI and LLMs
In this class, I have two general rules regarding LLMs:

Everything human-facing must be human-generated.
You are responsible for understanding, verifying, and citing everything an LLM generates.
I’ll explain what these mean below, but first, an important warning!

LLMs and learning
Phew, I can talk about the relationship between learning and LLMs for hours (see this for a more formal explanation of my thinking). LLMs and generative AI can be useful for statistical programming, but only when you already know what you are doing. They can be dangerous and counterproductive for beginners.

Additionally, using LLMs and generative AI to write does not lead to deeper learning. The point of writing is to help crystalize and organize your thinking. Pasting LLM-generated words into an assignment to make it look like you read and understood the content will not help you learn. Pasting LLM-generated code into an assignment and hoping that it works will not help you learn.

Rule 1: Everything human-facing must be human-generated
Generative AI tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude can be helpful for generating ideas or topics for your assignments and can even help you find existing research about topics you’re interested in. They are useful for debugging and troubleshooting code.

These uses are permitted in this course.

If you want to use LLM tools to document your code, clean up your notes, look up error messages, search for research related to your topic, and so on, cool. Do it. That’s fine. It’s unavoidable nowadays anyway, since every R-related Google search will give you a Gemini-generated answer at the top with mostly working R code.

Any writing and revisions, however, must be your own. You may not use AI tools to write any of the text you submit to me. AI text adds nothing to my understanding. I have no interest in engaging with it at all. There is nothing more disheartening for me than spending my time grading something that ChatGPT spat out in 10 seconds. I want to see good engagement with the readings. I want to see your thinking process. I want to see you make connections between the readings. I want to see your personal insights. I don’t want to see a bunch of words that look like a human wrote them. That’s not useful for future-you. That’s not useful for me. That’s a waste of time.

Thus, anything human-facing (i.e. not stuff done just for yourself, like your own personal notes, research, etc.) must be human-generated (i.e. written by you). You may not use AI tools to write any portion of your assignments. Using AI tools in this way, or failing to disclose the use of AI tools, will be treated as a case of plagiarism and referred to the Honor Council.

Rule 2: You are responsible for understanding, verifying, and citing everything an LLM generates
These tools are really good at working with code, but again, only if you know what you’re doing. Without guidance and expertise, LLMs love making lots of extraneous, convoluted, and weird code by default. The code ostensibly works, but it’s often strange and unnecessary and uses uncommon syntax and packages.

If you use LLMs for help with code, you must understand and verify what’s going on with your code and you must cite where it came from.

This means that you need to know what each line is doing. If the LLM uses a function or gives you an argument that you don’t understand or haven’t seen before, figure out why and figure out if it’s necessary. Look at the documentation for the function. Search Google for other examples. Ask the LLM about it, and then add comments to the code explaining what’s going on.

The citation doesn’t need to be anything formal (i.e. don’t worry about Chicago or APA guidelines)—it just needs to (1) say which LLM you used, and (2) mention what you asked the LLM.

You should do this by using code comments—inside your code chunk, add a # to the beginning of a line so that it’s treated as a comment (or text) instead of actual code.

Here’s an example of what this can look like:

Here’s an example of what this can look like:

# This calculates the average GDP per capita in each region in the dataset,
# for all countries after 2015. I couldn't remember how to use group_by() and
# summarise() together, so I asked Gemini:
#
# "I'm using tidyverse. I have a dataset named my_dataset and I'm filtering it
# to include all countries after 2015. I want to calculate region averages with
# group_by and summarise but cannot remember the syntax"

my_dataset |>
filter(year > 2015) |>
group_by(region) |>
# Gemini here included na.rm = TRUE, which omits any rows with missing values
# when calculating the average. That's okay and necessary here because
# South Sudan is missing some years of GDP data
summarise(avg_gdp = mean(gdp_per_cap, na.rm = TRUE))

# Gemini also included an extra ungroup() function at the end, but I don't need
# that because there are no groups leftover after summarising here

↑ That’s a lot of extra comments and you won’t always see stuff like that in real life code, but I want to see it here, and future-you will want to see it too.

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

not every automated thing computers do is ai

Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

Just read an AI disclosure statement that said that the authors used Zotero and because it takes DOIs and parses them into author/title/journal/issue/number/etc information, it's using an LLM and needs to be disclosed. But that's just… normal programmatic parsing of JSON from crossref??…

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

Just read an AI disclosure statement that said that the authors used Zotero and because it takes DOIs and parses them into author/title/journal/issue/number/etc information, it's using an LLM and needs to be disclosed. But that's just… normal programmatic parsing of JSON from crossref??…

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

This place is neat

Exterior of Georgetown University Qatar, with a sand-colored building contrasted with a blue sky

Main atrium, with a yellow ceiling, fancy chandeliers, and dozens of flags

The library central stairway, with a yellow ceiling and blue sky poking through skylights

Two minarets of the Education City mosque

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

My latest attempt at an AI/LLM policy in my intro to social science stats class. Basically two rules: 1. Everything human-facing must be human-generated 2. You are responsible for understanding, verifying, and citing everything an LLM generates quantf26.classes.andrewheiss.com/syllabus.htm...

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

not every automated thing computers do is ai

Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

Just read an AI disclosure statement that said that the authors used Zotero and because it takes DOIs and parses them into author/title/journal/issue/number/etc information, it's using an LLM and needs to be disclosed. But that's just… normal programmatic parsing of JSON from crossref??…

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d ago

Just read an AI disclosure statement that said that the authors used Zotero and because it takes DOIs and parses them into author/title/journal/issue/number/etc information, it's using an LLM and needs to be disclosed. But that's just… normal programmatic parsing of JSON from crossref??…

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 3d ago

k here we go

Screenshot of season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Plex

Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 4d ago

Next up: idk? Maybe Buffy? Babylon 5? Expanse rewatch?

Sky Marchini @sky.skymarchini.net · 3d ago

friend sends

the "oh they got this all screwed up" meme from thesimpsons, but it goes from "PIVOT TO ASIA // NO MIDDLE EAST WARS" to "PIVOT TO ASIA? NO, MIDDLE EAST WARS!"

Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 3d ago

“I was asked not to mention the Times at all. I’m choosing not to honor that norm, b/c silence abt how accountability journalism gets suppressed is itself a form of suppression.” Read the back story of how @nytimes.com and @thebulwark.com killed @adambonica.bsky.social’s piece. What a mf badass.

With Fear and Favor

Institutions don’t have courage. They have incentives.

data4democracy.substack.com

Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 4d ago

John Gruber dislikes Anthropic’s watermarking because Claude may choose words that make AI text easier to detect instead of simply writing the best answer. I personally don’t care. Claude’s writing was already too clunky to send without editing. If editing also defeats the watermark, bonus.

Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anyth...

daringfireball.net

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 3d ago

It’s super neat seeing how WhatsApp is like a whole global (and free!) universal layer on top of standard telephone/sms, but holy cow it’s rickety and fragile.

Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 3d ago

lolol just got locked out of my WhatsApp account for 24 hours because I was chatting with a music store about ordering an organ pedalboard

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 3d ago

lolol just got locked out of my WhatsApp account for 24 hours because I was chatting with a music store about ordering an organ pedalboard

James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social · 3d ago

Not that anything matters anymore, but Oman hosts U.S. forces including USAF air wings alongside allowing us access to naval support facilities at Duqm. Great coalition building Mr. President! Very reassuring to our security partners!

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 3d ago

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 3d ago

Number of work days elapsed before I forgot to bring my office key to the office: 3

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 4d ago

Just finished the final episode of Battlestar Galactica (nightly stationary bike viewing, paused for two months bc of move) and while the last season was often a little bonkers, overall it was fantastic: 9/10, great fracking times.

Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 10mo ago

Just finished the final episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks (nightly stationary bike viewing), rewatching the whole thing for the first time since it ended last year and it continues to be *so much fun*: 10/10, absolutely adore this show

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 5d ago

lol guess it’s the Saturday Scaries now

John Lansing @pipedreaming.bsky.social · 5d ago

We need a World Building Expo where pavilions showcase plumbing, electrical, HVAC, elevators, building envelopes, insulation ect with typical regional methods/materials side by side.

American vs. European home building 🏠 learn how we build so differently! #building #learn #USA #UK

YouTube video by BAS Renovations

m.youtube.com

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 6d ago

LDS community here rules - Ghanaians, Nigerians, Kenyans, random European countries, Americans, and bunch of others all together (with a separate Tagalog-speaking ward that meets earlier because there are so many Filipinos)

Andrew Heiss@andrew.heiss.phd · 6d ago

First week of Friday church! Huge fan of the Middle Eastern reverse weekend

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 6d ago

First week of Friday church! Huge fan of the Middle Eastern reverse weekend

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 7d ago

man, WWI was nuts

Jeremy Salkeld@enclavedmicrostate.bsky.social · 7d ago

Excuse me what en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese...

Aki Vehtari @avehtari.bsky.social · last wk.

All four books I've co-authored are freely available online for non-commercial use: - Bayesian Workflow at avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-Wor... Links to other three books are in the quoted post 👇 (too many books to fit in one post!)

Bayesian Workflow book: Website – Bayesian Workflow book

Website for the Bayesian Workflow book by Gelman, Vehtari, McElreath, et al. — case studies, code, and exercises in R and Stan.

avehtari.github.io

Aki Vehtari@avehtari.bsky.social · 2y ago

All three books I've co-authored are freely available online for non-commercial use: - #Bayesian Data Analysis, 3rd ed (aka BDA3) at stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/ - #Regression and Other Stories at avehtari.github.io/ROS-Examples/ - Active Statistics at avehtari.github.io/ActiveStatis...

The cover of Bayesian Data Analysis book