"Resist the fascist takeover of [academia, sports, local government, tech, etc]! Read more on my substack."

go home, #recsys, you’re drunk. (I am very out of shape. I struggled the last half of the ride home on a 10.5mi round trip to a party. I don’t need a 3.7mi “recovery” run. I also don’t run.)

“We need data centers to stay ahead of China” seems to be a common belief of AI supporters. Why can’t we ever want to stay “ahead of China” when it comes to high-speed rail or EVs or low cost of living or public safety?

Easily one the 10 best Star Trek episodes from any series. Harris Yulin is just devastating in this role. This is also the moment DS9 took the gloves off. We don't get The Visitor, Far Beyond the Stars, or In the Pale Moonlight without Duet first.

Random Trek@randomtrek.bsky.social · 4d ago

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) Season 1, Episode 19: Duet 00:26:08.446

Research funds are only one of the levers the Trump administration has used against higher education. In a new essay, Suzanne B. Goldberg maps the many ways the federal government can pressure higher education, and argues that protecting universities requires understanding the full landscape.

Responding to Federal Whac-A-Mole: Challenges—and Opportunities—for Higher Education

knightcolumbia.org

And this shit starts *early*. When my student Amifa was doing the lit review for her gender stereotype work (md.ekstrandom.net/pubs/fire-dr...), she found a body of literature showing that exposure to stereotyped expectations affects kids' images and imaginations of how they fit in the world.

Fire Dragon and Unicorn Princess

Paper appearing at SIGIR eCom 2022 on reproduction of gender stereotypes in search engine results for children's products.

md.ekstrandom.net

Annalee@flowerhorne.com · 3d ago

You want boys to do a thing girls do, whether it's reading books or washing their butts, you gotta stop teaching them that things can be "for girls," and therefore inferior/for inferior people. Nothing else will work—except of course pushing women and girls out.

You want boys to do a thing girls do, whether it's reading books or washing their butts, you gotta stop teaching them that things can be "for girls," and therefore inferior/for inferior people. Nothing else will work—except of course pushing women and girls out.

I suspect a lot of the draw of HP was less about the prose and more about the social aspects made possible by its popularity. So read books in community where possible. If you don’t know where to find it, live post as you read and a community might appear. Maybe try Terry Pratchett.

Sandy Ernest Allen@sandyernestallen.bsky.social · 4d ago

If you're (cis and) ashamed you've not read a single book since Harry Potter or whatever, don't fret! I'd suggest you can totally explore other series some day, if you want to. If others want to share their favorite Harry Potter alternatives below, feel free, and maybe I'll write a post on this ...

So GitHub Actions was down yesterday… came back up in time to push out the LensKit release, but UGGHHH.

I also enjoy a gin for breakfast (or brunch), but then come up with new paper ideas w/ my acabestie, not murder and patriarchal white supremacist fever dreams.

A.R. Moxon@juliusgoat.bsky.social · 3d ago

It's really been something to watch Secretary Gin For Breakfast and the temporary president realize that when you shoot off all the missiles that means you don't have any more missiles; your Man War Fighters don't sweat out new missiles no matter how much T you put in their breakfast waffles.

Cloudflare (>20% of all domains) has started automatically implementing DSM Dir art 4 rights reservation (ie copyright/TDM objection to scraping) for all sites that do not have a robots.txt file. They also adding purpose fields to robots.txt unilaterally. developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additio...

So there are a whole lot of people for whom it's a v reasonable assumption is that the baroque and slightly greasy style of AI-writing is what good looks like; meanwhile AI detection software will flag their writing as AI, and the only people who'll pass as human writers will be super privileged

For a junk drawer to legally qualify as a real junk drawer, what is the ONE absolute mandatory item it must include? A mysterious computer cable that is either completely unhinged (e.g. 3.5mm TRS to RJ-45) or is for a port that hasn't been sold on new consumer equipment for 15 years.

Helen Kennedy@helenkennedy.com · 3d ago

For a junk drawer to legally qualify as a real junk drawer, what is the ONE absolute mandatory item it must include? A cocktail swizzle stick from a place you don't remember.

New LensKit release today! Steam Australia dataset import, FlexMF WARP bug fix, SLIM performance improvements, and more. lenskit.org/stable/relea...

it's always odd when "you should expose yourself to more diverse ideas" always means a certain kind of conservatism instead of like, Indigenous art, new fusion foods, math paradoxes, or the Dvorak keyboard layout

Research group's compute server keeps failing with "GPU has fallen off the bus" errors. I do not like this season of Dimension 20.

Hey BlueSky, you’re neat, so you get this first: the clip I asked @dropout.tv to do for me of @dimension20.dropout.tv Adventuring Academy, because “community” gets tossed around a lot in TTRPGs & game studies but @analoggamestudies.bsky.social is doing the work.

I understand that funding bodies want to go all in on AI as the shiny new innovation thing. But if all the grants start going to AI at the expense of everything else then the research sector is going to end up looking like a farm with dozens of threshers hacking away in a field with no wheat.

This reminds me of the fundamentalist Christians who reject set theory because it entails multiple infinities and God is the only infinity. They write whole-ass math textbooks premised on rejecting godless set theory!

Elizabeth Nolan Brown@enbrown.bsky.social · 4d ago

My 4-year/old just learned about the concept of infinity and is now throwing a tantrum over it. “It’s weird! I don’t like it. I just want numbers to stop!”

I think the major story here is that AI agents know every hacking technique and infinite persistence. Their guardrails are turned off during testing. Misconfiguring the sandbox is negligence. The “rogue” story is overblown.

Foundation S3 is a ride (complementary).

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE)@shengokai.blacksky.app · 5d ago

It seems I am about a season behind on the sexy Lee Pace in Space show, Foundation, so I'm gonna start that up.

Learned yesterday that the IBM System/360 Model 44 had a floating point precision selector knob. Now I want to make a USB knob and a custom WASM interpreter that uses it to adjust FP precision. (This is not a good idea.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Sys...

IBM System/360 Model 44 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This is interesting work, and important question! It's also a question we touch on, briefly & much less formally, in our paper on LLM fairness: we argue that general model providers should have an affirmative responsibility to support downstream auditing. md.ekstrandom.net/pubs/acl-llm...

Benjamin Laufer@laufer.bsky.social · 3w ago

One intuition behind many AI policy proposals is that downstream AI applications -- the companies deploying AI in healthcare, finance, education, customer service, etc. -- should bear responsibility for ensuring safety. Our paper asks: What incentives does that create for the firms building AI?

I would like to propose the Taco Bell Principle When a person/institution Did A Problem, & IMMEDIATELY fesses up & takes proactive steps to solve it That's exactly what we want them to do? So how bout we let them live ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sarah Taber@sarahtaber.bsky.social · 3w ago

A quick word on Taco Bell: That's where we found the suspected lettuce, and it's not bc Taco Bell is gross. It's bc Taco Bell is REALLY GOOD at tracing product! Keeping track of exactly where they got their ingredients, & exactly what restaurants each shipment of ingredients went to!

"don't make enough money" is a fig leaf All those degree programs--social work, art, etc.--have disproportionately female student bodies. This is designed to make it harder for women to attend college--college education being a key factor in women's autonomy from men & left-leaning voting pattern.

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 7d ago

President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/aaAEu6v

Somewhat less confusing than the Confusing Library. youtu.be/AYxmPHLU9oA?...

The Two Ronnies The Confusing Library

YouTube video by PPLDTV

youtu.be

Governor JB Pritzker@govpritzker.illinois.gov · 6d ago

What color, what subject? Math is yellow. English is blue. Science is red. History is green. Languages are purple.

Bluesky is a "liberal bubble" because fascist chuds can't get traction without algorithmic assistance and because people here trained themselves to block "debate me" trybois the instant they roll up

The Verge@theverge.com · 7d ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

Happy 20th birthday, Pandoc. pandoc.org/twenty-years...

typst doesn't have pdfpages support yet, so I am assembling my tenure dossier PDF as $DEITY intended: emitting JSON and blank pages to indicate PDF inclusion, extracting them with pdftotext, parsing with Tcl, and using qpdf to inject the included documents in their correct positions.

“Coming up with universal rules, checklists, or impositions that apply to all of science is futile, and essentially authoritarian.” - @devezer.bsky.social Probably won’t be the most quoted line in the interview but one that I adore. Replace “science” with “people” and it still largely applies!

Mark Rubin@markrubin.bsky.social · last wk.

Q&A with @devezer.bsky.social about metascience, open science, and her work in this area.