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Derek Larson, Ph.D. 🇨🇦

@dlarson.bsky.social

Collection Manager and Researcher at the Royal BC Museum. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Ph.D. studying lizards, dinosaur teeth, and fossil turtles. MtG, TTRPG, and boardgame enthusiast. He/him

387 Posts1508 Follower2580 Folgt
@mossworm.bsky.social · 2h ago

iDigBio sent out another advertisement for free webinars, but does not mention at all that the entire image database is going away permanently on August 31. Like, maybe I'm missing something, but I would be absolutely screaming for people to make copies before it's too late.

chira 🎋@artofchira.bsky.social · 20h ago

the hank green thing is getting under my skin a bit I think he's decent as a person but aggravating as a communicator. a lot of (often patriarchal) academics have this belief of thinking of themselves as intelligent/rational as innate personality traits, rather than processes to be engaged with.

chira 🎋@artofchira.bsky.social · 20h ago

if you think you're above something, you're a mark. if you think you're not susceptible to something, you're exceptionally influenced. if you think you're too smart for something, you're exceptionally gullible. if you think you're too good for a task, you're exceptionally useless.

chira 🎋@artofchira.bsky.social · 20h ago

biggest lesson to take from this is one I wish more people new so I'll tell you now: people are irrational, emotional, and nonsensical, including you. maybe especially you. You have to see yourself that way so you can understand how to work in grounding and mindfulness to navigate yourself and life

Dr. Lindsay Stallones Marshall (she/her)@lindstorian.bsky.social · 3d ago

It's not just Google Maps. AllTrails put genAI into their system last year and it has screwed everything up so badly I would never use it for hiking, purely for safety reasons. Some things require long years of practical, experiential knowledge. Walking in the 'wilderness' is one of those things.

Kathleen Bachynski@bachynski.bsky.social · 3d ago

“We’re so used to using Google Maps in our everyday life that I think when people are starting to get into hiking, they think that probably Google Maps will work for backcountry use as well, and that’s just not the case,” said John Blown, of North Shore Rescue, a team based in British Columbia.”

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

Chise@sailorrooscout.bsky.social · 5d ago

WELL NOW, would you look at that? A massive, 24-YEAR-LONG study of MORE THAN 1.2 MILLION people in Denmark found NO LINK between aluminum in childhood vaccines and autism, asthma, OR chronic disorders. Aluminum is an ADJUVANT. It ENHANCES your immune response to a vaccine. That’s it.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 5d ago

Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.

Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts

Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.

nature.com

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

Leah McElrath@leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 5d ago

Honestly though, the fact that this function exists and was rolled out at all will now make every Google Earth image suspect to me going forward. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who feels this way. Incredibly quick and near-total brand destruction by Google Earth—and for what?

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 7d ago

The reputation-laundering operation known as AlphaFold has been shut down. It changed culture in damaging ways, and similar protein-structure packages carry the mantle of black-box short-cuts that break the "chain of custody of why", offloading labor to often-haphazard and de-emphasized validation.

Google shuts down its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold project as it focuses on Gemini - Engadget

DeepMind's award-winning AlphaFold team is no more.

engadget.com

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · last mo.

The "chain of custody of why" is a load-bearing element of science. In numerical solutions of PDE (as in fluid and structural mechanics), the modern practice of verification (solving the equations right) and validation (solving the right equations) as distinct emerged from painful epistemic flailing

Dr. Nick Posegay@nposegay.bsky.social · 7d ago

As an archivist I am really struggling to witness a civilization literally shred its history for the sake of absolutely nothing.

Dr. Nick Posegay@nposegay.bsky.social · 7d ago

Oh is Anthropic employing state-of-the-art storage technology to ensure the scans of books they destroyed will resist bit rot? What's their plan for changing file format compatibilities? Are they employing archival best practices for digital redundancy? How vulnerable are they to cyber attacks?