Me, forever doomed to be the online parlance translator of the relationship, explaining what "to know ball" means to my wife Ashley: "so it's like 'do you know Dorothy'"
Cat Hicks
@grimalkina.bsky.social
Author of The Psychology of Software Teams: https://www.drcathicks.com/#book she/her 🏳️🌈 Catharsis: https://catharsisinsight.com/ Host at: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/
listen to Dr. Cat - she talks good! and read her book, too - it's full of smart stuff we didn't have time to cover fully on the podcast.
Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · 13h agoI was on The Product Experience talking about building coalitions on our teams, lowering threat temperatures, and of course, the understanding that psychology can bring to your development work. Watch or listen: www.mindtheproduct.com/inside-the-m...
as promised, @grimalkina.bsky.social and i dig in deep here, as i defend dopamine from all of the haters open.spotify.com/episode/5eaA...
Ashley Juavinett, PhD@ashleyjuavinett.bsky.social · 5d agostop it with the dopamine speak pleaaaaaaaaaaaaase it’s not useful and dopamine ≠ addiction
A lot of things that I'd learned were strategically necessary as a high level technical IC delivering evidence (being exceptionally warm, constantly placating egos with rapport building) suddenly flipped into severe penalties when I was a VP. It was interesting to observe
I was on The Product Experience talking about building coalitions on our teams, lowering threat temperatures, and of course, the understanding that psychology can bring to your development work. Watch or listen: www.mindtheproduct.com/inside-the-m...
What your developers aren't telling you - Cat Hicks (Psychologist)
Dr Cat Hicks is a psychological scientist and the founder of Catharsis, a human-centred research consultancy that works with engineering organisations....
mindtheproduct.com
So 16 days ago I wrote this thread and shared this example of using structured approaches like my informed-patient to quickly run a literature + clinical guidance review for a loved one going through cancer (which I did while I was on the phone with them)
Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · 2w agoAn example of me working the problem is in the informed-patient skill I wrote. I will continue with this very serious example, and give you a different user you might not believe in, someone pretty skilled with evidence. I wrote this query the way *I* would write it, into *my* evidence harness
More on models in healthcare: information is in *both* images *and* text, and this is why I am getting ever more impatient with people seeming to be ok with one form of analysis and not the other www.nature.com/articles/s41...
End-to-end multimodal pathology foundation model with clinical dialogue - Nature Medicine
Trained on 2.3 million whole-slide images and 14 million clinical question−answer pairs, the multimodal foundation model PRISM2 matched clinical-grade cancer detection performance without task-specifi...
nature.com
Boosting this specifically because my mom just told me she's been searching bsky for mentions of my book 😅 so thank you @hazelweakly.me
Hazel Weakly@hazelweakly.me · 2d agoThis is what most “state of the art” developer experience research sounds like (Which is why @grimalkina.bsky.social’s book stands out so much. I’ll write a review on it soon, but it’s delightful and should be required reading for anyone director and higher in a company)
We need to get a handle on how this "coding" thing is creating addiction patterns. Some of my friends spend their nights and weekends on it. It's getting in between them and their families and social lives. They're even defining other people's worth solely in terms of how much those people code??
“we suggest that the path to using complex technologies runs through successful cognitive distribution.” - from "Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition" (Miton & Jackson, 2026) which I cite in www.fightforthehuman.com/we-need-more...
We need more than a metaphor: here are testable diagnostics for comprehension debt
Do we understand our code? I think we need to get past symptoms and into causes. Here's a field-tested measure of one organizational condition that can erode comprehension (Overproduction Pressure) yo...
fightforthehuman.com
Demigirlboss@demigirlboss.bsky.social · 2d ago"Cognitive surrender" or whatever is a skill issue. I offload cognition to the machine so I can do EVEN BIGGER COGNITIONS!
The conversation about AI in health stuff is always about the risks of patients using AI. I'm more worried about possibilities like every appointment gets inspected by an insurance company in detail so that if a patient uses the slightly wrong words about something their care is denied.
Insurance just denied a medication I take every single day because, and I quote, the provider did not submit new notes that it was working well 🙄
It's nice that The Odyssey is getting its day in the sun as a synecdoche for history. But when this summer is over, it's back to the relentless, remorseless rise of Jane Austen.
can I say something about a different software book I think I could write without everyone getting mad
Foreign Policy@foreignpolicy.com · 3d agoA 50-year old book reveals the tendencies that undermine military competence—a century ago and today. Read our analysis for free:
I feel that when you love someone who's going through chemo the healthcare system tells you a lot about the cancer stuff and next to nothing about adverse reactions and what to do about them and this seems pretty flawed to me
A treat was waiting for me in the post box - thanks @grimalkina.bsky.social for writing it, looking forward to reading !
For the love of all things holy….and really, can I please introduce you to the more evolved catecholamine
Ashley Juavinett, PhD@ashleyjuavinett.bsky.social · 5d agostop it with the dopamine speak pleaaaaaaaaaaaaase it’s not useful and dopamine ≠ addiction
Hello. If you struggle with maladaptive overachievement, and anxiety about productivity, and you experience relief at the sensation of productivity and difficulty regulating your behavior around demands for you to be productive, that doesn't make you a bad person, and that is not addiction.
This got me reading about attempts to associate microRNA markers with conditions, which I imagine we analyze with ML, thus being yet more of the type of algorithms in diagnosis work this platform tends to find abhorrent
Ada Palmer@adapalmer.bsky.social · 6d agoEndometriosis takes nine years to diagnose. That’s about to change. NICE has approved two tests: a saliva test reading microRNA markers, and a gut-sensor test returning results in 45 minutes, sparing women the keyhole surgery currently needed. buff.ly/QX3jHk8 #ShareGoodNewsToo
stop it with the dopamine speak pleaaaaaaaaaaaaase it’s not useful and dopamine ≠ addiction
"an AI-assisted condition (𝑛 = 55), where participants were allowed to use an embedded LLM (gpt-4o-mini) in whatever way they chose while writing." I just don't find Prolific samples told to basically do whatever copy paste they want very informative design for motivated writing
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 5d agoFantastic paper demonstrating how LLM editing is gradually distorting our writing and the way we think to write: arxiv.org/abs/2603.18161
Um what, this post is wild given the top of the thread. Sounds exactly like what Hank Green is trying to describe
Jonathan Jarry@jonathanjarry.bsky.social · 6d agoI almost never use AI. Occasionally, I’m looking for something and I can’t figure out a way to query DuckDuckGo (AI turned off) for it, so I’ll ask an LLM. But I *never* rely on that output, and always use that as a way to initiate a proper search and find papers on my own.
I'm so glad I was able to make this. These topics, affirming and defending our humanity in tech and bringing better psychology into our software engineering communities just... I feel a very profound source of joy within these conversations that I just want to hang on to and linger within.
Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · last wk.SEATTLE friends: Cat-in-real-life alert! I am in Seattle this week and decided to host a small (limited spots) Psychology of Software Teams happy hour this thursday July 30th, 4-6pm. RSVP here for location & to secure a spot: luma.com/lxcmtn68
I promise I was looking for the share button before I realized you linked my post @mcmullarkey.bsky.social I really liked this one. Provocative! buttondown.com/datadash/arc...
Coding taste is like depression
And we should stop pretending otherwise
buttondown.com
I'm at the spot!! With a fluffy gentle white dog!! I have learned there is a singles night right after this. Listen I'm not saying POST will help you date but I'm not not saying that
Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · last wk.SEATTLE friends: Cat-in-real-life alert! I am in Seattle this week and decided to host a small (limited spots) Psychology of Software Teams happy hour this thursday July 30th, 4-6pm. RSVP here for location & to secure a spot: luma.com/lxcmtn68
Hits close to home as a complex patient who's been in the UCSD system and a social scientist helping a lot of patients use AI. I see a lot of typical physician blinders in this tbh. academic.oup.com/jamiaopen/ar...
Early experience with a patient-facing AI chatbot integrated in a patient portal
AbstractBackground and significance. Many patients struggle to interpret lab and test results.Objective. To evaluate patient experience, usability, and int
academic.oup.com
Ashley and I were trying to decide whether we wanted to see the Odyssey and as the social media translator in our relationship I had to do a whole run-down of why she was seeing so many confusing posts about it and by the time I got to the end of that I was like, I do not want to see this anymore
Whataboutism is indeed annoying but I don't see this sort of unproductive exchange that way when the fundamental question of "what is the rule here" seems to not be established. That's what makes people feel like the rule is selective, because it's not invoked on examples in the same category
Molly Crabapple@mollycrabapple.bsky.social · 7d ago99% of the time, when someone accuses you of selective outrage, it’s a way of politically demobilizing you and shutting you up “Why are you angry about data centers instead of fast fashion” isn’t about making you care about fast fashion. It’s about shutting you up about data centers And visa versa
You know that trend where women on social media find the mom of a guy who is sending them terrible comments and show the mom the comments, I'm going to do that but it's going to be finding the daughters of the retired men of tech who pile into my mentions