My mentor told me once: "The guy who throws the bomb doesn't make it over the line" It's good practice to kill with kindness sometimes, it turns out.

@lastpositivist.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The fact that Mamdani just seems like a cheerful normal guy who's policies are things like "we're going to tax second homes to fund pothole repairs" or whatever and yet this generates panicked responses like "This is basically Stalin's great purge turned up to eleven" is... telling. It tells things.

I’m headed to Mexico city in a few hours. Suggestions welcome lol. We’ll see how much I’m able to transfer my French skills across in a few days 🤔. dw I have low expectations 😂.

It's funny that everyone who has *ever* programmed, knows how important attention to detail is. Hours wasted because you made a typo, forgot to add a character, etc. The tiniest thing you literally don't notice is wrong, and your program screams at you and dies. This is a universal experience.

It’s cool how taking an image of the moon at half-moon phase is arguably better than a full moon because the full moon doesn’t show the shadows in the craters so well.

Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 8mo ago

It's nice that if you can't find whatever esoteric astronomical objects you were looking for, you can always just look at the moon, and it's always mesmerizing.

There are more similarities between te reo Mãori and French than I would have expected

"If anyone builds it everyone dies" but the "it" is colonialism

I honestly just got lucky. I made the decision based on not a lot of information, mostly vibe. Talking to their students if you can (I wasn’t able to) is certainly recommended. Also perhaps it’s good to be willing to trade things off. Often the really high powered academics are bad supervisors.

Javier Burroni@jburroni.bsky.social · 9mo ago

It is, actually, a very complicated problem! How do you get insights about a future advisor?

Looking for a PhD program? It all starts with great supervision. Choose wisely. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

When you read a poem, do you wonder how the poet structures it through whitespace between/before words and lines? We did! Our findings on whitespace - how to measure/preserve it, how usage varies across form/time, how it affects LLMs - now in an #EMNLP2025 (main) paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.16713 🧵👇

Hana-Rawhiti accepting the Time Magazine award in NYC is a great example of how the world is really not paying attention to the NZ govt at all. They can go lose in their Oxford Union debates and kiss up to Trump all they like but they won’t get anywhere near that kind of attention.

#nzpol Labour is proposing to create a Capital Gains Tax on property - excluding farms and the family home. That income will help make GP visits free for the majority of people. Is that a better policy than continuing tax-free profits on, say, someone's seventh property? Absolutely. A🧵

Release: Targeted tax to grow the economy and fund free doctor’s visits

labour.org.nz

my 17yo niece is part of a choir that won an international championship earlier this week, just casually singing at the montserrat benedictine monastery she has had a hard start to life and when i was 17 looking after her we would sing phantom of the opera over and over (even the organ parts)

Louie Stowell@louiestowell.bsky.social · 10mo ago

It's friday! Time for the weekly good news thread! What's YOUR good news from the week? What's made you smile? What's brought some light into your life?

I grew up visiting my friends and family nearly always unannounced unless it was for some kind of occasion. I wish we would all drop by each others places more often. In my family, if you just drive past it’s considered rude if you don’t say hi. Maybe it’s too much for some but I liked it.

Emily Myers@emilymyers.bsky.social · 10mo ago

If you are invited to someone’s house for dinner (say, at 6:00), what’s the earliest you might arrive and the latest and still be considered polite? (Bonus q: what’s the *optimally* polite time?) I’m curious how this varies culturally/regionally/generationally.

I wonder what it felt like for Elon to be publicly rebuked by Dr Jane Goodall from beyond the grave

Yashar Ali 🐘@yasharali.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Earlier this year, Dr. Jane Goodall sat down for an interview for Brad Falchuk’s new Netflix series, Famous Last Words. The premise of the series is to interview people on the condition that the interview not air until the subject has passed away.

hate to say it but people like sina and i who’ve been around more than 5 minutes have been warning about the direction TPM’s been travelling in since at least 2023. it’s a highly divisive party, especially within māori society itself. solidarity with eru www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Toitū Te Tiriti's Eru Kapa-Kingi rules out starting rival political party after split from Te Pāti Māori

The activist hopes the split will spur Te Pāti Māori into creating genuine change from the inside.

rnz.co.nz

Where the separate divisions of ANTIFA landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944:

I’m picking D for sure. G is my only regret bc of Mexico. Also someone needs to redo the boundaries so that they at least cover equal surface area.

Brilliant Maps@brilliantmaps.bsky.social · 11mo ago

For the rest of your life, you can only eat food from one of these regions. Which do you choose? For more maps: brilliantmaps.beehiiv.com/s...

“States should think very carefully about what they actually want to get out of this before spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to indigenize the entire AI stack. You still won’t be able to eliminate dependencies and vulnerabilities on foreign states.” restofworld.org/2025/chinese...

The myth of sovereign AI: Countries rely on U.S. and Chinese tech

As countries pursue self-sufficiency in AI, they risk depending on foreign companies, undermining their independence and their goals.

restofworld.org

Ask not what your country can do for you. Definitely, definitely don’t ask what your country can do for you. I beg you, seriously.

Sassy Little Hobbit@sassypolitico.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Treasury advice hasn’t changed since 1984 what’s new 🙄

It’s pretty funny that Amazon rug pulled their data centre plans moments after Luxon tried to take credit for them. If he kept his mouth shut then he could’ve blamed the rug pull on labour but now he looks like a dunce even though it’s literally not his fault. Amazon predictably doesn’t give a f-

I noticed today that they’re starting to sell postcards at the magazine shop with AI art on them. You can tell which because they don’t credit an artist on the back. The irony of using a picture of a native bird to sell AI art is not lost on me.

Labour resents having to work with the rest of the left wing block to their own detriment. The main reason Luxon won the last election is that he simply wanted it the most. There’s nothing he wasn’t willing to say, and no compromise too damaging to his pride.

Sassy Little Hobbit@sassypolitico.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Say what you will about Luxon and his weird mantra around “building relationships” - the coalition is still stands more than halfway through the term. Labour is still holding onto the pipe dream of governing alone for some inexplicable reason.

(trying to explain "fuck, marry, kill" to a black widow spider) no it's *three different* guys

Me, contemplating returning back to Montreal soon: Mm it’s gotta be possible to get boil up ingredients somehow 🤔 I need to explore the blue line more except my French is not good

One way I can tell I've been back home for a while is that I'm back to thanking the bus driver every time I get off the bus

Today I started a project to scrape a website and gather together some data. After some quick testing, I found that they had implemented countermeasures which implied that they didn't want to be scraped. Then I quit the project and did something else. Crazy idea I know.

Only being able to speak one language is much more of a disservice to young children than knowing a few words in Māori. The whole drama proves that racism is not just a moral deficiency, but an intellectual one. We should resist them not just because it's unethical, but because it's stupid.

I sometimes think about how once I get this PhD I’m going to be seen by a lot of people as part of “the establishment” when I really don’t see myself that way at all. I wonder what it was like for other academics, if they noticed a shift in how others (probably mostly strangers) perceive them.