a huge chunk of the top talent IN AMERICA is first- or second-generation and from china. the only reason china doesn't completely dominate us here is that american immigration policy is very good at stealing their best research staff. it's a good thing nobody's changing that!

surely the *checks notes* country of china is short on *checks notes* engineers and mathematicians and could not possibly compete at the engineering and applied mathematics field *touches earpiece* hold on, i'm getting new information bsky.app/profile/segy...

SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social · 2w ago

by the time it gets confirmed that eg deepseek's tricks are all real and they really did make training 10x cheaper everybody on twitter has forgotten the litany of made up excuses about how they only trained on other llm outputs

I'm once again begging everyone to update their priors. "ChatGPT is not a search engine." Yes, yes it is. It actively searches the web based on your prompt, and returns active links relevant to your search/prompt. It's a search engine. It is. (Obvs don't use it that way if that's not your thing)

I knew this data format was old, but this is ridiculous

seeing the new Odyssey film in its intended format

I still revisit this book every three years or so and it always has something new for me.

James Bareham@happicamp.bsky.social · last mo.

Neuromancer, William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel, was first released exactly 42 years ago today. I read it for the first time in 2025. It holds up remarkably well and is remarkably prescient about AI—so much so that I wrote an essay about just how uncanny it is at times. I also made art

oof sorry, unfollowing now. loved his unique take on religion. had no idea he refused to send troops to Tunip, though Tunip his city wept and its tears flowed and there was no grasping of its hand

Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital

one major asymmetry is the way in which defection from the party consensus at the left edge of the party is considered betrayal because it's principed, but defection from the consensus at the right edge of the party is trustworthy because it is presumed to be a dishonest appeal to moderates.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s MARS TRILOGY predictions continue to hold

more mr. nice guy@juniorhoncho.bsky.social · last yr.

sending my own guys up to mars with a big machine that makes the atmosphere even worse

One of the issues here is that the series, “A Remembrance of Earth’s Past” isn’t structured really like a sci-fi series. Rather, it’s structured & written like a Chinese epic romance, which is pretty much what it’s trying to be, & that’s a tall ask for most non-Chinese readers.

Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring will be shown in Osaka, later this year, and the press conference was as Japanese as you’d expect #Vermeer

Henge epistemology has reached Hacker News victoriaritvo.com/blog/hengefi... @onceatrophic.bsky.social who says DH is dead?

Maxwell’s Demon: *ignoring entropy Me: ah-ha! But you CANNOT ignore entropy because you must store information! Maxwell’s Demon: *performs demon magic on the information bc he is a demon and is unconstrained by logic Me: well, nevertheless

Yet another example that "chat" is just one UI for LLM usage, and usually not the right one for a lot of expert applications!

Daniel van Strien@danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 3mo ago

What is "AI for libraries" beyond a catalogue chatbot? IMO: design patterns (OCR, extraction, classification, search), and agents that both run them and develop the small models behind them. As part of work with @natlibscot.bsky.social started a book on this: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-...

That feeling when you see a Brancusi

Not a new observation, but I think discussion of AI + entry-level jobs could better account for entry-level *tech* jobs being a uniquely weird case. Partly that LLMs are especially good at entry-level coding, but also that there was a *massive* increase in new graduates that no other field had.

New critical minerals projects just dropped, ty Jessica for doing a thread

Jessica McKenzie@jessimckenzi.bsky.social · 3mo ago

ok gonna quickly blog the 16 projects that the DOE Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation will be funding at US National Laboratories. (lemme know if you see anything worth a story lol)

People have way over-indexed on the 2023-era view that AI companies want to “train on your data” because human authenticity is scarce and precious. I promise I’m not saying corps are beneficent when I say that a random collection of files and social media posts has at this point small value.

A lot of the new tools and processes appear to work best when an expert in the process being completed supervises or partners with one of these generative tools. That is not a useful classroom tool for most early or intermediate learners.

How not to display art, by Michael Govan

D Fletcher Dunham@dfdunham.bsky.social · 4mo ago

LACMA members’ opening day, ready to drink pure haterade

i like most of the photography youtubers but i've found someone i do not like.

After four awesome years at ITHAKA / JSTOR, I’m taking a needed two week staycation before starting an exciting new gig. The last two days were about household chores, but today is being spent enjoying this stunning Nancy Graves at the @bampfa.bsky.social

If you’re teaching DH right now, how are you thinking about your students’ relationship to generative AI? Are you ignoring it? Banning it? Discussing a policy with them first? Encouraging vibe coding? Interested to see how educators across the continuum of opinions are managing it.

nyx says welcome home

Imagine being in space 30 min ago and now you’re about an hour from In n Out

NASA failed to predict the real splashdown risk.

this is something which, plainly, AI cannot do. journalism is by definition out-of-distribution, and even if you presumed that everyone wanted to read more Claudeprose than people already do, "writing up one's findings" is not the primary job a journalist performs!

Audrey Dutton@audreydutton.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I genuinely do not understand management's refusal to agree to basic protections, like that they won't replace us with AI. It's baffling. Makes no sense. We're on strike to show management how serious we are about this, and how eager we are to get a contract done!