oh wow they saw my GIF

Dropout@dropout.tv · yesterday

▶️Watch all of The Don Hertzfeldt Collection on Dropout starting NOW - and stay tuned for his new film, Paper Trail, coming to Dropout on September 1st watch.dropout.tv/the-don-her...

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif

molotov foxtail@semantic-nomad.net · 2d ago

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.

Monday excitement, my app's traffic graph looks like this (blue line is all requests combined) and I simply do not know why

I'm not the first to say it, but I'd be willing to bet this is volunteer training data labeling, not moderation

Edd Coates | Game UI Database@eddcoates.bsky.social · 6d ago

LinkedIn added an "AI slop" button. The U-Turn is happening, expect to see a lot more of this from other tech companies.

BREAKING: Google has rolled back its tool less than a day after it launched. Updated story coming soon.

Here's a funny article -- coordinates stored in float precision have significantly variable precision across the globe I suspect *most* people who "use floats" are actually using doubles in this day and age -- but most isn't all! kevinventullo.com/2026/07/20/a...

A Curious Property of Floating Point Geospatial Coordinates

If you store GPS coordinates as 32-bit floats, your precision in Iowa is about two feet. In central London the precision drops to half a millimeter, and at the South Pole it’s about a trillion time…

kevinventullo.com

it hadn't fully occurred to me that our new AI age is going to mean way more people just rolling the dice on every decision point in an analysis my favorite type of sum of squares is "stochastic"

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218.com · last wk.

I don't blame folks for not deeply investigating the implementations of their software -- this is why packages exist after all -- but periodically I get bug reports that X doesn't match Y package and: yes! on purpose! that's the reason X is there at all 😂

"people just assume languages and packages will all agree" This is absolutely true, which is also annoying as a package author -- a lot of my software does something similar to other packages, but makes different choices, because I think they're better! And often users assume it should be identical

He fit the same statistical models with three different software and got much different estimates. It’s another dimension of the multiverse. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/07/27/5...

Becoming a conspiracy theorist that Wu and Hochul switched freaky Friday style sometime in 2025

Sam@samd.bsky.social · 2w ago

it’s pretty remarkable how one of Zohran’s COGE proposals is to streamline construction of bus and bike lanes while Michelle Wu is doing the literal opposite, bogging them down in red tape for some reason

A newly-released FOIA dump of @boston.gov emails reveals extensive failures in internal communications, dysfunctional working relationships, and erosion in employee morale inside @mayorwu.boston.gov's City Hall: #mapoli mass.streetsblog.org/2026/07/22/f...

Failures of Communication and Accountability Plagued Mayor Wu's Election-Year 'Review' of Transportation Department - Streetsblog Massachusetts

An internal "30 day review" of city transportation projects that Mayor Wu requested during her re-election campaign last year was supposed to improve the public's trust in the city's ability to manage...

mass.streetsblog.org

I will no longer accept any sass about my liter-a-day habit

The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · 2w ago

Five cups of coffee a day is fine for most adults, heart association says, as evidence grows about the beverage’s benefits.

Lowkey a #climaterisk paper for those of us involved in spatial modelling

Jakub Nowosad@jakubnowosad.com · last mo.

🚦 New workshop from #ML4EO2026: "Where your models can be trusted" Learn how to evaluate spatial ML using kNNDM CV, Area of Applicability, and more. All with R examples. Materials: jakubnowosad.com/ml4eo2026wor.... #SpatialML #MachineLearning #RStats #RSpatial

starting to get a bit concerned that a significant number of technocratically-inclined people have assumed that solar+grid scale battery fixes this, rather than mostly just stopping the bleeding

Craig Harrington@craigipedia.bsky.social · 3w ago

This is an emergency, folks.

love when you can tell a museum curator is fighting for their life

> “Our findings frame AI slop as a tragedy of the commons,” the researchers concluded, “where individual productivity gains externalise costs on to reviewers, maintainers and the broader community.” The newer gift link: as.ft.com/r/cb395b74-8...

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

Our obsession with AI code-writing tools is overwhelming the web’s unsung human caretakers

as.ft.com

Sam Learner@samlearner.bsky.social · 4w ago

wrote for the magazine about the open source software that underpins our digital lives, how it is being upended by AI code tools, and about maintainers as.ft.com/r/b7f62212-9...

Get rid of your imposter syndrome (which tends to afflict smart people more than dumb people anyway). NO ONE is a "real expert." You have every right to be there. And you can make an enormous difference if you're in the room at the right time. Get involved. Participate. You can matter.

My friend is dead. A driver, through neglect, recklessness or malice, has killed Louisa. I’m beside myself with grief and filled with righteous anger at a city that has stalled and slow-walked safety improvements for all road users. Louisa should be here with us.

The Boston Globe@bostonglobe.com · 4w ago

A cycling advocate and transportation planner for the city of Boston was identified as the cyclist who was struck and killed in a crash near Roxbury Crossing this morning.

If only there were any techniques, methods, or strategies for giving a coherent fifteen minute talk that might be discovered with minimal effort by people who spend half their working lives standing up in front of people and talking.

my favorite example of this is when forestry papers state they measured trees with a diameter of > 12.7cm -- which actually means they used the FIA threshold of 5in

Randall Munroe@xkcd.com · 3mo ago

182.8 Meters xkcd.com/3248/

Deeply funny that the only citations in the entire Wikipedia article for BUFR are documenting complaints about it

Massachusetts drivers committed 354 recorded homicides In 2025, according to the annual @walkmass.bsky.social analysis of fatal crashes: mass.streetsblog.org/2026/06/17/m...

Massachusetts Drivers Committed At Least 354 Homicides In 2025 - Streetsblog Massachusetts

Older adults and pedestrians continue to make up a disproportionate number of victims in fatal crashes, according to a new report from WalkMassachusetts.

mass.streetsblog.org

the Scots are bringing a very fun energy into Boston but please I'm begging y'all to discover sunscreen before it's too late

it is a CRIME there's no cast recording for Black Swan yet EASILY best thing I've seen this (last?) season

A long time ago I even wrote a post about how applied statisticians and people doing statistics in science are programmers and how we should accept that. It also had far and away the most unhinged conclusion I ever wrote (not screenshotted) statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/11/13/w...

Dan Simpson@danpsimpson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Understanding how compilers work is a skill that will bear almost infinite fruit. An applied statistician (and particularly an applied Bayesian) is, among other things, a programmer and while not a 101 skill it is good professional development to understand how compilers and software work.

oof ouch

NERV IRB Coordinator@professormusgrave.bsky.social · 2mo ago

profmusgrave.github.io/anotherday/

I have to fill out three apps every time I travel for work and still only our manually curated spreadsheet contains all the info we need for expenses I don't think LLM development is likely to give me a single app for this tracking. I think it's more likely to give me a fourth

Mike Mahoney@mikemahoney218.com · 2mo ago

A lot of very smart people are worried about the SaaSpocalypse but I wonder if folks are underestimating the organizational problems SaaS deals with it's one thing to write a CRUD app, another to make sure the database has all the right fields, another entirely to get people to fill it out

A lot of very smart people are worried about the SaaSpocalypse but I wonder if folks are underestimating the organizational problems SaaS deals with it's one thing to write a CRUD app, another to make sure the database has all the right fields, another entirely to get people to fill it out

between this and the meteor I'm afraid we're all ignoring some omens

Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT@mikezaccardi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Wow, afternoon temps are almost down into the 30s in parts of Massachusetts... wind chill near freezing!

this would be the second time my home city was hit by a meteor this decade www.syracuse.com/news/2020/12...

After a million-year journey, a meteor explodes above Syracuse in 2020

The meteor burned up at about 5,000 degrees.

syracuse.com

Matt Arcidy@marcidy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

FYI

FYI