IMO one of the most useful ways to think about LLM use-cases is "Would someone in Star Trek use the ship's computer to do this? If they did, would the episode be about how that's a lame thing to do?"

NERV IRB Coordinator@professormusgrave.bsky.social · 4mo ago

It’s pretty clear that even though the makers of Star Trek didn’t think through computing most people in the Federation are just interfacing with LLMs all the time, from the Holodeck to the science station

Shout out to TexRail. I’m in Fort Worth for a conference and I almost took a 60 dollar Uber to sit in DFW traffic, instead of this lovely train that picks up in the airport and goes downtown for 2 DOLLARS.

Another note on something students mostly wont condemn: the Renewable Fuel Standard. Just graded their midterms where they were asked to evaluate the effect of taking away RFS, and most of the answers were "yes this hurts the environment, but it helps farmers and gas prices so it should stay."

Jared Hutchins@pablohutch.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I teach an undergraduate course on agricultural and food policy. In recent years, their assignment has been assessing the impacts of work requirements on employment. What is a bsolutely fascinating: a certain portion STILL support work requirements, even when they see research like this. Why? ...

Agree. I’ve had proponents of work requirements deliberately misinterpret my work to support their claims. It’s not from lack of evidence or knowledge about evidence, it’s twisting evidence in favor of policies they want to support anyway. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-aei-g...

What AEI Gets Wrong about SNAP Work Requirements

They cited my research, so let me respond!

donmoynihan.substack.com

I teach an undergraduate course on agricultural and food policy. In recent years, their assignment has been assessing the impacts of work requirements on employment. What is a bsolutely fascinating: a certain portion STILL support work requirements, even when they see research like this. Why? ...

Chloe N East (she/her)@chloeneast.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The “big beautiful bill” greatly expanded SNAP work requirements for parents In my paper with @jasonbcook.bsky.social, forthcoming at JPUBE, we ask what similar, existing requirements do SNAP work requirements for parents deny vulnerable parents SNAP benefits and do not increase their employment

Respectfully disagree with some of the points here. I think LLMs are going to be in research, but they have some real downsides (currently). 1) Data privacy is a real impediment. I simply cannot feed an LLM proprietary data to ask for help, would def breach many data sharing agreements.

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham@paulgp.com · 5mo ago

My attempt at articulating why I think LLMs are a clear net positive for all research, and it's a mistake to ignore it despite private concerns: paulgp.com/2026/03/16/r...

Fun fact: we still HEAVILY protect the sugar industry through 1) non-recourse loans white set a price floor and 2) the most generous tariff protection of all the agricultural commodities. I didn't know about OBBBA, here is a source: sweetenerusers.org/wp-content/u...

Michael Grunwald@mikegrunwald.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The US sugar program sets a minimum price for sugar - Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill raises it >20%!

‪ 🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲 👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity! Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚 🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪

Oh now I get it. Dubai is Golgafrinchan Ark B.

Hey, look at that—you can embed Bandcamp songs right in Bluesky now I’ll try not to be too annoying about that but hey, listen to our song "Dive"!!

Dive, by The Anxious Bench

from the album Exhalation EP

theanxiousbench.bandcamp.com

Bluesky@bsky.app · 5mo ago

v1.117 is live! We rolled out support for Bandcamp embeds. Now you can play songs right inside posts! We're big fans of Bandcamp and everything they do to support artists. Upgrade to the newest app version and give it a try 👇 caribouband.bandcamp.com/album/butter...

Today I am publishing what I believe to be the most detailed available map of Trump's job approval rating. Powered by over 12,000 interviews for our Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll. I hope this generates many stories, and hours wasted exploring data! www.gelliottmorris.com/p/a-very-det...

A very detailed map of Trump's job approval

Explore our new interactive map of Trump's job approval, powered by 12,000 survey interviews conducted in 2025 and 2026

gelliottmorris.com

my Blackest opinion is that the presumption of conflict between "America has a long and deeply rooted history of violence" and "we can and should fight against today's version of that, as did those who came before us" is less a philosophical debate about how to treat the past and more a skill issue

ICE ended up returning the man, Saly, after realizing he’s a fucking US citizen with no criminal record, per his sister-in-law. These fucking animals.

Leah McElrath@leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Hmong man detained by ICE today in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Photo via Reuters)

"Made in China" has been synonymous with "cheap crap." But that's changing, especially in solar, batteries and consumer electronics, where they lead the world. This report from a trade show found Chinese companies were "light-years ahead" of US companies. www.pcmag.com/opinions/chi...

I Came to CES to Check Out Energy and Solar Power Innovations and Found That China Is Running Laps Around Us

In Las Vegas, I saw a tale of two nations’ energy priorities. The US needs to get its act together.

pcmag.com

This was always the goal. Source: www.reuters.com/world/us/fiv...

Yet more ad-hoc payments revealing that crops like cotton get generous payments... despite being not impacted by any of the trade disruptions. Plug for my colleague's work on this topic, who found that cotton and sorghum also got generous payouts in MFP: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Anne Schechinger@anneschech.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Farmer Bridge Assistance payments are based on the # of acres that were planted in 2025, meaning the program was designed to send more money to large farms. And a farmer and their spouse would have to farm >8,000 corn/bean acres to hit the payment limit. farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2026/01/farm...

New paper alert: Plastic waste imports & coastal litter: Evidence from citizen science data doi.org/10.1016/j.ec... Plastic waste is an internationally traded commodity, yet there are concerns that the importation process creates plastic litter in importing countries. 1/8

This essay from @bschmidt.bsky.social on how history rejected computational methods, & so "quantitative history" ended up in the social sciences, & "digital humanities" in literature, with no historians doing computational work, is fascinating, & worth a read: dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/computa...

My nieces and nephews (high school aged) had the AUDACITY to start quoting the Supa Hot Fire rap battle video in front of me and then say to me “you wouldn’t get it.” Also those absolute noobs didn’t know about the sequels.

a man wearing glasses and a hoodie says but i 'm not a rapper .

Alt: Supa Hot Fire saying “but I’m not a rapper”

media.tenor.com

I thought this was a joke headline, but the joke is on me: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/u...

At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke

nytimes.com

Lars Vilhuber@lars.vilhuber.com · 8mo ago

NYT reports "Marco Rubio ordered the State Department to return its default font to Times New Roman. It rejected the Biden administration’s switch to Calibri, done for accessibility reasons, as a D.E.I play." Logical next step: Image below created with Google Font "Redacted Script"

Segregation was not just a Southern phenomenon, it was a national issue. Explore the spatial history of racial segregation and discover how it connects to our communities today: greenbookproject.osu.edu #GreenBookProject #CommunityMap #EconSky

This is a point the “AI inevitability” folks simply do not engage convincingly—We would not accept this technological caveat in any other context “Our machine lets everyone make their own custom pharmaceuticals—but now every drug everywhere is maybe poison—better do your research!” Yeah no thanks

Dr. Casey Fiesler@cfiesler.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Here's the reality this example illustrates: It's not even just about people blindly trusting what ChatGPT tells them. LLMs are poisoning the entire information ecosystem. You can't even necessarily trust that the citations in a published paper are real (or a search engine's descriptions of them).

The glyphosate debate has been a disaster from the jump. This isn't the first time Monsanto meddled with the research when they were supposed to be hands-off. But the association with GMOs meant many people *really* wanted glyphosate to be bad, so there's lots of crap research on that side too.

𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗@charlescmann.bsky.social · 8mo ago

The entire glyphosate (Roundup herbicide) saga is an appalling example of politicized science and motivated reasoning. Now key anti-Roundup papers AND key pro-Roundup papers have been retracted. Worse, I'd be willing to take odds that partisans of both sides will be completely unbothered by this.

seems like as good a time as any to remind y'all of the work we did showing that the rollout of GM soy (which tolerates glyphosate application->brought an increase in agrotoxin application) is associated with increased child leukemia mortality www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Agricultural intensification and childhood cancer in Brazil | PNAS

Over the last several decades, Brazil has become both the world’s leading soy producer and the world’s leading consumer of hazardous pesticides. De...

pnas.org

Parents For Future #EndFossilFuels 🪧🛢️❌@parentsforfuture.de · 8mo ago

#Oops: The seminal paper that has been used for 25 years to justify that the use of #Glyphosate is safe has been retracted. ▶️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings…"

Ok, I have been hearing about how seaweed will reduce methane emissions for going on a decade. Yet, I have never seen it actually adopted, despite how effective it's supposed to be? Something does not add up.

Jenny Splitter@jennysplitter.bsky.social · 9mo ago

I appreciate this piece including some limitations & criticisms. But best case scenario for feed additives is that they are one component of climate action re: food sector. We still have to talk about eating less beef, something that's often left out of reporting. www.marketplace.org/story/2025/1...

#EconSky I am trying to send out a survey to several farms and I need to validate the addresses I received (from state govt) with the USPS database (to make sure they are deliverable). Google Maps does not validate, just checks if it looks like address. Anyone have a way that they've done this?

Hey, the Anxious Bench was on local radio WEFT last night! Our intro starts at 42:55 or so in the stream www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d9i27...

Regarding this work, my co-author and I had the privilege of being invited onto a roundtable discussion about our paper and implications for policy today. Thank you to Lawrence Lucas for inviting us! Part 1: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QDj... Part 2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDrq...

Stories of Resistance Against All Odds - The Black Farmer Movement (Highlight Version Part - 2)

YouTube video by Gary Johnson Media

youtube.com

Jared Hutchins@pablohutch.bsky.social · last yr.

Recently had two articles published that I'm excited to tell ya'll about. First, in AEPP, a former student and I published this article looking at racial inequity in the US through the lenses of Cochrane's treadmill theory (🧵) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #EconSky

Happy Halloween!