Big deal! I can detect heart failure far faster than AI, as long as there is no particular requirement for being right.
activist, aspiring-polymath, problematic feminist working to better this world @b_cavello@mastodon.publicinterest.town avatar description: Portrait of B against colorful background banner description: Collage of creative commons illustrations
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Big deal! I can detect heart failure far faster than AI, as long as there is no particular requirement for being right.
Wow! I never thought of that, but like... of course! I guess I haven't really encountered horse meat enough to be concerned, but it wasn't until just now that I realized that probably most horse meat wasn't from horses raised to be eaten. Thanks for explaining!
It’s frustrating when something is so good that it feels like a good idea to eat extra only to find out that extra does not feel good 😭
heartwarming to see a bunch of clearly-just-got-out-of-the-packaging DC flags around town
Mu, shown here ruling from his Mountain of Power
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Dan Patch was not just a horse, but the most famous athlete in the world in 1906. He was never defeated in open competition and his harness record stood for 30 years. Oh and there was also a railway line named after him. And a movie. And a boat. And a bowling alley. And more things I can't remember
Yesterday I posted my op-ed in the Inquirer (gift link: share.inquirer.com/M8nPzg) Today I want to highlight all the other excellent op-eds - anyone engaged with higher education should want to read these. If you go to any one article in the collection, you'll get this box with all of them:
Got a flu shot at the Fair 🎡💉
I think 182 year old research articles should be free I want to read about the man
If true, this update is astonishing. The Commission climbed down from a planned break up of Google’s ad business to a mere fine, and then dropped even the fine for fear of offending Trump. This is for market violations that have been proven in U.S. court.
That’s cool!
Welcome home! Here’s to the new in the old and the old in the new. I look forward to hearing more of your reflections
”We need less consumption, more creation.” youtu.be/2XZ9z6OewR0?...
Very effective, from the looks of it!
Weekend project: building a (site) search engine www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-08... just for fun! :)
‘Nowhere to go’: What Happened After Trump Ordered [D.C.] Homeless Encampments Cleared By @marissajae.bsky.social and @kyletalking.bsky.social Gift link!
Hope y'all have been following this story today about Judge Sparkle Sooknanan who has been on the DOJ to return the 76 Guatemalan kids (with hundreds more in the plaintiff class) Trump tried to deport over the holiday weekend. She's been awake and working since 1 a.m.
Allison, 20, has been detained for six months at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. She had nearly given up her legal fight due to health issues and unsanitary conditions at the facility.
at their core, trans rights, abortion rights, and vaccine rights are actually all the same issue: they’re all about bodily autonomy, and the willingness to concede any of them puts the others at risk.
Never forget, a 13-year study found that protected bike-lanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all road users. ALL ROAD USERS. And painted bike-lanes? No safety improvement at all. For sharrows, it’s actually safer to NOT have them. Via @usa.streetsblog.org @nyc.streetsblog.org
OMG I had to email this NOAA researcher to be like, what's this .rex file things you're using, it's not documented anywhere, and he was like I named it after my dog Rex Because the dog was big and the files were about big hurricanes
all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe
Local Ohio outlet did a good story on this, with pretty eye-popping quotes from the sheriff. www.mahoningmatters.com/news/local/a...
😹
Oh! Thanks for letting me know
I think the bus metaphor is fine, but people want to suggest that the bus routes are already finalized when we’ve only just begun the conversation about the service we need THERE IS NO BUS yet, & anyone trying to say that others need to fall in line are skipping over one of the most important parts
Those willing, by contrast, to trade away the rights and dignity of transgender people or the poor cannot be considered friends of democracy any more than those who were willing to countenance second-class status for blacks and Jews.
Anyway, it is true that democracy will be on the ballot in 2028. But it'll be on the ballot for Democrats well before the general. And the party's task is creating democracy, not defending it. That demands both an attentiveness to structural politics and a willingness to defend the equality of all.
1) America is not a democracy, and because it isn't, your vote in the 2028 general election will not really matter unless you live in one of a handful of states. 2) 2028 will be one of the most wide open primaries in history and there's no reason to preempt critiques of candidates on these grounds.
I personally, as an abolitionist, do not find it to be particularly odious of the next mayor of a city that is home to 8.4 million people to want as many votes as possible and to not be killed by his own cops but keep up the perplexing work ig CNN
CNN editor: How many headlines should we give this one story CNN editor: Three CNN editor: Fuck that's good, his base will fucking hate this and hopefully him too
Actually, Frankenstein is a doctor success at the Venice film festival
Do you think it’s just because they’ve had more time to develop? Or is it because Sci Fi is always in conversation with an evolving tech landscape that stuff ages poorly?
Tired: using AI agents to write code. Wired: using AI agents to delete code.
"Adding Internet Archive Wayback Machine searching to the existing methods substantially extended our ability to track down PhD theses. This method helped us locate many missing records" Thanks @infodocket.bsky.social for point out this research by Adam Rajčan & Edgar A. Burns
Wow, I didn’t know Thiel was an FBI informant, either! www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-...
I like the top two all right, tho the middle kinda reminds me of the new Mississippi flag, but simplified a bunch
I appreciate this! Thanks for sharing
I have a new report coming out this week on British Sign Language (BSL) AI. Co-authors and I avoided using the popular term 'Sign AI' to ground languages with specific histories and cultures. Sign AI is a deeply depolitical move taken by tech companies.
Aw, that’s one of my fave anthems
Omg that last one 🤯🔥💯✨
Questions to ask when thinking of AI interface innovation beyond chatbox How can AI interfaces expand the forms of thought we can externalize? How can AI interfaces be reshaped by users to fit their evolving abilities? Do AI interfaces leave users permanently more capable?
“Texas Democrats lost. But they drew attention to Republicans’ efforts to put their thumb on the scale, and demonstrated a valuable tactic for galvanizing their beleaguered party. They lost, but they lost loudly. Losing loudly has been a crucial feature of successful political movements.” Gift:
Stopped at a Midas repair shop today and the guy there brought up the CDC. This is an example where raising the salience of what is going on really can break through the noise.
Deeply fascinated by the new wave band Trent Reznor used to play with in the 1980’s and how everyone looks so incredibly 80’s except for Trent Reznor who looks exactly the same as he always has to the point where he might as well have time traveled
As our neighbors vanish daily, this serves as a meaningful way to honor them and highlight the extent of this issue throughout the city’s
If you saw my earlier posts with this same intro header, Tasks for the National Guard in Chicago, they have become the latest Public Collectors zine. I finished it this morning. It's a single folded sheet and I made 425 copies. Get one free on 8/31, 11-6 at the Hairpin Arts Center, at #ZineMercado
New Mexico is overriding the federal government on the topic of COVID19 vaccines to ensure their residents can access them. States hold a tremendous amount of public health power. They should use it.
Don’t forget. There’s a reason we don’t celebrate Labor Day on May 1st with the rest of our comrades
Beautiful 1860s Victorian butterfly, which was used to store small packets of sewing needles on the underside of the wings. This was a collaboration between a London-based drapers company and a sewing needle manufacturer. On exhibit at Tatter Blue, a Brooklyn textile museum. IG tatterbluelibrary
This taught me a lot docs.bsky.app/markdown-page
This part. Besides it being way too early to worry about the primary, these folks are weirdly dodging the fact that WE COLLECTIVELY CHOOSE the primary winner. It's not some exogenous event we just respond to. If you support democracy, support democracy.
The cost of inference is going UP as I SAID! The mainstream media picking this up is a huge deal and I'm so happy to see it
did you really think i had forgotten about caturday.
The extent to which ICE is ignoring all civil rights and due process is astounding — and indicative of a culture where they’ve been told they can do literally no wrong. Agency and admin leaders must face sanctions and legal consequences.
This is for all the teachers out there. This AM at the farmers market, a stranger recognized me from my online American Revolution lecture course. Apparently, the lectures got her thru an illness when she was stuck in bed. Teaching matters. In so many more ways than we know.
Lawmakers in California killed an anti-AI price manipulation bill, and "a bill that aimed to protect electric utility customers from bearing higher costs associated with data center proliferation" that "required data centers to publicly disclose how much energy they use," per @khari.bsky.social:
literally just saw 10 FBI agents and 2 MPD across 5 cars pull someone over, look through their windows with a flashlight, talk to the person, then let them go terrorizing the community & what a fucking waste
I am so grateful to be in a cohort of smart and caring people who will never ever ever forget Katrina and New Orleans. It feels like such benchmark and litmus test for my generation.
Parenting tip: it's possible to find out in advance when your kid's school is going to do this and not send them to school that day, or that part of the day. We've done this for our kids, every time, across nine grades so far. It's inconvenient, but I like the part where they're not traumatized.
On one hand, reducing car use reduces urban pollution. But on the other, everyone likes it and cities become more livable
Every time your electricity bill goes up for the next 10 years, it can be traced back to this Administration’s actions. They are making solar and wind power illegal to build in the United States. They are artificially restricting supply while demand is going up.
"On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-based Retrieval" Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.21038 Repo: github.com/google-deepm...
Google stress tested the embedding models and finds that for any given embedding dimension d, there exists a combination of documents that cannot be returned by any query, highlighting a fundamental limitation of the current single-vector embedding paradigm.
So what you're saying is America is good at things that look like the thing but aren't the actual thing?
At some point in the not too distant future the conventional wisdom will be that this was a period where the US focused on dumb shit while China took the lead in multiple domains
It’s wonderful that this video from Milwaukee’s Public Library system features a nod to a book on Prince, because he loved libraries. In 2001, he donated $12k to save the Louisville Free Public Library’s Western Branch — the first to serve Black patrons. www.courier-journal.com/story/news/l...
light mode
hot ghoul summer
Morning Bluesky. Tesla had its seventh straight monthly decline in European sales in July, dropping 40% to 8,837. Chinese rival BYD surged past Tesla with 225% sales increase, to 13,503.
Concerned that we are losing the necessary ratio. 15% of teachers/faculty should be irretrievably strange eccentrics. Every learning experience should have some element where in later life you can reflect with former classmates about how bizarre at least one (1) class per year was.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has revoked the visas of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and 80 other officials ahead of next month’s annual high-level meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, a step the Palestinian Authority decried as against international law. https://to.pbs.org/4naCsqj
I haven’t seen this about moving out. I tried searching, but can’t seem to find the right terms. Can you direct me?
Quick Tip: Did you know you can hide posts by keywords? Under Settings → Moderation → Muted Words & Tags, set keywords you never want to see. Perfect for avoiding spoilers! 🙈
Turns out when you treat teachers well, invest in students, and focus on improving schools, you get real results. Illinois now ranks third in the nation for our education system for a reason.
What a cursed sentence (gift link) “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”
The devastating flu epidemic of 1918 was particularly dangerous for young adults, for people in their prime, who died by the millions. But RFK Jr. is too stupid to know that. Link below.
Yessss! This is the kind of thing we need more of!! I’ve been looking for frameworks around automation/capability extension. Thank you!
Augmentability Audit Template Use this worksheet during design reviews. Unlike usability testing, an augmentability audit checks if your system expands what users can think, learn, and do.
100 years of average May-June-July temperature departures over land areas through 2025... Data from NOAAGlobalTemp v6.0.0: www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/lan...
This one is only for Blueskyers of a certain age.
There’s a persistent myth that new solar farms don’t really help tackle climate change because panels are “made with coal” and “never pay back” their carbon debt. This is simply false. - UN: solar ~8x cleaner than gas, ~19x than coal per kWh - panels repay CO2 in 4 months; save 57x over life
"These raids are not law enforcement, they are fear enforcement." Preach!
Soon.
I wrote about this in more detail here: The Trumpists didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism.
Important to note that Christopher Caldwell is widely seen as one of the most respectable / least unserious intellectual representatives of the Right. And he really is! Which only hammers home how much of a radical consensus there is on the Right that pluralistic democracy needs to be abolished.
This hurts people and does not reduce homelessness. This sucks.
Which is which??
Major update: As of this morning, CVS says it's decided it can offer the vax in 13 of the 16 states IF you get a prescription. Still a big new barrier for many people, but a change from its "no vaccines at all in these states" position yesterday. The three remaining absolute-nos are MA, NV and NM.
Thanks so much for sharing this!
There is an update bsky.app/profile/magg...
I have had SO many questions about the Abundance™️ debates & at times felt aligned, at times opposed, confused, excited… and SO lost for a clear definition. This new piece from @niskanencenter.bsky.social’s Steve Teles on “Abundance Varieties” is SO clarifying! www.niskanencenter.org/abundance-va...
In an hour join @freegovinfo.bsky.social & James A Jacobs for an online conversation about Gov. Data Preservation 12pm CDT, moderated by Shari Laster, hosts @archive.org & @authorsalliance.bsky.social Registration blog.archive.org/event/book-t... And their free book at freegovinfo.info
The collapse of the Amoc would have devastating consequences for food security. This is not just an environmental issue, it’s a humanitarian catastrophe. Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds www.theguardian.com/environment/...
How can we steer innovation toward resilience? It's time to reclaim #AIForDevelopment. Our policy fellow Francisco Jure explains that creating new #AIBenchmarks can help. Learn more in "Reclaiming AI for Development": www.aspendigital.org/report/reclaiming-ai-for-development
THAT explains it! We saw it wasn’t available in Boston or DC, but is in Chicago, and I wondered why, @roblach.bsky.social
