Ada: Somehow I always hurt only my most sensitive body parts! Me: Okay kid, it’s time we have The Talk—
Swiss (Bio-)Statistician, Currently unemployed. Still not quite sure what vibe I should be targeting on this website, but I'll likely be sharing both nerdy professional stuff and funny nerdy things.
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Ada: Somehow I always hurt only my most sensitive body parts! Me: Okay kid, it’s time we have The Talk—
Thank you, 'A Memory Called Empire', for just now teaching me that it's apparently Verisimilitude and not Versimilitude. I've been using that wrong for decades, and apparently no one ever felt confident enough to correct me. My version sounded cooler, though.
When I was ghostwriting gay werewolf romances the client once emailed me an idea & ended it with "you get the jizz." He wasn't being funny, he just honestly thought the saying was "you get the jizz" & I think about that every now & then. I wish him well
Discworld QOTD, from I Shall Wear Midnight
Same. It’s not the product. It’s the externalities. It’s the grift. It’s the sell out of all the people who talked a talk of caring about making things open for the benefit of all.
The arc is really fun when you experience it one chapter at a time, as a part of a bigger community exchanging analysis and speculation, almost like an ARG. But getting there is tough, and at some point, it will just finish, removing that light at the end of the tunnel for future readers.
Being right sucks sometimes.
His son looks like if a man and a woman had a baby
Reading yet another "we asked about 100 different things in the survey itself, and we're now going to report a focused story that we justify with statistical significance on 5 of them" large-scale tech industry report and wondering why an industry so aware of "hacking" isn't aware of "p-hacking"
I think most of the loud ASOIAF fans don't actually want an ending. They just want a solution sheet for the plot so they can check whether they got a good grade in theorizing.
Coinbase’s CEO asking people to use AI by Saturday then firing people who didn’t is fascinating because I don’t remember such threats to get tech workers to use Slack, Jira, Visual Studio Code, Google Docs, smartphones or really any valuable productivity tool. Makes you wonder…
My self-concept really changed as a social scientist when I decided my core strength was being a creative and strategic compassion instead of [insert elitist idea of being technical here] and I really recommend it
I love Quarto because when you show the outputs to data scientists they go "oh, a quarto doc, nice" while when you show the outputs to anyone else they go "oh, you're a wizard, that looks incredible"
I'm feeling enormously smug about the relevation that everything was entirely caused by an utter lack of project management. That was my theory ever since I rewatched the first Hollow Knight trailers and noticed basically no design work in them actually survived to the final product lol
"Plastic...is very difficult to avoid. But we are at a moment with "AI" where things aren't so deeply integrated, though corporate interests are pushing for them to be...every act of refusal is especially powerful & meaningful now..." @emilymbender.bsky.social buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...
Your show is what really introduced me to him! 'gamernexus' just sounds so much like yet another channel full of Dark Souls guides, that the good work totally passed below my notice.
We are on the cusp of AGI, definitely for real
I'm sorry, but I need you to see this rock that looks like a sandwich that I just found on Instagram.
Discworld QOTD, from Unseen Academicals “The Librarian was not familiar with love, which had always struck him as a bit ethereal and soppy, but kindness, on the other hand, was practical. You knew where you were with kindness, especially if you were holding a pie it had just given you.”
I believe it stems from a combination of people never being actively taught what a useful comment looks like and people's first exposure to comments being the 'the following line does X' in tutorials. I've seen so many novices just copy that inane style of commenting outside its context.
one of the things that's still super weird about writing a period piece set in 2014 is that it feels less like writing the past and more like writing a hyperreal of the present; it's got all the things we have today but in the forms society largely pretends they still have, if that makes sense?
co-signed (in my 8 years of statistical consulting, clustering has not solved anyone’s problem)
Disclaimer xkcd.com/3126/
![Comic. [long message with unreadable text that includes lots of punctuation marks like semi colons and em dashes as well as citations.] Highlighted line at the bottom zoomed in reads: Not ChatGPT output—I’m just like this. [caption] I’ve had to start adding this disclaimer to my messages.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreifbqjlfnleuu4jrpvc7q6e43ckn2lqvuv7vdgtuf7e67dw5acy4di@jpeg "Click to view full size")
one of the great tragedies of our age is how many people are willing to view AI as magic because they don't understand how it functions but unwilling to exhibit any humility at all towards more important things they understand even less (like the climate or medicine)
"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people
tell me about it, tiny aloe plant on the counter at the cafe near my house
the scary thing about AI right now is not so much that it is capable of replacing your job but that your boss might think it is capable of replacing your job either way the end result is you don’t have a job
Discworld QOTD, from The Truth “Are you sure you’re allowed to do this?” she said. “No! I’m not! I won’t know until after I’ve done it! That’s why I’ve got to do it! Then I’ll know!”
bro just one more GPT bro. just one more you dont have to read or write emails anymore bro. one more GPT will fix everything bro
With how snout-like these helmets already look, you could probably move the antenna forward to the mouth part to give them cute whiskers 🐭 😆
The direct cause for my decision to just shave to baldness, was a mixed online-offline meeting where the office camera was positioned awkwardly and showed me (and everyone else) the spotted back of my head for like two hours straight^^
I recently read 'I Promessi Sposi', an Italian 19th century novel partially set during a 17th century plague, and I was blown away by how much of society's reaction to our recent pandemic I recognized within those old pages.
the manosphere stuff isn’t new. they were glorifying redpill pickup artist types when I was a teen. the problem is that podcasts and streamers more perfectly replicate the experience of hanging out with social peers than any mass medium in history and the human brain can’t cope
I really hope some ethnologist is observing how psychologists conduct research on LLMs because that stuff can get wild and probably tells us a lot about psychologists. (Less so about LLMs)
This was really wild because writing this article (which explained how female lions are in charge of the pride) really revealed to me how common it is for men to make male lions their entire personality and definition of manhood. I was dogpiled, brigaded, and attacked for WEEKS.
one cool thing about Scandinavian countries with comprehensive public health insurance is places like Denmark can do a study on… everybody and conclude that yes COVID vaccines are safe
Lmao this rules so hard
ah yeah the familiar whiplash of seeing a legacy media org cover something you're an actual expert in and realizing "oh if this is how badly they're fucking up this, how badly are they fucking up every other topic?"
Shame. This could've been such a spicy FF ranking lol
Watching a pannenkoek video is kinda like watching someone assemble a particle accelerator
As others have said, it's actually the other way around entirely - wikipedia is just how humans are, and corporations have been trying to enclose us, like they did in the 1700s
Friday #rstats #ggplot2 tip for anyone - like me - who’s spent hours trying to get the formatting of their exported plot right 📉🛠️🎨
Discworld QOTD, from The Wee Free Men “Yes! I'm me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don't understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That's the kind of person I am!”
I think my biggest challenge with short-form microblogging platforms like Bluesky is that, while I don't mind splitting stuff up into multiple posts to get around the character limit, sometimes I end up writing individual sentences that exceed the character limit, and there's often no elegant way to
"This proof has been left as an exercise to chat"
Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/
![4-panel comic. (1) [Person 1 with ponytail flanked by person with short hair and another person speaking into microphone at podium] PERSON 1: In the early 2010s, researchers found that many major scientific results couldn’t be reproduced. (2) PERSON 1: Over a decade into the replication crisis, we wanted to see if today’s studies have become more robust. (3) PERSON 1: Unfortunately, our replication analysis has found exactly the same problems that those 2010s researchers did. (4) [newspaper with image of speakers from previous panels] Headline: Replication Crisis Solved](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreibwuu57ullc7vacjyno6c5z3gtyakkg2qub6cn3dbbjdpn2kaowmi@jpeg "Click to view full size")
AI is a marketing term; before we discuss "AI is fake" vs "AI is real" we need to unfold what we *mean* by AI. For example, "artificial general intelligence" is fake and can't hurt you. Layoffs excused by "AI efficiency" are real and can hurt you. Linkedin discourse is fake - but it CAN hurt you.
Do you ever thinking about the running joke that is Ea-Nasir and feel a kind of poignant delight that something so simple and silly could make so many people laugh for so long?
My personal solution to the Internet of Things surveillance/botnetting issue is to make all IoT devices write-only. You can send instructions to them, but they can't be read from or initiate outgoing communication. This would create vastly more problems than its solves, which is why we should do it.
I've been pushing through a 19th-century Italian romance novel I acquired last year, and just now a scene made me wonder whether it has an AO3 presence. I am happy to share that there is a double-digit number of fics and that the most popular pairing even matches my current chapter.
I genuinely think all the time about that one study where the scientists put male turkeys in front of sticks with fake female turkey heads on them and the male turkeys started doing mating displays
Do. Not. Give. This. To. The. Medics. PLEASE.
My understanding of ChatGPT was shaped early on when I typed this meme into it and it agreed with me
It is surprising and exhausting how much of responding to peer review statistics comments is just teaching the reviewer about statistics, after they condescend to you. I just had someone tell me I should use a "categorical" variable instead of dummy coding in a regression🤷
That graph is interesting. The lines don't separate until about the median, so the effect is uneven. Roughly for the easier 50% of all problems, AI is just neutral. For the other half, which in effect would represent a majority of your working time, it's really hurting you.
We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.
I should be mad but honestly this video of my expensive standing desk being delivered with uh, less than industry standard care, is sending me I cannot stop laughing
I've recently stumbled upon someone developing a VN using the Custom Run functionality of the Roguelike Slice and Dice.
Omg, absolutely incredible reason for AO3 to have been down hachyderm.io/@vashti/1147... (alt text at original)
Linkedin is drastically improved if you imagine every post was written and voiced by GLaDOS.
I also want to make a call to any reporter that has thought they "can't understand the business side" because they're not good at numbers, or they're "not technical." Neither am I! Tech CEOs want you to feel like their numbers and tech are black magic. www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-...
me: there’s nothing worse than opening a blank document microsoft word: hold my beer
Is anyone in the mood to be the 4339th viewer on a wonderful video on a fascinating topic? Because I just found this hidden gem and loved it: youtu.be/XBycUqPucZ4?... It's about the history of the poinsettia flower and how corporate marketing has completely flooded out its truth.
David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...
Women are lagging behind on going bankrupt on DraftKings, drinking themselves to death, and fist-fighting anyone who looks at them funny on the subway but they can catch up.
One of the more maddening parts of the generative AI bubble is that, for it to make sense, it would have to have the combined value of both the smartphone market (around $500bn) and enterprise software (>$250bn) market...combined, and that's effectively what they're promising! Total flimflam
i keep cracking up at this post on AI writing
Stolen from a friend's IG:
if k means clustering, what does c mean
Even better: Make it intrusive thoughts. Whenever you miss a parry, the protagonist does a Disco Elysium lol
Etrian Odyssey 3 is only JRPG I ever bounced off of due to difficulty. Problem could've been starting at 3, though. You just get sent to a cave full of death without any real tutorial. The FF4 DS is also notoriously hard. I remember having to really plan out battles like the Calcobrinas as a kid.
www.ibiblio.org/harris/500mi... You might be one of the lucky people to learn today about an emailing bug that turned out to be caused by the speed of light.
The speed of writing code has never, and will never be the bottleneck. The bottleneck, the limiting factor, is always in the thinking about the code and how it works, understanding it. People who use chatgpt to write code are literally removing the only part of programming that is actually useful.
The title is so catchy and evocative that you probably get users that don't even know the podcast
It's a bit like the old saying about how a fine only makes something illegal for the poor: Being forced to use your real name online only stops bad behaviour from people who aren't privileged enough to be insulated from consequences.
Here's the latest episode of Better Offline. I'm joined by @internetofbugs.com to talk about the realities of software development, what coding LLMs can actually do, and how the media gets it wrong about software engineering at large. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline
Possibly the best thing I've read about ChatGPT yet. h/t @melaniemitchell.bsky.social amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...
The real problem with generative language models is that when you're confidently wrong about something absurd, people just assume you're repeating something a robot said. Like, no, I am doing a bit here – this is HAND CRAFTED misinformation.
The DS was where all the smaller creative projects went as the 'AAA or nothing'-trend was ramping up. It has a ridiculous amount of games that got like zero attention at release, but eventuality turned into hidden gems.
I suspect all the monotonous ongoing tasks currently keeping the world running don't really produce much accessible well-formatted continuous texts to scrape. Works of writing where monotony is just the first act before some dramatic breakdown would thus be overrepresented in training.
Archaea xkcd.com/3095/
![Comic. PERSON: It’s weird how, despite being one of the main branches of the tree of life, no archaea species are known to cause disease in humans. PERSON WITH SHORT HAIR: Personally, I think it’s because those gross methane breathers are too weird and incompetent to figure out how to hurt us even if they wanted to. [from small point under microscope on desk]: *Hey!* [caption] Bad news: After overhearing a conversation in our lab, Archaea has finally started harming humans.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreibeun6ux6wr6w76uv3nubobmc2aydwd2onzh525sxr3soufnc52pe@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Are you also watching along with andersonjph, or is it some other coincidental playthrough? I am currently experiencing the story for the first time alongside that stream. Having an enforced schedule is really nice for a work this long.
Btw, are you aware there's also Risk Powers? (applying a root/power to a risk for growth/shrinkage) They are niche, but their sibling of Inverse Risk Powers, as in applying the power to (1 - the risk) instead, has secretly been popular all along under the name hazard ratios. Everything is linked.
I got on a conference call first thing this morning with my boss and he asked me what my shirt said, so I had to explain that it was a cute dog sailor with the text TOTAL INFORMATION COLLAPSE & THE END OF ALL CONSENSUS REALITY, THE DAMAGE CANNOT BE UNDONE
Compare Vonnegut buying an envelope with this tech bro running from his life
Last week I had a hilarious moment where I realized that the new Mario Kart - which I don't really care about - has a new Mario Kart soundtrack attached to it and suddenly got really excited😆
The craving for summaries is misguided in general. Scientific writing isn't lengthy and complex for fun. We aren't recipe bloggers that get paid by word count. If there was a way to be appropriately precise while keeping things short, scientists would be doing it.
If only Arxiv required researchers to sign at the top rather than the bottom of the page, none of this would’ve happened. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/05/19/i...
A new use of the asterisk in the paper author list for credit assignment
“Data available upon locating the only postdoc who understands the file structure and who left 6 years ago.” #AcademicSky
The word “login” comes from throwing a log attached to a rope with knots overboard a ship to see how many knots go by over time (see also, knots as speed). You’d then put that info in the “log book.” You’d “log in” on a regular basis. This wasn’t from 1959, it was likely from 1689! Etymology baby!
Obviously it's not reliable because the tech inherently isn't, but I was under the impression that companies have managed to brute-force the algorithms to do a copy-paste impersonation for stuff within the context window most of the time. Does that still not work?
If you thought social media had scrambled America’s CEOs just wait until they’re fully cooked by AI apple.news/AJ_ht7MMyT9G...
The best part about knowing Latin plurals is using them incorrectly on purpose and seeing if anyone who knows WHY you're full of shit is within earshot. Insist that the plural of of "waitress" is "waitrices". You know you want to.
For everyone who was like “Google search is getting worse,” we were absolutely right.
Saw this and thought my oomfs' feeds could use this
Scarlet 🏳️⚧️ 