Shan Kothari

also LLMs can be dangerous tools even if they're not a road to AGI

I was going to say the same thing!

Satellite proposals threaten the night sky In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for authorizing satellite launches and operations…

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan.
darksky.org/news/two-sat...

Show me the coolest thing you own. Whether it’s art or a leaf that you found neat, I want to see it!

Wedgwood jasperware dish

tie: a complete 19th century edition of Humboldt's Cosmos (in my office) and this cool Wedgwood jasperware dish I found at Vinnie's Treasure Shoppe in Wihkwentowin

YouTube video by Chris Fleming Beef Hutchins - Frenchin the Bat

imo "Frenching the Bat" is an all-time banger youtu.be/D_TjzDqrzsQ?...

The phrase “preemptive strike” is as insulting as when we were sold “humanitarian pauses” in the middle of a live-streamed genocide. The powerful looking you straight in the face and telling you your common sense simply doesn’t matter.

what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"

"preemptive strikes" WAR OF AGGRESSION

Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments The opposition appeared overwhelming: Tens of thousands of emails poured into Southern California's top air pollution authority as its board weighed a June proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances...

They were going to pass rules to phase out gas stoves, until they received 20,000 public comments against the regulations. Except, oops, it turns out the comments were generated by AI.

Variation and macroevolution in leaf functional traits in the Hawaiian silversword alliance (Asteraceae) The Hawaiian silversword alliance includes 33 species in three endemic genera (Argyroxiphium, Dubautia, and Wilkesia) that occupy almost all major habitats of the Hawaiian archipelago (top row). We s...

Was on this one but it is my favorite as I learned a ton, got to think about Silverswords and traits as well as had a chance to collaborate with Baldwin and Robichaux besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

thanks! exactly the sort of thing I was looking for

thank you!

ecology and evolution folks! what are your favorite recent-ish, accessible papers on trait evolution?

Living the metascience dream (or nightmare) with AI for science What happens when we go from replication crisis to robustness extremes?

AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default?

Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.

Devezer's Urn LLMs make metascience easier, but that doesn't increase metascientific validity.

LLMs make statistical metascience easier. LLMs don't increase the validity of statistical metascience. www.argmin.net/p/devezers-urn

I was a Hark! fan from almost the beginning, and it broke my heart to read Ducks and learn what she was going through as she was drawing those early strips

Danielle Smith is no separatist; she's much, much worse In a televised address last night Danielle Smith launched a xenophobic assault on immigration and proposed a set of referendum questions for next Fall advocating a constitutional agenda that would red...

NEW POST: Danielle Smith is no separatist; she's much, much worse
emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/danielle-s...

giant bowl-shaped khakhra... obviously

giant bowl-shaped khakhra?

keep having to explain to my friends still Over There that we can be unhinged too!!

None of Smith's referendum questions are likely to result in actual policy change.

Because they require constitutional amendments (federal veto) or are plainly unconstitutional.

Assuming "yes" votes carry, what then?

Kenney's equalization referendum didn't soothe separatists. It emboldened them.

Smith kicked off the sovereignty referendum campaign tonight. The fight for the future of Alberta starts now.

friends don't let friends use X

A lot of AI rollouts assume that humans or other AIs won't interact adversarially with the product, when "any system deployed in the real world with real stakes will eventually get attacked" is one of the few real constants in life

More from the University of Alberta today. Faculty & students are fighting back against repeated capitulations of senior administrators to blackmail and threats from the UCP government. Read this powerful statement from the Indigenous Graduate Students Association.
www.facebook.com/share/p/1EPk...

Let me explain why I think these are interesting to look at.

There are two dominant perspectives on LLMs: Boosters and Haters. They are both wrong. Boosterism says this kind of thing is of the past and simply doesn’t happen if you’re using the latest SOTA model on super smart mode. That’s wrong.

I think Anthropic's big bet (and everyone's) is that they can continue to drive the cost of inference down to the point that they'll unambiguously make money on inference. The question is whether competition will make them drive prices down, too!

and people say Alberta has no culture!

I don't think music incorporating chance became (somewhat) common in the Western classical tradition until the 50s, and then the term of art was "aleatoric"

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns."

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...