Dr. Stephanie

That’s a good thing, right? Right?

We actually did a rewatch recently and I deliberately stopped the episode before. Jadzia lives in my heart.

I will say the other actors did a remarkably good job of doing this same reaction in their characters.

It’s been thirty years and I’M STILL MAD

Shocked, shocked to discover that an ML model is bad at predicting the distribution of datasets it wasn’t trained on

Remember how I said there are people much more qualified than I am to explain how moderation works and uses machine learning?

Rah is one of those people. Read and be educated.

Definitely recommend the book, if you’ve never read it before - Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum.

Screenshot of a chunk of text from Terry Partchett’s book Carpe Jugulum. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example," said Oats. "And what do they think? Against it, are they?" said Granny Weatherwax. "It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray." "Nope." "Pardon?" "There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is. "It's a lot more complicated than that..." "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts." "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes..." "But they starts with thinking about people as things...

Same trend is driving them both - both come from the danger of thinking of people as things.

Absolutely! None of us can trust these companies to act in their users’ and customers’ best interests. Not that we ever *could*, of course, but AI magnifies and accelerates the problem - and that means we need to be more careful and detailed, not less.

My concern is that it is a PROCESS - and one that bsky seems to be dodgy about right now.

Good moderation, that works, has to be a combination of machine triage - so you don’t treat your human mods as essentially disposable - and human review. Other people can explain the fine-tuning of that process far better than me.

I also want to stick up a flag on behalf of the humans who have to review image and video content on the internet these days.

That’s the alternative to some kind of automated review, you see - human eyeballs, human brains.

The burnout rates are EXTREME. That’s trauma, all day every day.

No one reads the terms of service on things, just like no one reads the manual.

ARE they doing training with your data?

ARE they selling it to someone else?

If they’re doing training, is it to improve the functionality of the existing model (which you probably want, fyi)?

ASSUME NOTHING.

Understanding what someone is *actually* doing with AI and user data is critical.

At this point, “no interaction with AI tools anywhere” isn’t going to happen on any significant scale. The internet as a whole blew past that gate at least a year ago.

And again and always, ML != AI.

That’s really not true, and honestly not even a safe assumption to make. (I don’t like that I appear to be defending bluesky or hive here - I’m not. But this is absolutely a “read the contract, don’t assume” context.)

There’s about six jillion issues with them completely offloading all moral or mental responsibility for flagging images on the site to an AI tool. That the same AI tool *might* be used to generate new content is way lower on the list than “we have no idea what decisions the robot makes in our name.”

It says hive *can* - but I think that screenshot is just from their basic features page, right? Not saying that bluesky is *using* that feature? My dog *could* tow a sled, but she’s never even seen one, so I wouldn’t say I own a sled dog.

Rare Merlin and King Arthur text found hidden in binding of medieval book The ‘extremely significant' text was hidden for centuries.

I love that the Zoology department was integral to finding text about Merlin that was otherwise invisible to the human eye.

Scoop: White House memo says furloughed federal workers aren't entitled to backpay A move to deny backpay to up to 750,000 furloughed workers would dramatically escalate Trump's pressure on Democrats to end the shutdown.

Oh, for fucksake.

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

Bring back inscrutable security posters

I had a very long dream last night that I was trying to find an apartment in grad school.

I can happily report that I found a *much* nicer one than I could have actually afforded at the time.

Cold leftover meatballs, on a fork like a popsicle. Ciliegine mozzarella balls, same way.

I had an elementary school friend who taught me to love this as a hiking snack!

Churchill also was notorious for taking meetings while sitting drunk in the bathtub, sooooo….

I have a fabulous undergrad who has a lot of experience with QIIME2 & using R to analyze microbiome data. She is looking for a job starting in January. Would love to learn more bench and field skills (will be getting some in her last 2 months). Open to academic, industry, government jobs in the US.

27 things we wish we’d known when we started our PhDs Nature - Nature’s survey of PhD candidates reveals hard-won wisdom on choosing supervisors, managing mental health and surviving academic culture.

27 things we wish we’d known when we started our PhDs

Nature’s survey of PhD candidates reveals hard-won wisdom on choosing supervisors, managing mental health and surviving academic culture.

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Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

Image from MS showing the “design language” of the new icons. On the left is the old Word icon, a series of stacked blue horizontal bars with a large white W in a blue box. On the right is the new icon: it’s down to three bars, but they’re rounded and designed to look as if the icon is shiny plastic folding over itself. The W is smaller and lower on the icon, and the colors of the bars have subtle purple and white gradients instead of being plain.

I don’t think they’re really supposed to be representational at all, aside from Powerpoint, where - as per usual - it all breaks down.

The new icons are just the colored bars in the back of the previous icons, but made bubbly.