Valentin Rodionov

Watch this. Then remember that the president doesn’t care. He cares that his old ass gets richer in the hand full of years he may have left.

And his sick rich friends. The most corrupt evil man to ever serve as president is ignoring real evil

"there is little reason to doubt what the aim [of the massive investment in AI] is: to embed knowledge in machines—knowledge that previously belonged to the people working in these domains."

🧵

Sen. Ron Johnson Endorses Book Touting Chlorine Dioxide's Unproven Health Benefits Wisconsin's Ron Johnson has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation. Now he's giving credence to assertions about the therapeutic powers of chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant and deodorizer. “It i...

NEW: Sen. Ron Johnson has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation.

Now he's giving credence to assertions about the therapeutic powers of chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant and deodorizer.

“It is all lunacy," one expert said.

Riding the Autism Bicycle to Retraction Town Does anyone *really* know their Factor Fexcectorn?

Springer-Nature statement

“Whilst the details of peer review are confidential, we can confirm that the article underwent two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers, supporting an accept decision.”

How am I now expected to believe that two people looked at the paper twice and DGAF?

Boxing up the NSF at Eisenhower Av for the forced relocation. Boxes have “Details Matter” signage.

NSF

- Forced reorg

- POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements)

- Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …)

I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing.
“Details matter” 🙃

A collage of four figures from a scientific paper, each showing multiple panels of blue, red, and green fluorescent cells in colon tissue.

Can you spot at least three unexpected overlapping panels? (There are more!)

#ImageForensics
#ResearchIntegrity
#Academia

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

I played intramural sports in college, can I be the Director of Intramural Research?

One of the open positions at NIH is the Deputy Director for Intramural Research. This is an important position (sort of like a dean who coordinates the intramural programs in the various institutes).

This position is advertised on Facebook. Here is a winning comment.

Not a fan of this timeline...

Well said, Justice Jackson.

Plain and simple.

Not to mention the strong Stare Decisis argument based on Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) and other cases.

What's Happening At the Water Surface Anyway?

More controversy about air/water interfaces, which you might imagine wouldn’t stir up much passion:

WHY DOES MARCO RUBIO HATE AMERICAN TYPE FOUNDRIES

"there's a new serif in town"

I’m sure FIRE will be all over this

Professor Grune’s diet of dodgy blots As German TV asks Tilman Grune what he will eat in the future, I have other questions for him.

Professor Grune’s diet of dodgy blots
forbetterscience.com/2025/12/09/p...

"We can't allow fact checkers into the country" is late-stage USSR shit, real end-of-empire stuff

YouTube video by euronews All aboard except the driver? A fully autonomous train takes to the tracks in Germany

1. In Hamburg there is a "fully autonomous train" that for some reason has a human operator to press the ON switch first thing in the morning and the OFF switch at the end of the night. In a recent talk about AI in science, I asked the audience to consider whether they want to be like that operator.

Excess mortality or excessive assumptions? How to make a popular metric tell any story you like

What was killing the Swedes in 2013-2017?

I was rereading the excellent post about the atrocious op-ed by the occupants of the NIH leadership positions (Bhattacharya and Memoli, hereafter BM) noting their assumptions for excess death modeling.

kucharski.substack.com/p/excess-mor...

1/5

A screenshot taken by someone on Twitter/X of Elon Musk agreeing with a tweet that shows the EU flag being peeled back to reveal a Nazi one. For Elon’s purposes here Nazis are apparently bad, but you can’t rely on that with him, of course.

The latest from an honored member of the Royal Society. Every week he attacks the foundations of society in the UK and the EU and @royalsociety.org is apparently too worried about retribution to do anything about it.

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’ AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
AI research in question as author claims to have written over 100 papers on AI that one expert calls a ‘disaster’
@aishadown.bsky.social for @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Tenured US professor fired over pro-Palestinian protests contests dismissal Sang Hea Kil is first tenured faculty member fired from a public university in connection to the protests

Universities will keep sexual predators on the faculty because their "hands are tied by tenure." Turns out protesting genocide is all it takes to loosen those unshakable chains.

My org @fightforthefuture.org has been “de-googling” for the last year.

We’re totally off Google suite, Google docs, Drive, Calendar.

We’re using Signal and Element for chat, Nextcloud for docs, etc

Planning to publish a “how to” guide for other nonprofits and activist groups soonish.

The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Activists Are Fighting Back Half of the country now requires age verification to watch porn or access “harmful” content. Digital rights advocates are pushing back against legislation they say will make the internet less safe.

Adults shouldn't have to sacrifice their privacy in order to watch porn, R-rated movies, or anything else the government might deem offensive to kids.

Keeping kids safe can't come at the expense of our free speech rights.

Wang et al. 2024 (DOI: 10.1038/s41419-024-06897-y) corrected their paper once, but unfortunately, in the already CORRECTED figure they ended up using images that overlapped... Now they request to correct the correction. 🤦‍♂️ I don't know what else to say... #ImageForensics
pubpeer.com/publications...

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda.

It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

- Garry Kasparov

The most interesting part of this story isn’t that the pipe bomber is MAGA. That was blatantly obvious. What should interest folks is that the FBI and DoJ hid that fact from you, and still haven’t made a statement. This info is coming from sources on the condition of anonymity.

Just curious, which paper was that?

A Spaceship Name Generator inspired by The Culture and John Scalzi Need a starship name with a personality? Our generator creates names inspired by Iain M. Banks and John Scalzi, moving beyond standard military tropes.

Inasmuch as I explicitly model my starship names in the Interdependency series on what Iain Banks was doing in The Culture, my presence in this headline is superfluous; nevertheless I will take it

www.geeknative.com/216328/a-spa...

“You’re prompting me wrong.”