Andre Vellino's Avatar

Andre Vellino

@avellino.bsky.social

Associate Professor School of Information Studies & Institute for Science, Society & Policy (ISSP), University of Ottawa. Dharma Teacher in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh.

57 Followers  |  30 Following  |  26 Posts  |  Joined: 20.02.2024  |  1.8639

Latest posts by avellino.bsky.social on Bluesky

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I have always thought this tweet by Hillary Clinton in 2016 was prophetic.

22.06.2025 02:01 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Wow. The ease with which people's minds are manipulated is terrifying.

30.03.2025 11:48 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Of course Elbow, Sask., would hold an 'Elbows up' rally A Saskatchewan village in the heart of the Prairies lived up to its name on Friday with a small but patriotic 'Elbows up' rally. The movement, inspired by Saskatchewan-born hockey legend Gordie Howe,...

My partner's mother, who loves in Elbow Saskatchewan, organized this "elbows up" event. www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

21.03.2025 23:21 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Reply to The Daily's "Were the Covid Lockdowns Worth It?" Yes, they were - just look at Canada

My first attempt at writing an article on Substack.

21.03.2025 21:27 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Now this is terrifying: tests by Apollo Research on Frontier AI models show in-context scheming and pursuing misaligned goals covertly. They introduce errors, disable oversight, exfiltrate data, and persistently deceive.
No worries - be happy!
static1.squarespace.com/static/6593e...

11.12.2024 01:55 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Opinion | Bluesky Is Different From X. For Now. Users are looking for a more curated experience on a platform that is not constantly trying to get them to interact with brands.

If Clay Shirky says that BlueSky is different from X, then it must be.

08.12.2024 00:06 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Sick animals suggest COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market A preliminary analysis takes a closer look at genomic data collected at the market.

Evidence in the "lab leak vs. spillover" covid debate always favored spillover, more so the more we learn. Two new pieces of information support spillover: Sick animals in the Wuhan market & no genetic similarities to Wuhan lab strains www.nature.com/articles/d41...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

07.12.2024 00:01 β€” πŸ‘ 311    πŸ” 93    πŸ’¬ 15    πŸ“Œ 3

As I play at home with local instances of Llama 3.2, there's no doubt at all that "AI is real and dangerous"... very dangerous... At the very least, it greatly amplifies everything what a human mind can do and there are a sufficiently large number of malevolent minds out there that want to do harm.

06.12.2024 14:42 β€” πŸ‘ 31    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 0
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Good Job, President Biden... Which will all be undone when Elon and Vivek are done with slashing the US civil service!

06.12.2024 14:37 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Trump Picks Stanford Physician Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to Head N.I.H. As the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would oversee the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $47 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers.

For all his many flaws (belief in letting SARS-CoV-2 propagate to induce herd immunity, belief in the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab-leak) at least Bhattacharya is a qualified MD.

27.11.2024 02:51 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

LinkedIn is going to be the first social network where more than half of the accounts, posts, and comments are all fake. And that's beautiful to me

26.11.2024 23:18 β€” πŸ‘ 581    πŸ” 82    πŸ’¬ 55    πŸ“Œ 14
Transformers (how LLMs work) explained visually | DL5
YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown Transformers (how LLMs work) explained visually | DL5

This is quite a good (visual) explanation of how LLMs work.

26.11.2024 17:58 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Did he have a choice, though?

25.11.2024 20:50 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Large Language Model Influence on Diagnostic Reasoning This randomized clinical trial evaluates the diagnostic performance of physicians with use of a large language model compared with conventional resources.

Fifty physicians (26 attendings, 24 residents) were given diagnostic tasks, with the help of ChatGPT-4 (GroupA) and without its help (GroupB).The median diagnostic reasoning score for GroupA was 76% and for GroupB 74%....The LLM alone scored 90%!

25.11.2024 18:40 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

David Joffe isn't drawing the right conclusions from this study. Rather, it shows that the vaccinated (any doses) was associated with a 22–29% lower risk of Long COVID compared to the unvaccinated

25.11.2024 00:16 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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This professor has taken on RFK Jr. for opposing vaccines A Q&A with Dr. Peter Hotez, who has clashed with the new health and human services secretary nominee. Hotez himself helped develop low-cost vaccinations.

Between RFK(secretary of HHS) who doesn't believe in vaccines and Jay Bhattacharya (now head of NIH) who believes in just letting a virus spread in the population to achieve herd immunity... we're in for a rough ride if there's another pandemic.

24.11.2024 16:42 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Covid-19 may lead to longest period of peacetime excess mortality, says new Swiss Re report | Swiss Re Covid-19 may lead to longest period of peacetime excess mortality, says new Swiss Re report

According to Swiss Re Institute's report, β€œThe future of excess mortality after COVID-19, if the ongoing impact of the disease is not curtailed, excess mortality rates may remain up to 3% higher than pre-pandemic levels in the US and 2.5% in the UK by 2033.” shorturl.at/eoFWt

#MedSky ο»Ώ#CardioSky

23.11.2024 23:59 β€” πŸ‘ 400    πŸ” 129    πŸ’¬ 13    πŸ“Œ 8
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I had a few straggling X accounts lying around. "Sorry"? - "Not Sorry, Elon." This feels so good.

21.11.2024 17:44 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Westheimer: Pending uOttawa strike is about much more than money When universities prioritize financial interests over educational ideals, strikes and protests are one tool for fighting back.

ottawacitizen.com/opinion/west...

20.11.2024 17:30 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Performance of Multimodal AI Chatbots Evaluated on Clinical Oncology Cases This cross-sectional study assesses the ability of unimodal and multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to generate medically accurate responses to questions about clinical oncology cases.

A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness

20.11.2024 19:21 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Inbox | Substack

If this is true, it's interesting. The claim is that the election was hacked and that the tell is the large number of "Trump" President votes in battleground state with no down-ballot votes and only in battleground states. But it could also be a Dem conspiracy theory. substack.com/inbox/post/1...

17.11.2024 21:45 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Jay Bhattacharya, an NIH critic, emerges as a top candidate to lead the agency The Stanford physician was excoriated by NIH’s director in 2020 for his β€œfringe” ideas on covid. Four years later, he’s poised for power in Trump’s Washington.

Jay Bhattacharya, an NIH critic, emerges as a top candidate to lead the agency

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/...

God help us.

16.11.2024 19:44 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image 16.11.2024 01:31 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Things are so bad in the US, I am seeing adds like this on Facebook

14.11.2024 23:11 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
New York Times visualization of Climate Tracker report data.

New York Times visualization of Climate Tracker report data.

climateactiontracker.org/documents/12...

14.11.2024 07:40 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Do we, though?

13.11.2024 21:11 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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ChatGPT : "Choices like Musk and Ramaswamy suggest a push for disruptive, business-driven reforms.
....
This cabinet could be effective in implementing the Project 2025 agenda, but it would ... face significant resistance both internally (from gvmt) and externally (from the public and media)."

13.11.2024 21:10 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I am going to duplicate my FB posts for a while and when I reach a critical mass of my FB friends on bsky, I'm going to cancel FB - for oh so many reasons!

13.11.2024 21:06 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Opinion | Climate Science Can’t Keep Up With the Warming Planet We need more timely updates in response to the rapid changes to the climate.

We Study Climate Change. We Can’t Explain What We’re Seeing. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/o...

13.11.2024 18:06 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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I knew the tears would come after the denial phase.

12.11.2024 23:53 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

@avellino is following 19 prominent accounts