Jon Petters

They literally ruin everything they touch

2) A main challenges to the utility of these tools is good information inputs - either the permission to access this information isn't there yet (e.g. research literature, collaborators), or the information isn't widely available (e.g. datasets)

Just answered a survey about the use of agentic AIs in research, and can boil down my responses to three bullet points:

1.) I'm interested where it relieves me of the burden of meeting formats/guidelines, but not at all when it would supplant me thinking (e.g. writing)

(1/2)

Make America Great Again was always a lie. This is what our government is doing to children.

apnews.com/article/chic...

6 AM Tuesday morning #HurricaneMelissa approaches Jamaica. Horrifying next 24 hours
says Dr. Shepherd. Pray. Been at this a long-time one of the most horrific, well-formed hurricanes I have ever seen. 175 mph winds and a direct landfall looming

worth updating immediately to speed up Google Drive performance. "use as default" was checked for me too

the democratic party’s basic problem is it has almost no control over how its message reaches the ears of voters, especially outside of presidential election years. but rather than devote serious time, attention and cash to that problem its consultants and pundits want to fight factional battles

Oh my god

"Data available upon request"

When you could code silly quizzes on Facebook, it was FULL of "what would you be in medieval times?!" etc.

I made one that nearly always answered "died as a child", "died in childbirth", "lived and died as a servant"

People got SUPER mad with it.

Everyone assumes they'll be at the top of the tree

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

Today on my blog: some thoughts on the best data management strategies for collaboration: dataabinitio.com?p=1204

What's your best data tip for collaborative research?

Work really hard and one day this can be you (followed by graffiti of a headstone that says “RIP worked really hard” on it

happy sunday, remember that you are completely expendable to your employer and that when you die they will forget you ever existed within weeks and easily replace you

A leading Democrat in the Senate just released an important report documenting how NASA has been working to implement the president's proposed budget, not Congressionally approved funds, in slashing missions. Read more ⬇️

Coming soon! The Data Management Workbook by @kbriney.bsky.social 📖

Learn more and preorder your copy ➡️ https://tinyurl.com/3bkdjce6

#datamanagement #dataanalysis #statistics #researchdata

The key problem with what Ezra Klein says here is that he fails – or is unwilling – to grapple with the fundamental reality of the political conflict: The movement that dominates today’s Right fully rejects the very idea of “living here with each other” as equals. That’s their defining position.

The big story here is of an agency of dedicated statisticians and public servants working tirelessly to improve economic data in a climate of budgetary cuts to data collection. They have been very innovative in meeting that mandate. But we should also just fund our economic infrastructure.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

If Biden had said even one-tenth of this, he’d have been impeached and removed as a dictator. What is wrong with our elites? They’re paralyzed by their fear of looking unsavvy or biased against MAGA. They’re going to keep pretending everything is normal until the bullet passes through their face

Michelle Obama: kids should have healthier school lunches

RFK Jr: maybe if we let the plague run wild we can build a master race

Media: wow these are the same thing

Like three years back at our institution one IT person (ONE PERSON) decided that renewing the uni Qualtrics license was too expensive and unilaterally terminated it. No investigation as to what impact that would have for uni research or business, just ended.

a bald man is smiling with the words welcome aboard behind him ALT: a bald man is smiling with the words welcome aboard behind him

Welcome Kristin :)

I'm sure our health insurance providers will find a way to make $$$ on them as well

Yeah, that's better...still need to ask my local pharmacy about vaccine availability

Why we can't just get this vaccine with the flu shot at MPOW...🤷

Illinois doesn't seem to be on the list, FWIW

Virginia is though, so, awesome

I genuinely think one thing that trips up folks on the left is that they can't imagine not sharing certain core values. Lemme explain. Here's an intuition pump:

Say you're in negotiations with counterparty X. And there are two possible deals on the table ...

The authoritarian checklist It is time to admit that America is no longer a functioning democracy

New, from me:
America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism.
This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

The White House Is Going to Put Government Statistics on the Blockchain (Yeah, We Don't Know Why Either)

I was the executive director of U.S. Open Data, a non-profit that I created at the behest of the Obama White House. I worked as one of the nation's leading experts in open data. Putting open data on the blockchain is a profoundly stupid idea that fails nearly every test of good open data.

Undermining the Fed to get lower rates now is like ripping the batteries out of your smoke alarm because it’s beeping. It’s quiet for a bit. Then your house burns down. Credibility anchors expectations; expectations anchor inflation.