Elise Cutts

As a science journalist it’d be helpful if researchers made this distinction more widely and regularly. Maybe reviving machine learning as a term to contrast with AI, which these days is synonymous in the public mind with generative AI/ LLMs, could be one way?

And since self employed people need to handle all their own business expenses and pay their own employment taxes and health insurance, our hourly rates before that also need to be higher than for an employee.

So that €20/hr after taxes and everything else is much less than it seems.

Example: I play in a paid D&D game that’s €35/session, with 4 other players.

That means the DM gets €175 for our 4-hr session. But he also preps for at least as long, and has administrative work on top of that. So let‘s say 9rs/session —> ~20/hr

That’s more than fair. Actually quite low.

Being self employed has changed how I think about money in at least one important way: I‘ve started to see the hidden hourly rates behind the sticker prices of services and products.

Often, esp. for small businesses, this means I think prices are fair that my friends think are asking too much.

a few tiny panels from a comics page. Upper two display the formation of Jupiter - gathering gas and ice to its early planetoid and growing massively in size. Below two panels showing planets in orbit through a field of dust, ice, and rocks. Making tiny grooves in it - but over time their lanes become much clearer. None of this is to scale

A snipped from this page that's nearly done. the first planet forming and as planets form, clearing their lanes... Really eager to have time to put this one to bed!
#Nostos #Unflattening 2

Wow, did you ever manage to recover?

Thank you!! 🥰 I’m really looking forward to readding your posts as well.

Thank you, and thanks for taking the time to share your work!

About a week ago I was interviewed by the Sharp and complex mind of @elisecutts.bsky.social, for Reviewer Too. Best interview experience you’ll ever get on complex subjects! Check it:

bsky.app/profile/elis...

Elise cuts (ha ha, pun intended) straight to the implications and interest. Very fun!

Conspiracy brain says this a list of jobs dominated by women, with engineering and business thrown on to avoid suspicion

What is up with gmail's spam filter flagging messages from researchers?

Even addresses from the same university are acting weird —one scientist, no problem. The other, straight to spam.

I'm not even a scientist and I occasionally get emails like this, too.

Gmail often lets them through, meanwhile actual emails from researchers I need to contact get flagged as spam 😵‍💫

This literally sounds like something that would happen on Star Trek, also. Jean-Luc Picard riffing on a Shakespear verse to take down the Borg somehow.

I don't know about extinction burst... I'm very, very skeptical of a system as old as patriarchy just crumbling entirely within a generation 🙃

But another step in the recent anti-feminist backlash that's worth adding to the timeline is definitely gamer gate. It was so bad, people forget.

I apologize to all of my friends, who will soon have to tolerate even more etymology fact dumping, now with extra historical context!

... take my money

Encouraging! Thank you :)

beep boop

This was a short news story written in a very newsy voice. There are some standard ways of saying things in news stories that you sort of need to follow. I assume language models consumed a lot of news articles and can therefore spit out news language.

Thank you!

I wonder if anyone feels entitled enough to complain to the cashiers at clothes shops about the clothes being behind a paywall.

"LPSC did not provide specifics on the criteria that will be used to evaluate abstracts.. but the conference appears worried enough ... to strike straightforward information about bathrooms. From 2022-24, LPSC listed the locations of gender-neutral bathrooms on its website, but not in 2025 or ’26."

A graphic showing 69% AI generated, 13% paraphrased AI, and 18% human generated text — for a text I wrote 100% by hand!

I ran a recent story of mine that I wrote 100% by hand through an AI text detector and LOL.

Just. Lol.

Thank you! Your story was a lot of help

‘Orwellian’: planetary scientists outraged over deletion of research records Researchers say that a NASA-funded institute is over-interpreting Trump’s anti-DEI order.

The decision doubles down on an earlier move by LPSC's parent organization to scrub DEI content from their websites in response to the EOs.

The removed content included LPSC abstracts, which are 2-page mini-papers.

@alexwitze.bsky.social covered the controversy back then for Nature:

‘This is censorship.’ Conference requires abstracts to comply with Trump anti-DEI order NASA-funded planetary science institute previously scrubbed hundreds of records from its archive

New from me for @science.org: A major planetary science conference will require submitted abstracts to comply with Trump's anti-DEI executive orders.

This conference, LPSC, is a big deal. It's been running since 1970 and is one of the biggest planetary science conferences out there. 🧪🔭

Look it's a common hobby at this point and if you're the kind of nerd I need to talk to for my job, you're at high risk anyways

When I interview a researcher and they casually use a 20-sided die as a "relatable metaphor" for some thing they're working on, I really have to fight back the urge to ask them about their D&D characters.

Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era | The Local A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.

A very good article about one fake freelancer and the grim state of journalism/the world: thelocal.to/investigatin...