Richard D. Morey

Glob-glob! Absolutely magical sea anemone larva (about 7 mm) from The Lombok Strait, Indonesia 🇮🇩

Update: I spent seven tries just to get it to change an uppercase delta to a lowercase one. It kept “fixing” the problem (still uppercase!). After seven tries, it finally just substituted a “hand-crafted” SVG path (!). (I know this is easy to fix myself; wanted to
see if I could do it with prompts)

every statement from schumer is like the villager in zelda who’s 300 feet away from an evil towering castle going “ganon? never heard of him. boy I wish someone would round up 10 chickens to put back in my coop”

Yeah, given the extreme cost of the infrastructure just to maybe cut out some boring boilerplate coding? Doesn’t seem worth it.

Yeah, I really can't stress enough that AI code assistants royally fuck up statistical analyses. And they do it with absolute confidence.

I'm specifically testing claims of people I know re: LLMs using a test case that I've already coded myself. I don't think it has streamlined the work, really. It does boilerplate fine, but then I have to check any serious code. Not a net gain (but a change in the nature of the work)

Trying to one-shot this app has been a disaster - there are a bunch of interconnected animations/interface dependencies between parts of the app that it just screws up. Building it one logical step at at time seems to work better. I've tried it three times in various ways.

I *think* so - but all credit to Travis on that, it was his vision.

it was my pleasure to receive and edit a nice paper. Travis Proulx and I are pleased at how that whole special issue turned out.

Also, sometimes a change will completely hose the app. The order in which I ask it to add features is very important (in ways that seem logical given that it doesn't...know...anything, but still - if you thought this was anything like asking a person to complete a task you wouldn't understand why.

> d3.js code with animations, but "vibe coding" scientific apps is likely to be very dangerous. I would need to completely gut this app of the backend stats functions and substitute my own.

And, in fact, in my own code I use this fast *approximation* for animation speed before replacing it with the correct answer after the animation stops. But here it has simply used it has the "correct" answer. Of course, this doesn't mean that using Claude might not have save me time writing >

In case you don't immediately see the issue, this is in the context of power for a t test, and it simply calls the normal CDF in the function that is supposed to be the noncentral t CDF. If I didn't know I might be fooled because this will, indeed, give close-to-correct power values for large N.

Javascript code for a noncentral t cdf produced by Claude. It is simply a call to the normal CDF, which is not correct (though will be a decent approximation with large N).

I've been testing Claude to see how well it can "vibe out" a stat. power app that I've already coded completely myself - so I know what I want. It mostly gets things right with animations (those are easily verifiable) but looking into the backend stats code is nightmare inducing (see pic).

This is a fast-changing space! I moved from R+shiny to R+custom javascript and now I'm thinking for most purposes, R+Quarto+webr is the way to go, plus whatever distributed Rstudio installation you have (I've used posit cloud, but that's quite expensive now)

don’t skip leg day

Are Familiar Objects More Likely to Be Noticed in an Inattentional Blindness Task? | Journal of Cognition

Exciting that Simons showcased Ding et al’s @jcgntn.bsky.social paper showing theoretically interesting null effects of familiarity on inattentional blindness in his @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social OneWorld seminar. Some null effects matter! Paper here: journalofcognition.org/articles/10....

Q&A after Dan Simon's @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social One World Seminar- Must attention capture be visual to miss the gorilla? I doubt it. Dan mentioned research about verbal memory impairing visual change detection. Sounds like my first work with @ncowan51.bsky.social! References in the thread🤓:

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.

Apparently email (and some other Microsoft services) has been down for about 16 hours for many here at Cardiff Uni. I might actually...get to write today?

something unfortunately unparallelizable, probably :(

YouTube video by New York City Public Advocate "I'm the first US elected official with Tourette Syndrome and I have some thoughts about BAFTA"

Jumaane Williams posted last night that he was gonna make this video so I had been waiting for it — thanks to @erinbiba.bsky.social for flagging just now.

Williams speaks from a place of deep consideration for everyone involved and it shows in the way he discusses the impact and solutions.

...and that they have surely been used to train LLMs *wince*

/sheds a single nostalgic tear

webr is so cool

Last month, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin approved a proposal to establish a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence funded by private corporations and philanthropy. Mnookin said the move was a response to the inevitable creep of artificial intelligence into all disciplines of academia. Rather than reject AI, she envisioned a university that capitalized on this change by making artificial intelligence a "hub" connecting the humanities to computer science.

On the first day of my economics elective this spring, my professor said we would be expected to use NotebookLM to pass his class. He had lengthened the coding assignments so that they would be doable only with the help of AI. The reading assignments were longer, too: ten 40-page papers per week, which he asked us to feed into AI for a summary rather than read ourselves. When it came to lectures, he told us to simply upload the slides to AI and ask it to teach us whatever he failed to explain properly in class.

BLEAK. Bleak. I’d been paying attention to Columbia selling out its governance to the Trump admin, not so much its stance on AI.
www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

Of course, but the point is they don’t stick around long

Interesting; might be worth an email to the author…

Also a bit concerning - can't find one of the only two refs:
"Some results on first-passage times of simple random walks"

Google scholar has no results for the title, and no such paper in that journal issue (nor authors) www.sciencedirect.com/journal/stoc...

Smells like LLM hallucination