Tegan Maharaj - moving slow and fixing things

‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides

"if you run that forward just four decades,” Wagner says, “we’re talking about nearly half the tree of life disappearing in one human lifetime. That is absolutely catastrophic.”
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Reddit - https://preview.redd.it/r3lm5muq1f2f1.png?width=1568&format=png&auto=webp&s=f1219b66ecde453a5a6a66f1de9fcc4bb64454df

Summary of the bill that just passed. All the environmental/climate rollbacks are despair-inducing enough, but also 14215 and the other power-consolidation tactics .... oof
www.reddit.com/media?url=ht...

Unknown Species of Bacteria Discovered in China's Space Station Swabs from China's Tiangong space station reveal traces of a bacterium unseen on Earth, with characteristics that may help it function under stressful environmental conditions hundreds of kilometers a...

Apparent unknown species of bacteria (named Niallia tiangongensis) discovered in China's Tiangon space station #astrobiology 🔭🧪🧫🔬
www.sciencealert.com/unknown-spec...

www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

2025, and it's news that "women's pain should be treated".

in 2019 I had an IUD put in with no anesthetic, it hurt like hell and I had 6 months of debilitating cramps before I got it taken out (I sometimes couldn't walk, or threw up). I was encouraged by the (female) doctor to leave it in.

Biodiversity loss in all species and every ecosystem linked to humans – report Sweeping synthesis of 2,000 global studies leaves no doubt about scale of problem and role of humans, say experts

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

These boxes are not moving. A mind-bending optical illusion by Japanese artist Jagarikin.

You and me both :)

I greatly enjoyed “The Spectrum of AI Risks” panel at the Singapore Conference on AI. Thanks @teganmaharaj.bsky.social for great moderating, Max Tegmark for the invitation, and the organizers and other panelists for a great event!

PS. Do I really have sad resting panel face? 😐

And you thought the left was censorious. How about actual censoring?

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Robert Reich post: If the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity gains since the 1960s, it would now be nearly $26 an hour.

May Day Reminder:

The Federal Minimum Wage - in the richest country EVER - is still only $7.25/hr.

UNACCEPTABLE.

Does this seem true to you? Why or why not?
It seems plausible to me, but definitely not certain.

cf also: "here be giants"

Most of world's colourful corals go white in record-breaking bleaching | CBC News The world's rainbow reefs have gone ghostly white in seas around the globe due to record heat in the oceans, the International Coral Reef Initiative reports. But scientists say the reefs aren't all de...

www.cbc.ca/news/science...
:'(
84%

Disaster Preparedness for AI Safety --
Just gave a talk at the #ICLR #Alignment workshop on a new report I'm working on - if you would like to contribute or chat about it, please get in touch!

👀

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This was dope. Brief, not a line wasted. Sums up vast literatures + outlines a problem among the most important in all of bio. An "opinion" piece w/ as much depth as many reviews.

"Fighting change with change: adaptive variation in an uncertain world"

Working link:
bio.utexas.edu/research/mey...

For #rstats people working on computing environments without GUI, you should check out the package `txtplot`.

E.g. this density plot is pretty useful to get an idea what my data looks like:

Barchart showing meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B, meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B, meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct. Each model has two bars, a blue one saying PRO-LEFT and a red one saying PRO-RIGHT. The PRO-RIGHT bars on higher than the PRO-LEFT in all of them.

👉 👈 Meta announced that they're changing their models to reduce "left-leaning [political] bias"--that means leaning them to the political "right". Lots to unpack about what that might mean. So I ran a quick "shot in the dark" study...and found a *political right* bias in Meta models. Some notes.🧵

📢Curious why your LLM behaves strangely after long SFT or DPO?
We offer a fresh perspective—consider doing a "force analysis" on your model’s behavior.
Check out our #ICLR2025 Oral paper:

Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuning!

(0/12)

I'm in Singapore for ICLR! Msg me if you'd like to meet and chat about responsible AI, risk (assessment), disaster preparedness, international collaboration, sustainability, etc 🧷🌏🌱☮️🛟

Latest in the global clawing back of civil rights: Is a woman a woman if she says she's a woman?
No! Says a bunch of old British dudes in costumes - a woman is whoever the patriarchal legal system (invented when women were property) says is a woman. 🤦🏽‍♀️

It's very thin

It's the entire International Maritime Organization, which includes China, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, most South Pacific islands, and most of Europe. US notably absent 🙄.
A fixed rate isn't ideal, but I'm taking any international collab step in the right direction as great news rn!

What Sweden, Finland, and Poland can teach the United States about confronting Russia's nuclear threats The United States can learn from Russia’s nearest neighbors—Poland, Sweden, and Finland—about how to respond to Russian nuclear blackmail more effectively.

"Preventing nuclear war means preventing the use of nuclear weapons as both blackmail and bombs."

"What can Sweden, Finland, and Poland teach the United States about confronting Russia’s nuclear threats?" by Marlena Broeker, current Scoville Fellow for @nukesofhazard.bsky.social.

e/acc logic:
(What is the u?)

WEIRD Audits? Research Trends, Linguistic and Geographical Disparities in the Algorithm Audits of Online Platforms -- A Systematic Literature Review The increasing reliance on complex algorithmic systems by online platforms has sparked a growing need for algorithm auditing, a methodology evaluating these systems' functionality and impact. In this ...

Our systematic lit review of algorithm audits, with a focus on linguistic and geographical disparities in the field, is now officially accepted at @facct.bsky.social 🎉🪩

You can read the preprint here! arxiv.org/abs/2401.11194

Looking forward to presenting this one in Athens in June :)

I think it's because they do a good job teaching fast-reading -- paying more attention than skimming, but not reading every word. If there was too much detailed content to pay attention to, this would be too hard. It makes kids feel like they are leveling up their reading (they are).

Mila Techaide 2025 | Mila Conférence IA d'une journée au profit de Centraide du Grand Montréal

Join us on April 17th for Mila TechAide 2025! 🌟 Hear from amazing speakers in #AI like Sara Hooker, Kyunghyun Cho, Golnoosh Farnadi, David Adelani, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, and Tegan Maharaj. All proceeds support #Centraide. Let's make a difference together! 💡🤝

Get your tickets now! t.co/EBsatAqGTA

Fixing the science of digital technology harms Technology development outpaces scientific assessment of impacts

New Paper! I'm truly excited to share @natematias.bsky.social and my new Policy Forum in Science published yesterday.

We evaluate science's ability to address technological harms, and offer recommendations for what could be done to improve on the status quo: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...