Literally #HumanFactors 101

Because LLMs literally don’t know ANYTHING except how language fits together.

Add “AI is not a person” to all newspaper style guides asap

“Gnu year, gnu me” —A gnu, probably

i don’t see how any of the benefits of chatgpt and other consumer-facing LLMs can possibly outweigh their incredible ability to induce suicides

Thinking about how hard it is for people in the U.S. to budget & accurately predict healthcare costs as I stare down this bill for my 2.5 y/o son's birth. Yes, 2.5 years later.

Seriously, just the stupidest timeline.

"the [CSU] system’s funding model says ideal tenure density is around 54%, according to Sueyoshi....“Our aim is to lower tenure density so that we can hire lecturers for classes that students need in high-demand programs,” Sueyoshi said." In 2001 the CA state leg set target of *75%* tenure density

Big news out of Montana: Dr. Thomas Weiner has lost his license and will never practice medicine there again as the medical board finally responds to reports that he hurt and mistreated people. They noted Scott Warwick, who got 10 years of chemo etc, died from it, but never had cancer. Context 👇

This undercuts the mission of the CSU, harms students and faculty (lecturers and tenure track, both), and is bad for the economy—all driven by long term underinvestment. It’s a policy choice, not a necessity.

I want less AI and more softwares that can respond to a proper Boolean search. Especially you, MS Outlook. I don't want you to make my emails more verbose and meaningless, I just want you to ACTUALLY FIND stuff when I search by sender or keywords.

Wow I'm now never taking a Waymo I make automated trains for a living and lemme tell you there is a backup for "the network is down"

This is one of the things I’ve been trying to explain to people: LLMs poison their own well. They’re trained on the Internet and most of their output (excrement) ends up… on the Internet. It becomes the inputs for new outputs. We’re spiraling into a new pandemic: Epistemic cholera.

But here's the real cherry on top re: discovering a published paper that I can only assume was written by an LLM, full of fabricated citations. When I was searching in various places to confirm that those citations were fabricated, Google's AI overview just kept the con going.

LLMs: Destroying human knowledge for what? To line a few pockets before the bubble bursts?

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

Looking at the pulse oximetry, instead of the patient, is one of the ways kids die in ED. Yes. Knowing can be life saving. BUT TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS.

When people think about patient safety, hospitals usually come to mind first. But most healthcare is delivered in the community—and from the patient perspective, almost all of that relies on retail pharmacies. We can’t have safe care without safe pharmacies. #QISky

There's a cross-platform uniformity to how LLMs bullshit you. Today I was designing an exercise for a responisble-use of-LLMs course we are designing for NIH trainees. I asked ChatGPT to complete one of Claude Shannon's original guessing games: "There is no reverse on a __(10 letters)__"

I'd like to speak to an expert who could help explain the implications of classifying fentanyl as a WMD. Drop your recommendations or reach out.

Breathing is an “aerosol generating procedure.”

For today only (Dec 14) All Systems Red (1st book in The Murderbot Diaries) is on sale across all US ebook retailers for $2.99 (published by Tordotcom, edited by @leeharris.net cover art by Jaime Jones) www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/...

Someone just tagged this post from November 2024. Maybe I should do a signed paperback giveaway? I'll pick one at 5 pm CST tomorrow at random from the likes. You don't even have to follow or repost ... but it would be nice if you did!

If they aren’t yet boosted, get your college kid their flu shot while they are home for winter break! Or better yet, have them go to their student health center or local pharmacy by their big kid self asap #TisTheSeason

It’s not funny. 1,700 year-old bones only do this when they’re very distressed. #FreeSanta

The brilliant @patientsafetylearning.org are recruiting for their board. www.patientsafetylearning.org/blog/we-are-... Their resources + work have been invaluable as both a "normal" + "professional" patient #MedSky #QISky

Read this as an American woman and then go break something.

Wrote something combining threads from here & elsewhere on meaningful consent, bias, dis- & misinformation, and harms to critical thinking & skills development and social interaction in the context of "AI." Here's "Failures of “AI” Promise: Critical Thinking, Misinformation, Prosociality, & Trust":

This really is a must read for anyone in academia.

Why does every introductory healthcare management book include use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for employee selection/development as though it’s not a tarot reading performed by a squirrel? How do we expect education to advance evidence-based practice if we keep teaching pseudoscience?

The December Comfort Watch series continues today with Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life, which posits one of the most interesting afterlife scenarios ever -- and once helped me get a big damn raise at my newspaper job. whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/04/t...

this encapsulates the essential relationship between the people running universities, the people doing academic work in universities, and the people looking to smash and grab as much as possible from universities while we're on the way down

Some universities are closing departments left, right, and center. My university still has departments you’ve never even heard of!

"are you enjoying duo mobile" does a hamburger enjoy being made of quarks. does a fish enjoy linear time. does the mountain enjoy the first taste of a cup of hot chocolate when you get back to the ski lodge. your question means nothing to me. i couldn't enjoy duo mobile even if i tried

It took over 4 years, but the paper is finally published. In this study, we developed novel methods drawn from #LegalEpidemiology to map addiction #stigma in California law. This #interdisciplinary work was conceptually and methodologically difficult!⤵️ #PaperSky #EpiSky #AcademicSky 1/

The #ManufactureOfDoubt is an historical script that regulated industries use in pursuing their political and economic goals. Many of the issues noted by the editor are known techniques deployed in #agnotology. I wrote about a lot of this in my book; also see work of @drtomori.bsky.social

Civilized.

Not sure if any single part of academia felt more like a weird cheat code than Interlibrary Loan. Like, I just say a book I want, basically any book, and this crack team of experts just *get it*????

AI is cooking architects in its gourmet kitchen connected to 3 bathrooms in a row

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

This is a wonderful, even spectacular, thread.

Same. Being a biologist or public health through this whole progression is a special kind of psychological torture. In PTSD terms it’s like being forced to watch a Moral Injury while unable to help, but on a culture-wide scale.

6 years today the first COVID case was identified in a man in Wuhan marking the beginning of a global pandemic that changed the world. We are way less prepared today to face another pandemic than we were back then. This fact makes me sad.

Right. I see. And they said disease control was expensive. How many buildings could we have fixed with this kind of money? Hmmm? www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/lon...

I can’t imagine buying another Boar’s Head product for a long, long time.

PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS! EVERYONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR PUBLISHED BOOKS! Do not ask me how my writing is going.

Device…hoarding. Because you don’t go get a new one while yours is still fine. Apparently I am also practicing car hoarding, house hoarding, husband hoarding, dog hoarding, computer hoarding, furniture hoarding and art hoarding.

I saw (and heard!) a short video in grad school of a baby with whooping cough and I’m still kind of traumatized 20 years later—no hyperbole.This is seriously, honestly, I promise you, NOT the future we want.

Today’s xkcd made me cry. In a good way. xkcd.com/3172/