Groundhog Day | noun | a situation in which the same usually negative or monotonous experiences occur repeatedly or are felt to occur repeatedly with no change or correction.

Groundhog Day | noun | a situation in which the same usually negative or monotonous experiences occur repeatedly or are felt to occur repeatedly with no change or correction.

Find the deer.

Find the hiddden bear.

Thanks for the helpful auto-complete, Gmail.

"every time I type a quotation mark, I know I’m preparing to lie" ""Eat breakfast alone, share lunch with a friend, and give dinner to your enemy"" "“Poetry is not exhausted with reality,”" therumpus.net/2021/10/12/t...

Lots of good quotes. Starts off with Dumas gaming the 'paid per line' metric.

[TRUE CONFESSIONS] Whenever there was a scene with a window, I found myself looking out. (1981)

Essentially "Treat your spreadsheet like a SQL database table." Life is pain, especially your data statsepi.substack.com?utm_source=n...

Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.

There are four time scales driving AI: speed of (1) new research ideas (2) hype generation (3) large scale deployments of technologies (4) fundamental changes propagating through the world's economy. Very different & driven by different realities. People interchange them and are bad at predictions.

Find the hidden cat.

"Two things are both true to me right now: AI agents are amazing and a huge productivity boost. They are also massive slop machines if you turn off your brain and let go completely."

In January 1976 I started work on a Masters thesis in Machine Learning in the math dept at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia (that dept's most famous graduate, Terence Tao, was only six months old). I have officially been full time in AI for fifty years now.

Extraordinary claims that confirm your biases or trigger outrage are the easiest to believe, but that's exactly when skepticism matters most.

I'm sort of blind to hashtags so it took me a long time to get it.

The best result I’ve seen with LLMs was feeding one a PDF file containing a large table, and asking it to reformat the table in Markdown. Had to correct a couple things, but it was lots faster than doing it by hand.

This! LLMs can be so good when closely guided by capable humans. They are TERRIBLE without them

It’s damn good at grabbing every damn thing from the history though While completely ignoring the finger laceration or ankle sprain that actually brought them in

Medical coder here; they’ve been trying to automate my job for literal decades. The LLM they’ve got plugged into our records currently can’t even manage enough pattern recognition to reliably pick up the condition in “patient arrived in ED complaining of [condition].”

This is quite a post www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/reality-is...

I think that the mass enthusiasm we see around gen AI is manufactured, and I think this because it doesn't exist for renewable energy, despite it being more measurably impactful (and also technologically wonderous)

Higher reported SpO2 from pulse oximeters for darker skin tone www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Smoking: 44% in 60's to 11% now Screening for early detection of breast, cervical, prostate, lung, colorectal.

PCA is one of those techniques that sounds unreasonable (yeah sure we all want to fit a p-dimensional ellipsoid to our data) but turns out to be a reasonable solution to a wide range of problems. Also: I do hope stackexchange has been archived, because it is my gen's library of alexandria

Ok there's one real cultural difference I'll admit: Persian expats are usually way more polite than other academics.

亦步亦趋 yì bù yì qū to blindly imitate someone

"The whole industry is staked on a shaky metaphor."

By effecting this post you've affected me, to the point where the effect is a very confused affect.

We just had an illuminating realization that tomorrow is the Epiphany.

People keep expecting the AI to do everything instead of the one thing we need, natural language translation to and from structured information.

There's no "I" here.

My prediction / hope for 2026: this will be the year we start seeing the theoretical neuroscience and #NeuroAI fields start embracing spiking as something beyond a poor man's ReLU. Spikes aren't just the brain's activation function but they are fundamentally different. 1/ 🧠🧪🤖

Our Solar System is orbiting the center of our Galaxy at about 220 km/s so in 2025 we collectively traveled something like 7 billion kilometers across the Milky Way. Once in a while, when you have a moment, it’s worthwhile to take a look around, see where you are, and appreciate how far you’ve come.

Nothing comes out of these water jets but lies and insinuations. Why did I buy a j'accuzzi?

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

The days between December 25 and January 1 are the Lanthanides and Actinides of the Gregorian calendar

Oliver Sacks was a hero of mine. I couldn't let @rachelaviv.bsky.social’s brilliant piece pass without comment. My latest, on why Sacks's fictions are so much worse than those of your garden-variety journalist fabulist. . open.substack.com/pub/mariakon...

Alphafold, the 2020-era Google AI innovation, has owned protein structure, and AF3, its newest iteration, predicts interactions with nucleic acids DNA, RNA, and it increasingly docks small molecules (drugs). THAT is public interest, unlike 99% of what AI does.

THE SOLSTICE OCCURRED @ 20251221 10:03 AM UR ASTRONOMICAL WINTER HAS JUST BEGUN THO UR METEOROLOGICAL WINTER BEGAN 12/1 BUT UR DAYS WILL NOW BEGIN 2 GET LONGER CONGRATS U MADE IT

Funny animal videos no longer being trustworthy just fucking sucks all around. I love the wonder of animal behavior and what it says about the experience of being alive. It's because it happened in reality that it's so fun. It's not fun if it was just made up. There's no wonder there.

I see a lot of complaints about untested AI slop in pull requests. Submitting those is a dereliction of duty as a software engineer: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/...

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Jane Austen used 'however' at the beginning of a sentence, and so can you.

flu = 🤒 flew = 🦅 flue = 🏠🎅

It's more that the entire field of LLM literature relies on this kind of anthropormorphism; accurately describing what the things *are* makes them sound so much less fundable. Their text-response to text-prompts must always be described as behaviour, bias, opinion, thought etc. and never just text.

Noticeable, incidentally, that the authors persistently attribute behaviours, biases etc. to the LLMs when the parsimonious explanation is that the model is being weighted towards portions of its training data & then returns text drawn more from those portions.

And the results are in! After carefully reviewing the results of a national poll the Board of Directors of the Society for Canadian English (SCE) has determined that this year’s Canadian Word of the Year (CWOTY), the first of its kind, will be “maplewashing.”