new AI/ML feed drop!

I hope whoever at my uni’s monitoring my social media for political statements is enjoying my brain making audible Rice Krispies noises instead.

I should add: it is nontrivial, but far from impossible, to map the diverging use cases in which the tolerance for conditional token generation is acceptable (“go get’em tiger” emotional support) vs the stakes of factuality hallucinations are too high (medical advice). OpenAI et al. just don’t.

🥉 Dr Skeen becomes the THIRD member of our Public Health Junglists Starter Pack lol

I hope whoever at my uni’s monitoring my social media for political statements is enjoying my brain making audible Rice Krispies noises instead.

“‘Normal’ is not normal, if you’re not normal” goes surprisingly hard (wife has old House MD episodes on).

This goes for universities and scholarly societies too. Dropping your X handle in a talk should widely be seen as a disgrace.

Chronic disease is equally as attributable to systemic factors as 19th century infectious outbreaks: our food and built environments etc. But it’s easier to _individualize_, thus moralize (“just exercise, you slug!”), hence it’s MAHA and, more subtly, eugenicist (“You’ve just got bad genes”) appeal.

bypass link: archive.today/2025.09.12-2...

Danny Cherry Jr. (@deecherrywriter.bsky.social) spoke to Trans Income Project executive director Natalie Rupp about TIP's work to get Medicaid-enrolled trans adults the care they need through a partnership with CrescentCare. antigravitymagazine.com/feature/find...

that wsj story now feels like a culmination of anti-trans panic that should prompt a reckoning in the mainstream media. was totally bunk, false, peddled. it’s the kind of thing that has led to reconciliation before, and it should now. news editors should be looking at themselves in the mirror

sleep is so stupid. you’re telling me i have to lie here doing nothing, completely disconnected from reality for 8 hours a day or else i will feel like shit and then die…. but also i am complete ass at it. takes me hours before i can even get started. like bro this sucks

Gulf folks who still follow me: Bluesky access for users in Mississippi👇🏻

I met Demetre Daskalakis a handful of times in 2017, when he was NYC’s deputy commissioner of disease control. Staggeringly accomplished, humble, humane, brilliant, and fun, he inevitably elicited a “that’s who _I_want to be” response among junior staff like me. A repugnant waste of talent.

“Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated [by this CDC] and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”

Send me any errors you find in Katrina coverage -- I've seen a few that I think are coming from AI summaries. This may be one of the first big news anniversaries in the emerging AI age. And storm related numbers have changed over the years. (AI often summarizes my stories incorrectly)

I met Demetre Daskalakis a handful of times in 2017, when he was NYC’s deputy commissioner of disease control. Staggeringly accomplished, humble, humane, brilliant, and fun, he inevitably elicited a “that’s who _I_want to be” response among junior staff like me. A repugnant waste of talent.

Academic or student in the USA? Our research techniques can be useful in assessing fake news. We're helping students to investigate and better understand the anti-democratic online ideologies that threaten their communities with two free webinars on digital investigation skills this September 🧵

I did my (shit) MA thesis on dehumanization, and across literatures every theory converges on this point. Like so much else in 2025 “NPC” rhetorics are both tacky and disturbing at a fundamental level.

😔

Adams' proposed legislation would allow authorities to hospitalize anyone “who appears to pose a danger to themselves or others due to substance use disorder,” and judges to mandate treatment, reports @tganeva.bsky.social:

Extremely cool. I don’t think prolonged hyperfocused nonspecialist LLM exposure can ever be truly “safe” for people with prodromal (or acute) psychotic or delusional disorders. But this is a solid first alignment step toward interrupting that (still rare) decompensation-sycophancy feedback loop.

Extremely cool. I don’t think prolonged hyperfocused nonspecialist LLM exposure can ever be truly “safe” for people with prodromal (or acute) psychotic or delusional disorders. But this is a solid first alignment step toward interrupting that (still rare) decompensation-sycophancy feedback loop.

China will add a K visa to its ordinary visa categories starting Oct. 1, available to eligible young science and technology professionals, following a decision by the State Council.

And be sure to read this excellent critique of an embarrassingly sensationalist piece that commits errors of inference an undergrad would blush at, and eventually admits to a 0.001% prevalence if this kind of thing: bsky.app/profile/jeff...

thing is up sorry it took so long ig: www.instagram.com/p/DNBU-8_ONjl/ tip: www.transincomeproject.org

‘To the Brown administrators who’ve participated in this disgusting “deal”: I do hope you feel the tremendous shame of what you’ve done. These are unconscionable, abhorrent actions to have taken — especially given what the university represents, and given our era.’ Blistering good piece.

You are not consulting an oracle; you are querying a lossily compressed database of probabilistic word adjacency on the internet.

This actually gets to a bit of implicit theory I was trying to unpack with my lab the other day: a _big_ covariate in the sequelae of these interactions is “Do you understand what a token prediction model is? Y/N [or do you truly think you’re engaging a digital oracle].”

Trans postdoc, started last month. Literally nauseous half the week. I have huge strides to make this week and I’m already struggling to motivate myself. I’m even considering publishing using a non-Brown affiliation I maintain.

This actually gets to a bit of implicit theory I was trying to unpack with my lab the other day: a _big_ covariate in the sequelae of these interactions is “Do you understand what a token prediction model is? Y/N [or do you truly think you’re engaging a digital oracle].”

Apparently, "certain early-career grants and training grants" will not have MYF enforced. I wish like hell I knew what they were, but fyi for context and because I've been doomful today.

I was supposed to start working on my K today. At a <4% probability of getting a career award funded, I might as well stare at the ceiling instead.

To be fair, the “public health guy” in the Wire S4 being mostly correct and entirely ignored and talked over by cops and electeds was spot on.

not sure the appropriate and healthy response to real genAI concerns and risks is to become hyperreactive neo-luddites

Messing with Character/.ai and Replika and claiming LLMs lack therapeutic use cases is like huffing WD-40 and claiming anesthesia lacks medical applications. This is lazy exploitative cynicism, on all fronts, not legitimate safety red-teaming (and the “Stanford experiment” isn’t much better.)

hot take: cis women should not be writing about Sniffies for mainstream publications, and you should not be reading those pieces.

JB engaging here is not nothing. But this “anything I dislike is pOliTicaL” stance is maddeningly arbitrary, and still effectively chills “LGBTQ+“ health research, which recognizes intersectional/policy-level drivers of stigma and inequity as a first principle: irreducibly “ideological” in short.

JB engaging here is not nothing. But this “anything I dislike is pOliTicaL” stance is maddeningly arbitrary, and still effectively chills “LGBTQ+“ health research, which recognizes intersectional/policy-level drivers of stigma and inequity as a first principle: irreducibly “ideological” in short.

When I was a production editor in 2011, proudly spending all day every day _making books_, the C-suite said to call everything “content” and ourselves “content managers.” The staff all but mutinied. “Content” used to be cynical ad sales argot for “whatever isn’t an ad.” I hate its normalization.

People with prodromal delusion and psychotic spectrum disorders used to think the KGB was issuing them communiques through the classified ads. It’s that infinite user-affirmation loop that makes gAI chatbots unique in driving decompensation. But it’s neither necessary nor sufficiently causal.

Vibe check for @simoneskeen.xyz: A pragmatic technologist with a critical, humanistic lens. You analyze AI in biobehavioral health with nuance and wit, grounded in real-world experience. A skeptical and insightful commentator on technology and culture.

See also: the haphazard relabeling of “gender” with “sex” in federal datasets, revealed in @thelancet.com.

I bought his album as a 17-year-old “guy” and kept it diligently, desperately, hidden. Just Regular Dude Stuff 🍳.

I bought his album as a 17-year-old “guy” and kept it diligently, desperately, hidden. Just Regular Dude Stuff 🍳.

See also: the haphazard relabeling of “gender” with “sex” in federal datasets, revealed in @thelancet.com.

Fun and easy way for cis men to materially support trans people:

A compelling look at the tensions between rules-based (deterministic, i.e. scripted) and LLM-enabled (probabilistic) therapeutic chatbots amid a creaky unfit-for-purpose FDA regulatory stance. There _is_ promise to these agents, if rules-based/LLM handoffs can be finessed, and clearance achieved.