Sheetal teaching Uma how to cook a few basics near the start of SISTER MIDNIGHT. As someone who can occasionally (not always) mask vulnerability with prickliness and aloofness, I appreciate when the right person rolls their eyes and sees right through my shit like that.

I had complicated feelings toward marriage equality for a bit. But when I got gay married myself, I became misty-eyed at the “Spouse A” and “Spouse B” designations at the Manhattan City Clerk’s Office. Witnessing blazing societal progression boiled down into administrative humdrum; it felt so real.

“To this day, grants continue to be ‘realigned’ with administration priorities, a clear form of ideological coercion.”

this is so cool! language models use a ring-like manifold to keep track of when they need to insert a newline, just like a brain would. arxiv.org/abs/2601.04480

In the early 2000s, I had a pretty decent dirtbag cellphone by keeping a pink plastic pager, a refillable phone card, and knowing where all the payphones were in my neighborhood.

Seriously, yuck. Compelling thread. Come for the fatal data integrity revelations, stay for the overconfident LLM flexing in the open-ended responses.

This might be what finally gets me to Boston for a weekend.

Let me warm up a bit and I could still beat this from pure muscle memory 33 years later.

Fantastic mechinterp paper showing that you can identify specific neurons which cause hallucinated answers in LLMs, and that these neurons are specifically associated with the language model trying to follow instructions too hard. arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01797

Deleted the dissertation committee remark because I didn’t want it misconstrued. Mine was extraordinary, to a one, but in-depth detailing of grungy web data structures and requisite cleanup and transformation steps will test even the finest of us.

I do AI and health tech in academia, and after this weekend, despite considerable investment in building a network and a presence here, I think I’m done. I already delinked from my professional site. It’s getting embarrassing, frankly.

Let me warm up a bit and I could still beat this from pure muscle memory 33 years later.

unironically having companions that simulate some form of consent is important

Sorry to harp on this but what drives me completely bonkers about this is the Gemini thing was a direct result of people at Google trying to prevent harmful usage of their product whereas the Grok thing is a direct result of people at X and xAI trying to promote harmful usage of their product

As ludicrous as this is, keep in mind that NIH F-series fellowships, regardless of the applicant’s age or experience, require undergrad transcripts that will be picked over by a Study Section. A baseless, obnoxious structural barrier to students (like me) with non-traditional career trajectories.

Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty

I do science in clinical and tech-adjacent subfields. Personal style (for women) is often conflated (typically, though not exclusively, by men) with frivolity. Presumed orthogonal to technical skill. Mostly, I don’t care. But I’m on the market now: I have to care, at certain key moments at least.

Six months in Rhode Island and my Louisiana brain still can’t parse bright beautiful sunlight streaming through my windows with my weather app admonishing me that it “feels like 7 degrees” outside.

cars are a menace

I saw a high-reach public health account that I used to consider annoying but innocuous using causal language around LLMs and suicide today, and lost any respect for their capacity for valid inference.

Announcing atproto.science! #ATproto has huge potential for supporting new ways of doing research, so we started @atproto.science to help bring together researchers, build community, and explore what's possible when science meets cutting-edge open social network protocols! 🧪 >

My PhD program, atypically, emphasized sound inference at individual, group, and population levels (and, relatedly, at staggered degrees of abstraction). This shitshow of a thread demonstrates why we need a lot more of that.

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.

the transformer model is not going to spontaneously uninvent itself. much consternation from this fact

Lol.

Rurality is a devastating geosocial determinant of health that rarely breaks the mainstream conciousness. Firearm access, yes, but exacerbated by social isolation, community atomization, chronic unemployment, alcohol culture. and a near-total lack of mental health professionals.

Ooh, this looks _very_ useful.

there are certainly things I don't like about AI/LLMs but a tremendous amount of 'criticism' is just dumb clickbait slop

…who cares? The only reason you’re seeing “investigative reporting” on _Discord drama_ is that the AI angle will reliably rile up a critical mass of Blueskyers. Please.

These data look interesting (I bookmarked the report myself), but this is an incentivized self-selected non-probability sample, so functionally no more generalizable than a big qual study.

I started my year with the Bourbon Street massacre as a Tulane PhD candidate (literally, I woke to the “mass casualty event” text). I’m presently huddled in a Providence bar as a Brown postdoc. None of this feels particularly abnormal to me. And that in itself is abysmally abnormal.

My version of this is telling my corporate friends how academic salaries work.

This <entity> gets it. Brief🧵👇🏻

NSF - Forced reorg - POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements) - Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …) I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing. “Details matter” 🙃

CERTRON dropping a legendarily soul-shaking electro-industrial EP and then vanishing from the scene circa 1991.

this is still true.

I see reactions calling this “petty and cruel.” Cruel it is. But this is just one facet of the ongoing administrative eradication of trans people being perpetrated by this federal government, alongside NIH censorship, the vandalism of public datasets, State invalidating our passports, and so on.

I see reactions calling this “petty and cruel.” Cruel it is. But this is just one facet of the ongoing administrative eradication of trans people being perpetrated by this federal government, alongside NIH censorship, the vandalism of public datasets, State invalidating our passports, and so on.

If you mentor ECRs/trainees, I encourage candor re the dismantling of our scientific infrastructure by bigots and quacks. Even if we’re all still stuck writing grants. Amidst the constant sucking existential dread, hearing euphemisms like “kooky funding environment” feels tantamount to gaslighting.

If you mentor ECRs/trainees, I encourage candor re the dismantling of our scientific infrastructure by bigots and quacks. Even if we’re all still stuck writing grants. Amidst the constant sucking existential dread, hearing euphemisms like “kooky funding environment” feels tantamount to gaslighting.

God yes. Also, this is not an either/or proposition. I had world-class quant training and _of course_ we talked about Biometrika, “regression to mediocrity” etc., but at no point was tossing frequentist statistical inference into the dustbin of history presented as the appropriate way forward.

…*gritting my teeth so hard my skull squeaks* Hooray for our atomized private for-profit American healthcare “system,” where at least some meddlesome twit can’t go rooting around our EHR data because he got blackpilled on X or whatever.

“Cruelty is anhedonic” beautifully exposes so much of what makes the bigot brain incomprehensible. Brilliant 🧵.

"Performatively miserable all the time" is definitely a Bluesky MO (I have an instablock policy for any "this is so bad" political news QTers), but as long as you have a primary purpose here (chatting about science, in my case) and mute/block the ~12 people who drive a lot of it, you'll be fine.

I refuse to surrender to the boxy-sweater-and-mom-jeans uniform that seems to get New England women through the winter so I'm buying a few more heavy boiler suits like a sci-fi scientist stuck in a miserable alien outpost (which is like 70% my actual true circumstances for the next couple years).

please read this

it's not a "black box" it's transparent, u can look inside & see what's happening, u can open it up and tinker with it, it's just that what you see is a massively-parametrized function that doesn't work in a way that's instantly legible to you personally but ppl can and do understand things about it

Incredibly depressing if the lesson of the US is preemptive institutional surrender

Lifelong academics have long accepted fundamentally broken systems, and taught trainees to do the same. Far too many are simply adjusting to our putrid current NIH. Some deep introspection needs to accompany this kind of organizing. Because ECRs (like me) with options are already abandoning ship.