My sweet 92 year old very Catholic grandma when I showed her a picture of a cross at a church I saw on vacation: "Aww poor Jesus, they beat him up so bad..."

Good for parents in Washington state for standing up against this bonkers effort to use their pre-schoolers to train AI. But other parents won’t be as aware or able to prevent this. https://www.404media.co/researchers-wanted-preschool-teachers-to-wear-cameras-to-train-ai/

We’re disappointing

Reasonably sure Mastodon peeps like libraries and might like a peek at this wowzer I stepped into today. #dascdmx

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@LeafyEricScott/116535705377283005 Thank you everyone who replied. @duckdb is indeed the way to do this! I'm still sad that readr::read_csv() doesn't "just work" here, but it wouldn't have mattered for my particular current use case where I don't actually want to read […]

👋 Meet Zhian Kamvar! 🇺🇸 Senior Software Engineer at Recast and maintainer of {tinkr} for rOpenSci. tinkr package cast (R)Markdown Files to XML and Back Again. Find Zhian at: 🐘 hachyderm.io/@zkamvar 💻 github.com/zkamvar 🔗 linkedin.com/in/zkamvar #maintainermonth #ROpenSci #rstats

We need to really stop using the terms "the flu" & "flu like symptoms". One of the things that led to COVID being minimised early on was medical experts liking it to "the flu", meaning influenza. Which unfortunately most people read as "that cold and fever I had for 3 days in January that I […]

Update. "We find a sharp rise in non-existent references following widespread LLM adoption… These errors are…especially pronounced in fields with rapid AI uptake, in manuscripts with linguistic signatures of AI-assisted writing, and among small and […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Periodic reminder that “rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10" is bullshit without reference points. People with chronic pain, tough guys, people with intense periods, and people who struggle with interoception all struggle when the endpoints are nebulous. Let me introduce you to the DVPRS […]

Lots of people talking about buying solar panels. Alas if you look online there's a lot of retailers with all sorts of panels for sale, not all of which are honest. Want an easy way to check if the listed power output is plausible? Example using a 50w panel listed on Amazon. It's 370x820mm. Step […]

Are we surprised? Futurism: The CDC Fired All Its Cruise Ship Inspectors Before the Hantavirus Outbreak https://futurism.com/health-medicine/cdc-cruise-ship-inspectors-hantavirus-outbreak

I cannot for the life of me figure out a good way to read in a dataset made of hundreds of CSVs with *mostly* the same columns (in :rstats: ). I wrote a blog post that is basically an extended reprex. Comments and solutions are welcome! […]

[blog] Throw-back Thursday! Last year @maelle introduced the idea of ROR IDs (tldr; ROR IDs are to Organizations what ORCiDs are to individuals). Have you set your organizations up with ROR IDs and put them in all the docs yet? ⏳ Roaringly Acknowledge Organizations with ROR IDs in DESCRIPTION […]

"During #Trump’s second term, the number of peer-reviewed studies authored by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (#epa) scientists has dramatically declined…[reflecting] a steep reduction in the scientific research being conducted at EPA. So far in 2026, there have only been 61 peer-reviewed […]

smoke'm if you got'em GH users b/c you can't handle PRs until 15:00 ET today. https://www.githubstatus.com/

Experts disagree on when the true biological middle age is. I think it’s when you season your cast iron or carbon steel pans immediately after using them.

I kinda miss the cables with the little thumb screws on computers. I've got my monitor hooked up via a USB-C cable that briefly disconnects with the *slightest* nudge and I can't just tighten it!

Why do I suck so bad at growing cucumbers? They always grow like 3 tiny leaves, flower desperately, then die. #gardening

This thing about Chat GPT needing to be told not to talk about gremlins feels like something from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

People get mad when you call LLMs "spicy autocomplete" but my investigations into recreating and implementing small versions of this tech make me think that nick name is very accurate. Basically, it's a method to predict the next content in a text file. The whole conversation between you and […]

Liberals are now considering privatizing airports. The phrases "broadening ownership" and "getting full value of our assets" are doing a lot of ideological heavy lifting. Translation: The things the public built together are being sold to people who can […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

#rstats Playable Doom! Figured out some key handling stuff in my custom graphics device, so I can now actually control the game! Content Warning: I'm not good at doom :)

This is your periodic reminder that the City of #boston is pretty much always looking for new poll-workers. You can make a bit of money, get to know your neighbors (if you work the polls in your neighborhood), and help preserve democracy. You need to be a US citizen living in Massachusetts (but […]

I think I have shared this before, but it's so delightfully bizarre that I have to share it again. Behold, the most ?!?!? email I've ever received:

#rstats Doom. Work-in-progress! #doom #wip

Extremely valuable reminder about "simply" and "just": this language (along with its pals; "basically" "obviously", "of course") isn't merely stylistic noise; it sends a specific message: "This should be easy" or, in other words: "If this isn't easy, it's your fault" This is implicitly an […]

Again, the White House has decided to prioritize the destruction of public science, ignoring both what the public want and what the laws that Congress has passed demand.

What is the criterion that the Criterion Collection uses? Good movie?

The accessibility checklist for academic conferences and events that I had a hand in producing now has its own proper address, not under my staff webspace: https://accessible-events.ncl.ac.uk/ If you work at a university and you're planning any sort of gathering of people, please have a look […]

@economics_that_works I say I have called it. Donald Trump is the most ironic eco-warrior in history. Bravo Donald J Trump. You have become the single most important person in the death knell of oil energy. Now the world is going to wake up to the reality of the mineral and energy demands of […]

What is the criterion that the Criterion Collection uses? Good movie?

OMB has clearly decided to ignore Congressional intent and implement their own preferred budget at NSF. It's outrageous, unconstitutional, and is gutting our scientific capacity.

"Instead of canceling grants en masse, as the N.I.H. did in the first year of this Trump presidency, it is now vetting them before approval with a 'computational text analysis tool' that scans for terms including 'racism,' 'gender' and 'vaccination refusal'..." 🧪 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/s...

Surveillance and data-manipulation giant Palantir was a CIA-funded creation and has become one of the planet's most powerfully evil companies. It is vital that the general public understand the danger -- and then work to root it out of our lives […]

Darth Maul practices #gongfucha?! There is a tea scene in episode 3 of #starwars: Maul—Shadow Lord. Kind of a weird setup though. A clay kettle that he keeps on the tea tray and three identical cups, but one has a lid that and is used as a gaiwan for brewing. Also, he’s got an incense set placed […]

Monday morning remembering how to write code after 2 weeks vacation soundtrack: https://scott-troyer.pikapod.net/share/c8rKYpvL4z #hiphop #music

RE: https://mastodon.social/@campuscodi/116431164616224382 This is fine

#IceOUT #PERSIST #Arizona Tucson Arizona Saturday Protests Outside Ciscomani's Office Saturdays through May 30 8 – 10am MST In front of Ciscomani's office 1636 N Swan Rd SE corner of Swan & Pima Tucson, AZ 85712 www.mobilize.us/mobilize/eve...

A bit of a long shot, but in the spirit of #FediHire I'm on the lookout for opportunities to contribute to R tooling. If your org could use some help developing or productionising an R package or some prototype R code, managing data access via databases or APIs, or translating between languages […]

A journalist in Brazil asked me for a satellite light pollution map for São Paulo with SpaceX's awful million "AI data center" satellite plan. So, here you go. Compared with Starlink, which isn't visible at all from latitude 23 south on the summer solstice […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

“Amid renewed suspicions of election fraud as the midterm elections near, a review of voting in #arizona’s 2024 presidential election found only a sliver of the votes cast were possibly fraudulent. Only 28 of the 3.6 million ballots cast were flagged as potentially illegal by an organization […]

Republicans just decided they don't want to hear how badly the war is going until May 19. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/w...

"The settlement...affirms that the agency will continue issuing grants and operating its programs...The Trump administration reaffirmed that it had reinstated all previously canceled grants...and reversed all staff reductions." 🎉✊ www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/a...

HPV vaccines have been shown to substantially reduce cervical cancer in women, and a paper published just days ago has also shown that cancers in males are also significantly reduced with vaccination. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I am as ever disgusted by these men attempting to cast HPV vaccines as a moral issue. Almost everyone has sex eventually. There is no reason whatever not to vaccinate kids routinely against HPV before they have sex for the first time.

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...