Interesting work, but man what a missed opportunity to make use of the (for once totally justified) xkdc ggplot theme here :D

We just created an 1st year undergrad course on digital competencies (incl AI), 300 students signed up, and one of the first lectures was literally titled "what is a computer" (several profs thought it's needed now). From what I heard was well received too.

This does puzzle me. People have done interrater agreement, train-eval-test etc for ages, but now this one type of ML model is seen as some oracle (term from the Messeri et al typology which fits well I think). You're doing the good work as editor if you call them out though, thanks!

People into magical thinking (outside of their free time) should ideally have no business doing science :D but I guess it is what it is

And isn't the (limited but often only feasible) solution to both human/machine annnotations to just use expert test sets, assess error &take it into account in stats? Like what else is there to do? You seem to criticize DSL, but what's the better way? (besides just... not doing large scale research)

Nice work; but question: is the issue w LLMs really any different from any other annotation procedures? Including human annotators, can also be low quality/erroneous (eg lazy crowdworkers/students, bad instructions) &can also be "hacked" (data forgery/manipulation). Is this really an LLM problem?

This is, to our knowledge, the largest-scale global study of socioeconomic representation in film festivals to date.

It also expands & adds the cultural econ angle to our recent "Quantifying the global film festival circuit" paper: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

We find that while the festival circuit does favor a few large&wealthy countries (we suggest a few ways to measure&model this), some small ones (eg 🇮🇸 🇺🇾 🇱🇺 🇲🇳 🇪🇪) perform way better than expected by their socioeconomic & geo profile (location matters btw!)

We analyze country representation & diversity at 600 film festivals over a decade (20k films, 163 countries, 30k appearances), combining several databases and using various metrics, stats and simulation methods & mapping cultural flows & exchange parity of films across borders.

And last but not least, grateful to Estonian Business School for awarding me with the EBS Research Prize of 2025 just today!

Then also, in September I'm visiting Linz in Austria via the EdTech Talents program, collaborating with private sector and academic partners on related topics of media literacy education and AI.

On 20th August we celebrate the 1991 restoration of independence from Soviet Union - restoration, because Estonia was already a legitimate independent republic before WW2, during and after which USSR (part of its pact with nazi Germany) tried to occupy us for half a century.

- built by students who had never written a line of code in their lives.

Shows that you can just take a few days, maybe get somebody like me to provide a few pointers, and just DO stuff.

For example, we had: an AI-driven study assist app, a cooking recipes app, couple of tourism related apps and brochures, a custom-GPT assistant for a bike repair service, and an entirely vibe-coded, small but working anime game, with generated visuals and music -

And sure, I was ready to just organize them into study groups, that’d be fine too. Only a couple people had some programming experience. But by day 4, all groups had built and presented functional prototypes or demos!