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exhaustedqueers.bsky.social
@exhaustedqueers.bsky.social
52 followers 65 following 24 posts
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andrew.heiss.phd
Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...
Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code. In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle. This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything. You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.
December 9, 2025 at 8:17 PM
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pomological.xor.blue
bietigheimer apples, painted by ellen isham schutt, 1905
bietigheimer apples, painted by ellen isham schutt, 1905
December 6, 2025 at 2:18 PM
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aschwartz.bsky.social
🚨New Paper🚨 US doctors are paid very different amounts for treating different patients—even when providing identical services.

How much less are physicians paid for treating non-White patients?

In @jamahealthforum.com, we offer the 1st national estimates. (1/7)

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Payments to Physician Practices and Incentives to Serve Different Racial and Ethnic Groups
This study measures disparities across patient racial and ethnic groups in per-visit payment to physician practices from health insurers and other sources, adjusted for visit content, geographic marke...
jamanetwork.com
November 26, 2025 at 4:21 PM
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publichealthguy1.bsky.social
the screams were actually us from the future
karenho.bsky.social Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · Jul 22
We should have listened when the modems screamed at us.
November 24, 2025 at 10:36 PM
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dieworkwear.bsky.social
I remember when there was a discussion on Twitter about Shein's manufacturing practices and some apologists invented all sorts of fantastical machinery and technology to avoid facing the more horrifying truth. Reminds me of this comedian's joke.

IG bscomedian
November 20, 2025 at 12:07 AM
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wolvendamien.bsky.social
A new state-by-state evaluation of the projected energy and water use of "AI" data centers in the US. Looks… real bad. Like, "undoing tech sector climate gains" bad.

Strongly recommends immediately ensuring any & all new "AI" data centers to run on existing & expanded renewables grids. Which… yeah.
Environmental impact and net-zero pathways for sustainable artificial intelligence servers in the USA - Nature Sustainability
The rapid expansion of AI server installations in the United States poses sustainability challenges in terms of water usage and carbon emissions. A study now quantifies these potential impacts and out...
www.nature.com
November 14, 2025 at 2:06 AM
exhaustedqueers.bsky.social
Uh is this why Google drive is down?
Down Detector shows 2,874 reports of Google Drive outages suddenly, beginning at about noon today Nov 12.
November 12, 2025 at 6:52 PM
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pomological.xor.blue
grano apples, painted by james marion shull, 1909
grano apples, painted by james marion shull, 1909
November 1, 2025 at 10:18 AM
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themountaingoats.bsky.social
those of you who are afraid of aging, please understand that one of the huge blessings of middle age is arriving at this exact station
rosenthorne.bsky.social Rosen Thorne @rosenthorne.bsky.social · Oct 29
We gotta normalize responding to bullshit with "dude who fucking cares"
October 30, 2025 at 12:44 AM
Reposted
esghound.com
Yeah so about that

bsky.app/profile/esgh...
Education and Wealth vs voting since 1996 showing Clinton (1996) with support among the lower educated/lower wealth quadrant and Dole wining the high wealth and education quadrant. This has flipped since with Harris (2024) dominating high wealth and education
October 26, 2025 at 3:49 PM
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vickyacab.bsky.social
Starting in Milan, in 73, revolutionary groups would mass up, go into supermarkets and chase out the bosses/security, get on the loudspeaker and declare everything free. They would then make revolutionary speeches while shoppers gleefully enjoyed the discount. They called this "proletariat shopping"
October 25, 2025 at 12:44 PM
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hypervisible.blacksky.app
“…for an AI chatbot to generate an autopsy report, contract workers have to sift through thousands of gruesome crime scene images, a gig known as ‘data labeling.’”
The AI Industry Is Traumatizing Desperate Contractors in the Developing World for Pennies
AI is propped up by a global sweat shop operation, where exploited workers polish the software for wealthy corporations in the west.
futurism.com
October 19, 2025 at 2:51 PM
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napaaqtuk.bsky.social
"Consequently, the Indigenous data sovereignty movement formed to protect collective interests in data governance and ensure that benefits derived from data are directed back to Indigenous peoples"

Heck yeah! @joseph-yracheta.bsky.social @kstsosie.bsky.social
stephenturner.us Stephen Turner @stephenturner.us · Oct 16
A Tribal data repository to advance Indigenous health and sovereignty www.nature.com/articles/s41... (read free: rdcu.be/eLiqc)
October 16, 2025 at 10:48 AM
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jesserbnwtz.bsky.social
In advance of #NoKingsDayOct18th, I beg you: don't leave out Trump's attacks on homeless ppl as part of his authoritarian takeover.

Trump openly talks about rounding up homeless folks and forcing them into detention camps. This threat is now backed up by policies and budgets.
October 17, 2025 at 12:30 PM
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carceralabolition.bsky.social
Reframing Social Work with an Anti-Oppressive Lens
A Guide for Beginning Practitioners link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
October 15, 2025 at 2:02 PM
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agreenberg.bsky.social
Researchers pointed a satellite dish at the sky for 3 years and monitored what unencrypted data it picked up. The results were shocking: They obtained thousands of T-Mobile users' phone calls and texts, military and law enforcement secrets, much more: www.wired.com/story/satell... 🧵👇
Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data
With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data—including thousands of T-Mobile users’ calls and texts and even US military communications—sent by satellites unencrypte...
www.wired.com
October 14, 2025 at 1:03 AM
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okbjgm.bsky.social
the degree to which i feel like i am living in the pre-title montage of a post-apocalyptic movie cannot be overstated.
October 14, 2025 at 5:09 AM
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mollyknight.bsky.social
Please give me an unironic list of things that have gotten better over the last ten years because I’m spiraling.

I’ll start: you can buy an enormous TV from Costco for like $100 bucks now.
September 11, 2025 at 5:38 PM
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unplannedatlanta.bsky.social
Must read from the @atlpresscollective.com

atlpresscollective.com/2025/09/05/a...
Addressing homelessness in Atlanta: The fight for Housing First
In the wake of Cornelius Taylor’s death, Atlanta navigates the homelessness crisis with a new plan. But do its goals serve residents?
atlpresscollective.com
September 10, 2025 at 12:51 AM
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katestarbird.bsky.social
Not surprising, but still very important to document.
jayvanbavel.bsky.social Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · Sep 8
Extreme views are heavily over-represented on social media

Social platforms’ tendency to reward hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward simplistic messages and extreme positions and this fuels populism www.ft.com/content/9251... via @jburnmurdoch.ft.com
September 8, 2025 at 10:10 PM
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olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
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carceralabolition.bsky.social
In 1969, the Black Panthers launched free breakfast programs across the US, feeding thousands of kids before school.

The FBI called it a threat. In some cities, police raided kitchens, smashed food, and urinated on supplies to shut them down www.reddit.com/r/RareHistor...
September 2, 2025 at 3:11 AM
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hypervisible.blacksky.app
To gauge how it’s “working,” one would have to be clear on what the actual work is, which is not helping to educate children but rather to imbed these systems in a way that they cannot be removed, establish them as a source of truth, and destabilize labor.
Silicon Valley’s Drive to Get AI Into America’s Schools Is Working
Educators across the country are bringing chatbots into their lesson plans. Will it help kids learn or is it just another doomed ed-tech fad?
www.bloomberg.com
September 2, 2025 at 12:43 AM
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mguariglia.bsky.social
Gosh, if only we had a liberal president who had a majority in the house and senate that could have listened when people warned him about how policing and the national security state could be used this way!
barackobama.bsky.social Barack Obama @barackobama.bsky.social · Aug 28
This interview, which is also available to listen to as a podcast, provides a useful overview of some of the dangerous trends we’ve been seeing in recent months regarding federalization and militarization of state and local police functions.
Opinion | Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force
www.nytimes.com
August 30, 2025 at 6:56 PM
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lukeoneil47.bsky.social
An international incident
There was a shooting yesterday that was one of the ones that was big enough that we all had to know it had happened so they sent me out to lower the flag to half-mast outside work. Half-staff they call it on land I don’t know. I looked at my phone out of habit on the way back inside and there was another shooting going on. A real nasty one it looked like. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what the protocol here was supposed to be. If I were meant to put the flag all the way back up to reset things or lower it halfway down again still. They had fired the main flag-knowing guy last month who had been in the National Guard a hundred years ago or something and this wasn’t really my job in the first place but I said I’d do it so I wouldn’t get fired myself. I figured I’d be proactive so I lowered it down to the ground to one-third mast and went back inside feeling fine about it and none of my bosses seemed to care and then there was another shooting by the time I got to my desk. I went back outside again and lowered it further still. The next day I came in to work and you won’t believe what happened. Now we were in a Zeno’s Paradox–type of a scenario vis-à-vis the flag height and its approach to the soil. People inside were debating what the definition of a mass shooting was and the managers were getting a little pissy about how work was being waylaid by all of us streaming the news on the computer all day. Trying to find out what kind of guy it was who killed everybody this time. Everyone hoping it was the other type of guy to balance it out. Like trading free throws at the end of a close game. Being sort of new I was left to my own devices so I went out and lowered the flag halfway closer to the ground once more. Probably not worth remarking on what happened by the time I came in the next morning and the next one too and just between us I was running out of real estate there height-wise with the flag so I went around back to the maintenance area to look for the custodian but there was some kid there instead who said in his cockney accent that the guy had been sacked so I borrowed a shovel from this kid he was an actual Victorian child with a sooty face smoking a cigar and everything and went back out to the flagpole and started digging to give the flag some breathing room so it would never have to touch the ground which was considered poor form in the flag community. I had dug halfway to the molten core by the end of the next month but on the upside I was bulking up. The planet itself was spinning on this flag pole’s axis now. I was going to hoist an upside-down American flag in a country on the other side of the globe at this rate. It was going to be a whole international incident. People were going to get shot over it.
December 17, 2024 at 9:50 PM