LightNews LightNews
hughgarner.bsky.social
@hughgarner.bsky.social
8 followers 72 following 1 posts
Software engineering, data, visualization and systems. Occasional art things.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted
simonwillison.net
Let's build hyper-personalized AI-powered software that avoids the attention hijacking anti-patterns that defined so much of the last decade of software design - here's our manifesto with principles on how we can do that - more thoughts on my blog: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/5/r...
December 5, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted
nndroid.bsky.social
🌳 As a #NationalTrust member I’ve just voted for the recommended slate to keep out the bogus, right-wing entryists of “Restore Trust”. Anything this creep wants is bad for Britain and bad for our heritage.
🌳 If you’re a member, vote Recommended Slate now: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/a...
teresapbn.bsky.social teresapbn.bsky.social @teresapbn.bsky.social · Oct 20
One vital reason to vote in the National Trust elections and for the NT endorsed candidates. We can't risk the Restore Trust candidates getting any influence on it.
October 29, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Reposted
omaromalleykhan.bsky.social
I know statistics are poorly understood and are misused. But facts matter

Between the 1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021 Census *every* ethnic group in the UK has become *less* geographically segregated and *all* groups, majority and minorities, are more likely to interact with people not like them
October 7, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted
jahduran.bsky.social
They only like you when you're... SEVENTEEN!

Happy birthday to The Quietus!

Please, please, please consider taking out a sub. We've introduced a new playlist perk. Sign up today and get 45 this month! Pls share & ask sugar mummies & daddies to dig deep.

thequietus.com/news/the-qui...
The Quietus is 17! We're Celebrating With New Playlists for our Subscribers | The Quietus
It’s now five years since we launched our subscription platform with Steady in a last-ditch attempt to save The Quietus during the desperate Covid crisis. Thankfully, we raised enough to temporally keep the wolves from the door, and the website is still here to celebrate its seventeenth birthday. SEVENTEEN! We can barely believe that we’ve […]
thequietus.com
September 4, 2025 at 11:24 AM
Reposted
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Ever stared at a table of regression coefficients & wondered what you're doing with your life?

Very excited to share this gentle introduction to another way of making sense of statistical models (w @vincentab.bsky.social)
Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Website: j-rohrer.github.io/marginal-psy...
Models as Prediction Machines: How to Convert Confusing Coefficients into Clear Quantities Abstract Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear models, but is more challenging for more complex models with, for example, categorical variables, interactions, non-linearities, and hierarchical structures. Here, we introduce an alternative approach to making sense of statistical models. The central idea is to abstract away from the mechanics of estimation, and to treat models as “counterfactual prediction machines,” which are subsequently queried to estimate quantities and conduct tests that matter substantively. This workflow is model-agnostic; it can be applied in a consistent fashion to draw causal or descriptive inference from a wide range of models. We illustrate how to implement this workflow with the marginaleffects package, which supports over 100 different classes of models in R and Python, and present two worked examples. These examples show how the workflow can be applied across designs (e.g., observational study, randomized experiment) to answer different research questions (e.g., associations, causal effects, effect heterogeneity) while facing various challenges (e.g., controlling for confounders in a flexible manner, modelling ordinal outcomes, and interpreting non-linear models). Figure illustrating model predictions. On the X-axis the predictor, annual gross income in Euro. On the Y-axis the outcome, predicted life satisfaction. A solid line marks the curve of predictions on which individual data points are marked as model-implied outcomes at incomes of interest. Comparing two such predictions gives us a comparison. We can also fit a tangent to the line of predictions, which illustrates the slope at any given point of the curve. A figure illustrating various ways to include age as a predictor in a model. On the x-axis age (predictor), on the y-axis the outcome (model-implied importance of friends, including confidence intervals). Illustrated are 1. age as a categorical predictor, resultings in the predictions bouncing around a lot with wide confidence intervals 2. age as a linear predictor, which forces a straight line through the data points that has a very tight confidence band and 3. age splines, which lies somewhere in between as it smoothly follows the data but has more uncertainty than the straight line.
August 25, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Reposted
theangelremiel.bsky.social
There are so many forms of art where it is no longer possible to make a living by being quite good, which is harmful to all forms of art. You should be able to make a living wage as a good enough piano player or a decent actor or a competent portrait painter because that's where people learn.
August 20, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Reposted
leonenglish.bsky.social
This excerpt is an exceptionally good look at what a lot of people seem to believe LLMs are or will become versus the reality.
Still, Wolfsthal has heard whispers of other concerning uses of LLMs in the heart of American power. "A number of people have said, 'Well, look, all I want to do is have an interactive computer available for the president so he can figure out what Putin or Xi will do and I can produce that dataset very reliably. I can get everything that Xi or Putin has ever said and written about anything and have a statistically high probability to reflect what Putin has said," he says. "I was like, 'That's great. How do you know Putin believes what he's said or written?' It's not that the probability is wrong, it's just based on an assumption that can't be tested," Wolfsthal says.
August 6, 2025 at 11:12 AM
Reposted
nedboulting.bsky.social
A massive thank you from Lizzie, David, Pete (who'll be there if he can be) and me.

The response to this new venture has been overwhelming.

Please sign up here (entirely for free) to make your support known. Let's get this up and running.

neverstraysfar.com
July 5, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Reposted
cyclingweekly.com
There's no way we're not going to be there' – Ned Boulting, David Millar and Lizzie Deignan launch plans for free audio and video Tour de France coverage

www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/there...
'There's no way we're not going to be there' – Ned Boulting, David Millar and Lizzie Deignan launch plans for free audio and video Tour de France coverage
NSF Live in France to cover Tour in 2026 and beyond, replacing free-to-air coverage
www.cyclingweekly.com
July 5, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Reposted
jahduran.bsky.social
I met up with @maryannehobbs.bsky.social last week at the Tate to talk about her new radio show, but instead found myself on a lazy river considering free will, art, conflict and life on a NWOBHM bus...

thequietus.com/interviews/m...
A Condition of the Space: Mary Anne Hobbs Interviewed | The Quietus
Ahead of the launch of her new radio show on 6 Music & an appearance at MIF, Mary Anne Hobbs would sooner talk about an old bus...
thequietus.com
June 5, 2025 at 9:40 AM
Reposted
danjdevine.bsky.social
Plenty of European countries - including the UK - are doing this, though in more of a foot-on-the-oxygen-line than a bullet-to-the-head way.
paulginva.bsky.social Paul Graf @paulginva.bsky.social · Jun 3
Man comes to the US from Lebanon. Starts out delivering pizzas, becomes a Nobel winning neuroscientist. Trump freezes his funding, he gets an email from China offering to move his lab “any city, any university I want" with guaranteed funding for 20 years.

What are we doing?
Ardem Patapoutian's story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1986 at age 18 after fleeing war-torn Lebanon. He spent a year writing for an Armenian newspaper and delivering Domino's at night to become eligible for the University of California, where he earned his undergraduate degree and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. He started a lab at Scripps Research in San Diego with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, discovered the way humans sense touch, and in 2021 won the Nobel Prize. But with the Trump administration slashing spending on science, Dr. Patapoutian's federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain has been frozen. In late February, he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to "any city, any university I want," he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years.
June 3, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Reposted
himself.bsky.social
"When we think of AI, we should think less of Terminator 2 and more of the TV show Severance, in which office workers search for “bad numbers” on the strength of vibes alone."

www.theideasletter.org/essay/our-sp...
Our Spreadsheet Overlords - The Ideas Letter
Weatherby argues that the current discourse around AI, especially the buzz around “artificial general intelligence,” is a distraction from its actual impact: the expansion of bureaucracy through massi...
www.theideasletter.org
May 30, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Reposted
simonwillison.net
Once again, if your LLM system combines access to private data, exposure to malicious instructions and the ability to exfiltrate information (through tool use or through rendering links and images) you have a nasty security hole

This time, GitLab: simonwillison.net/2025/May/23/...
Remote Prompt Injection in GitLab Duo Leads to Source Code Theft
Yet another example of the classic [Markdown image exfiltration attack](https://simonwillison.net/tags/exfiltration-attacks/), this time affecting GitLab Duo - GitLab's chatbot. Omer Mayraz reports on...
simonwillison.net
May 23, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted
jonathanhopkin.bsky.social
How does destroying the university sector help growth I wonder
eicathomefinn.bsky.social Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · Mar 19
'UK research council leaders are bracing for cuts to quality-related (QR) research funding of up to £100 million a year ahead of next week’s Spring Statement – a move likely to lead to a fresh round of redundancies at UK universities.' 1/3
Job fears grow as Research England models £100 million QR cut
Loss of almost 8 per cent of mainstream quality-related funding feared amid concerns that Spring Statement will deepen sector funding crisis
www.timeshighereducation.com
March 19, 2025 at 8:04 AM
Reposted
himself.bsky.social
1. @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself have a new piece in Science on "AI" Large Models, pushing back against much of the collective wisdom about what they can and can't do. Official below, unpaywalled at henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod... . So why this now?
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies
Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past
www.science.org
March 14, 2025 at 12:57 PM
Reposted
rocher.lc
Curious to see how they plan to anonymise our NHS data for training ML models. I personally wouldn’t know how to start doing that

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
The government plan features a potentially controversial scheme to unlock public data to help fuel the growth of AI businesses. This includes anonymised NHS data, which will be available for “researchers and innovators” to train their AI models. The government says there would be “strong privacy-preserving safeguards” and the data would never be owned by private companies.
January 13, 2025 at 9:29 AM