sadanielwrites.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

submitted 12 hours ago • 463 comments

Hahahahaha.

submitted 17 hours ago • 13 comments

If your work or education involves science communication, this class may be of interest to you. My full presentation and slides with IEEE Women in Engineering are available at no cost on my website: maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/narr...

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

Please enjoy this photo of our new kitten Bobby and our mostly confused dog Ralph

submitted 3 days ago • 1044 comments

ON TOP of the ethical reasons to not use AI, it's also 1) bad at what it does 2) literally makes you stupider 3) has HUGE environmental costs: every search is equivalent to pouring out an entire bottle of water. It's not worth it to generate a cutesy emoji or have it write an error-riddled draft.

submitted 4 days ago • 22 comments

I’m not normally a conspiracy theory guy but I’m really starting to think that OOPS! All Berries wasn’t actually an accident

submitted 6 days ago • 5 comments

Welcome to the archives.

submitted 9 days ago • 96 comments

I can’t understand, after the last 30 years of it happening EVERY TIME, how people think AI is going to stay free Once everyone’s reliant, it’ll cost a fortune we just “have” to pay Its energy needs will cost us the only world we have All so someone doesn’t have to write their own Reddit shitpost

submitted 13 days ago • 19 comments

I've seen folks talk about how "in four years" they'll be able to get back to their planned projects and I really don't think that's going to work out. People & projects losing funding now will not be able to hit pause and come back once funding is restored. Hard-won progress & capacity will be lost

submitted 16 days ago • 321 comments

Continuously marveling at the side by side cultural “truths” that writing is a valueless endeavor that no one should ever expect to live on WHILE ALSO being so powerful that artificial writing tools are worth hundreds of billions and require restructuring our entire legal framework to allow 😒

submitted 18 days ago • 4 comments

If your product can't exist without theft, it's not a product, it's a crime.

submitted 24 days ago • 7 comments

Rereading @mdbell79.bsky.social as I begin work on draft 2 and struck by how beautifully this passage captures what we mean when we say to LLM tech bros that the writing itself IS the work. I love thinking about a novel as the culmination of all the evolving selves of the writer who created it.

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

The fascist win if you lose your compassion for other people. That's part of the war. You have to keep compassion.

submitted 28 days ago • 33 comments

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you” —Oscar Wilde

submitted 39 days ago • 31 comments

yes, ChatGPT is in schools; there are K-12 school districts and DOEs entering into AI contracts, too. so rather than panicking over the death of academia as a foregone conclusion—particularly when LLMs are frequently wrong—why don't we talk about the climate costs of AI? my latest @teenvogue.com

submitted 43 days ago • 30 comments

Had a lot of design work today so of course my brain kept looping nonsense versions of songs like 🎵 semibold kind of font 🎵

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

I keep hammering this point. GenAI doesn't save time, it just kicks that time/work down the road, usually to someone else who now has to deal with it.

submitted 51 days ago • 9 comments

Found this meme while clearing out old files and wow is it more relevant than ever.

submitted 54 days ago • 0 comments

Just bums me out when people advocate for the Plagiarism Machine That Lies. Announcing to the world that you like abdicating your brain to the world's shittiest machine. Have an ounce of self-respect

submitted 56 days ago • 33 comments

Carl Sagan said when he was at university in the 1950s, “it was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare,” and so many of our problems with today’s tech leaders are downstream of their lack of engagement with the humanities.

submitted 57 days ago • 5 comments

Academia isn’t perfect, but it offers a rare space to pursue knowledge for its own sake. If research were fully privatized, only profit-driven questions would get asked. Yet many of the most transformative discoveries began as curiosity-driven inquiries whose value wasn’t clear for years.

submitted 60 days ago • 10 comments

Added 800 words to a new manuscript today. This will be the third book(!) I’ve written. Wild! For those curious, my first book is in the query trenches, and my second book is drafted (soon to be revised).

submitted 61 days ago • 0 comments

theonion.com/historians-q...

submitted 63 days ago • 231 comments

I had a joke about Prometheus but it takes a day to deliver.

submitted 67 days ago • 0 comments

The drive to acquire more wealth than a person or their family could possibly use is a disease. It's hoarding. We see the folx living in mazes of newspaper stacks & want to get them psychiatric help. Billionaires are the ultimate hoarders & need to be treated as such before they destroy us.

submitted 69 days ago • 1 comment

Just reminding folks that there are some very wealthy people out there who are happy with this stormy economy, and have all the tools they need to swoop in as the markets are listing and plunder what's left of our livelihoods. Leaving us with nothing. This isn't just capitalism: it's piracy.

submitted 69 days ago • 1 comment

submitted 71 days ago • 11 comments

My wife is chaperoning a class trip to the skating rink. Last time she was there it had these incredible knock-off board games.

submitted 71 days ago • 21 comments

Masking discourse is on again and I’ll just say if you see people masking when few others are it’s likely because they’ve determined that for them, in that setting, the benefit of not catching (or spreading) whatever’s going around is worth the cost of masking. It’s rarely more complicated than that

submitted 78 days ago • 308 comments

After a very productive (3k words) writing session today, I’ve finished the first draft of my current novel-in-progress! Lots of editing to come, of course, but I’ll be celebrating this in the meantime!

submitted 83 days ago • 0 comments

This country doesn’t lack abundance. This country has a problem because a 0.1% of the population has hoarded wealth at historic levels that destabilizes everything and has done so with the assistance of the political class.

submitted 85 days ago • 12 comments

Trump and Vance are both big fans of leveraging coal miners for political gain, but in office, they're attacking the systems meant to keep miners safe.

submitted 86 days ago • 1 comment

submitted 89 days ago • 25 comments