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

We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All Maybe you've heard that AIs are "black boxes" But a growing body of research keeps arriving at the same conclusion: Today's AIs all work in surprisingly similar -- and simplistic -- ways 1/2 www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-...

submitted 16 hours ago • 25 comments

Universal right to counsel is something we on the left need to talk about more. It's just as important as universal healthcare - just like you don't choose to need Healthcare, you don't choose to get arrested or face eviction or foreclosure or bankruptcy or a debt collector or get sued or divorced.

submitted 16 days ago • 22 comments

Vegetative electron microscopy. Apparently, it's a recent digital fossil. These things are hard to dig out.🧪 www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-ph...

submitted 21 hours ago • 3 comments

The reason why older generations burnt the shit out of their meat and boiled the shit out of their vegetables, was your kid died if you didn't. Medium rare steaks and roasted Brussels sprouts are a side effect of an intact food safety infrastructure

submitted 2 days ago • 21 comments

I know how controversial the new parking lot was, given that it replaced paradise. Those were some of the longest meetings of the zoning subcommittee I’ve ever attended. But you know what took even longer and made me even angrier? Trying to find a parking spot before those meetings.

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

Independent Bookstore Day is this Saturday 4/26! The metro is your best friend during the crawl :) Download this metro-friendly bookstore map and plan out your crawl! Get a prize (hint hint...t-shirts, totes etc.) at your final stop. #dcbookcrawl Algorithms don't throw parties. Indies do.

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

Discussion of why AI hardware as a field prefers low precision types came up (again) the other day. The software brained answer is that for precision insensitive workloads, you effectively double your bandwidth from caches/device mem/host mem But there's a lot more to it.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

My survey class on the history of science is essentially about the social conditions required for science. The final lecture is always about how the US became the dominant nation for research in the 2nd half of the 20th century, and how it in retrospect it may be seen as an anomalous "Golden Age."

submitted 7 days ago • 7 comments

How did a mostly unchanging commentariat paid to reproduce takes from a fixed template of stale perspectives decade after decade fail to articulate something that didn’t fit its template? the further you go, the less it seems like a question

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

Actually. How the US benefitted from outsourcing its research interests to experts in universities.

submitted 7 days ago • 27 comments

I knew the U.S. higher education system was a massive draw for foreigners, but I did not know the U.S. sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it did natural gas and coal combined. Great piece by @crampell.bsky.social

submitted 8 days ago • 29 comments

🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read. He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

submitted 9 days ago • 342 comments

I'm going to state something that's obvious at every university: today was the deadline for folks to decide which grad school they'll join in the fall. This probably won't make headlines, but because we don't expect normal funding, universities aren't admitting a normal number of students. (1/4)

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

BIG NEWS: D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is imposing "extraordinary measures" to close the budget gap created by Congress. Those include freezes on spending, hiring, promotions, overtime, and some contracts. She's also planning for possible furloughs and facility closures.

submitted 11 days ago • 24 comments

EuroHPC Launches EVITA to Standardize HPC Education Across Europe ow.ly/h2Xo50VzZnN #HPC #EuroHPC #HPCwire

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

📢Out now! Ruoyao Zhang and Yang Xia introduce an acceleration framework for a broad range of continuum models that improves the performance of numerical simulations without compromising accuracy. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #HPC 🔓https://rdcu.be/edTQj

submitted 40 days ago • 1 comment

MY PERPETUAL COMPLAINT: DEATH IS ALMOST NEVER THE CORRECT METRIC FOR HEALTH-IMPACTING INCIDENTS, EVEN OUTCOMES MAY ONLY BE MEASURED AFTER SIGNIFICANT EXPENSE AND SUFFERING

submitted 12 days ago • 11 comments

This is the one you need to be protesting right now, they are trying to “financially terminate” people in their own words We’ve campaigned against debanking for a long time - losing bank accounts can destroy someone’s life, it’s happened to me for doing sex work. This is that, a million times worse

submitted 16 days ago • 7 comments

us government went from telling miners “learn to code” to telling coders “learn to mine” in less than ten years

submitted 14 days ago • 129 comments

This is the thing. In a world with a livable universal basic income, minimal IP rights would be fine. In the current world, copyright is necessary to protect creative people against Disney, Amazon, and the rest.

submitted 13 days ago • 3 comments

Oh bloody hell I hadn't thought about that but yeah Ai makes up fake libraries and dependencies. Someone else squats on those libraries, which means their malware code is now in yours. Congrats, you just got pwned

submitted 14 days ago • 4 comments

The rumor that Carney personally orchestrated the bond yield spike by dumping Canadian holdings of US treasuries is to be presumed false until really convincingly proven true, but it’s funny.

submitted 14 days ago • 10 comments

Given the recent focus on software safety, I really enjoyed this article by @mppf.bsky.social exploring how Chapel, despite not being as safety-driven as Rust, comes quite close for the errors he studied, while also arguably having a better story in terms of programmability and #HPC parallelism.

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Not a single economist theorized a model even close to how it turns out the global economy actually works

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

People will always say they’re your friend and they support you no matter what but then they’ll say some toxic shit to you like “you have to let go of the cursed amulet, it’s changing who you are” and “don’t let its power corrupt you” all because they want the amulet for themselves

submitted 16 days ago • 138 comments

two years ago, silicon valley bank collapsed, threatening to wipe out large swathes of the fortunes of peter thiel and his cronies. so joe biden stepped in to cover their losses through the fdic. they were made whole. then they bankrolled trump. and now no one else will ever be made whole again.

submitted 16 days ago • 8 comments

“It is no longer enough simply to recognize how authoritarians work… What makes Sebald fascinating even decades after his death is the way he marks out possible lines of resistance—not in the traditional sense of protest, witness, & activism[,] but through other means altogether.”— @colindickey.com

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Are you tired of context-switching between coding models in @pytorch.org and paper writing on @overleaf.com? Well, I’ve got the fix for you, Neuralatex! An ML library written in pure Latex! neuralatex.com To appear in Sigbovik (subject to rigorous review process)

submitted 25 days ago • 2 comments

I find “people don’t actually know how things work” has a lot of explanatory power. I don’t mean this in a holier-than-thou way. I’m only vaguely aware of how my microwave or the car radio work. A lot of modern life is assuming the functioning of complex tech and models.

submitted 18 days ago • 59 comments

I periodically come across the image below, with the caption claiming that it is showing a German plan to use an atomic bomb against NYC, or at least an attempt to imagine the effects of such a weapon against NYC. But... it actually doesn't. Not at all! It's actually MUCH stranger than that.

submitted 18 days ago • 2 comments

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

submitted 20 days ago • 1113 comments

a propos of all these crank leftists complaining that there wasn't enough property damage yesterday, dusting off my essay about the civil rights movement (and how they won without burning down any walmarts) www.liberalcurrents.com/how-to-win-a...

submitted 20 days ago • 22 comments

YOU GUYS.

submitted 22 days ago • 322 comments

Parents Gently Explain To Child That Their Money In Heaven Now

submitted 22 days ago • 167 comments

This feels like the defining image from this year’s Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting. The National Science Foundatipn paid for a booth in the exhibit hall. But the booth sits empty, because NSF has been DOGE’d, and there is no one left to send.

submitted 22 days ago • 71 comments