Becky

This story is not just about ChatGPT killing yet another person. It is a confluence of poor medical follow-up, isolation, and the complete lack of a support system for chronically ill people in this country. She should have had someone else to talk to other than a busy doctor and a chatbot.

Glad more are realising this is a blunder! > By applying these tests outside their proper context [such as to LLM-based AI systems], the findings derived from such practice answer no real questions and fail to provide meaningful insights. doi.org/10.3384/nejl...

Something I try to illustrate with these annoying threads is that design is not business, but business is a constraint on design. The responses "it can be an advantage to be faster" are not unexpected. It's the implication that they are *part of* design that is incorrect.

If you look at what corps are doing and not just saying, "human in the loop" is more of a blame strategy than a real principle. The human is outnumbered by computer processes and overwhelmed by design. If we actually want to empower humans we need Less Computer

In their quest for velocity, managers identified a critical bottleneck: themselves. Now they are automating away the very work of leadership - determining what is most valuable to work on, and aligning everyone around those goals. The result: worse outcomes, delivered faster than ever before.

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

Academic time management is postponing five small tasks so you can fail to complete one large task

Grad school rite of passage (must achieve at least one): -forget poster tube on plane -print poster on 16 A4 sheets then tape together in front of everyone silently judging -no one stopping by your poster -enemy lab stopping by to judge your poster -standing next to a more popular poster

I have been meaning to write about this for a month or so now but it breaks my heart. AI has infected every hobby. Everything is noise. It's hurting existing communities and trudging through the slop is exhausting.

Now available in its final formatted version in the October edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society: "Visualizing Weather Risks: Participatory Design Workshops for Hurricane Threats and Impacts Graphics". The project and the team have been such a highlight of my career.

Humans need friction. So does the economy. Wrote about Musing Ourselves to Death & what a future where the internet transforms into a place for AI assistants to perfect commerce. Spoiler: We talked to some smart ppl & it would be chaos! w/ @matteowong.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

How to pay for parking.

One of the primary health insurance companies is likely dropping one of the most common health care providers in our area. There's no way this ends well.

Here’s a type designer’s roundup of font-choice bloopers: www.marksimonson.com/notebook/vie...

We found an unusual bird in our bird house today!

The argument against trains is that our cities are insufficiently dense to support trains, and that is certainly true for many cities at this moment. However, we should not be designing and zoning for this moment. We should be thinking about our infrastructure in thirty years.

Physiographic illustration is a craft, honed over years of careful attention to detail. After May 18, the USGS published this triptych of Mount St. Helens by cartographer Tau Rho Alpha and geologist Jim Moore, with the support of David Jones. Just how did the north face change? See for yourself.

Exclusive: In March, the White House’s budget request for fiscal year 2027 called for eliminating NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. Whether Congress will approve the request is unclear, but NSF is not waiting. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4hC7bes

i’ve noticed recently that when i’m having an in-person conversation, i feel this internal pressure to make my point faster/a perception that the other person is growing impatient. and i realized it’s because we’re so used to getting info in quick clips now that a longer explanation feels foreign.

Americans have never been angrier with one another. But polarization is not the disease—it is the response to a revanchist movement seeking to roll back sixty years of social progress. 🆕 by @lilymasonphd.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/a...

I got my flu shot at our campus library this week! If you study or work at a university, flu shots are often offered at convenient pop-up locations around campus in the Fall. Check it out!

one of the reasons that I warn researchers away from adapting commercial LLMs into their pipeline is that Big Tech has a history of sunsetting popular, usable products and replacing them with worse ones. (i'm trying to ween myself off of google scholar, but it is hard).

Yet more evidence for the towering heap of proof that synthetic users are bullshit. As with all AI products, they do not improve "productivity" for a task but create an excuse not to do the task. In this case, the task is research. AI participants do not help you do research, but to AVOID research.

Me: so if I need to, idk, go to work in the next 9mos, how am I supposed to do that? US healthcare system: sounds like a non-covered expense! But do let us know immediately if you lose your job due to your disability-- Me: --so you can help? USHCS: HAHAHA! No. So we can cancel your care.

What software or web tool or workflow that you regularly use would cause the most grief if it just stopped working today? Can you think of a way to lessen the impact if it did?

"Smart" appliances are not always a smart choice... arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...

The more we buy into the logic that academia needs to be more like "the real world"--the more we buy into the idea that all we're doing is training students to go out and be good workers--the less we are fulfilling any sort of distinct mission, and the less exciting our work is our students.

That's the point--and, frankly, I think the more most students are exposed to what is truly unique about the academy, the more they love it. A university is one of the only places where people can play with ideas without needing to expect any sort of commercializability.

Is Diamond Access a 'loss leader'? Hundreds of ‘free’ academic journals have started charging fees www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Check out this amazing course manual by @olivia.science for her course ‘AI as a Science’. Cite as: Guest, O. (2020). AI as a Science: Course Manual. Radboud University Nijmegen. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

"Organizers had placed all barricades and staff at the market's entrance, and the episode has them rethinking whether access points need to allow authorized vehicles onto the site during setup without leaving an opening for others to slip through." Absolutely. Never give robots a physical opening.

There is something so unbelievably bleak about an article that calmly walks readers through how to navigate being laid off after 50, losing your health insurance, and somehow surviving the years until Medicare. What a broken country.