Compton Scatterbrained

Compton Scatterbrained

@comptonscatter.bsky.social

Bad hearing, bad sight, scattered brain. Full of PFAS, but a true believer in radiation hormesis. Why isn't rutile rutilant? I like valence electrons (but K shell too) & deep time.

328 followers74 following10.7K posts

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Colin
@colin-fraser.net

I had my AI agent create an app called “Lunch” to help me with decision fatigue and boost my productivity. It has a few pictures of things I might like to eat. Tapping one spawns a subagent to order that item on Uber Eats and 60-90 minutes later I’m eating. It’s 600 thousand lines of JavaScript.

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

It's so weird sitting here *for the second time* watching this sort of financial tsunami coming while dumbasses keep running to the dry beach looking for treasure and, like, we can scream our heads off and like zee goggles, zey do nossing.

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Philip N Cohen
@philipncohen.com

LLMs, asked to "peer" review 200 papers published this year in top science and medicine journals, either rejected or recommended major revisions 76% of the time. Telling the LLMs the paper was a revision paper made them much more generous. arxiv.org/abs/2610.31414

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Anna Krijger
@annakrijger.bsky.social

Armoede niet aanpakken bij de bron, maar zinloos pleistertjes plakken deel 786: Mensen met 'energiearmoede' krijgen een tegemoetkoming als ze éérst geld uitgeven aan energierekening. Maar ze zetten de verwarming niet eens aan- en krijgen dus ook dat geld niet 😭

nu.nlGeldstress groeit nu de temperaturen omlaaggaan: 'Verwarming blijft uit'Kwetsbare groepen krijgen meer geldstress nu de temperaturen zakken en de energieprijzen stijgen. Het Noodfonds Energie, dat pas in januari opengaat, is alleen voor mensen die hun verwarming aanzetten...

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Kate Littler
@palaeoclimate.bsky.social

Hello 👋 I am putting together an “AI in the Geosciences” workshop for our UGs & MScs. -Part education (what even is AI?) -Part intervention (dear god stop using LLMs for your reports) -Part introduction to machine learning & handling big data. Ideas for resources I might have missed pls? 🙏 ⚒️🧪

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Brandon Bishop
@brandontbishop.bsky.social

Cactuses make a surprisingly large amount of carbonate when they die. Makes the desert strangely coral reef like.

azgs.arizona.eduCarbon Sequestration and Sonoran Desert Cacti18 October 2021 Can cacti sequestration of carbon dioxide play a role in global carbon sequestration program?
Larry R. Nittler 🚀🎹🌖☄️@larrynittler.bsky.social

Something like 20% of the dry mass of a saguaro is the mineral weddellite (CaC2O4 ·2H2O)

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

This is the new ending of that necrogoblicon music video. Instead of clawing The Brad's face off, he simply beats him at the office with AI cheating

KetAnthropic JoshAI@ketanjoshi.co

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

Damn, I'm just looking for some images of people sitting on bus stop benches as a drawing reference and fuck me if at least half of them aren't goddamn AI. Also none of them have the positions I want anyway. Ug.

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

Sigh. I just use Ubuntu because I want an easy terminal with easy ssh and keys and whatever, no mac bs and I've always been too lazy to learn powershell, so no windows anymore. I AM LINUX INDEX-FINGER STABBING SENIOR. So don't gimme this "CAN'T UPDATE SNAP STORE BC SNAP STORE RUNNING"

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Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

So while it's not a bad thing, I feel silly knowing I'll have to teach the kids basic unix commands and whatnot so they can deal with their computers when they're older because the suposedly-made-for-dumb-seniors OS is still like "frutsel in the terminal to fix x" sometimes.

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

Sigh. I just use Ubuntu because I want an easy terminal with easy ssh and keys and whatever, no mac bs and I've always been too lazy to learn powershell, so no windows anymore. I AM LINUX INDEX-FINGER STABBING SENIOR. So don't gimme this "CAN'T UPDATE SNAP STORE BC SNAP STORE RUNNING"

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

Because now I have to go DDG for "oh yeah how do I list processes again? oja ps aux kthx" then kill the stupid thing manually because closing in the GUI doesn't actually close it and then go look up "ubuntu how update snapcrap?" to read someone on AskUbuntu say "here how update w CLI" christ

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Nikolay Tumanov
@ntumanovxray.bsky.social

Please, continue to use chatbot to generate illustrations for linkedin posts, otherwise I will not have new additions for my #CursedMolecules collection. #chemchat #chemsky

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Chemjobber
@chemjobber.bsky.social

huh interesting thoughts

Jake Yeston@jakeyeston.bsky.social

Gotta rant… I am not going to see the Elizabeth Holmes movie and it’s making me kind of crazy that it’s becoming a phenomenon, because the Theranos story is about who got fooled, not who fooled them. This jaunty @wired.com piece is reasonable all things considered www.wired.com/story/how-el...

wired.comHow Elizabeth Holmes Tricked WIRED—and Everyone ElseWIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then.

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Howard Lee
@hlee.bsky.social

Extreme greenhouse warmth triggered two major flora turnover events of the past 120 million years ⚒️🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.comExtreme greenhouse warmth triggered the two major floristic turnover events of the past 120 million years - Nature PlantsPlant microfossil compilations show strong climatic control of land plant diversity. Extinctions and emergence of lineages of flowering plants, gymnosperms and ferns were concentrated within the two w...

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Brandon Bishop
@brandontbishop.bsky.social

Going to plug the earthquake/civil engineering PhD student--Nathan Girmay--who's been working on this as I was really impressed by what they were doing and their presentation.... #SMIP_Strong_Motion_Data_Seminar

scholar.google.comscholar.google.com
Brandon Bishop@brandontbishop.bsky.social

I do not like strike-slip fault peak ground displacement being underestimated in building engineering due to directional polarization.... #SMIP_Strong_Motion_Data_Seminar

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Kevin Riggle
@kevinr.free-dissociation.com

I’m reminded of this article from a few weeks ago about the people holding up the Internet sheets.works/data-viz/hol...

sheets.worksThe People Holding Up the Internet: Who Maintains Open SourceFour billion phones ask one text file what time it is, kept by a UCLA lecturer in his spare time. We counted who maintains the code under your phone.
Charlie Warzel@cwarzel.bsky.social

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

theatlantic.comThe Man Who Saved the Internet YesterdayOndřej Surý was a relatively anonymous volunteer working on PHP security. Then the internet exploded.

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Chenxin Li, PhD
@chenxinli2.bsky.social

Wow coming from a former NSF director

Joshua Weitz@joshuasweitz.bsky.social

“I believe that NSF has lost any semblance of independence and that any policy statement coming out of NSF is directed by the White House, presumably OSTP, in consultation with OMB,” says former NSF Director Neal Lane. 🔥 via @policyhound.bsky.social

science.orgTwo top NSF officials are leaving. In an agency under Trump’s thumb, it may not matterBrian Stone and Rebecca Keiser are leaving as unofficial head and chief of staff

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Dr Corrina Readioff
@fierengraw.bsky.social

Replying to @scalzi.com

This is magnificent!! I withdrew from contractual negotiations with a major academic publisher earlier in the year because they wouldn‘t revise the offered contract to prohibit AI use of my work. It’s extremely heartening to hear of others having success with these kind of clauses, bravo!!

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

While this can be technically true, I am reminded of a book excerpt someone once sent me talking about the neutrality of tools. That a tool designed to do a thing invites doing the thing, & that well-designed tools know what is intuitive to users & present themselves to do the thing they're best at.

Marcus Edwards 🔬@marcusedwards.me

Surely there's a balance to be struck somewhere. AI is not the antithesis of art. We can use tools without sacrificing our ability to participate in worthwhile activities like art. It's in the user's hands to choose what they want to do themselves and what they want to automate.

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

Of course this was talking about physical Don Norman type stuff, how we know a door should be pushed rather than pulled, that handles on a fulcrum should be squeezed and whatnot. But we should still look critically at the supposed neutrality of softwares.

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

eevee
@eev.ee

Replying to @eev.ee

maybe we should stop writing software in C, the language of choice for having CVEs

Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

bwahahaha

Magnetic Resonance News@nmr900.bsky.social

The validity of Site-Specific Natural Isotope Fractionation–nuclear magnetic resonance (SNIF-NMR) in spirits certification is being challenged in court on the grounds that the method “lacked recognised metrological traceability” www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2026/10/cost... #NMRchat #NMR 🧲 🍾

thespiritsbusiness.comCostco wins '100% agave' Tequila lawsuit - The Spirits BusinessA lawsuit that challenged Costco and its Kirkland Tequila brand over the use of '100% agave' has been dismissed in a US court.
Compton Scatterbrained
@comptonscatter.bsky.social

If you don't want people to make slop, don't waste your time reading it, editing it, thinking about it, and for fuck's sake don't encourage ppl to make more slop by using AI to read the slop. Just, automatic bit-bucket that shit.

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

Dalmeet Singh Chawla
@dalmeet.bsky.social

Google DeepMind's latest version of the AI crystallography GNoME database still flooded with near duplicate entries and unrealistic compounds — my latest for @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/research-int... #ChemSky

cen.acs.orgGoogle DeepMind AI crystallography database includes near duplicate structures and unrealistic compoundsAfter hyping previous claims, tech giant doesn’t comment on inquiries about lack of novelty in database of AI-generated crystals

Compton Scatterbrained reposted

B Jarosz
@datageekb.bsky.social

"Every professional organization that represents population scientists has come out in stark opposition to these proposals. It's likely going to lead to a significant undercount. It's going to imperil the validity of the decennial count, which is going to have ripple effects." -Nathan Dollar

wfae.orgQ&A: Proposed 2030 Census changes could be ‘very harmful,’ demographic expert warnsThe Trump administration has proposed several major changes to the 2030 census that could limit who is counted and what information is collected. Among the changes, any non-U.S. citizens without a gre...