Every reason [approx] is a legitimate reason to buy another book ... or better, several! 📚📚

Exclusive: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture ​mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its ‌artificial-intelligence models, part of a broad ...

Meta will begin keystroke logging US employees at work -- complete with mouse movements and periodic screenshots -- to train better AI agents.

This comes after Boz posted about a future in which AI will "primarily do the work" at meta.

It's a new era for tech labor. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

A comparatively minor point but I'll add the complexity & tech debt of software involved.

Last week I got my first tariff bill, from FedEx for a package received in October, a 6 month delay.

Extremely dodgy-looking but legit. Wanted "15.3" dollars. Not "$15.30". Obviously hasty & worrisome app!

Opinion | Measles Took My Daughter. This Is What I Want Everyone to Know.

Measles is NOT "just like chickenpox". It can kill years later. This woman was so brave for coming forward with her story.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...

Not FOSS but I use and recommend Musicolet for Android. 100% local capability.

I especially like how easy it is to use and play by file system *folder* in addition to the usual options by album etc. Great for sequential language lessons, series, etc.

Brandon Sanderson vs. AI Art - Cal Newport Late last year, the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson gave a talk at Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual conference organized by his media company. It was titled, ... Read more

"This makes the idea of reading a book written by a language model, or watching a film generated by a prompt, intrinsically absurd, if not anti-human.
Cal Newport

It is anti-human, Cal

calnewport.com/brandon-sand...

💧 New blog post! Learn how to create mini inset-style maps in #rstats using #purrr, #ggplot2, and #cowplot.

Featuring SUI data from USGS, with examples at the national watershed scale and in the Great Basin.

🔗 waterdata.usgs.gov/blog/nwdc-in...

#DataViz #WaterData #OpenScience

Independent bookstores make quiet comeback as big chains dominate retail About 422 indie bookshops opened in 2025, up 31%, defying predictions of retail consolidation

"Independent bookstores make quiet comeback as big chains dominate retail"

"About 422 indie bookshops opened in 2025, up 31%, defying predictions of retail consolidation"

Yeah. As an ex-Googler, I'll note that they often have 5 different teams working on something in different ways and not collaborating.

(Unlike some companies, it's not hostile, just each team doing its thing with different business goals.)

But current conditions don't even need a model 😆

So much this!

Humans learn language with astonishingly little and different input than these systems. Their comprehension and production gradually develop. We don’t depend on processing every bit of language that’s ever been produced.

Google has accomplished this feat of extreme inaccuracy through the power of a special "internal model"

support.google.com/websearch/an...

Google Weather on my Pixel phone is typically very wrong. For example, it says it is currently 61° F in my location but the actual is 72°.

It has been this wrong as long as I've checked. Routinely off 10+ degrees, and also wrong about precip.

... and we are supposed to trust their "AI" ?

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com #ArtificialIntelligence systems increasingly shape and permeate our mentality and social environments. Like every great historical transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation capable of making visible the logic behind economics, embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 91K Views

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons! Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 209K Views

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 696K Views

Pope Leo on AI:

“Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses.”

This short thread is worth reading:

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Two bald eagles soaring in the sky with an evergreen (fir? I'm hopeless on trees) tree on the left and blue sky with grey clouds behind them

A bald eagle sitting at the very tip of a 100 foot tall spruce (?) tree with partially cloudy skies behind

Something better than the news, two bald eagles outside my window in Seattle, just now. And one in a tree yesterday evening.

Happy Friday!

library(tidyheatmaps) tidyheatmap(df = data_exprs, rows = external_gene_name, columns = sample, values = expression, scale = "row", annotation_col = c(sample_type, condition, group), annotation_row = c(is_immune_gene, direction), gaps_row = direction, gaps_col = group )

This is how you can visualize gene expression data in #tidyheatmaps 🤩

https://jbengler.github.io/tidyheatmaps/

#rstats #dataviz #phd

LNG Canada exceeds estimated 2024 global record for burned gas | The Narwhal LNG Canada in Kitimat, B.C., burned more gas in 2025 than any other liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility on record in 2024

B.C. loves to say it has the cleanest natural gas in the world, but the truth is — well, more like the complete opposite of that.

a real banger of an investigation at @thenarwhal.ca today by @writermjs.bsky.social & Wil Crisp. thenarwhal.ca/lng-canada-b...

I’ve been thinking recently that with increased automation, capitalism, and integrated systems society has lost the “gray” areas that smooth interactions.

A human can assess exceptions.

We need more soft systems: automated yet with human judgement.

Does anyone know existing writings on this?

AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails

"Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data."

A screenshot of the above post when I posted it, showing a note that it is "Processing..." with an hour glass.

For instance, when I posted ^^^ .. a "processing" delay for almost a minute

Weird Bsky errors, freezes, delays for the past few hours.

So if you have issues, it's probably not just you. (Which is almost a tautology, I guess 😆)

With you .. until Harbor Freight. (So multiply my costs by 2.5 😆)

tinyrox is on CRAN!

Minimal roxygen2 alternative. Zero non-base R deps, generates your .Rd files and NAMESPACE

`install.packages("tinyrox")`

Part of the tinyverse toolchain:
cornball.ai/posts/tinyve...

Roughly half of STEM PhD students in the U.S. are international students.

75% of them stay in the U.S. long term after graduating to contribute their skills to U.S. scientific research and development.

Cutting international student visas hurts U.S. science now and long into the future.

Electoral College cartogram showing which states are in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and which ones could join in time for it to activate by 2028. Each state is sized and labeled according to its number of electoral votes. The states are spaced out enough to accommodate the changes in size but retain their general shapes and relative positions on the map. Current members are in solid orange, potential members are in light green, and nonmembers that are unlikely to join are in medium gray. Members have 222 electoral votes, potential states have 68, and the unlikely states have 248. The compact would only activate once states with at least 270 electoral votes have joined. The seven potential members and their electoral vote are Alaska (3), Arizona (11), Michigan (15), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), Pennsylvania (19), and Wisconsin (10). Democrats would need to gain the governor's office and/or legislative chambers to win unified power in these states, as detailed in the spreadsheet linked in this post.

NEW: Virginia just passed a law to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, giving it 222 of 270 electoral votes needed to activate.

This map and spreadsheet show which states could join to activate it by 2028 depending on the outcome of the 2026 elections docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

We found out several things during the wait. 1) target uses AI for theft prevention which often falsely targets people. 2) they purposly don't notify you if you don't scan all items in a self checkout lane. 3) if u hit the ok button on the self checkout and you miss an item they say thats stealing

Thank you for being a valued Streaming Service+ subscriber. Your monthly plan is increasing from $9.99 to $24.99. This price adjustment reflects our continued investment in canceling your favourite shows after one season, removing titles from the library without warning, and building a worse UI.

It's such a low-key resistance move but talking about not using AI, especially in a professional context, is so important in working against "inevitability" narratives and so powerful in identifying who your people are — and in ensuring there are more of us all the time.

Sadly, not a surprise at all 😢

Neither the urge to keep working and make the numbers, nor this:

“Truthfully, I now have even less respect for our leadership team than I did before, which I didn’t know was possible"

Book highlight that says: "A not-wholly-unfair analysis of academic publishing would be that it is an industry in which academics compete against one another for the privilege of providing free labour for a profit-making company, which then sells the results back to them at monopoly prices."

Enjoyed reading "The Unaccountability Machine" by Dan Davies: at turns thoughtful and hilarious. Goes deep into cybernetics, history, neoliberalism, and accounting (!).

A friend sent me this quote which is pretty funny and on target unless you're an academic; then the joke is on you (and me).