The purpose of a system is what it does.
#cdnpoli

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels.

The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them.

We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.

CDC Caught Burying Report on Real Effects of COVID Vaccine Tipsters revealed the acting director for the Centre for Disease Control is blocking publication of a pro-vaccine research article.

“… the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has secretly blocked publication of a report that concludes COVID-19 vaccines are a significant boost to public health…the report found that COVID vaccines drastically minimize risk of hospitalization after catching the virus.”

Can we soon predict children’s intelligence? | Radboud University It sounds logical: the more active your brain, the smarter you are. But a new study shows that the brain doesn’t work that simply.

> Can we soon predict children’s intelligence?

NO STOP IT

www.ru.nl/en/services/...

Honestly, the biggest reason why I don't put any stock in the moon landing conspiracy is that it's a lot of work to not add much to what we know from the actual history. That is, that the "space race" was initially a "race to space", which the USSR, not the USA, won. So the USA shifted the....

So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it:

International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.

Richard Dawkins. Steven Pinker. Lawrence Krauss. Jonathan Haidt. Robert Trivers. Prominent atheists and scientists who have pushed anti-trans propaganda for years. They all had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Some received huge research grants and island trips, and all of them benefited from their ties.

This applies to writing too. The struggle is where you learn the important stuff

Waiting for the AI bros to come in and well-ahktually this one.

It's bad to burn lots of carbon for absolutely no benefit, period.

jonny (good kind) (@jonny@neuromatch.social) Attached: 2 images My dogs I am crying. They have a whole series of exception types that end with `_I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS` and the docstring explains this is "to confirm you've ver...

FFS

> Like the LLM resorts to naming its variables with prompt text to remind it to not leak data while writing its code, which, of course, it ignores and prints the error directly.

neuromatch.social/@jonny/11632...

Fig. 1 for the ages

Workers are capable of running workplaces without managers and we should restructure our economy around this concept

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all As of April 24 you'll be feeding the Octocat unless you opt out Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models.…

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Map of Canada with the province of Manitoba highlighted. Text that reads "Recent data shows 65% of Manitoba students and their families have difficulty paying tuition fees. Canadian average: 48%"

Across Canada, 48% of college and university students report struggling with the cost of tuition. In Manitoba, that number jumps to 65%.

Federal student grants are also on the chopping block.

Student support should be increasing, not decreasing.

Help us Grow the Grants: buff.ly/2gw2LnU

Deadline Approaching to File a Claim in the Anthropic Settlement - Writer Beware Just a reminder: if your book or books are included in the $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright settlement, the deadline to file a claim is fast approaching: March 30, 2026. Relevant resources: A note for...

Counting down to the fast approaching deadline for eligible authors to file a claim in the Anthropic settlement (March 30th!). Victoria Strauss has an update with links to more info. writerbeware.blog/2026/03/13/d...

Paleontology has an Epstein problem. Women in the field say it's a symptom of a deeper misogyny | CBC Radio The names of hundreds of scientists have appeared in the Epstein files, including prominent dinosaur researchers. As the paleontology community reckons with the fallout of these revelations, women in ...

Science has an Epstein problem. Women in paleontology say it's a symptom of a deeper misogyny.
When paleontologist Riley Black learned that several scientists in her field had appeared in the Epstein files, she wasn't remotely shocked.

www.cbc.ca/radio/epstei...

A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Should we be worried? Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci-fi movie?

A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Should we be worried?

I know people are very sensitive about the use of the word “genocide” but the attempts to medically eliminate trans children is very clearly meets the standard because they are trying to eliminate a population and also they know some of those kids are going to kill themselves

We deserve better trains

it's really cool how "you don't 'have' a sex you are weighed against [the structure] sex" is the last and ultimate piece of the puzzle that truly allows being nonbinary to "click" and feel meaningful. like wow sex is not "a feature of you" it's something imposed on diverse & complex individuals??

but the mediocrity As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity. You should be so lucky as to have it flowing almost effortlessly from a tap. We all write mediocre code. Mediocre code: often fine. Not all code is equally important. Some code should be mediocre. Maximum effort on a random unit test? You’re doing something wrong. Your team lead should correct you. Developers all love to preen about code. They worry LLMs lower the “ceiling” for quality. Maybe. But they also raise the “floor”. Gemini’s floor is higher than my own. My code looks nice. But it’s not as thorough. LLM code is repetitive. But mine includes dumb contortions where I got too clever trying to DRY things up. And LLMs aren’t mediocre on every axis. They almost certainly have a bigger bag of algorithmic tricks than you do: radix tries, topological sorts, graph reductions, and LDPC codes. Humans romanticize rsync (Andrew Tridgell wrote a paper about it!). To an LLM it might not be that much more interesting than a SQL join. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It doesn’t matter. If truly mediocre code is all we ever get from LLMs, that’s still huge. It’s that much less mediocre code humans have to write.

Reading this (fly.io/blog/youre-a...)

and I think one of the things is, Rust enforces a huge amount more type based language verification than Go, C, etc.

It doesn't surprise me that LLMs are bad at rust but good at Go. Go is designed to work a lot better when you just get the syntax right.

This is also genocide

All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman Kelli Reynolds, the autistic heroine of this thrilling, prescient, and emotionally rich sci-fi adventure from Hoffmann (The Outs...

'Scuse me, coming through, STARRED REVIEW: www.publishersweekly.com/9781616964566

#IgnoreThisBook

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.

And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

Either we abolish capitalism or we die

Extract from linked article reads: Unfortunately, the power to reverse these decisions doesn’t belong to the people, but to a small cabal of the ultra-rich. The future of the planet is so far out of our control that some environmental experts argue not even the world’s most powerful governments can stop the collapse.

At least they're coming out and saying it now, I guess.
futurism.com/science-ener...

For-profit clinics don't save us money. They actually cost us more. @onthealthcoalition.bsky.social #Health #ONpoli

Lee Smolin pauses working relationship with Perimeter Institute after being named in Epstein files Lee Smolin has been asked to “pause” his work by the Perimeter Institute as they review ties to Jeffrey Epstein

I‘ve mentioned that thanks to the Epstein tranche I learned that one of my PhD advisors, Lee Smolin, continued to have contact with Epstein after 2007, which is not the impression I had

It’s weird to say the least for my professional past to become a public story that demands feminist analysis

the world order effectively letting the palestinian genocide occur with no real objections has effectively dropped the formalities around pretending to care about genocide in the post-ww2 era and so the 21st century will be marked by more genocides & attempts to depoliticize them

When I get angry I write a poem. This is the most useless form of anger.

Sorry, it ran a bit longer than expected.