Huh, is there not RLHF and stuff like that with modern human input?

Nice photo! The insect looks like a praying mantis to me by the way, with the big body and little legs. We have little mantises like that here in Madrid too, though I haven’t seen a bird with one yet.

Wow, great layering with the foliage!

Birb Stalker (2021) An unusual take on bird photography

ericphanson.com/blog/2025/bi...

Great cormorants!

Egyptian geese!

a duck swimming with waves behind

A duck with a green head and water droplet falling from its beak

a duck swimming

Ducks!

I don’t really agree with that post, both in that it’s still not a nice workflow to have to debug weird latex issues with an LLM, and also that the knowledge cutoff isn’t that big of a deal in practice. LLMs definitely lower the barrier to try something new for me.

I wrote a blog post about making a web app valuetier.org (#1 human values tier list site 😉) and my thoughts on LLMs as a machine learning engineer: ericphanson.com/blog/2025/va...

A Eurasian magpie looking inspirational

An Eurasian magpie starting to fly

A green woodpecker looking up from eating some bugs

Two magpies and a woodpecker

Nice and round!

An 8x8 grid of headshots of magpies. One has a bit of food.

Magpies :)

What does “stochastic parrot” mean to you that disagrees with those points?

Love of power vs hatred of assumptions 😄

A photo of a small praying mantis on a railing by a river

Praying mantis! I didn’t know Madrid had them

(the answer was more drugs)

The drugs to control the side effects (a lot of nausea in particular) also work remarkably well, apparently it used to be a much worse patient experience. For me the infusion was totally smooth, but now it feels like the various drugs are doing some skirmishing in my stomach. But not terrible.

Well the chemo definitely works, untreated CHL has like a 6% 5-year survival rate and 0% 10-year one, and chemo can take that to 97% or higher for early stage. Pretty amazing.

Started ABVD chemotherapy yesterday for stage 1 classical Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I’ll be ok! It’s got a great prognosis.

Weird experience. It’s kind of a cascade of drugs where there’s the chemo drugs but then drugs to help with the side effects and ones to help with their side effects. Mostly works!

I think it does since that restricts it to old Makie, and a newer Makie is installed, so the resolver prefers an old version of the new package rather than downgrading an existing package

it looks like Tidier.jl only declares compat with TidierPlots 0.9 (github.com/TidierOrg/Ti...)

A church tower with 3 big stork nests

A close up of a stork moving a small stick in its nest

A close up of a stork standing on its nest with its feathers ruffled by the wind

A close up of a stork preening in its nest

I saw some lovely storks in Ávila on Monday! #birds

The Egret is feeling Great about it though!

2023*

A Great Egret holding a small fish in its beak, standing in a river

Close up of the egret holding the little fish

This egret caught a little fish! I included a zoom since I’m not sure Bluesky preserves the original resolution.

I was very happy to have snagged the shot although I miss-framed a bit and didn’t get the feet.

Costa Rica (2013)

a nice green heron in Costa Rica (2023) #birds

Cryptocurrency 'market caps' and notional value A naive equation works well when estimating the value of small quantities of popular crypto tokens, but it's also being used to estimate values of illiquid tokens and the market capitalization of all ...

Re-meme coin market caps, they are likely exaggerated a lot: blog.mollywhite.net/cryptocurren.... You probably know that but it might be a good nuance to convey still in the newsletter

Our world in data uses 2015–2019 for the baseline, and has a very clear section on how excess mortality is measured:

ourworldindata.org/excess-morta...