Cappella Catharinae performing.

Crazy coincidence that just the night I'm in Stockholm it's Kulturnatten, so I got to listen to Renaissance and Baroque vocal music in gorgeous Katarinakyrkan.

I can also see why AI images are so tempting to people who do this. If an image's function is to just fill space, then why would they care what the image even is or where it came from?

It's the same thing with news articles. Why would you put a picture of a completely unrelated thing into your article if it's not strictly necessary??

Hard agree. I find most of the images in presentations distracting if the presenter is not specificly talking about what's in the pictures.

Yeah. One convenience sample of US college students answers yes to a suggestive question about abolishing social media vs. mounting population-level evidence that most young users are pretty indifferent or even positively disposed towards social media.

Yeah. One reason I like Bluesky is the wealth of different feeds people have made. Like Paper Skygest, which I think is just links to sites that typically host academic papers from a user's network. People have made all sorts of cool, niche feeds.

Yeah. The problem with algorithmic feeds is that even those algos that are not designed to maximize your time spent in the service are somehow based on engagement. Like, I wouldn't want my newspaper to only contain articles I'd be most likely to rage quote-tweet, but that's what most algos optimize.

For You has been a nice distraction sometimes, but it does seem to increase Bluesky's likeness to some other, less enjoyable social media sites. I guess even opt-in algorithmic feeds were a mistake after all.

I am happy that my Social Media Experience™ is so far limited to people complaining about a Hitler-Stalin discourse happening somewhere else in the network without actually being exposed to said discourse.

Oh wow, this looks great. Thanks for singing the praises so ignorant people like me can find out about services like this.

This was excellent. We recently wrote and sent a policy brief -style document with a similar message to people working on a teen social media ban in Finland. Hopefully these messages will have some effect, though I'm not super optimistic about that.

Subjectively seeing the same in Europe (NL), the liberalization of gambling online feel like a massive long term risk to (psychological) health and family/personal wellbeing…

Hey, it's R code written by me c. 2013

Lmao.

I was trying to find something akin to "I asked an LLM what people think," but it sounds even more ridiculous when you type it out as I did above.

bsky.app/profile/step...

But thanks for the suggestions! We have the option of staying for one or two nights, so either way the stay is not going to be very long. But maybe long enough to eat something delicious and see something interesting.

I'm ashamed of mixing up the names of Latvia and Lithuania! In my defense I'm tired right now, I actually do know the basics about the Baltic states.

I hear Latvians are fond of potatoes?

Any tips for what to do/eat there? Me and a couple of colleagues are stopping there for a night en route to a conference in Warsaw next August.

#accidentalaRt

Both per capita and per unit area-- though I believe the standard per area illustration is that it has 2 popes per square kilometre.

A mountain of geographers

A community of ecologists
A clade of taxonomists
A gang of criminologists
A moderation of psychologists

Superb! Regarding collaborative editing, given that lots of Quarto documents rely on executing code to produce outputs, how do you envision this will work? Will collaborative writing require setting up a data-analysis environment with the ability to execute e.g. R code on some cloud platform?

Pizza with banana and curry.

Sounds like a perfect combo with Swedish banana curry pizza.

CHAPTER XXIII. HOW FLATTERERS SHOULD BE AVOIDED I do not wish to leave out an important branch of this subject, for it is a danger from which princes are with difficulty preserved, unless they are very careful and discriminating. It is that of flatterers, of whom courts are full, because men are so self-complacent in their own attairs, and in a way so deceived in them, that they are preserved with difficulty from this pest, and if they wish to defend themselves they run the danger of falling into contempt. Because there is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when every one may tell you the truth, respect for you abates. Therefore a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires, and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions. With these councillors, separately and collectively, he ought to carry himself in such a way that each of them should know that, the more freely he shall speak, the more he shall be preferred; outside of these, he should listen to no one, pursue the thing resolved on, and be steadfast in his resolutions. He who does otherwise is either overthrown by flatterers, or is so often changed by varying opinions that he falls into contempt. [...]

A prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel, but only when he wishes and not when others wish; he ought rather to discourage every one from offering advice unless he asks it; but, however, he ought to be a constant inquirer, and afterwards a patient listener concerning the things of which he inquired; also, on learning that any one, on any consideration, has not told him the truth, he should let his anger be felt. And if there are some who think that a prince who conveys an impression of his wisdom is not so through his own ability, but through the good advisers that he has around him, beyond doubt they are deceived, because this is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice, unless by chance he has yielded his affairs entirely to one person who happens to be a very prudent man. In this case indeed he may be well governed, but it would not be for long, because such a governor would in a short time take away his state from him. But if a prince who is not inexperienced should take counsel from more than one he will never get united counsels, nor will he know how to unite them. Each of the counsellors will think of his own interests, and the prince will not know how to control them or to see through them. And they are not to be found otherwise, because men will always prove untrue to you unless they are kept honest by constraint. Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.

Now is the time for posting thoughtful discussions of the role of LLMs in academia. I don't have one of those. But Machiavelli does.

Outlook!? In space!!?? What were they thinking!!!???

There are dinosaurs on the Moon?!

Some medieval Europeans even classified them as fish, so they could be eaten during Lent and other fasting days.

The Vegan Chinese Kitchen by Hannah Che

Most of the recipes come from Hannah Che's The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, which I can highly recommend.