Andrew Perfors

Okay this made me cry

A brown penguin chick of some kind. It looks very much like a man in a suit. It is bedraggled and miserable

Made it to Friday but at what cost

a map of openai's influence on other media companies

Amazing site here via @timnitgebru.bsky.social - a map of big tech influence on media and media companies.

imo this goes a decent way to explaining why coverage of AI specifically has been so shockingly bad recently. Very useful resource!!

nananwachukwu.github.io/media-captur...

The entire anti-trans care grift is built in treating the usual way medicine works as if it's a scandal.

Therapists figure out if a kid is trans the same way they figure out if they're depressed. They ask questions, maybe using a formal scale to quantify how kids compare to similar kids.

Thoughts & prayers to the EPA :(

Jesse Singal: “I don’t understand why all these experts with degrees keep disagreeing with me. So demoralizing. What could the explanation be??”

i think enthusiastic LLM use is mostly a stack of cognitive biases, unacknowledged plagiarism, and unmet needs in a trenchcoat

but also my main objections aren't about them being bad at tasks so i don't care if you think they've gotten better at it

Data centre power emissions double over five years Ryan Cropp Ryan CroppEnergy and climate reporter Mar 3, 2026 – 7.32pm Save Share Gift this article Some of Australia’s biggest data centre operators have more than doubled their reported carbon emissions over the past five years, as the exponential growth of the sector leads to a major rise in demand on the power grid and puts pressure on the government’s climate agenda. Top data centre operators Amazon, AirTrunk and CDC all declared annual scope two emissions increases of more than 20 per cent in 2024-25 and more than 100 per cent since 2020-21, according to new figures published by the Clean Energy Regulator.

AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda told The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday that the government’s AI plan was “pretty good”, but it needed to think more holistically about how the nation would build the infrastructure required to power it. Reported electricity emissions by data centre operator (tonnes CO2e) AmazonNextDCAirTrunkEquinixCDC FY21 FY22 FY23 FY24 FY25 200K 250K 300K 350K 400K 450K 500K 550K Source: Clean Energy Regulator The technology industry has argued that the energy demands of data centres will support the rollout of renewable power because they will sign the long-term power purchase agreements needed to make projects financially viable.

The emissions of Australia's top data centre operators have doubled over the past few years. You can see why Amazon Australia fought so hard to try and keep these numbers hidden.......

www.afr.com/policy/energ...

this is not an amount of money any individual or household should be able to have and we have to abolish both billionaires as a group and the economic system that makes them possible

Every trans person is like "I knew something was up before I had the words to describe it and had to fight for this for years" and every transphobe is like "one conversation with a doctor could have convinced me to get the walrus surgery from the movie 'The Walrus'"

Yes! We literally cannot shut up about our work.

people have been lied to about this. the GOP, the NYT, and sundry centrists have spread this bullshit story where kids are being bum rushed into surgery by a shadowy conspiracy of endocrinologists and gender ideologues

This is called doing double work. The complaints I'm hearing from veteran coders is they're losing their minds that bosses are recruiting cheap vibe coders to fill out teams and real coders spend half their time fixing the dogshit code.

In the last decade, the Atlantic has not platformed a single trans person to speak about issues affecting them or the broader trans community. Not a single one. Yet, they have monthly screeds by Helen Lewis and endless money to pay random transphobic grifters to pump stuff like this out.

yeah honestly if this is the price i pay for the good bits, so be it! :)

Just saw you saw! I'm glad for you at least :)

No 😥

Might have been better closer to Melbourne, but up in the Dandenongs where I live it's solid cloud. (To be fair I gave up about 20 minutes ago)

You?

good morning everyone project your personal imposter syndrome onto this gif ur welcome

Yeah the cloud cover here is so complete I can't detect even a trace of the awesome thing happening at this very moment 😥

feels like a metaphor

😩😭 oh dear!

Simpson's meme. Top panel: Is this homework too hard? Bottom panel: No it's easier than real research.

Sometimes I assign applied statistics homework problems that are pretty difficult. Students spend hours over days on them. But you know what is much much harder? Research

I've repeatedly said this in the past: the end goal of all AI is surveillance, specifically to influence and control

A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else.

We mustn’t let this war do so.

I get why/that people say this, but dont' underestimate this:

all other social networks are invested in making sure that posts that link to journalism remain buried, or at least never go viral.

BlueSky doesn't do that. That makes it very valuable to a ton of newsrooms righ tnow.

X Is Drowning in Disinformation Following US and Israel’s Attack on Iran WIRED has reviewed hundreds of posts on X that promote misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attack.

NEW: X Is *drowning* in disinformation following US and Israel’s attack on Iran. WIRED has reviewed hundreds of posts on X that promote misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attack.

read @davidgilbert.bsky.social:

we were probably all up last night staring at the ceiling with our own version of the same thought running on endless loop, but mine looked something like this:

I hate these people to a degree that feels simultaneously corrosive to the soul, and also the only righteous response to this kind of evil

this is just who they are

they do bad things everywhere all the time because they are evil and stupid and constantly indulging their very worst impulses

there’s no twelve dimensional plan here

Javascript code for a noncentral t cdf produced by Claude. It is simply a call to the normal CDF, which is not correct (though will be a decent approximation with large N).

I've been testing Claude to see how well it can "vibe out" a stat. power app that I've already coded completely myself - so I know what I want. It mostly gets things right with animations (those are easily verifiable) but looking into the backend stats code is nightmare inducing (see pic).

Thank you! 😄☺️

The work of creation in the age of AI | Andrew Perfors In which I become an old man yelling futilely at the clouds

Best essay on modern, digital life I think I've read. ht to @cgruenloh.bsky.social

by @perfors.net

It's from February 2024, but it's forever relevant.

perfors.net/blog/creatio...