Becky

mapping power is so hot right now

longhaulmag.com/2026/02/27/a...

Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis. Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.

"Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis!" The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, held in August 2020, was the epitome of the individual choice mindset. Of course it spread cases outward and caused infections, illness, and death. A new research paper allows us to watch the Sturgis Covid wave spread across the US.

Have you seen bethdeconinck.com/2026/03/04/o... ?

I thought Beth gave a wonderfully empathetic yet sharp analysis.

There are lots of intersections that are dangerous for cyclists, but what made Ipsley Cross so lethal was a kind of eldritch geometry that let cyclist and driver see each other a *long* time before the collision, while providing the illusion that they were *not* going to collide, until they did.

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Of the many, many issues with how quickly "AI" became a core part of things is illustrated here: There just isn't a way to defend against prompt injection. Imagine if SQL was constructed in such a way that injection is impossible to mitigate; It would be insane to rely it.

Oooh that looks awesome! I studied Roman lighthouses and signalling a little during my undergrad and masters and always have been interested in learning more!

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? No. No it can't. Come on, now.

New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)

davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...

Hey, looks like my obviously_not_valid_tarball is just fine, actually!!

Michael A. Duprey, Georgiy V. Bobashev: Enhancing Computational Efficiency in NetLogo: Best Practices for Running Large-Scale Agent-Based Models on AWS and Cloud Infrastructures https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15317 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.15317 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.15317

Philip Koopman, William Widen
Redefining Safety for Autonomous Vehicles
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16768

yes, you have to understand the lay of the land of the field you are attempting to contribute to

I don't understand how people came to conflate sheer output with the transformative process of internalizing and analyzing information and creating something new from it

Every word of this post (and the original posters, too).

The point of undertaking a literature review is to engage in the slow, cumulative cognitive process of learning as you read and write. It’s not “processing thousands of references to get a statistical summary of what the LLM was fed”

i don't think i can say this any more directly:

if you want to get better at something, you have to do it a lot

there are other requirements but that one is non negotiable

Every day I become more and more convinced that the main thing we need to do to improve literacy is just make kids read a lot of books, both on their own and as read-alouds

We are going to need to strengthen policies for identity use after death...

The answer to problems in sociotechnical systems is not always "more software", "better software" or "open source software".
A lot of the time the best solution is _less software_ and sometimes even _no software_.

And this is why you should ALWAYS check when reference managers import metadata (as you can tell, these two articles, if the second one exists, are related in topic but definitely NOT the same):

(I call this process "Cleaning References")

In my experience, the vast majority of waste in a software shop is time spent building things nobody wants on top of overly complex architectures that solve problems we don't have. Focus on that. Put solving your customer's actual (not imagined) problems first.
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People tend to think of functional illiteracy as just being unable to read words aloud or such.

What it *really* means is such as not being able to perceive subtext, context, understand who the audience of something may be, etc.

Media illiteracy is fundamentally part of functional illiteracy.

Why?
1. Because some people care about ethical issues. Devs are using a tool (Claude) that is being used to kill people. And that's only one aspect.
2. Because some devs want to feel they are coding. They don't want to be passive observers.

Saving this one for reasons.

She told me that she believes that she (and other Tesla drivers) get too dependent on the screen, and that the screen doesn’t really see cyclists.

Ok WOW.

So, please, Tesla folks, look out for cyclists. I don’t think you’re evil or anything, just please don’t kill me please! Please!

Oh that's not good!

****majors are not the only metric of a department or program’s value****

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

Yeah a lot of this has to do with the muscle memory that we develop when regularly manipulating physical buttons / levers / etc, most of which have a unique position and purpose in the cabin. All of that is lost with a touch screen which uses the same 12x12" (or whatever) area to control everything.

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

Writing helps you organize and clarify your own thoughts.

When others read, it helps them do the same, whether they agree with you or not.

Both of us probably need the reminder a year from now.

This is why it’s valuable to write, even if your ideas aren’t unique.