Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!
Quarto friends! I need your help:
We are implementing a new QMD parser in Quarto. It will be super nice. But it's a big change, and we want to minimize the impact.
1. Can you share a link to your Quarto project at github.com/quarto-dev/q...
2. repost this and let your Quarto friends know too?
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.
Microsoft Excel adds Copilot Al to help ... theverge.com The Verget-4.1-mini Al model | 5 successor to the LABS.GENERATIVEAI function Microsoft started experimenting with in 2023. Microsoft notes that you can combine its new Al function with other Excel functions, including IF, SWITCH, LAMBDA, or WRAPROWS. The company adds that information sent through Excel's COPILOT function is "never" used for AI training, as "the input remains confidential and is used solely to generate your requested output." The COPILOT function comes with a couple of limitations, as it can't access information outside your spreadsheet, and you can only use it to calculate 100 functions every 10 minutes. Microsoft also warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in “high-stakes scenarios” with legal, regulatory, and compliance implications, as COPILOT "can give incorrect responses." Copy Share Select all Web search Dictionary ...
Good thing no one uses Microsoft Excel for anything related to legal, regulatory or compliance business functions
www.theverge.com/news/761338/...
Introducing VizDex!
An ever-growing library of personal and independent blogs and newsletters dedicated to data visualization.
vizdexproject.com
The AI fatigue is real, from @katiecollins.bsky.social.
www.cnet.com/tech/service...
« Comment fait-on comprendre au grand public que lorsque vous commencez à toucher les droits fondamentaux de certains, cela concerne, en réalité, les droits de toute la population ? »
L’Insee est désormais sur Bluesky ! Dorénavant, vous pouvez également retrouver nos publications en suivant notre compte @insee.fr. Abonnez-vous !
12 years. RIP my darling boy.
Merci pour easyBNF, je ne connaissais pas. J'utilise l'extension de navigateur Ophirofox qui est vraiment bien faite également ophirofox.ophir.dev
A fascinating article whose conclusions could certainly be transposed to official statistics
Like this parquet file explorer? datalab.sspcloud.fr/data-explore...
Very interesting. I'm wondering why treating systematic errors, misreporting... are related to a specific analysis. Would it make sense to share these steps and results between different analysis?
No one can explain stochastic gradient descent better than this panda.
Totally agree. What do you think of the concept of steady states of data?
www.linkedin.com/pulse/steady...
As a data and analytics person embedded in the business, I’m often involved in robust discussions with IT over access to software & data. It can be frustrating but @deanmarchiori.bsky.social has some great tips on dealing with this conundrum
#dataBS #dataSky
www.deanmarchiori.com/posts/2024-1...
Great post! Sad but true. However, when you succeed to convince executives that data science is a strategic priority and build a mature collaboration with IT, they install onyxia.sh
Has anyone built an integration of #llm in #quarto documents such as a function that reads all the previous generated text, some data structure of plot and some instructions to then outputs a text to be rendered? @quarto.org @posit.co @hadleywickham.bsky.social
Dear data folks, what differences do you see between data cleaning as a data science domain and data editing as an official statistics domain? The objectives are the same. Yet data editing has been an active area of research for decades. The two communities seem to ignore each other.
