bestqualitycrab

Putting the Box-office in Boxing Day - Kinomatics Did Santa deliver for Australian cinemas this past Christmas? Traditionally, the day after Christmas, Boxing Day, is a “make or break” release date for cinema businesses. We tracked the last 10 years ...

Keeping my head down and distracted as the world burns down around me - a new kinomatics blog post emerges into the maelstrom: kinomatics.com/projects/aus...

This is good and important work.... it is also crying out for some network modelling à la @bestqualitycrab.bsky.social analysis of "daversity"

Love this!

Yesterday the Post ran a story about the National Park Service censoring displays and exhibits critical of America's past. The NPS even has a database of what's being considered for erasure. I downloaded the 7GB database and turned it into a protest bot. Here's @nps-uncensored.bsky.social.

Sorry, Bluesky, but I have to say it: improv comedy groups can already do social science research better than most professors with PhDs

No way!!! Where have I been? What have I been doing? This is everything!

All projects must focus on one of the following topic areas: • The 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence • American Military Valor • The American Dream and Economic Freedom • America's Role on a Global Scale Public Humanities Projects supports two categories, Historic Places and Exhibitions, at two funding levels (Planning and Implementation). Proposed projects may include complementary components: for example, a museum exhibition might be accompanied by a website or mobile app. Proiects mav be international (but must

A colleague sent this along from the NEH. What an absolute joke. As they said, we’re in an era that is post-satire. I’d say it’s just rank stupid.

The Remote Labor Index (RLI) measures how well AI agents can automate real-world remote work projects — the current best automation rate is just 3.75%.

The debate on AI and the labor market needs empirical indices like the RLI — real-world performance metrics.
#AIandWork #AgenticAI #Automation

The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM In one email, an AI researcher suggested it’s “hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you.”

The trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community.

But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed. https://bit.ly/4qWgPLz

Satire didn’t just die. It was autonomously executed.

Yes, I remember when I had my first child and had to build 30 data centers to feed them.

It's quite an achievement when a man is so immediately annoying on sight, that even knitwear cannot begin to mitigate it.

Yuuuummmmmm

So many truths in this article

This! Stop batch labeling everything “AI” and start using the name of the actual tool. The AI hype cycle does nothing to help disambiguate the ramifying harmful effects of extractive technologies from everything else.

Heard an interview today where a guy said (and I'm paraphrasing) "LLMs have had years to train on every aspect of chess, read every book and article about it, review every match, but when they play, they STILL makes illegal moves. That tells you everything."

And.

Yup.

Pepper spray and threat of 'sonic weapons' at protests alarm rights groups Alarmed by a spike in pepper spray use and threats of sound cannons at protests, human rights groups want a review of "less lethal" weapons for crowd control.

This ABC article states that NSW Police have admitted deploying a Long Range Accoustic Device at the 9 February protest in central Sydney www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.”

You can’t trust chatbots.

20,000 people in northern Portugal have been without power for 17 days

One thing that astonishes me about the Herzog visit is that Israel has murdered more journalists than any other state in the 21st century, and he hasn’t faced a single question about this (to my knowledge) from the Australian media

#TheNerdReich.

This article immediately labels @emilymbender.bsky.social and I as "curmudgeons" because we don't think that the spicy auto complete has a concept of the self.

U of A looks to remove EDI from hiring policy | CBC News The University of Alberta is proposing to eliminate Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) from its hiring policy, a year after the school initially said it was moving away from the term.

The trumpification of Alberta continues: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Video of a wall of cops chasing protestors in Sydney.

I hope Minns is happy with his ICE agents

It can be difficult sometimes to distinguish between social cohesion and common assault

It isn’t surprising to any woman who has spent anytime in the university sector that male academics feature in the Epstein files. Sexual predation is built into the brickwork of patriarchal places. I am intrigued by his coordinating role as a community coach for their actions against whistleblowers.

The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, c. 1800-1900 Abstract. As Britain industrialized in the early nineteenth century, animal breeders faced the need to convert livestock into products while maintaining th

I just learned that there's a book titled "The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900" and it's going straight onto my list of favorite academic book titles

academic.oup.com/north-caroli...

The DOJ Redacted a Photo of the Mona Lisa in the Epstein Files While Epstein’s victims endure the fallout of their photos and names being exposed in the Department of Justice’s latest tranche of files, investigators redacted the identity of the most famous portra...

cool. glad we protected her identity at least www.404media.co/the-doj-reda...

In Oregon testimony last year, an agent said two photos of a woman in custody taken with his face-recognition app produced different identities. The woman was handcuffed and looking downward, the agent said, prompting him to physically reposition her to obtain the first image. The movement, he testified, caused her to yelp in pain. The app returned a name and photo of a woman named Maria; a match that the agent rated “a maybe.” Agents called out the name, “Maria, Maria,” to gauge her reaction. When she failed to respond, they took another photo. The agent testified the second result was “possible,” but added, “I don’t know.” Asked what supported probable cause, the agent cited the woman speaking Spanish, her presence with others who appeared to be noncitizens, and a “possible match" via facial recognition. The agent testified that the app did not indicate how confident the system was in a match. “It’s just an image, your honor. You have to look at the eyes and the nose and the mouth and the lips.”

This is like a scene out of Monty Python.

ICE agents get a name back from face recognition and multiple agents start calling out "Maria! Maria!" to see if a woman in custody reacts. (Presumably if she does that's a match???)

It didn't work, so they ran the app again and got another name.