@krisshafferphd.com
Consultant in data science and web intelligence. Adjunct instructor in information science. PhD, Yale University. Formerly music theory and critical digital pedagogy. krisshafferphd.com | latchkeyai.com
Anyone who says you can just have #AI write your code for you... hasn't had AI write code for them!
You can totally do it! And there are some very powerful possibilities. But you have to be a project manager, QA engineer, and helicopter parent all at once.
It's both liberating and exhausting.
WhatsApp: “Our app is so private, even we can’t read your messages… while we’re looking at you through your cell phone camera.” 😂😂😂
great job Gavin
Parents’ genes – even when not directly inherited by a child – may play a role in their educational and mental health outcomes, finds a new report by @uclpals.bsky.social.
Extremely funny to me that right wingers are combing through the new pope’s old tweets and trying to cancel him like Disney just cast him in a live action Frozen remake
An AI-generated image of the band Chicago dressed in papal regalia.
I hear there’s a new tribute album in the works.
A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope
Interesting point about "delve," "leverage," other "AI words."
Well, that was fast!
Also... "poopbutt".
NSO to pay almost 168 million in damages!
Congrats to WhatsApp on this historic (yes, historic) jury verdict against NSO Group!
This is also a win for all the researchers, advocates & victims who have been tirelessly exposing NSO's abuses & advocating for justice!
www.accessnow.org/press-releas...
Anyway, it's an interesting approach. Feels more like PI work than DS work at times — everything from "great work!" or "here's some feedback for improvement" to "fine I'll do it myself!" haha.
I also wonder how helpful it may be to ask the model to reason through the task, but then substitute better tokenizers, better algorithms, replace linear models with graphs, replace regex with sentence transformers, etc.
That answer will differ based on the task and relative performance of each model.
The usage question is when that is good enough. It can do something in 5-10 minutes that I can do *WAY* better, but takes me 5-10 hours (or more). As always, it's a trade-off. Is it accurate *enough*? And does the time-to-result outweigh the (in)accuracy?
One thing I keep noticing when watching it "think" is that the process it follows is very remedial (basic tokenization, K-means clusters, regex, etc.). It's doing upper-division undergrad work. (Which is better than the 9th-grade essays it was writing last year! But maybe not professional enough.)
Asking the latest GPT advanced reasoning models (o3 and o4) to perform complex data analysis/machine learning tasks is both entertaining and instructive.
NEW: Denver City Council votes unanimously not to renew a contract for vehicle tracking cameras over fears that ICE will use the camera network for immigration enforcement. #copolitics
"Technology can identify locations from photographs now. It’s vitally important that people understand how easy this is."
This is a really cool new feature AND a major security/privacy risk that you really can't do anything about. So, you know, Generative AI...
Gonna be Barsenalona for the #UEFA women’s #championsleague final this year. And there’s a good chance it will be for the men, too!
In the cogsci discussions I have with students I get asked this a lot.
www.innerdrive.co.uk/blog/impact-...
#cogscisci
Like you don’t even really need to say why, though if it’s significantly inspired something in your own research or teaching, do say so.
Ditto if you give someone’s work to students and they enjoy it or it sparks lively discussion.
Normalise telling people how awesome they are.
I don’t know which academic needs to hear this but yes you should absolutely email other academics just to tell them you enjoyed their article/book/chapter. Just do it. Don’t overthink it.
Hello So-and-so, just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed ‘Title’. Hope you’re well. Best, You.
Done.
🧠💉 Psychology & vaccines
A new study identifies four psychological profiles linked to vaccine attitudes – from eco-humanists to sceptics.
Connectedness to nature predicts vaccine trust, while egoism & conspiracy thinking predict hesitancy.
🔗 doi.org/10.1057/s415...
#SciComm #Vaccines 🧪
It is becoming increasingly funny to me when I see things like 'AI will be able to do all research!'
Buddy I don't know how to break it to you, but the amount of information that is not in any sort of digital form, let alone machine readable, is massive.
✅ Writing isn’t about sounding smart. It’s about being understood.
🗣️ Keep your voice. Write for students. Write for your parents. Write like it matters; because it does.
💟 Writing is thinking. It keeps your science on track, your ideas evolving, and your impact real.
9/10
A collection of modules, datasets, and other resources for learning to program in R, geared toward students in psychology and neuroscience: ritcheym.github.io/ppn/
Move major scientific journals out of the reach of US jurisdiction NOW
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/h...
"Signal is a commercially available app that is not authorized to be used for sensitive or classified information. It’s encrypted, but can be hacked."
This is just sloppy writing, implying that the problem with Signal is that someone might break its encryption.
apnews.com/article/hegs...
