Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

My only comment on Gemini is that y'all take everything seriously when it offends white people when we've been yelling about issues for how long and when has a product ever been pulled and when has there ever been this type of shock and media attention?

It's such a pleasure when I get to ask a former PhD student for help on a current project—because it's an area that she knows better than I do.
In other words, I succeeded when she was my student.

The CEO of Exxon just said "we've waited too long" to tackle climate change. He blames "society" and "activists" from keeping Exxon from working on this.

Yes, Exxon. Yes, Exxon. Yes, Exxon: the corporation that for decades has been spending millions to slow progress on climate change, despite its own research showing the problem was urgent.

He said:

"We've waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions.... Frankly, society, and the activist — the dominant voice in this discussion — has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."

What the fuck is this — some sort of dark and twisted joke?

The interview is here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015207/https://fortune.com/2024/02/27/exxon-ceo-darren-woods-interview-pay-the-price-for-net-zero/

https://www.salon.com/2024/02/29/exxon-ceo-to-world-climate-isnt-our-fault-now-pay-the-price/

Happy Birthday, R!

#rstats

Apparently #Clarivate's Web of Science, one of the major proprietary indexes that employers use to determine whether papers in a journal can be considered in tenure & promotion decisions, denied @joss 's request to be indexed without even telling us. This is not the first time JOSS has been rejected

I checked their "objective review criteria" and JOSS easily passes all the qualifications.

Speaking strictly as my own opinion, not in my role as a JOSS editor or reviewer, but as a matter of fact these indexers are a fucking racket.

https://github.com/openjournals/joss/issues/1283

Registration for posit::conf(2024) is now open: https://posit.co/conference/. It's going to be in Seattle, Aug 12-14, and we've tried really hard to make it more affordable this year, so I hope I can you see there in person! (We'll also have a virtual option; more on that soon)

if you remember using a cracked copy of nero to burn other cracked software onto cd, remember to do your gentle back stretches today

@nicolaromano These are great points. The difference is that sold engines were marketed as user driven tools, while LLMs as marketed to hype driven fools.

@BorisBarbour Interesting stuff! This highlights why it's so important to include the versions of all the software used for analysis. I find it so frustrating that this does not seem to be the standard across the board.

Even more egregious, some researchers don't even version their own code. I've spent quite a bit of time trying to convince them that this is critical. It's crazy to me!

Here is a quick #tutorial on how to build a #NeuralNetwork from scratch using #NumPy:

🌍 https://www.fabriziomusacchio.com/blog/2024-02-25-ann_from_scratch_using_numpy/

#MachineLearning

I never want to get to a point where I have to turn down random meetings with people asking for help with stuff. I take a meeting or two a week thats just like "how do I do this thing" or "how are you thinking about this" and they are often my favorite part of the (work) week. I have seen people on here host "open office hours" in a more structured way where they set aside an hour or two just for helping ppl with stuff, and I love that.

Thats one of those big hidden harms of overworked profs having to tend grants all the time, all that accumulated wisdom and no time to share it.

This is the single best article on color spaces I have seen around. Well written, well informed and illustrated with interactive visualizations.
If you only read one, this should be it. Truly brilliant work @eeeps!

https://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces/

In case you were looking for another reason not to submit to MDPI (or its preprint service, preprints.org). Use bioRxiv.

There's a lot of speculation about whether OpenAI's video generation model #Sora has a 'physics engine' (bolstered by OAI's own claims about 'world simulation'). Like the debate about world models in LLMs, this question is both genuinely interesting and somewhat ill-defined. 🧵1/

Well, RIP nginx, long live freenginx: http://freenginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2024-February/000000.html

A thorough report of a software supply chain attack on the #PyTorch project using self-hosted GitHub runners. “Our exploit path resulted in the ability to upload malicious PyTorch releases to GitHub, upload releases to AWS, potentially add code to the main repository branch, backdoor PyTorch dependencies” https://johnstawinski.com/2024/01/11/playing-with-fire-how-we-executed-a-critical-supply-chain-attack-on-pytorch/

Cellpose V3 is out!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.10.579780v1.full
#spatial #cellseg #pytorch #segmentation

Microsoft: I swear have no knowledge about you besides what you tell me.

Microsoft: I insist I have no knowledge of your location.

Microsoft: The weather in Parkville, Maryland where you are is sunny and 35 degrees.