Posts by kjhealy@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #ApiAeuduP2CpDAp6qe by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-01-03T15:05:51Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
On Instagram, this “Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller” who is “Your realest source for life’s ups and downs”—it’s a bot created and managed by Meta—posts amongst other things about making imaginary charitable donations, complete with picture of imaginary boxes of coats. Oh, Jean Baudrillard, how the rock-kickers sneered at you back in the day.
(DIR) Post #ApiAezd1rjTOftRyfg by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-01-03T15:07:18Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Marion and I talk about aspects of this stuff in the book btw. More at https://theordinalsociety.com
(DIR) Post #ApiAezkTQ3Qb2yvvH6 by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-01-03T15:33:31Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Oh look, these have been around for a while https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/social-profiles-for-metas-ai-characters/amp/
(DIR) Post #Aqqj26uUgQlyq1DQnI by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-02-05T13:20:09Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I made this graph just now—sitting in my kitchen, drinking coffee—with free software and a subset of the four million data points provided for EVERY DAY since late 1981 publicly and without restriction by NOAA just on this measure alone. Now I wonder how much longer it will be possible to do this.
(DIR) Post #AqtYh990lWYPcPFbmq by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-02-08T00:17:01Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
The NIH indirect cost cap thing will blow a hole the size of Texas in the budgets of research medical schools and life sciences departments across the country. Federal IDC rates are extremely high and it would be wrong to say there’s no room for debate about them. These cuts are gigantic, though. Capping IDCs at 15% is like a 45 percentage point cut. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html
(DIR) Post #AqtYhCUOKURFzaHE1o by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-02-08T00:17:30Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
There’s also going to be a bunch of knock-on effects in terms of opportunity costs and what IDCs help pay for elsewhere, including research and instruction outside their immediate spend. And I assume the DOE will be next (where Physics money comes from) and of course the NSF, if the latter even continues to exist.
(DIR) Post #AqtYhFvnX38yfS7efA by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-02-08T00:17:47Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
The Federal IDC infrastructure is a weird system with many weird features that people justly complain about. But big Universities are massive engines of employment, regional investment, redistribution, and so on, in addition to their teaching and research functions. Tearing it down overnight is bad.
(DIR) Post #At2Y0YRwlEm0ZnXca8 by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-04-13T01:37:47Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
“Hi it’s Elon. Can we be friends? Will you be my friend? I’ll give you a cybertruck I promise.”https://www.paloaltoonline.com/technology/2025/04/12/silicon-valley-crosswalk-buttons-apparently-hacked-to-imitate-musk-zuckerberg-voices/
(DIR) Post #AtgYbxhzwVPlitImuG by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-05-02T11:12:49Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Nature reports that the NSF has stopped funding awardees entirely, “until further notice”. This administration is determined to destroy the country’s scientific research infrastructure by choking off funding and taking a wrecking ball to the merit review system.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2
(DIR) Post #AtgYbysfaJXrMHIpBA by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-05-02T11:16:04Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Are the various problems with the NSF’s merit review and grant allocation system best served by simply destroying it and replacing it with groyper commissars whose views are based on a combination of social media forum screenshots and YouTubers who want to sell you supplements? In this essay I w
(DIR) Post #AtltKRx6ZVia7RHc8m by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-04-27T16:04:24Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I just had to convert ~20,000 html files, some quite large, to plain text (and one or two other formats), because reasons. I used pandoc, obvs. But this is also a good example of an embarrassingly parallel task. From the shell, GNU parallel is just the thing to make an otherwise lazy computer work a bit harder. The `:::` syntax is parallel's way of passing a list of files through to the command you're parallelizing.
(DIR) Post #AtrnXQMMN3NaAReuMS by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-05-07T17:55:15Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
In Pope Safety Engineering, Time in Conclave, or TIC, is an inverse of MTBP (Mean Time Between Popes) the standard measure of Papal Infallibility. Continuous-time models are the expected value of a PDF (Pope Density Function). Simplified models may add a Mitre parameter, λ, to express a constant pope failure rate.
(DIR) Post #AuRDqu2fVZP1iSnR0S by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-05-14T12:44:39Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
They conkered them, obviously; Jesus Christ do I have to do everything around here
(DIR) Post #AutzsZpyZ9rjwcRkwq by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-06-07T20:22:15Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
RIP Bill Atkinson. “-2000 lines of code”https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
(DIR) Post #AuxZF8fznORGEj9UcC by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-06-09T01:35:17Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Here, I made a helpful graph to assist with current “Very large numbers of Americans live in big cities, that’s one of the main reasons why they are big, you see, it’s just, like, science man”, discourse, with real Census data and everything.
(DIR) Post #AvWzRxUC8vsTpPYA1w by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-06-26T12:14:29Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
The Occam/Chekhov/Chesterton Razor/Gun/Fence matrix. Summer’s off to a productive start.
(DIR) Post #Awx4iCS1p6QcG3r1rU by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-08-08T00:25:57Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I had the Blueberry talk with GPT5. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/08/07/blueberry-hill/
(DIR) Post #AxT9DueM9z4HBriQme by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-08-23T17:36:01Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
The most compact, informative, and useful introduction to the Philosophy and Sociology of Science remains Kovar (2001), “Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass”.
(DIR) Post #AzPc6RwNfHVDPMbzsW by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-10-20T17:42:24Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virginia” to see how they hold up. “Our service is fully based in a shed in Virginia”; “All my files are in a shed in Virginia”; “A shed in Virginia was designed to survive a nuclear war”, etc.
(DIR) Post #B1URwXxevXBLO7CZAu by kjhealy@mastodon.social
2025-12-21T20:30:18Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
If your artifact’s rather obtuseWith a purpose you can’t quite deduce You’ll always be ableTo write on the label“Most likely for ritual use”