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uspol 

remembering every person who has ever tried to persuade me that progress is the de facto state of humanity as I learn that Iowa legislators voted to make it easier for companies to use child labor

Went on a daytrip to AMS06, Microsoft's very large datacenter in Middenmeer, NL. Which quite likely hosts my university's email. Like every datacenter it has a security perimeter that is highly surveilled. This perimeter is quite permeable to the rabbits and crows that live in the area. These places have such scales now that they have their own fauna. I relish the fact that a few hundred rabbits probably live and feed there.

love that the NYC inspector general's office solicits tips with the tagline "Help DOI get worms out of the Big Apple"

"What’s more, during the yearslong squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls; his reputation as both a misogynist and an author beloved by misogynists meant it was just sitting right there this whole time, waiting for anyone with grammatical flexibility and the courage to try." harpers.org/archive/2023/05/go Lauren Oyler gives off mean girl, but she is unfortunately sometimes a correct mean girl

machine learning lol 

the ML side is not entirely wrong as far as wanting to take an iterative approach to the model but it's just funny

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machine learning lol 

sitting in a zoom meeting of my advisor's NSF grant and the machine learning faculty are pushing for image annotation to be coarser and not let the domain experts refine the categories/labeling process which feels very on the nose for a humanities/STEM conflict in a multidisciplinary project

More like this!!! Entire 40-person ed. board of Elsevier-published journal resigns in protest to absurd $3000+ APCs to start a competing title on a non-profit model: https://imaging-neuroscience.org.

I recognize this is extraordinarily niche but I really wish there was something like On The Media's Breaking News Consumer's Handbook for "critical minerals" headlines so I could point people to a resource whenever some new exaggerated deposit claim or project is announced

university keep being dumb 

that being said I don't know that UD is significantly worse than most big state universities or even more prestigious schools--like an ExxonMobil STEM scholarship sucks but like BP funds the MIT Media Lab so meh

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university keep being dumb 

my university's "graduate student news" email opened with a very union-busting vibes anecdote about how grad students should really communicate with senior leadership more directly and had among upcoming fellowship and funding deadlines a STEM fellowship from ExxonMobil

we're doing great over here, thanks

MTA, NYC 

Today I bought an omny card at CVS--this is the contactless fare card that's supposed to replace metrocards sometime next year. the MTA really really wants people to just use their bank cards or phones but I'm trying to see just how much work it is to only use cash with them. They're supposed to be for sale at all CVSes but anecdotally I've heard a lot of stores haven't had them. Mine did, but the guy ringing me up didn't know how to add cash to it so I gotta try another store I guess.

basking in the satisfaction of taking apart and cleaning an extremely gross appliance (in this case, the box fan that Erin and Peter left in the apartment six years ago which has accumulated years of cooking greases and grime from being wedged between the stove and the window to augment the practically useless range hood ventilation)

buttondown.email/perfectsenten this week in sentences: and by place, a tough competitor, rooting, a petal in a dahlia, without light

A nice part of doing my thesis defense on zoom is I have four emotional support beverages at my side

ha ha ha, trying to compress 120 pages into a 45 minute presentation is

not easy

it's like if you had to know a lot about mime to understand how Mussolini rose to power or something

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I'm so sorry to the future historians who have to write about the gamers

we must give consideration to all measures of home box office tendency and dispersion. what of hbo min, hbo mean, hbo stdev, the hbo interquartile range

changed the font on my thesis defense slides to the LaTex font and now they feel a lot more Important

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Horsin' Around

This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.