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Tom
@erispoe.bsky.social
Founder. I make machines do useful things. Effect. Public transit geek. Berlin based. Being afraid of immigrants is weak af.
264 followers848 following573 posts
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New 2026 US House & Senate election forecasts, using available political science knowledge & our methods from “If a Statistical Model Predicts That Common Events Should Occur Only Once in 10,000 Elections, Maybe It’s the Wrong Model” with @DannyCEbanks and @Jonathan_N_Katz. GaryKing.org/electit
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One of the more interesting parts of this famous chapter for me is this is a fairly BAD way of thinking about surgery. The stereotypical rockstar surgeon with total hierarchical control is directly challenged by all kinds of research on team outcomes in ORs including v famously psych safety research
In *The Mythical Man-Month* Brooks relates an idea from Harlan Mills for structuring programming work as a 'surgical team'; there's a lead programmer who makes design decisions and does a lot of the work and they have a fleet of support staff.
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I wish there were a hundred more Cat Hickses at every level of this tech doing work like this (and kudos to whoever *is* already doing that)
This also convinces me we need behavioral science inside of everything we do next with technology to achieve its promises 🤷♀️ I hope to survive in tech long enough to keep doing it
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I want to expand on this in a short thread. Fascism sucks. It is also not going away: it is an effectively permanent part of modern representative politics because it is an effectively permanent part of human nature. We have to be prepared to push back against it, basically forever.
That said, I think at this point, we can conclude that fascism is a latent political force in basically every country, to a greater or lesser degree and so you need to be thinking, "what if my country goes fascist? what if a neighboring country does?" and plan for how to avoid or deal with that.
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Replying to @emollick.bsky.social
If the finding is that AI is bad or biased at something, you need to be much more careful. You cannot claim that because GPT-4 fails at something, that AI is bad at that task, because current or future models may do it. So what can you claim? These are just some examples: 3/
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What happened to owning the means of production?
I have not seen much conversation about worker-owned AI models, nor have I seen any unions talking about collectively-owned platforms, but that's what a good alternative should look like. I do understand people will say that sounds insane; It usually takes about 7 years until people think I'm sane.
Spreadsheet work is a large part of the economy and science too.
People can’t just say this for literally years now and have the products it creates only positively affect spreadsheet people. Most people have profoundly negative experiences with this product because its utility remains pretty niche but targeted to the capital class.
Finally. We need more actually European banks. www.euronews.com/business/202...
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I’m convinced, upon rereading, that this simply misunderstands how either or both of how LLMs or watermarking works daringfireball.net/2026/08/anth...
Email + atproto anyone?
1. Recently I’ve received lots of emails from people I don’t know personally, asking for my feedback on their books or papers. They explain the connection between my work and theirs and ask me to take a look. The catch, of course, is that the emails are transparently, obviously, written by AI.
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Happy anniversary of the abolition of feudalism to those who celebrate en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboliti...
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This is a wonderful app for discovering what’s around you. I love that the Wikipedia projects makes apps like this possible. apps.apple.com/gb/app/inqui...