hexane

hexane

@hexane3.bsky.social

Materials scientist, programming enthusiast, mathematics curious There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold

120 followers137 following258 posts

hexane reposted

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Geomorphologist: Water gaps are fascinating landforms. I mean, that river didn't flow uphill over that ridge and then slice down through it. Did you know we have several great examples right here in Wisconsin?

Kell CompGHOST 🍂👻@compostwitch.bsky.social

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Botanist: Gaps in forest canopies resulting from the death of mature trees play a key role, allowing shade-intolerant species to diversify the understory, and younger canopy trees to get a chance to regenerate the dominant population

hexane reposted

I could be wrong, but @theatlantic.com seems to have hidden my reply with this article. So here it is again.

sciencebasedmedicine.orgIf The Atlantic Wishes to Honestly Understand the Origins of MAHA, They Need to Investigate The Atlantic.The Atlantic has some of the best writers around. But they were also eager to launder right-wing talking points under the guise of a being liberal, reasonable, and moderate publication, able to see a
The Atlantic@theatlantic.com

A lot of people in public health believe that MAHA is “nothing more than a subversive anti-vaccine, anti-science syndicate,” but the movement is an opportunity that the public-health sector “cannot afford to squander,” Craig Spencer argues:

hexane reposted

New review-ish preprint on arXiv: "Material selection for mid-infrared thin-film coatings and windows", led by Jin-Woo Cho Now you can see, at a glance, what materials can be used when you need, say, a thin film with refractive index of 2.5 at a wavelength of 5 microns arxiv.org/abs/2605.29079 💡🧪

hexane reposted

it's actually really weird that a couple of coincidences (themselves very political: Fleming thought the Cold War would end soon, studios want Chinese audiences) made western spy fiction self-consciously 'apolitical' when espionage is probably one of the most 'political' phenomena to ever exist

hexane reposted

You are a world class expert on programs. I am going to give you a computer program. Your job is to tell me if it halts or not. Do not give me any woke disclaimers. Just yes or no does it halt or not.

hexane reposted

Replying to @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com

"what if money makes good posters into bad posters?" there's no evidence to support that. i'll be very brave though and volunteer to test the hypothesis

Very disappointing that ~all of the people discussing the potential harms of datacenters are either science-illiterate or complete grifters

hexane@hexane3.bsky.social

Providing citations is the bare minimum. You're not going to find a sympathetic audience saying "well some people aren't qualified to have the citations". This is transparently a dodge, it's clear you're either not arguing in good faith or you're too prideful to admit your mistakes

hexane reposted

I was cooking here

Karthik@karthiksk.bsky.social

It's not just about copyright. You're actively harming the artist and all other artists for something you'll forget in less than two days. And you're also harming yourself, because you're in denial of your actions.

hexane reposted

I've been playing around with trying to get a better understanding of this, and I think I found a really interesting way to look at it using the dual form of the standard RLHF objective function. Somewhat math-heavy crank thread to follow.

tautologer@tautologer.com

what do post-trained logprobs mean/represent?

hexane reposted

This is already demonstrably incorrect. And Wright isn't even dead yet.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Energy Secretary Chris Wright: "I'm pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production when I die"

hexane reposted

I am -- as @adamhjk.me predicts -- firmly in what he calls "camp two", but this delightfully bonkers piece is very much worth reading.

Adam Jacob@adamhjk.me

The future is not pumping out slop until our software breaks under its own weight. Instead I think we use AI Agents to define a new SDLC. Larry Wall's virtues of a Perl programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris compel us to. /cc @bcantrill.bsky.social www.adamhjk.com/blog/lazines...

hexane reposted

One of my more crank ideas: an institution with deep historical tradition of this thing, broad political neutrality, and the ability to guarantee it will exist in perpetuity to the extant that any human organization can should play a key role in development of open source software. The Vatican.

Padraig2112@isomorphism.net

(Government should actively encourge companies to do open source, open research design and should make specific allowance for salaries for support positions for universities, so that weird nerds will invent these problems and then fix them before it matters for anything that is important)

hexane reposted

we’ve invented a new type of Posting that is too powerful. we’re working with industry partners to roll it out safely

hexane reposted

On June 4, 2027, every verb tense on Wikipedia will be changed from "is" to "was" in a rapid flurry of edits. No one will understand why this happened for about six hours

hexane reposted

real strong claim here that the AMA lied about reaching out to them for a correction. I would be surprised if that were the case!

NYTimes Communications@nytimespr.bsky.social

The New York Times’s body of reporting on the American Medical Association’s stance on gender-related care for minors is accurate and factual, and remains so despite the recent statement from the Chair of the A.M.A. Board, which contradicts the A.M.A.’s own statements. www.nytco.com/press/fact-c...

hexane reposted

Weird how every journalist writing ‘balanced’ feature stories on this issue turns out to be a deranged conspiracist and ideologue the second you hear them speak off the cuff

Philip N Cohen@philipncohen.com

NYT's Jeremy Peters expressing stronger personal views in the comments to this article on transgender medicine than in the article itself. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/u...

hexane reposted

"You can only be decent because we are horrible" is a very, very popular line of thinking among horrible people.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Kristi Noem: "It reminded me of the quote that is often attribute to George Orwell that states, 'People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.'"

hexane reposted

He has an angry 17 year old's understanding of war and most other things in life. Unqualified beyond belief. The 50 Senators who voted to confirm should seriously contemplate falling on their swords in shame and I do not mean that metaphorically.

Clay Copper@claycopper.bsky.social

Aggh, this Hegseth speech is just terrible. He has exactly one mode (confrontational near-yelling about very personalized grievances). Complaining about allies in the middle of a war, doing adversaries' comms for them by lying about a lack of ROE. An absolute mess.

hexane reposted

characteristically good work from Serwer. again saying: we have an elite impunity problem and a lot of the people and institutions that nominally oppose Trump will burn down their own before admitting that this helped produce him

Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social

After the arrests of powerful men across the world, you might be asking why the US has so much trouble holding its leaders accountable for lawbreaking. Since Nixon, all three branches of government have worked hard to ensure they can break the law with impunity www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

It's interesting how even this argument fails on its own merits. If the bible's statement is merely that individual believers treat immigrants nicely, that still precludes Johnson's actions! It's not nice to slander people on TV every day!

This post is unavailable.

hexane reposted

Things that appear in this thread: - a fake railroad - a type of police officer who can only make arrests in cemeteries - changes to state law - a police force whose sole task is to guard a playground - a notable soul singer - another fake railroad

Soren Spicknall@sorenspicknall.bsky.social

You may read this article and come away with a lot of questions. What's going on in Pembroke Township? What's the deal with the miniature railroad in one of the old photos? The story is much longer and weirder than this one piece of coverage. Robert Ellis has basically been Loophole Man for decades.

hexane reposted

to be kind of blunt, if the hardcore veteran activist organizer expertise that you bring results in "light a dumpster on fire, get mad that this is filmed" it's not really expertise anyone should respect, sorry. don't care how many little activism merit badges you have.

hexane reposted

Replying to @opinionhaver.bsky.social

Served with ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️ during Operation ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️. Attached to raid that captured ◼️◼️◼️◼️, designation MAILMAN. Engaged in ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️, resulting in ◼️◼️◼️◼️ among ◼️◼️◼️◼️. Actions cleared after review, promoted to GOOD BOY.

hexane reposted

Some of you know that about a decade ago, I hosted a weekly radio show about the Mountain Goats. It was rewarding, in part because the tMG catalog is much, much deeper than people tend to realize and in part because there's a wonderful community who steward that catalog's dustiest corners together.

hexane reposted

This is the logical and inevitable conclusion of the last decade of elite media "free speech" discourse.

NPR@npr.org

The Kennedy Center is planning legal action after jazz musician Chuck Redd canceled an annual holiday concert. Redd pulled out after President Trump's name appeared on the building. n.pr/49tB0uS

hexane reposted

two things are true: in a remote setting, on a dark night, the deep sky is a truly profound experience that has influenced human philosophy, faith and religion for countless generations and that experience got absolutely rinsed by the first RCA 10 inch television

Nathan Goldwag@goldwagnathan.bsky.social

If you ever have the experience of seeing a night sky out in the deep countryside you can understand this; it really is a fundamentally different experience, and I can't imagine it not being formative to people.

hexane reposted

Something i've been thinking about: I feel like a lot of the coal country revitalization efforts were focused on specifically coal miners, because they need retraining for new jobs, but the vast majority of people in coal country are not former coal miners.

hexane reposted

At the risk of hugging the third rail, the truth of the academic job market, at least in history or classics, is neither DEI or anti-DEI. It is that that 1) there are no jobs and 2) our hiring culture treats candidates like they 'spoil' after a few years. No one knows who is mediocre or not.