iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Real estate agent made me laugh. Reminds me of the Aunty Donna video

030

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

I like CarbonBrief for climate science and policy updates and 404 Media for big tech (from a critical pov)

020

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Adding my voice to the chorus of messages saying that we love your work and the effort that goes into it is a *huge* part of why. It’s like how Bill Wurtz has only two giant explainer videos; I’m just grateful these miracles exist and in awe of the work that was done.

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I agree with Acemoglu on this, but it‘s worth remembering that he’s one of the guys who got egg on his face when he backed one of his students who faked a paper saying that AI increases scientific output: futurism.com/the-byte/mit...

futurism.com

MIT Disavowed a Viral Paper Claiming That AI Leads to More Scientific Discoveries

MIT is distancing itself from a headline-making paper about AI's purported ability to accelerate the speed of science.

120

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Classic LLM slop. If you read it for more than 2 seconds you see its implications are stupid. As if the O&G industry didn’t see Hormuz as a logistics risk before 🙄

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

The article has a lot of hallmarks of LLM slop. I wouldn’t trust them based on that choice alone. Lots of, “not x, but y” and “ultimately z”.

110

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Great to see profiles of motivated students doing great work, but this piece takes the unfortunate approach of lumping together all sorts of machine learning into “AI”. The targeted, efficient models that might be useful for carbon capture are very much not the wasteful LLMs that most people know

250

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Probably smuggling them out in one’s pockets, six at a time

Mr Burns inspecting the pockets of a ragamuffin and seeing six atoms.

020

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Thanks for the helpful summary! Are you able to share the list of attendees or source for that info? I’m struggling to find who from the New Zealand government attended. NZ is missing from the conference website and it would be a bit off-brand for the current administration, so I was a bit surprised

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

One tip I haven’t seen others mention is to only lightly wash the pan - use barely any soap, so a thin oil layer remains. Use steel wool to remove anything baked on. Avoid the dishwasher. Also +1 to really hot pan and oil. I can get completely nonstick eggs if I let the oil get to almost smoking.

010

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Incredibly well done! Happy to have contributed a little

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Having had a proper read of the paper, it’s good work and is just on the detectability of the warming signal (not the level of warming as I assumed). Choice of year for baseline tends to be either based on availability of observations or when emissions were low, and this prob wouldn’t affect either

110

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Fair call, and I mostly agree. I guess I meant in the context of public-facing information, Paris targets, etc. I should probably read the paper fully before guessing what might change as a result.

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

More of a personal opinion than a scientific one, but it seems unlikely to me because a) this is one study, regardless of how good it is, and b) suddenly saying that there’s more warming than we thought and that we need to adjust all our numbers might erode public trust.

110

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Seconding The Years of Rice and Salt as an excellent alternate history read for this idea!

010

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

What a legend. O trilogy was my jam. I always thought Philip Pullman stole the idea of a society of talking polar bears from him.

010

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

All those people won’t be exposed to extreme heat if they simply go inside. Problem solved.

010

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

Most AI marketing is vague promises to fix whatever people care about. If SNL taught me anything, it’s that Californians care a lot about traffic.

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

I brought my copy to the Christchurch show and got it signed by all the other Fish members and Josh Thomson. Guess that’s rarer, at least. Loved the book, btw!

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Hey Andrew - fair call on the need to be careful with this. Totally agree the Earth as a whole won't be back in that PI range for several millennia. Keen to understand more where you're coming from on the rates/amount of warming as I'm doing some follow-up work atm. If you have time pls reach out!

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

The implication is that overshooting a temperature target before returning to it won't necessarily result in the same climate as before, depending on where you live. 3/3

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

We found that northern Eurasia does so in the most models (which we link to non-linear changes in the hydrological and carbon cycles) as well as a patch off the Antarctic coast (likely linked to meltwater). Parts of North America and East Asia aren't far behind. 2/3

100

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

The second paper from my PhD was published this week! Co-authors and I used results from a group of climate models to test which regions most reliably return to their original climate if CO2 concentrations go way up and then back down again. 1/3

doi.org

Drivers of Regional Variation in the De-Emergence of Climate Change under Negative Emissions

Abstract A central question of climate change impact assessments is identifying when the signal of change emerges from the noise of natural variability, though to date, this framework has been almost ...

230

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

What if Wakefield Street had a ship parked in the middle of it?

120

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Not yet. The target in the Paris Agreement is for long-term average temperatures, like 20-30 years. Of course we don’t know what the next 10 years will be like yet, so if it’s a centred rolling average then we have to estimate, and our best guess is that 2025 will be cooler (thanks to La Nina).

110

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Plus it’s intended for long-term averages, not individual years. We’ve got like another decade of bad news coverage about crossing 1.5… for real this time. I really fear this will lower trust in climate science for much of the public

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

I read this as Pepcorn, the snack invented by Brian David Gilbert. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fG8...

youtube.com

PEPCORN: a cooking video

YouTube video by brian david gilbert

020

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

My personal take is that the legalisation of gambling goes too far in the UK towards enabling harm by being too accessible and I prefer a more tightly regulated market. (I'm in New Zealand, where we've been more tightly regulated but are becoming slightly less so.)

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

"should be... willing" is bold phrasing. I think there's an implied omission there about "and making public statements to that effect" This more or less is already the case in the UK, just what you can actually bet on is at the discretion of the (licensed) bookie - they get to make the odds.

110

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

That'd be an instant rejection in my books.

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Rutherford himself famously thought the idea of making viable nuclear power reactors was "moonshine"

010

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Putting aside climate for a moment, I would back this policy being implemented here in New Zealand for the noise reduction alone!

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

historians, indigenous culture experts, and so many more professionals besides just us physical scientists. That’s why today’s Marsden Fund announcement is so disappointing. To not see the value of the humanities in solving our biggest problems is wilful ignorance at best and malice at worst. 3/3

020

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

How do we best communicate climate-related risk to vulnerable communities? How do we ensure community buy-in for adaptation solutions? How do we efficiently invest in the low-carbon transition? These are social science questions, & they’re central to tackling climate change. We need sociologists 2/3

100

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

As a climate scientist in training, I know there will always be more that physics can teach us about the planet. But, we already know *enough* to be sure that climate change is a huge problem. Solving it is no longer a scientific or even an engineering problem. We need the humanities for that. 1/3

111

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 28/10/2024

Climate Town recently put out an excellent video that recaps the whole saga in a this-would-be-hilarious-if-it-wasn't-so-awful way: youtu.be/jucDFrO89Ko?...

youtu.be

How To Steal An Election | Climate Town

YouTube video by Climate Town

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 23/10/2024

I learned from a Corridor Crew video that the noise diffusion technique used to generate it means that every image has exactly 50% average brightness, a light pixel for every dark pixel. So the end result will always look overly balanced and kinda boring once you’ve seen a few.

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

I have a part time job in corporate and use a page in a notebook to collect all these horrid corporatese phrases. They use verbs as nouns and nouns as verbs. I’ve separately heard people say, “we’re looking to solution this” and, “I don’t have a solve for it”. Drives me bonkers.

040

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 07/10/2024

PhD student here. Zotero works great for me - browser plugin is a must. I store all my papers in a Dropbox folder and link Zotero to that so I can access them from either my desktop or laptop (both need to be logged in to Dropbox).

010

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 04/10/2024

The dream. Slim pickings for bundles like that here in New Zealand

120

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 03/10/2024

Personal opinion incoming. This is what went through my head when the govt announced cutting back on the Dunedin hospital build: #nzpol #Dunedin

A six-panel screencapture from Spongebob, with Christopher Luxon's head superimposed over Patrick, who is holding a candy bar. The edited captions read, "thanks Labour, I think I'll give out $14.6 billion in tax cuts now..." He eats it. "I think I'll build the Dunedin hospital and run a first-world heathcare system now." He eats his empty hand. "OW! Where'd my budget go?"

051

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 03/10/2024

Patrick H Willems on YouTube has a great video about his hatred for “content”, particularly as applied to film.

010

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 03/10/2024

This laughably stupid long tunnel idea has made it abundantly clear that Simeon Brown’s only experience of Wellington is the car ride between the airport and Parliament, and that he lacks the imagination to consider anybody else’s experience of the city.

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 03/10/2024

I agree with Dan - 3-4 years is doable for a research master's grad but could be a stretch for a lot of others. Source: me, a master's grad currently in the 4th year of a PhD that I'll finish this year.

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 02/10/2024

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray was a little pulpy but great fun

021

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 29/09/2024

I'd love to see something like a carbon takeback/storage obligation implemented: www.cell.com/joule/fullte... Put the onus on FF companies to actually sequester, store, and monitor CO2 in order to be allowed to sell their products. I think it'd just speed up the transition through price increases.

cell.com

Upstream decarbonization through a carbon takeback obligation: An affordable backstop climate policy

A carbon takeback obligation (CTBO) is a supply-side mitigation policy requiring extractors and importers of fossil fuels to recapture and store a progressively increasing fraction of the CO2 generate...

000

Hunter Douglas @hunterdouglas.bsky.social · 29/09/2024

Yes fossil fuels powered the incredible rise in living standards over recent centuries, but now their use needs to end. Because the companies selling them resist, their use need to be actively *ended*. We have the tech. A stirring articulation of this challenge: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

theguardian.com

Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread | Tim Winton

The lassitude that distinguishes our moment is born of sorrow and buried rage. We act like colonial subjects because, in effect, that’s what we are

010