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Erin LeDell

@ledell.bsky.social
7K followers 1.8K following 26 posts

Chief Scientist @ Distributional.com @dbnlAI.bsky.social #MLSky #StatSky Founder @ datascientific.com Founder wimlds.org & co-founder rladies.org PhD @ UC Berkeley 🏡 🌈 Oakland, California.

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Reposted by Erin LeDell
Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Current state of things: there's crop art of Signal at the Minnesota State Fair www.cropart.com
A white hand with Signal-blue painted nails holds a cellphone with a near-dead battery, with the Signal icon the only app on screen. Crop art by Molly Gehrke
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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 02/04/2026
A crude drawing of a person telling computer "say I am alive" 
Computer outputs "I am alive"
Person: "oh my god"
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Bluesky @bsky.app · 19/03/2026
Last April, we raised $100M in Series B funding. This round gives us the ability to scale our team to meet the rapid growth of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Read more: bsky.social/about/blog/0...
bsky.social
Bluesky's 2025 $100M Series B Lays Foundation for Open Social Web - Bluesky
In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto. Since our Series A, we've grown from 13 million to over 43 million global users.
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Dia Lacina @dialacina.com · 08/03/2026
Happy International Women's Day to the original International Woman
Carmen Sandiego from the 90s cartoon
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Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 07/03/2026
This International Women’s Day, five women at EFF talk about the women who have inspired them. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
eff.org
Admiring Our Heroes for International Women’s Day: Five Women In Tech
In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us. Anna Politkovskaya Jillian
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Janelle Shane @janelleshane.com · 13/04/2025
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 24/11/2025
This is an incredible image of comet 3I/ATLAS, taken by Satoru Murata ICQ Comet Observations group on 16 November 2025 from western New Mexico. Structure within the major dust tail from the comet is clearly visible, together with two smaller jets trailing the nucleus and maybe even an anti-tail.
A bright, greeny–white splotch in the centre of the image is the nucleus and coma of comet 3I/ATLAS. To the upper right streams the major dust tail. The background comprises distant stars against a black background, with the NGC 4691 galaxy at upper left.
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Emily Riederer @emilyriederer.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
The way python and R foster inclusion directly contributes to their success: joyful places to exist, a steady flow of new maintainers, and a delightful collection of niche tools empowered by wildly different expertise coming together Watch the new python documentary for more on PSF’s work here
The PSF applied a $1.5M grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to make innovative improvements to packaging security — and we were recommended for funding! But as a condition of funding, we were asked to affirm that we wouldn’t undertake any diversity, equity, and inclusion work, whether or not we used the government funds to do so. The PSF simply couldn’t agree to that statement, as facilitating “the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers” is written directly into our mission and core to our values, so we withdrew our application. In the end, it wasn’t a hard decision for the PSF to put our community and our values first, but it does mean we lost out on this large funding source. Donations and sponsorship will help us fill the gap, so we can continue supporting the Python ecosystem and living our values.
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Gaël Varoquaux @gaelvaroquaux.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
A speech about what drives me, how science and open source are bitter victories, unable to make improve the world if society does not embrace them for the better: gael-varoquaux.info/personnal/a-...
gael-varoquaux.info
A national recognition; but science and open source are bitter victories
I have recently been awarded France’s national order of merit, for my career, in science, in open source, and around AI. The speech that I gave carries messages important to me (French below;...
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Python Software Foundation @python.org · 27/10/2025
TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵
python.org
The official home of the Python Programming Language
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Michael Lund Markussen @mlmarkussen.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
Lilac-breasted Roller Lillabrystet Ellekrage Coracias caudatus #birds #birding #Kenya #photography #nature #naturephotography #wildlifephotography #wildlife #ornithology #birdphotography #animalphotography
Lilac-breasted Roller
Lillabrystet Ellekrage
Coracias caudatus
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Look at that. And New Mexico is not a rich state. Just one that figured out some priorities.
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Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Meta trained a special “aggregator” model that learns how to combine and reconcile different answers into a more accurate final one, instead of relying on simple majority voting or reward model ranking on multiple model answers.
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mr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 06/09/2025
Hallucinations are accidentally created by evals They come from post-training. Reasoning models hallucinate more because we do more rigorous post-training on them The problem is we reward them for being confident cdn.openai.com/pdf/d04913be...
highlighted text: language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance

full text: 

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when
uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such
“hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that
language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over
acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern
training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary
classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations
in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue
that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are
optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This
“epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical
mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate
leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may
steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems
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Autumn Nash 🎃👻💀🖤 @withenoughcoffee.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Plugging something into the tiny computer that you keep in your pocket. That one that has all your passwords, information, and location.. and giving control away to a random ai and company you know nothing about…
media.tenor.com
a cartoon dog is sitting at a table in front of a fire with the words it 's fine everything is fine
ALT: a cartoon dog is sitting at a table in front of a fire with the words it 's fine everything is fine
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
A nasal spray reduced the risk of Covid infections in a double blind, placebo controlled randomized trial jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
It's fine if this is all seven overvalued companies in an AI trenchcoat, right? Right?
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Violet Blue® @violetblue.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
"When in doubt, don't ask ChatGPT for health advice."
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 13/08/2025
“The AI in the study probably prompted doctors to become over-reliant on its recommendations, ‘leading to clinicians becoming less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance,’ the scientists said in the paper.”
bloomberg.com
AI Eroded Doctors’ Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study
Artificial intelligence, touted for its potential to transform medicine, led to some doctors losing skills after just a few months in a new study.
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Gareth Watkins @garethwatkins.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
Somebody on LinkedIn said what we're all thinking.
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
I have some academic lady friends I’ve known for 20+yrs. This industry can be so cold, competitive, and selfish, but these women are so kind, generous, steadfast, and fun. We’ll sometimes get busy and go months without chatting, then reconnect as if no time has passed. I’m so grateful for them…
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Radical Graffiti @radicalgraffiti.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
"Capitalism is temporary. Dykes are forever" Seen in NYC
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Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE @leftistlawyer.com · 23/07/2025
Maybe if your country is the wealthiest in the world but the richest tenth of the country have two thirds of the wealth and the bottom 50% only have 2.5% of the wealth, you don't have the wealthiest country in the world, you just have feudalism.
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404 Media @404media.co · 23/07/2025
ChatGPT Hallucinated a Feature, Forcing Human Developers to Add It 🔗 www.404media.co/chatgpt-hall...
404media.co
ChatGPT Hallucinated a Feature, Forcing Human Developers to Add It
Welcome to the era of ‘gaslight driven development.’ Soundslice added a feature the chatbot thought it existed after engineers kept finding screenshots from the LLM in its error logs.
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 20/07/2025
It is *bananas* that they would give vibe coding tools (and _Replit_, of all platforms 🤣) production deploy access! With no backups! We gave better backup tools to teenagers on Glitch remixing apps a decade ago.
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laura olin @lauraolin.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Post from @suchnerve: Printing out a word document that says “I am a person” and then being like omg my printer is sentient now
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Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫 @lookitup.baby · 20/07/2025
This thread is incredible.
xcancel.com
Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk)
.@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database
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Amy Diehl, Ph.D. @amydiehl.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K. thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...
thenextweb.com
ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds
A new study has found that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT consistently advise women to ask for lower salaries than men.
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 18/07/2025
make art! if it's the end of the world, you might as well make art! if it's not the end of the world, then the future will be better because people made art right now!
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
A U.S. surgeon trying to have a “peer to peer” consultation with a doctor at a health insurance company who is hiding his identity as her patient gets denied coverage. And it gets worse from there. You have to see it to believe it. (1/2)
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Letícia Cesarino @letcesar.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
futurism.com/stanford-the...
futurism.com
Stanford Research Finds That "Therapist" Chatbots Are Encouraging Users' Schizophrenic Delusions and Suicidal Thoughts
A new pre-print study from Stanford researchers finds that AI chatbots used for therapy routinely fail at providing safe, ethical care.
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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 18/07/2025
If you grew up around or spend a significant amount of time talking to people who participate in cultic, occult, or conspiratorial cultural milieus, it’s very easy to understand the pathways by which a person talking to a chatbot could end up in exactly the same type of disordered cognitive state
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van cartier @christopherxci.blacksky.app · 15/07/2025
universal healthcare & universal basic income are literally the main 2 things that should have come out of the covid lockdown era— instead we just got twice as many nazis
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 13/07/2025
This is my most confrontational post of the day: please watch Armond’s video & think on it. It isn’t at all progressive or leftist to spread disabling disease in an ongoing pandemic. There are more Armonds than you know, & folks who don’t mask are making more each day bc most spread is asymptomatic
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Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
If you're at @icmlconf.bsky.social this week, come check out our poster on "Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge" presented by the amazing @afedercooper.bsky.social from 11:30am--1:30pm PDT on Weds!!! icml.cc/virtual/2025...
icml.cc
ICML Poster Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement ChallengeICML 2025
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Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
This was such a wonderful discussion, if anyone has any ideas for helping build curiosity in the classroom please share!!
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Grace @gracekind.net · 14/07/2025
If you thought men writing women was bad, get ready for men prompting women
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
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James Baker @jwbaker.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
GenAI suggesting 'rm' is a big red flag for me. I'll always remember my @carpentries.carpentries.org instructor saying something like "rm exists, but there is no recycle bin, so probably best not to use rm". Pair programming with GenAI requires some ability to understand the output, the red flags.
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WIRED @wired.com · 19/05/2025
As fog blanketed Seattle, @knibbs.bsky.social's waited to meet @jay.bsky.team—CEO of Bluesky. Fittingly, just before she arrived, the skies cleared. It felt poetic. Her name, Lantian, means “blue sky” in Mandarin. And her mission? Clear the smog from social media.
wired.com
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
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Jeanette Schofield @itzjeanette.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
@womeninaiethics.bsky.social is delighted to announce the AI Ethics Book Festival this Friday from 11am to 6pm ET. 🎙️Join us to hear from pioneers and scholars whose work reflects a deep commitment to diverse and vibrant technological futures for everyone! 👇Register: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
us02web.zoom.us
Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: AI Ethics Book Festival - 2025. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.
Women in AI Ethics™ (WAIE) is delighted to announce our first virtual AI Ethics book festival. This festival reflects our core mission and key role as a catalyst in the global movement towards inclusi...
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RLadies+ @rladies.org · 14/03/2025
In order to better align with our mission to support all underrepresented genders in the R community, R-Ladies is re-branding to R-Ladies+! 💜 🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ ⚧️ ✨ R-Ladies is rebranding to R-Ladies+ rladies.org/news/rebrand... ✨ Rebranding Call For Proposal rladies.org/news/rebrand... #rstats #rladies
rladies.org
R-Ladies is rebranding to R-Ladies+ - R-Ladies Global
R-Ladies is a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community
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Jay 🦋 @jay.bsky.team · 14/03/2025
We put up a proposal that lays out a way for users to declare whether/how they want their data to be used by things like generative AI or public archives, check it out on github: github.com/bluesky-soci...
github.com
proposals/0008-user-intents at main · bluesky-social/proposals
Bluesky proposal discussions. Contribute to bluesky-social/proposals development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Gordon Forbes @gforb.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
It's amazing how far back ideas go. This paper from 1984 by @f2harrell.bsky.social discusses the need for train/test data splits and the importance of assessing model calibration and discrimination and instability in variable selection methods. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Regression modelling strategies for improved prognostic prediction
Regression models such as the Cox proportional hazards model have had increasing use in modelling and estimating the prognosis of patients with a variety of diseases. Many applications involve a larg...
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Mike Dickison @adzebill.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...
blog.archive.org
End of Term Web Archive – Preserving the Transition of a Nation | Internet Archive Blogs
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Danielle Beckman @daniellebeckman.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
This is one of the images deleted from the CDC historical archive, by the way. I downloaded it this morning and can't access it anymore. We are ready to repeat the past.
Photograph of a man with his hands over his face, a woman with her hands covering her ears, and another man with his hands covering his mouth

"This is the way many people deal with HIV."
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Kathie McDonald-McClure @kathiemcmcclure.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
This just in. Calling all public health folks to download the CDC data sets you need TODAY! #PublicHealthData #CDC
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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 31/01/2025
The CDC has removed data on sexual orientation, gender identity, and health disparities from their website. Pages removed include: - Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System - Social Vulnerability Index - Efforts to Address Racism as a Fundamental Driver of Health Disparities
CDC Page:

The page you're looking for was not found.

Please try the CDC archives or the A-Z index.

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