iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 19h

I'm again grateful to @theverge.com for publishing my newest long-form essay on the limits of the computational model of the mind, the benefits of understanding both biological and cultural evolution to explain human thinking, and the danger of cognitive hot dogs in education.

theverge.com

Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI

AI is junk food for the mind: easy, tempting and ultimately very bad for you.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 5h

In general, the backlash against artificial food coloring has probably led to more “natural”food colors that change the taste? For example people demanded Trix change back: www.npr.org/2025/09/08/n...

npr.org

Food-makers are phasing out artificial dyes. The problem: Americans love the color

Sam's Club is among the food makers removing artificial dyes from products, yet hoping shoppers don't notice a difference in color. But why?

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 5h

@mattansb.msbstats.info I had never heard of the triangle test! In audio testing (like codecs/bit rate etc), ABX testing is quite common. (Listen to A and B then say if X is A Or B).

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 04/10/2026

There will not be a nuclear reactor on the moon in 2030 or 2036 or even 2050. We can’t build these things on cost and on time on earth; it is farcical to think anyone will ever build one on the moon.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Voter registration deadlines are SUNDAY in Alaska, Rhode Island, South Carolina. And MONDAY in: Arizona, Arkansas Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and *Texas*. If you live in these states, verify your registration now, literally.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 03/10/2026

One time I made potatoes like this and nailed it- every subsequent time something went awry because they were never as good as that first attempt.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 03/10/2026

I try to tell people that “reasoning” is just more prompt engineering. (I assume this is true for the non-open models too.)

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 03/10/2026

Parquet + polars lazy frames and scan_parquet has completely changed my day to day data analysis. It’s the perfect combo.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Kate Sánchez @ohmymithrandir.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If you're a woman who plays EA Sports CFB or Madden, I wanna talk to you! And if you're a woman who loves football and don't play those games, I also wanna hear from you! Working on a piece on football, the sports video games, and well, US! RESHARES APPRECIATED

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 02/10/2026

Yeah just the weight/ size (doesn’t fit in my older laptop bag). It’s mostly moot since it rarely leaves my desk but in general I prefer smaller/lighter.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 02/10/2026

Still a bit mad about by the denominator madness I wrote last year in Salt Lake County: marcoshuerta.com/posts/salt-l...

marcoshuerta.com

Did Salt Lake City Vaccination Rates Vary by Zodiac Sign? – Marcos Huerta

Data is Singular

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 02/10/2026

My work bought me a 16” Macbook Pro and I would have preferred the 14” (though at the time for the M3 line, I think the 14” had external monitor limitations so I guess I’m glad in that sense; most of the time it’s in clamshell mode connected to 2 monitors anyway.)

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 02/10/2026

I would also suggest alerts that remind you if you …turned it off. I disable the cronjob that runs my Mastodon hurricane bot and forgot to turn it back on. No errors sent to my errors channel Slack! It must be working, right?! Nope! 🤦🏽‍♂️

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 01/10/2026

Jim Crane had an analytics-driven team, fresh off winning the 2022 World Series, and I guess decided he didn’t like the data nerds getting all the glory. He ditched Click, started listening to ex-players like Bagwell, and tanked the franchise. He’s now the Houston Jerry Jones.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Pretty clear to me there’s a very good case against this man for mass murder, and I’m saying that in as measured a fashion as I can. He’s order the killing of 234 people under no plausible war or legal justification. I am skeptical he will ever face legal accountability for til his but he should.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Kashmir Hill @kashhill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Meta is using a radical interpretation of a tax credit for “research and experimentation” to get billions of dollars off GPUs for its A.I. data centers. My latest with Jesse Drucker, @elitan.bsky.social and @mikeisaac.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/t...

nytimes.com

How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes (Gift Article)

Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Meta Muse appears to read your Apple messages and upload them to the cloud even if you explicitly tell it not to: appleinsider.com/articles/26/...

appleinsider.com

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 29/09/2026

This doesn't seem … good?

Bar chart showing Anthropic negative earnings increasingly negative to -$42 billion in FY 2025.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/09/2026

Reuters got some of the IPO docs. Anthropic is a total dog of a company. Spent $12.6bn to make $4.6bn in revenue in 2025, $7.33bn of which was compute costs. Operating loss of $8bn. Losses getting worse year over year. Amazing stuff www.reuters.com/business/fin...

Summary
Companies
• Anthropic IPO could value the company at more than $2
trillion
• Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025
• Al lab spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year
• Operating loss widened to $8.06 billion in 2025 from $2.98 billion in 2024
• Execs, industry analysts have expressed concerns over harms of Al tech
Sept 28 (Reuters) - Anthropic is making a massive bet that Al will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.
But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming year, according to the
prospectus.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 29/09/2026

The python to parse all these files is such a monstrosity - which is why it's one of my few repo's that isn't public! 😭 Thankfully I now load a (slow) json API with all the vote data, but behold this mess from 3 years ago, complete with commented-out bespoke debugging print statements.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

🎙️ Today on Regression to the Mean Girls @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social & I chat with the amazing @emilyriederer.bsky.social about a deep dive into election data! We chat data quality! Headless browser automation! Connections to EHR data! It’s great.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 29/09/2026

The "VOTE.CSV" is the true abomination. 😱 lis.blob.core.windows.net/lisfiles/202... I forget when I first found a hidden XHR that was JSON, but now it's the first thing I check for - though sometimes the site does server side rendering & there's nothing to find: you have to scrape tables.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Emily Riederer @emilyriederer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Had so much fun chatting with @lucystats.bsky.social and @sarahlotspeich.bsky.social about gnarly real world data wrangling — from elections to EHRs and beyond! Show link below! Meanwhile, I’m live-posting of my latest civic data eng sidequests here bsky.app/profile/emil...

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 29/09/2026

In terms of tackling ugly data for civics, the "CSV" files from the Virginia LIS with state legislature's legislative voting records I had to parse to build data for recordedvote.org remain a total nightmare (thankfully VA set up a more modern API last year.)

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 29/09/2026

👏🏽 One of the first times I found a hidden API instead of trying to scrape (which I talked about with @libbyheeren.bsky.social on the Data Science lab) was election data from CNN. 🤫 Though it was just the general, not early vs in-person.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 28/09/2026

I swear if the Rangers put up a “co-champions” banner, their franchise should be disbanded. As it is, the Astros should just hang it in the hallway. This is nothing to celebrate.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Sarah Langs @slangsonsports.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Players to lead MLB in AVG, OBP and SLG in the Divisional Era (since 1969) 2026: Yordan Alvarez 2025: Aaron Judge 2013: Miguel Cabrera 2002: Barry Bonds 1999: Larry Walker 1980: George Brett

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 26/09/2026

It’s a bit of a tell that the comments are off on this article.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 26/09/2026

LLMs aren’t too smart, they’re too dumb - resorting to hacking web sites when given basic information retrieval tasks? Would love more details on the exact requests/prompts and why there were no human intervention steps. (A prompt can never be trusted to constrain LLM behavior!)

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 25/09/2026

There was a whole thought in the science policy world that we had to keep science / science-funding “non-partisan”, but Republicans made it partisan a long time ago: and the damage to NSF, NIH, etc., that happening now is a consequence.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 25/09/2026

I think the AP mentioned animals in their post just to help define anthropomorphism. I think plenty of AP stories ascribe emotions like scared to animals? It’s very easy for me to say that matrix mathematics to predict likely strings is not thinking. Word forms are not their meaning.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 24/09/2026

Miller and all his records/emails should be subpoenaed on Jan 3.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 24/09/2026

The poor EV6 never gets as much love as the Ioniq 5 but it's great! We love ours (though admittedly the trunk storage volume isn't as big…)

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 24/09/2026

Add my voice to the Ioniq 5/9 recs - and don't sleep on the Kia EV6/Ev9 which essentially the same under the hood and have different styling/looks. (We have an EV6 because we preferred its appearance to the Ioniq 5 but basically the same car - same motor/battery/UI)

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Ryan Goodman @rgoodlaw.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

From 16,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle. "The state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen."

nytimes.com

From 15,000 to 185 to Zero: Trump’s Claims of Illegal Voting in Nevada Fizzle

It was the Trump administration’s latest stumble in its effort to find proof of widespread noncitizen voting, despite decades of evidence that it is extremely rare.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 24/09/2026

What a great title for a podcast. As an alternative to the ntfy app, when I want to send myself push notifications from some script/app/monitoring job, I created my own slack and send messages to different "bot/site monitor" channel via webhooks. (An idea suggested to me by @waldo.net )

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 19/09/2026

It really needs a 4k remaster/re-release.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Trump says he's also looking at banning the Washington Post, calling it a "crummy paper" and "disgusting." Anyway, good job, Jeff Bezos! It obviously was worth losing all those scubsribers and turning your opinion section into MAGA-lite, only for the president to continue to call you "fake news."

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 15/09/2026

It’s completely unclear to me too. An LLM is stateless text generator - it can’t have its own intent. It’s not Skynet slowly achieving self-awareness in a server room.

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 14/09/2026

Why can’t Apple/Spotify let us exclude kid music from their year-end analysis? 🫠 I was almost free when I got our oldest a HomePod mini but now the toddler is all in on Danny Go. 🤪

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 14/09/2026

”… X, the burnerverse’s platform of choice, is famously subject to little moderation. Since Elon Musk acquired [X] .. its algorithm has regularly boosted racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic content, making it the ideal petri dish for a coordinated harassment campaign.”

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Marcos Huerta @marcoshuerta.com · 14/09/2026

States should be going after car dealers (hello Virginia), and it’s an easy fix: let automakers sell directly and ban deceptive fees etc.

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

ℳatt @matttomic.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I'm sorry, a free what of what?

Costco ad seen at the store: 1 free Bucket of Mayonnaise with your first online order

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Shel Winkley @shelwinkleywx.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Texas is baking today. But the grid can handle it. ERCOT dashboard: 57.8% of power demand is being met by solar and wind right now. That means less than half of today's demand relies on sources that create heat-trapping emissions. #txwx

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Reposted by Marcos Huerta

Liz Sepper @lsepper.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The fact that Sark hasn't ordered Ted Cruz carried out of the stadium is a fireable offense

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