iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I watched about three minutes on my phone just now, oof, I want my three minutes back

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I mean if I didn't used to, I sure do in my dad era lol

Me: what do you think 'addicted' means 8yo: ummm it's when you like something a lot so you do it a lot? Also it's a little bit bad?

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Mama: why do you think dada ate that entire pack of chocolate biscuits, is it in his nature 8yo: well he's addicted to chocolate biscuits

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 11h

Mama: arggg why do I always spill something on my shirt!! 8yo: it's in your nature mama Me: wait I also spilled something on my shirt, is it in my nature too? 8yo: no that was an accident

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be the academic you want to see in the world (ie, the kind who, when your name comes up, nobody's immediate thought is "yea that dude is a snake")

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Reposted by samuel mehr

public health guy @publichealthguy1.bsky.social · 11h

workin on my night cheese

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 12h

congratulations Manulife at being the First in Canada to suck so hard at travel insurance

Manulife advertising First in Canada to offer travel insurance quotes in ChatGPT, whatever that means

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 16h

This is not tech doomerism, it's practical operating procedure at this point

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 16h

I think scientific trainees need frequent and comprehensive warnings about the threats to confidentiality posed by commercial AI tools

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 16h

I'm a scientist concerned about trainees using Chat, Claude etc recklessly Imagine if that internal employee ID number was protected human subjects information, like the email address of a participant, or a confidential diagnosis or worse

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Reposted by samuel mehr

Steve Mullis @stevemullis.net · 20h

[car dealership waiting room] Me: [chanting] knobs, knobs- Other car buyers: knobs, KNOBS Car salesman: [pounding desk] KNOBS, KNOBS, KNOBS!

forbes.com

Knobs Returning To Some Automakers’ Vehicles, To The Relief Of Many

Auto companies are listening to the complaints of consumers, who want their knobs and buttons back.

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Reposted by samuel mehr

noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 18h

I’ve been finding it useful to think about unsettled LLM norms in academia as reflecting pretty widespread agreement that it’s good to automate drudgery, and profound disagreement about which aspects of the job as it existed ten years ago constitute ‘drudgery’

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(this is just one example of the type of information that is somewhat obscure on formal materials and extremely straightforward in a website -- one way to think about it perhaps is as "the sorts of things you'd learn about a candidate if you had a 5 minute chat with them at a conference")

hard to figure that out from my CV, but easy to figure out from my website, which at the time had a paragraph explaining that while I was formally based at Harvard's school of ed, I was spending a lot of time in the psych department with 'de facto' supervisors there

to avoid outing candidates I've recently reviewed whose materials had this problem I'll offer my own CV as an example. my primary supervisor was Howard Gardner but his letter (years ago) would have been less informative than the faculty I actually ran experiments with and published with

here's an example of a really common thing that is not really "missing" but is regularly unclear from a CV: who you *really* worked with as a grad student. a CV says all the places you worked but very easy for it to be not-obvious for outside folks how to interpret the CV info; websites can clarify

many universities are a bit blasé about retaining faculty, perhaps surprisingly, but I do wonder about reputational risk here, as a secondary outcome of these insane scandals ("do I want to start my lab at the place with the awful rape case? in what other ways might their admin act horribly?")

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the standard story about junior faculty is "pre-tenure, they're vulnerable, keep their heads down" there is a parallel one: junior faculty are *far* easier to poach than senior (on avg they cost less, they have smaller families & labs, junior lines easier to get approved). they are a flight risk

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while I wholeheartedly support faculty voting with their feet when something is Not Right at their university, I am also relatively clear-headed about the whole thing, which is to say, I don't think unis generally learn much from their talent picking up and heading elsewhere

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one aspect of the Cornell case I've not seen reported on much is what Cornell faculty think of how Cornell has handled it Suffice it to say: hooboy, the texts I'm getting from Cornell faculty, especially those who are junior and can quite easily get snapped up by other wealthy universities

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Fuck, tearing up at this scene from DANNY, THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD again (the context is that Danny, the protagonist, lives alone with his dad in a caravan, they are broke, his mother has died, and Doc Spencer and his wife know it. So they bake Danny a meat pie)

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Give your kids good books to read because decades later they will still remember esoteric food stuff from their favorites, when cooking for their own kids (pastry recipe in this thread, and the Roald Dahl thing also applies to making quiches or any dish with a pastry crust)

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normally I say "my quiches may not be beautiful, but they are tasty" however tonight they were both tasty and beautiful

A slice of quiche on a plate with a salad

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I was totally unaware of her as a teenager, despite being neighbors, and when I learned of her as an adult was like 'yeah this tracks 100%'

It Takes a Suburb: A Town Struggles to Ease Student Stress (Gift Article)

I am grateful for the excellent education I got at lexington high school, in particular from the music program; but I was also shocked to learn, later, about how badly that absurdly well-funded school fails students who don't already have perfect SAT scores or whatever

nytimes.com

Lexington, Mass., is fighting the joy-killing, suicide-inducing performance anxiety so prevalent in turbocharged high schools. It has not been easy.

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Lexington is America's best small city in 2026 - Boston Agent Magazine

i went to high school here and could write 20,000 words on why towns like Lexington are not America's best anything here's two, for a start: (1) we had one Black neighbor who was repeatedly 'mistaken' as a burglar in his own home; and (2) our neighborhood crank was presidential candidate Jill Stein

bostonagentmagazine.com

With low crime rates, positive health outcomes and financial security, the hidden gem offers residents quality of life in a quieter setting.

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It's true Canada recently got a little more insane due to western provinces being weird about all this

omg this is it!! absolutely brilliant. thank you for finding it, I apparently did amalgamate

bit of bsky magic turning up this fantastic one in reply to my garbled childhood memories of it

It doesn't have much of a point

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I still tell a joke that @danielketter.com told me in college, and now my kids do, about a broken pencil. I'm not sure why anybody really likes it though

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I lost count this weekend but I think eight or nine somehow???

Ours work great tbh

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Oh lol I was hoping you'd found it

I just spent like 15 min searching for this strip and could not find it so maybe have the characters mixed up or have amalgamated memories or something, but peanuts was fatalistic and funny as hell

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As a kid my godmother and I would routinely say "why bother?" to one another, referring to a Peanuts strip where it's Charlie Brown's birthday and Lucy tells him all the things she planned to do to celebrate, but did none of them because "and then I thought, why bother?"

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The now-4min trip between the two biggest universities in town is just mind blowing to me bsky.app/profile/mehr...

It's also been absolutely full of students going north to l'UdeM when I've been on board from downtown. Amazing new system, total game changer for Montréal

Perils of bilingual posting

This is about the REM though which is brand new!

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Somebody else replied, the post includes "en retard" (late in French) so is being mistagged as using the English slur of the same spelling

I say this as the REM's biggest foreign fan lol

or because it's Montréal, faque on construit des trains, les gens vont les prendre

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