Stuart Watt
@morungos.bsky.social
1.3K followers 780 following 4.7K posts
Cognitive/social scientist and occasional coder. Umquhile Mancunian. Purveyor of Jurassic Park memes. Writes on modernization and technology. Consciously uncoupling from corporate shenanigans. Halifax, Nova Scotia https://morungos.com/
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morungos.bsky.social
“I know, let’s drive the entire world economy on fear of missing out. What could possibly go wrong?”
justinhendrix.bsky.social
"A group of non-revenue-generating energy companies have collectively ballooned in value to more than $45 billion in hopes that tech companies will one day pay for their yet-to-be-built power.The biggest of these is the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-backed nuclear startup Oklo..."
The Frothiest AI Bubble Is in Energy Stocks
Concept stocks with no revenue have soaring valuations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed the biggest of these energy companies.
www.wsj.com
morungos.bsky.social
There’s a lot on that in Schank’s “ASK system” framework, and books like “Dynamic Memory Revisited”. A surprisingly large part of his answer would be: through stories.
morungos.bsky.social
I was ‘80 and ‘82, mostly JMB if I remember. Definitely covered Twelfth Night too.

I rediscovered many books when I was commuting by train, but Hardy i still hate. It said nothing to a Manchester kid like me. I’m convinced you need life experience to get these books, otherwise you’re parroting.
morungos.bsky.social
We must be near contemporaries. I just could not get my head around some of the texts. I really struggled with The Crucible, which I now understand just fine, but expecting small British children to understand allusions to McCarthyism still seems completely bonkers to me.
morungos.bsky.social
Mine too. I bet I hated it more than you hated it. 🤣🤣
morungos.bsky.social
The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was Conan Doyle’s fan fiction of Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights.
morungos.bsky.social
That is not even remotely unhinged. It is objectively true. I hated the Mayor of Casterbridge with the fire of a million galaxies.
morungos.bsky.social
Of course modernization improves scale, not quality. Nobody doubts that LLMs can make academia create more outputs, we just think they’re lazy and shit. If you care about understanding the world, they’re harmful, because scaling isn’t a goal.
morungos.bsky.social
I’d argue the process of the modernization of science is an amazing thing to study, much more so than focusing on one particular technology.
morungos.bsky.social
So has the personal computer, VLSI, modern academic publishing, and many other products of the modern world. There’s no reason to attribute causality to that one.

The early examples of the branching model of science, in radio astronomy, predate the internet by decades.
Reposted by Stuart Watt
dbellingradt.bsky.social
Combining direct lighting - as Mark the Evangelist is demonstrating by using the illuminating dove - is great for targeted tasks and emphasizing details at your desk, while indirect lighting - see the open window - creates a warm and inviting environment. Bonus: your cat will like it. #catcontent
Mark the Evangelist working at a desk, and his lion is present. The lightning dove is flying above him. This image is also part of the 1530 bible print: https://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/0011/bsb00113027/images/index.html?fip=193.174.98.30&seite=89&pdfseitex=
morungos.bsky.social
I led a lot of REF work and it nearly killed me, but I grudgingly felt it was a good process of reflection both for units and individuals. Removing that pressure to reflect would be bad, IMO.

This is consistent with learning btw. Learning requires work. Removing the work is actually harmful.
morungos.bsky.social
Papers aren’t the focus, really. They’re used to build a picture of the researchers and the community. The key decision is which researchers to include or not, and that can easily tip the final outcomes with big financial impacts. Although this does vary a fair bit between between panels.
Reposted by Stuart Watt
thesaxbygale.ca
Tories are all upset because, after years of bumper stickers and flags, it was Katy Perry who achieved their dreams.
Reposted by Stuart Watt
benmacleod.bsky.social
Canadians – If you have some time this long weekend, fill out this godawful government survey on AI, which itself seems to have been written by AI trained exclusively on buzzword-laden LinkedIn posts.
morungos.bsky.social
Call me skeptical if you like, but most interesting impacts across domains happen because people move between them, not tech. That’s been studied in the sociology of science. The tech to enable discovery of connections goes back to the Memex, it’s not new. It’s the people, always the people.
morungos.bsky.social
Happy to report that I laughed more at the movie Deep Cover than I have for a few years. Great fun, well written, and a fantastic cast loving every moment. More “British style” comedy than you’d expect from the crew. Reminded me of Elgin James and Stephen Merchant’s “The Outlaws”. Would recommend.
morungos.bsky.social
For a lot of my apps, containers would ramp costs by a factor of two — or in the case of Kubernetes, up to ten. I’m not getting the benefit. Feels like the kind of scam Intel pulled when they bought McAfee, far and away the biggest consumer of cpu cycles in existence.
morungos.bsky.social
Agreed. I’m adding this issue to my list of tech risk dumps, because it’s actually a great example of shifting the risk onto customers and off corporations.

Although I’m not a massive fan of containers. Kubernetes does my head in. It’s stupid decisions which uniformly benefit big cloud providers.
morungos.bsky.social
That’d scare the hell out of me. The thing that rankles most is the almost complete lack of enforcement — or if there is some, they’ll target non-drivers anyway.
morungos.bsky.social
Due to the nature of this kind of analysis, there’ll be some work that’s categorized as “surveillance” here that arguably isn’t, and you know what? I don’t mind, because the message needs to get through that a lot of CV tech is oppressive. We can be better, so let’s be.
morungos.bsky.social
A great read. Now that I’m increasingly working on CV, i love this, because it’s more leverage for my stance that most folks are doing it entirely wrong anyways.
abeba.bsky.social
New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature
An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.
www.nature.com
morungos.bsky.social
Now you know why. If pedestrians or cyclists try, they get mown down by drivers turning right. Drivers don’t even bother to look.
morungos.bsky.social
I was in an AWS training session years back, and fully the first ten minutes was warnings about not giving money to Jeff by messing up Lambda. It did not inspire confidence.
Reposted by Stuart Watt
uniondesign.bsky.social
So someone “vibe coded” an app w/ a Google Maps API key that racked up a $50,000 bill and… LOL. But TBF those keys default to wide open. No restrictions by domain, IP, enabled APIs, etc. Massive potential for damage. They should be like a deadman’s switch… default to fully locked w/o explicit input.