Recent posts by Computational Cognitive Scientists on Bluesky

This looks really interesting! Living With Latent Waste: Archaeology in a Permanently Polluted World 🧪 🏺

I'm really looking forward to this event at the RI in July. Melanie's book is wonderful. www.rigb.org/whats-on/ali...

A galaxy with non-smooth features, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope in the COSMOS survey. It is at redshift 0.12 (lookback time 1.60 billion years) with coordinates (149.80066, 1.82724). 48 volunteers classified this galaxy in Galaxy Zoo: Hubble.

Reconnaissance - and there are two missions with that name! 😞

This is an actual line that was added to the official system prompt for Codex for GPT-5.5 by OpenAI. Usually the system prompt is as minimal as possible, so I assume it would otherwise mention goblins a lot. AIs are weird.

#AcademicSky #AISlop

Talkie-1930 has little patience for modernism.

😭😭😭

oh the irony

I'm still lobbying for bleat.

Unfortunately: Curiosity, which always comes out Curioisty the first time I type it

Kinda wild that hair loss treatment actually works now

painting my lava lamp 💚

Unless it is for dietary purposes (done as fast/painless as possible) self defence, diseases, essential ecosystem control, accident or so, killing an animal "JUST BECAUSE" puts you in a very dark moral area. Being angry as a reason, puts you half way to the place where people need to watch you...😬

On Saturday when I got my CT scan I had a cute little outfit on because I was out looking cute when all hell broke loose. Part of that cute little outfit was control-top tights. Listen to me. Never get a CT scan in shapewear. The scan you get back is something out of a body horror film.

Resplendent Quetzal at Paraiso Quetzal Lodge #CostaRica #birds #nature

A smooth galaxy, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope in the COSMOS survey. It is at redshift 0.17 (lookback time 2.19 billion years) with coordinates (150.26703, 2.85200). 49 volunteers classified this galaxy in Galaxy Zoo: Hubble.

Mr & Ms Maevia (an undescribed species) from Big Bend National Park, one of the main reasons for our trip. They will have a proper name someday thanks to our efforts (which involved trying to collect these extremely skittish creatures in an extremely spiny setting, sotol plants) 🖤 #InverteFest 🧪

Good riddance. Californians can enjoy those west coast sunsets without you.

Northern Emerald-Toucanet #CostaRica #birds #nature #toucanoftheday

Some notes on talkie, a new "vintage language model" from a team including Alec Radford (yes, that Alec Radford) "trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text" simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/28/...

Nugget (in red) ❤️ Metaphycus wasp, being the most adorable Hymenopteran ever today #InverteFest

Everything is terrible, so I'm rabbit holing hockey, and I have zero regrets.

Nugget 🧡 Bruchomorpha jocosa, piglet bug #InverteFest

Nature's artwork...

Just shot a little sunset time lapse of the storms over Dallas! (video of back of camera image scroll) #txwx

Another new paper for the reading pile: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... They find that the partisan shift in support for higher ed “began at the national level and was instigated by nationally oriented ideological activists rather than mass-level demands…“

BABY 🖤 Dusky pygmy rattlesnakes are already small, and this is a tiny child at that. She could comfortably curl up on my watch face. Pretty chill, though I did not test this thoroughly.

Dalea formosa blooming today #nativeplants 🌿

If you’d like to read the paper - “The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Dalea formosa blooming today, southeast Colorado #nativeplants 🌿

One of three short-eared owls I managed to find last night while gallivanting around the marshes and fields south of me. Probably the best photo I've managed of this species. #birds 🌿

scuba diving is one of the few sports I enjoy that necessitates Indy going to a sitter (he only goes in the water up to his tummy). He loves daycare but comes home exhausted and needing a bath from all the wrestling. But man does that make him even more snuggly

OMG look at this guy the Steelers drafted 😂

Lichens on rock today 🌿

The inevitable dramatic irony.

It’s eight people. Eight men whose personal net worth tallies more than $1 trillion. Median US resident net worth is less than $125,000.

I don’t know how anyone makes it anywhere in life without learning how to pretend you’ve read something when you haven’t or pretend you’ve understood something if you didn’t. These are invaluable skills most of us picked up in college

Lichens on rock today 🌿

A talkative Sulphur-rumped Flycatcher at @tapirvalley.bsky.social #CostaRica #birds #nature

Echinocereus viridiflorus, our Nylon Hedgehog Cactus, blooming in the Tobe Creek area today #nativeplants 🌿

This doesn’t even make sense on its face! How does a supposedly more secure White House help when the president leaves the White House? When was the White House *not* safe? Is every event from now until forever going to be in this building? I am getting a stomachache here.

The new LLM trained only on pre-1931 text is small enough that it can potentially run on device, so, with the right tools, you can get a fully vintage version of Siri, but from the era of Downton Abbey (also a small model). Here, I asked for it to arrange for sushi delivery in Philadelphia. Hmmm...

I'm kind of obsessed with the Bluey-themed birthday card my 11-year-old made for her dad, in honor of his love of corny jokes.

Without downloading anything new, where are you mentally?

If they cut KC I'm going to crash out slightly

Says something about the current state of my nervous system that I find these skeets soothing

Looking forward to Ziwe's interview with Ramy. Famous Egyptians need to be knocked down a few pegs (even nichely famous Egyptians need to be knocked down a few pegs, go ahead and drag me)

Texas sky update.

Not for any reason other than curiosity (with a small dollop of ego), I'd like to see network connectivity research using the acknowledgment sections of nonfiction books, too.

This is the eagerly-awaited Levine / Devenaud / Radford historical model. First really sizable model trained only on period material. Definitely check it out!

This is the eagerly awaited Levine / Devenaud / Radford historical model. First really sizable model trained only on past material. Definitely check it out!

I read about tulip mania all the time. Specifically, the same entry about tulips in this cute little history anecdote book, which is in my bathroom for when I or visitors forget to bring in a phone. Stellar bathroom book, couldn't recommend enough www.goodreads.com/en/book/show...

Bluesky nerds, when Jack Aubrey calls someone a scrub…what exactly does that mean? My only context is TLC 😂

Monday night music open.spotify.com/track/1p2ea5...

super super sick of reading LLM voice

I'm writing a book and some of the material I teach to 1st year archaeology students about ritual is suddenly relevant for this chapter. (The book is about space, by the way). It strikes me that this is the sort of interaction between teaching and research that will be lost when everything is AI.

found these combos at a corner store next to the prophylactics. it wasn’t a mistake

Warblers on Ice! Orange-Crowned Warbler #birds

Scotty’s cactus flowers blooming now 🌿

Here is an AI trained just using text from 1931 or earlier, which leads to a lot of interesting experiments: can the model independently develop later inventions? Can it learn to code from examples alone? You can talk to the model here: talkie-lm.com/chat Details here: talkie-lm.com/introducing-...

There’s going to be a third party by 2028

Lichens on rock, Tobe Creek area today 🌿

Test prints for all my mini Artemis & Project Hail Mary paintings are almost done! I’ll make sure I’m happy with the colors first, then order everything. On track for mid-May release. Thanks for your patience!

This year we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the California Coastal Act, a law that protects coastal and ocean resources, and the public’s access to the coast. Learn how you can advocate for the ocean this Earth Month at the link below! mbayaq.co/42zxbA4

The neighborhood🪑

I think about tulip mania multiple times per day, typically when I'm reading about AI economics in the news. It's the first recorded speculative bubble, driving prices for tulips so high that all of this was (supposedly!) exchanged for a single bulb. And most of the tulips were diseased!

Love this so much (Also definitive proof that humans are so much better than machines)

LSA letter mentioned 🎉🍾🥂

A spiral galaxy, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope in the COSMOS survey. It is at redshift 0.24 (lookback time 2.94 billion years) with coordinates (149.70191, 1.67824). 43 volunteers classified this galaxy in Galaxy Zoo: Hubble.

Ted Cruz pushes back on NASA budget cuts: 'I don't want to wake up one day and look up at the moon and realize the Chinese have beat us there' 🧪 #SpaceRace

Solidarity forever. ✊🏻

Microsoft's MIT licensed VibeVoice speech-to-text model (think Whisper with speaker diarization) is really good - my notes on running the 5.71GB 4bit MLX conversion on an M5 MacBook, using about 60GB of RAM at peak and transcribing 1hr of audio in ~9 mins simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/...

I’m a Hachette author and so happy to see this!

Song Sparrow Tune time...

It is an emotional day for me. Two years ago tonight, I had a brush with death when I found myself in the center of a borderline EF4 tornado while in my car as it ravaged Sulphur, OK during an outbreak of >30 tornadoes. ICYMI: this long read is my story of what happened and what I experienced.

Cake season in the Calarco house is off to a sweet start: a triple decker carrot cake with cream cheese frosting for a special birthday guy.

When spirit gently opens to a greater light...

Just once I wanna see a research paper say, the tokens we pretrained on were not high-quality or diverse, they were absolute trash we scraped from AMA subreddit longtail submissions combined with everyone's public Venmo transaction messages

Male Cardinal Feasting on the honeysuckle...

every TV cartoon and most video games in the '90s had one character that looked like a slimy booger and sounded like Bobcat Goldthwait on cocaine, and that's why it was the golden age.

A Sandhill Crane colt (a baby crane), less than 24 hours old, takes a snooze in the sunshine next to mama crane.

Arghhh .... There's another one now .... and they are working out some deal with Meta. Once again, their plans to demo and have commercial viability by 2030 are ambitious. However, funding being backed by Meta is a cause for concern (given they burn money) www.overviewenergy.com/updates/over...

I've been saying! What we archive defines who we are. www.businessinsider.com/digital-dark...

And all of the backups…

Sunset at Ashridge the other night - so lovely :) #Ashridge #Berkhamsted #CanonR5markii

Moments of tranquil reflection...

It’s funny he keeps talking about fighting people when he quite famously claimed to have been roughed up by Maxine Waters

In Durham for the Space Research Center's SPARC Summit. I lived in Durham 1964-1968 and I believe this is the first time I've been back since!

A smooth galaxy, observed with the Hubble Space Telescope in the GEMS survey. It is at redshift 0.47 (lookback time 4.99 billion years) with coordinates (53.01591, -27.66830). 131 volunteers classified this galaxy in Galaxy Zoo: Hubble.🔭

Well, I am interested to see how this goes *only* because at some point, there will be Fourier Transforms involved if a case ever went to court.

Creating a police state, brick by brick.

wow this person must really hate mediocre bird photography

Police state shit right here.

Another cracking day in the harbour city. Wish I had an outdoor job on days like today! #Sydney

I just had a mini-dream about people with three heads

This is what I mean about Jack Russells …. 😅😭

This week's fur factory haul (brushing an entire dog out of my malamute/husky/wolf). Been doing this for 7 years and I still don't understand how this happens every week. I wish my hair grew like that. 🙄

Can I say “depends what you mean by middlebrow” without everyone getting mad?

Because we live in a Perpetual Crisis, individual crises feel less like discrete events than straws breaking camel’s backs; we don’t even notice them, but they leave us in ruins all the same