@smachlis.bsky.social
Author of Practical R for Mass Communication & Journalism
❤️ #RStats, writing & walkable/bikeable cities
Having fun with GenAI
Retired tech journalist
Also #SmartHome #HamRadio #VibrantAging #Running #Photography #Crochet #ASL
https://machlis.com
@smachlis.bsky.social@smachlis.bsky.social@smachlis.bsky.social@smachlis.bsky.social@smachlis.bsky.social@smachlis.bsky.social@smachlis.bsky.social@smachlis.bsky.socialBack on the next kick though 😀
#NFL (for followers who want to screen out my football posts)
@smachlis.bsky.socialWeekly number of Bluesky posts with the #RStats hashtag (case insensitive) Sept. 2024 - Oct 9, 2026, excluding the CRAN Package Updates bot. Weeks run Sat–Fri.
This past week: 185 posts
Coded with {bskyr} and {ggplot2}
[Posted via cron job. Tx for ur patience if something went awry] #RStatsStats
@smachlis.bsky.socialI kind of like "simulated intelligence" (that's what I initially thought "SI" stood for). Or "imitation intelligence", which I first encountered from a @simonwillison.net talk in 2024 simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/...
But the little 4B LLM running on my PC, while impressive, isn't super intelligent
@smachlis.bsky.socialThe NYT authored a research paper about the chatbot tool - "Epstein Files Engine: Agentic Search for Investigative Journalism"
@smachlis.bsky.social@duyknguyen.bsky.social tells IRE #AccessFest26 that the NY Times built a chatbot for the massive Epstein files data dump using the open-source LibreChat chatbot project.
Reporters are trained to use the bot's answer as a *starting point*, not a final answer!
www.librechat.ai
#ddj @ire.org
@smachlis.bsky.socialReposted by @smachlis.bsky.social"Frisket is an open-source AI spreadsheet for reporting! for research! for investigations!
You can drop in documents, audio, video, emails, spreadsheets, etc. Ask questions, get structured data back." - Columbia Univ data journalism prof @dangerscarf.bsky.social
frisket.dev
@smachlis.bsky.socialMy state university didn't have a football team. But we did have co-ed dorm "tag football" (you tagged someone and they were out, no flag, no tackling) and quarterbacks had to be women. Dorms competed against each other. It was so much fun!
@smachlis.bsky.socialYour privacy is being violated by Meta’s Muse AI agent *even if you don’t use it*, if you email or message with someone who uses it.
@smachlis.bsky.socialMeta’s Muse “record[s] details of how you and your contacts met, your shared interests, your disputes, and ‘tensions and alliances‘ within your social group. “Even people who don’t use Muse are subject to this mapping process by other people’s Muse agents.”
@smachlis.bsky.socialMy Amazon About You page includes “Has a phone that is 3 inches wide.” Which seems like a somewhat random thing to care about?
@smachlis.bsky.socialWe have an Emoluments clause in the US Constitution, the highest law of the land. It is being regularly flouted. If laws are not enforced, what is the point of having them?
Although separately, yes, the US Supreme Court needs a code of ethics
#USpoli
@smachlis.bsky.social New unofficial Google Gemma 4B LLM for better speech to text?
“This is not an officially supported Google product.”
“[D]esigned to post-process, correct, and optimize automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization outputs.”
huggingface.co/google/Diari...
@smachlis.bsky.social