It is only possible to walk because you get feedback from your feet on where the ground is.

Americas midterms changed how the world is perceived.

Sanity, empathy, sense of justice is real and it's there. Sea to sea.

If dems hadn't had a blue tsunami it would be like your foot going through a rotted floor.

Its like it's possible to breathe again.

Let's walk.

#canada #us #eu

@mm Apart from the cannabis, do you feel like you would want to have a permanent solution to what makes you feel miserable or is coping entirely fine with you?

@ai6yr this stuff is so simple and should be a universal human right but it's increasingly controversial which is just wild.

It's like people think we're not all connected so people in an out group can get sick and not impact people in the in group. Bruh it doesn't work that way.

I was involved 20 years ago in basic sanitation work in El Salvador. No idea how it is there now but where we were working up in the campos on the ridgetops, pretty much everyone wanted better sanitation and was working to improve their situations but they didn't have the money to make it happen. While we helped with some of the technical aspects (we were focused on drinking water access including getting water and filtering it while other NGOs focused on waste sanitation, hand washing, cooking fires, public health and vaccination campaigns, and the like), much of what we were actually doing was providing money.

If only people buying coffee paid a tiny bit more for that coffee and that money got back to the people actually growing and picking the coffee, we wouldn't have had any reason to do work there.

I am not associated with that NGO anymore so I don't know how it's been going in those communities. The plan though was always to get the infrastructure to a state where they could maintain it themselves including pay for the maintenance. That required some careful engineering to ensure they could afford the maintenance and repair costs. And to help the community establish a bank account where they were depositing a few cents per household per month (basically a local tax) so that when it was time to replace elements of the systems, they would have the money to do that.

Anyway that was a good experience for me to have in my formative engineering years to understand that we need to be engineering things for everyone and not just rich people. And that stuff that I took for granted such as safe tap water is not even close to universal.

I have been (mostly secretly) pursuing my doctorate for more than six years at the University of Oxford. Yesterday, I successfully defended my thesis and passed my viva. This morning was the first time I got to say to someone "so sorry but it's not Miss Wheeler, it's Doctor Wheeler."

My path here was beyond weird. Oxford rejected me three times between 2018 and 2020. Then a pandemic, Brexit, and a late third round of admissions at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford opened a door, and I matriculated over Zoom as a DPhil in Social Data Science from my little room in Seattle at 3 a.m in October of 2020.

My thesis uses classic machine learning methods at scale, with full transparency, to detect potential influence in text over time. It started with a question about whether Ada Lovelace ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and it ended up deep in Harold Bloom’s theory of influence. I presented the methods paper at Computational Models of Narrative in Madrid this year.

I also rowed for my college’s boat club (come on Linacre College, Oxford!!), went to more bops than I’ll admit to, and finally got to really, really love academia.

If school never fit you, and especially if you’re neuroatypical, you may just need to wait until you can do it on your own terms. I have failed out of or gotten kicked out of or dropped out of many more schools than I ever got a degree from. You can do it and just message me if you want to talk. There are more people than I could ever hope to thank in a single post, and I'll be writing more about them over the next weeks and months.

I did it my way.

The whole story is here: https://www.tarah.org/2026/11/10/i-got-a-doctorate-in-machine-learning-from-oxford-mostly-in-secret-over-the-last-six-years/

#Oxford #DPhil #MachineLearning #DigitalHumanities #DataScience

@ai6yr Why am I hearing "Sir Robin bravely ran away, ran away, ran away...." from Monty Python.