cannot get over how goofy the "true-color" reconstructions of greek and roman marble statues look am i really expected to believe that the sculptors achieved such mastery of form but the painters never progressed beyond slathering lumpy block-color paste over it all

thread of surprising diaspora communities starting with some who owe their origin to stalin-era resettlement: - (volga) germans of kazakhstan. peaked at 1 million just before fall of berlin wall, largely migrated to germany - koreans in central asia, originally far east russia. around 500k today

during this ordeal, o3 gaslit me with the following image. left is a bastardized version of a sketch i sent it with the "problematic rise" circled, right is the proposed fix. come on man!

My sycophancy benchmark is updated with new tests and improved scoring, and now has a website and a paper! Thread below. syco-bench.com

just tried to get some plumbing-related advice from o3. results were so awful that it has genuinely lengthened my agi timelines; further, am considering training as a plumber to get a few more years of job security

🚨 REPLICATION REPORT UPDATE: One year ago, a tweet by John Holbein alerted me, @ollefolke.bsky.social, and @jopieboy.bsky.social to a paper with a shocking result about Sweden’s law criminalizing the purchase of sex.🧵

i am going to become the joker. terrible indictment of the sleep science subfield that fu and co are still able to pump out these awful short sleep gene papers. when will the fever break?

the greater honeyguide doesn't just lead humans to beehives so it can feed on the post-harvest scraps - it's a ruthless brood parasite to boot. has to be one of the most devious bird species going.

found myself reading a manga ("berserk") against my better judgment. marveling at how distinctly japanese the story is: - bushido themes: absolute loyalty to your band/leader; overwhelming odds can be beaten with insane ferocity; never giving up - obsession with mastery, apprenticeship, drilling

Scientists have created a broadly effective antivenom using the blood of a Wisconsin man who has spent years exposing himself to deadly snakebites from black mambas, taipans, cobras and many others.

donald trump if you can hear us, please donald trump, please save me, please save me donald trump, please i'm asking you, please save me

If you are at a big LLM company and on a project to do RL to maximize user engagement with the models, you probably have a moral obligation to quit immediately and warn people. It's bad enough when social media does this.

HT to @eudoxia.bsky.social who posted it elsewhere. ponnekanti.net/posts/the-in...

understood that i had many foibles which barred me from entering the elite, but did not appreciate that "slow writing speed" and "bad at keeping up with correspondence" were among the more important

i love how the web shows me such a marvelous diversity of minds. take michael druggan: world-class mathematician (putnam top 10), well-calibrated bettor; hugely roided out bodybuilder, trump voter, constantly arguing that women who dislike gym rat physiques are lying. very unexpected "type of guy"

recently asked o3 how it would do one of the more complex + bespoke tasks i perform at work and yeah, looks like o3 packaged into a real agent with perfect vision, good memory, some in-house context would complete it to an acceptable standard - basically as good as what i was producing ~4 years ago

2030-01-16 mood: calm before the storm still don't fully believe this is happening. but today marks the beginning of the end of my working life. saw a hacker news comment describing how to see if deskmate is training on your machine - turns out it's been active on our workstations for two months.

New preprint finding that eliminating US global health funding over the next fifteen years would cause: - 15.2m deaths from AIDS - 2.2m deaths from TB - 7.9 additional child deaths

the lavish vocabulary of the english language allows for wonderfully subtle gradations of connotation, for instance,

something i have been very surprised to learn over the past few years: a pretty typical aspect of aging is your body getting riddled with selfish proto-cancer lineages which acquired mutations that allowed them to out-compete their neighbors. any tissue with a fast turnover rate seems at risk

just used blockenheimer.click to block all the delusional brigade-happy idiots who liked this post. very satisfying to build up one's defenses in this way did rate limit my account however - i think limit is 1,666 created records (blocks, posts etc) per hour

as someone who has the same relationship to statistics as a car mechanic has to engineering, o3-mini-high is awesome "uh can we promote sparsity in the model? cool but that package is slow as hell. yeah this new one is quicker thanks. can i like bake in a prior. nice, i think that's working"

macaskill's 80k hours interview on ai is really giving me a "what the hell am i doing with my life" moment

i honestly would not have expected people to vote with their feet to this extent i suppose this is partly due to well-publicized horror stories about border crossing and deportation rather than pure political disagreement

my and 4o's best attempts at depicting "they broke their backs lifting moloch to heaven"

fun to see iceland experimenting with new forms of femocratic governance

annals of pareto distributions for crime

Eight people in South Sudan, including five children, died on a three-hour walk to seek medical treatment for cholera after US aid cuts forced local health services to close, the UK-based charity Save the Children said reut.rs/3E9kB27

please, paleoproteomics... live up to your promise... figure out how to recover a greater diversity of proteins from skeletons, i beg you...

there are so many kinds of people in the world and so many remarkable life stories

i'm just disappointed because i thought that colossal was actually going to produce animals with essentially the entire genome of woolly mammoths etc instead of introducing a tiny number of cosmetic changes to existing animals

extremely parasocial thought i've been having: "maybe the ideal human society is just millions of clones of kelsey piper"

eventually managed to get gpt 4.5 to guess my ancestry from my face - the very casual, positive, definitely-not-race-science vibe i adopted may have helped - and found the results pretty nuts almost hoping that the blue part is based on stored memories, geolocation rather than uncanny perception

very notable: chickenpox/shingles vaccination clearly reduces future dementia diagnoses in the old, and for whatever reason the effect is only seen in women throw it on the pile w/ epstein-barr -> multiple sclerosis, hpv -> cancer, h pylori -> stomach ulcers... post-infection sequelae are very real

the past eightish years have made me much more elitist qanon, tiktok, insane fb groups, antivax, X paid bluecheck boosting, trump 2.0 admin... apparently can't trust ordinary people to gather + spread accurate information about complex systems (i.e. the modern world), let alone act properly on it

i've known the inside scoop on a few news stories in my time. usually just papers i co-authored that made the press rounds, but sometimes more fiery stuff patterns observed:

some populist right guys raise "dry sex" as this esoteric, hushed-up explanation for high hiv rates in africa - really a post-hoc excuse for why pepfar was pointless and shifting blame to backwards africans. while the practice clearly is not great, hazard ratios don't seem huge enough to explain.

francesca gino is down to a gender discrimination claim and most of her lawyers have withdrawn; trying not to feel too much schadenfreude. the fact that her defamation claims were dismissed is probably enough. but i'd prefer to live in a world where jail time was on the table for outright fraud.

it rocks, and is quite funny, that i have become much fitter and more muscular almost solely via burpees. thank you for changing my life dr busy dad phd. indoctrination video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgL7...

i'll try not to be too rude: i would really prefer if all new york times journalists made a habit of double-checking the vibes they inhaled off their social media feeds. it would not take much effort at all to discover that EAs are horrified about this catastrophe and actively fighting it. thanks.

apparently "custom bluesky feeds" (everything that isn't "following") cannot show reposts, which seems a ludicrous handicap

before posting on 4chan, let your words pass through three gates: is it rude? is it false? is it pointless?

wonder how many He Jiankui stans on twitter know that his experiment was a total shitshow: - the mutations edited in were basically random + have unknown effect - even he admits that 1 of the kids got an ineffective partial edit - seems the kids are mosaics of different edits, some perhaps harmful

Take a moment today to read about a few of the young children whom Trump and Musk killed by shutting down USAID. The blame for these deaths falls on them. There will be hundreds of thousands more dead kids before their lethal crusade against foreign aid ends. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

candidate gene studies and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race (context: faah is the gene that was held responsible for the "no-pain scottish lady" case study that made the rounds on twitter last year)

theory: tech CEOs get into history, western canon etc because humanities knowledge is scarce in STEMlord silicon valley – costly signal of intellect + success-enabled leisure. this is then copied by dwarkesh types occurs to me that this mirrors aristocratic education being aped by the middle class

A+ piece by @ruxandrabio.bsky.social. IMHO she is one of the sharpest writers about bio today! worksinprogress.co/issue/fertil...

remarkable that the post-covid anti-establishment electoral wave is so global that it includes greenland and botswana