Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

This article is now predictably popular on Bsky but key parts of it are, well, hallucinations. They try to claim "errors are rising" on "new reasoning systems" primarily based on Vectara hallucination leaderboard and one OpenAI document. So let's look what those actually show.

One of those things that says what it doesn't say by saying it

Happy May Day

Vibe coding is going to re-open the web. It's never been easier to make an interesting website, page, or single page app.

Posts like this on reddit all the time:

A long but and worthwhile essay on where we are with technocracy/expertise and populism and how difficult the problems we face really are. Too few academics seriously think about their role as experts in society, apart from the ways that position serves their personal career.

On Bayesian background priors, the long trail of failures in health tech (RIP Theranos) give me pause about companies making similar claims. Many people also get their blood tested in the course of routine doctor visits. It's not that hard to upload bloodwork to <leading general purpose model>.

Troubleshooting AI systems is hard, because sometimes the AI solves its own problem, and sometimes it doesn't. This makes the fundamental task of measuring things harder.

Let's try Google's new "AI Mode"... Right on the splash page, they suggest an interesting query: "houseplants that improve air quality and don't need much light". (1st image) I went ahead and clicked it and was given a long reply with extensive citations (2nd image). Very cool! .... right?

First time in basically ever I've been added to a long (10,000+) queue for the archive.today. Pages are super slow to load too. Noting alongside reports of serious uptick in web-enabled bots and crawlers recently.

American policy is pretty easy to understand right now. Trump desperately aspires to be a “great man”. One of his simplistic views of history is that great men conquer foreign lands and grow their empire. One man’s ego, and hundreds of cowards in congress who fail to stop him, explains it all.

I don't think people understand the *massive* gulf between fire injuries/deaths and traffic violence. Here's an example: Average annual fire injures in Berkeley: 2 Average annual traffic injuries in Berkeley: 694

The first principal component of the internet (or perhaps all mass media) is attention. Intention is a rounding error.

We don’t need to outlaw cars in America. We merely need to legalize human-centric development in the highest density regions.

So many harmful tropes of the dominant academic culture on display here. If you have editorial/institutional power and you’re not trying to address this problem, you are doing a great disservice to science and young scientists.

This is a super interesting emergent phenomenon in LLMs that I think is actually quite profound.

Ok that’s enough

link 📈🤖 Pareto optimal proxy metrics (Zito, Greaves, Soriano et al) North star metrics and online experimentation play a central role in how technology companies improve their products. In many practical settings, however, evaluating experiments based on the north star metric directly can be diff

Good video on the evolution of nonchalance. I think with AI making the outputs of art easier to create, we will naturally start to place much more value on things only humans can do. One of those things is to exercise agency and show people that you actually care enough to try.

If we have any hope of preventing the collapse of US scientific and research environment, we also have to rip off our blinders on the ways our institutions are weak and how they have failed so many. Those weaknesses are points of leverage for people trying to tear the whole thing down.

On the white liberal woman as the Omni-villain for the right and the far left www.cartoonshateher.com/p/liberals-w...

Science is in an impending crisis of epistemology. Old, trust-based methods which many were happy to claim were sufficient will stand no chance in the future.

David Lynch was a master of capturing the inchoate darkness and beauty that exists outside of what we can articulate in words alone. He inspired me and countless others with his work. RIP to a true artist, visionary, and virtuoso of vibes.

WE ARE HIRING! Are you interested in LLMs, metascience, and their intersection? We’re hiring a full time postdoc on a three-year contract to help us develop, evaluate, and extend RegCheck (regcheck.app), our app for automatically comparing research papers with their preregistrations.

New AI Snake Oil essay: Last month the AI industry's narrative suddenly flipped — model scaling is dead, but "inference scaling" is taking over. This has left people outside AI confused. What changed? Is AI capability progress slowing? We look at the evidence. 🧵 www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-prog...

USC athletics staffer Heinel who did prison time for Varsity Blues: “Buildings don’t get built by FAFSA kids, you know,” she said, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. “A private school needs donations to exist.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

Insane levels of ludditism in response to this. I wonder if the reactions would be less extreme if it wasn’t branded directly as a “TA”. Many are sensitive to a “job replacement” framing of AI products (even tho the dynamics behind AI job replacement are identical that to all of existing technology)

Some people don't have the comfort of a 1990s/2000s grunge/rock band album to throw in the stereo and thrash out to, and it shows.

I'm teaching a grad seminar this winter on Prediction for Decision-making. We'll look at what it means to make good predictions for decision-making from various angles, with a focus on decisions for & about people. Reading list: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/06/n... Suggestions welcome!

Every mathematician studying knot theory has a new example to include in the “relevance/applications” section of their presentations for the next 20 years. (I studied knot theory in undergrad)

In a classic experiment, 12 articles were resubmitted to same journals in which they had already been published - - 3 were recognized as resubmissions. ✅ - 8 of the 9 articles reviewed again were rejected, often due to "serious methodological flaws"! 😮 😕 ⁉️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧪

Walmart is advertising company, Amazon is an advertising company, professional sports leagues are advertising companies, ... you get the picture.

Basic income has never seen like a good idea to me. People, men especially, get immense non-monetary value from work. If we are going to do universal anything, it should be a job-guarantee. We need to identify more opportunities for low-skilled labor to do meaningful work.

+1 for Kenji’s spatchcock turkey with lemon herb mayo. Easily the best and highest return to effort ratio on a turkey I’ve ever had

Comments be like: “I invoke the Rome Statute and declare that Mr. Zuckerberg does NOT have access to my data”

Altered States (1980): A professor obsessed with his research into the meaning of life pushes the envelope and nearly becomes permanently transfigured by his auto-experimentation. He realizes there is no answer he will find satisfying, finding meaning in his relationships with his wife and family.

After seeing @emilyliu.me 's post this morning about using Bluesky for the comments section on her site, I had to try it. Here's a writeup on how to do it, with everything you need to set it up yourself in five minutes. Leave a comment on this post to test it out! www.coryzue.com/writing/blue...

Really love how this article on trephination (among the top results on Google for the term) reads like a casual endorsement and instruction manual.

While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network. I blogged about it here:

Thought about doing something like this myself a while ago, but it was obviously going to happen soon enough. This is the way.

Tons of NFL posts on the "Discover" feed. Things are moving in the right direction

This classic work in the history of nationalism argues that the rise of widely available print (esp. newspapers) made it possible for geographically dispersed groups of people to imagine themselves as a roughly coherent entity called "a nation" in which there was an ongoing conversation.

cyberambitions

Wtf is going on with xAI? Literally what is the business model?

Good overview of current bluesky ecosystem for technically minded people. Imo the best bet for long term usage, but there arel important platform design choices yet to be made. anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/m...

I saw $2.89 in Minneapolis this past weekend.

Hello world