Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
Golly, this map looks familiar. Used to see it with a different color scheme, though.
Sturgeon's Gun and Sturgeon's Razor are "90% of guns are crud" and "90% of razors are crud," respectively. But 100% of cats are the best cat in the whole wide world. I'm not sure exactly how this works; it must be some obscure result in quantum physics. I'll ask Schrödinger.
I don't have any predictions about when the messy collection of #algorithms we currently call "#AI" will be able to write good #research papers. Could be tomorrow, could be next year, could be a decade, could be never.
But I do know what it will take for me to take the idea seriously: show me an AI that can write a good #literature #review. No hallucinatory references, no "on one hand X, but on the other hand not-X," no repetitive sentence and paragraph structures that make me want to scrub my eyesockets with bleach and a wire brush. It doesn't even have to be publication quality. Just something that would get a decent grade as a term paper in an upper division undergraduate course.
This is the kind of application where AI should be really useful, and right now it's crap. So I'm not holding my breath.
From the latest #CPAC: #Republicans portraying their leader as the guy who's best known for destroying a #republic. Points for accidental honesty, I guess.
I have to admit, I did not have “energy drinks are manly and coffee is for girls” on my batshit manosphere bingo card.
The ultimate #mashup. "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not an exterminator!"
Not reposting because I don't want to give it a boost. All I will say is ... HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WE GOT HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?
The screenshot is a post by a friend, who prefers to remain anonymous, from several years ago. It's horribly relevant again, for obvious reasons.
I'd prefer to know, on the whole. Particularly when the artist in question is still alive: I may (or may not) still be able to enjoy their art that I already have, but I want to know whose pockets to avoid lining. Once they're dead, "separate the art from the artist" becomes a lot easier for me.
Of course I'd far rather there were nothing *to* know. I wish with all my heart that Edgar Rice #Burroughs and HP #Lovecraft were not raging racists, that Marion Zimmer #Bradley were not at the very least an enabler of child molestation and perhaps† a molester herself, that Joss #Whedon were a feminist in deed as well as word, that JK #Rowling believed the messages about equality and inclusion she gave a whole generation of children and their parents, that Neil #Gaiman were a kind and decent person who created mythologies to tell thoughtful stories about the human condition. But since they are what they are and were what they were, that's not an option.
There are writers I still regard as role models *as writers* even if I don't care for them much as people. Not monsters, for the most part, just garden-variety jerks. The way they put words together speaks to me, as I want my words to speak to my readers. I'm not in a hurry to give up what they've taught me by example.
Still. I don't have a whole lot of money to spend, and I'd rather that what I do have go to people I don't despise. Knowing is almost always better.
It is the #Eternal #Chicken. We can observe the echoes of its hatching as the #cosmic #background #radiation from the Big Bang. Eventually it will grow larger than the #universe itself, at which point everything will collapse into a new #singularity and be reborn in another unimaginable blast of fire and fury. The #phoenix myth reflects our ancestors' dim understanding of this cosmic truth.
A fairly recent aerial shot of Denver and the Front Range. Yes, I'm old enough to say things like "I remember when half of this was farmland!" My mountains (I'm old enough to say that too) are increasingly crowded, and the city has drastically outgrown its infrastructure. I'm a bit *too* old to enjoy the constant surge of people the way I used to: I've been a city boy all my life, but lately I find myself craving quiet.
With all that said, I surely do love this place. My mountains, my city, my street, my block. Home.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
