nonesuch_user @nonesuch_user@qoto.org

Source: https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/05/18/2023/semafor-flagship-little-personal-hell

#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #GlobalWarming #GlobalHeating

RT @PjotrSauer: Pollution Reveals What Russian Statistics Obscure: Industrial Decline https://t.co/6rT8ZrC0H5

Important meta-science. You need *lots* of data to test hypotheses about what causes differences in treatment effects well. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade7979

"It's unclear exactly when Twitter stopped the visibility filtering, but, like the Atlantic Council, Voice of America reporter Wenhao Ma first noticed it at the end of March."

Visibility filtering rules that had been in place for foreign propaganda accounts removed by #Twitter (apparently on the order of Elon Musk), including those of government agencies and officials of #China, #Iran and #Russia, reports NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171193551/twitter-once-muzzled-russian-and-chinese-state-propaganda-thats-over-now

“There’s no scenario in which life outside Horizon will be good for UK science”: reactions in @guardian from me & others to to the latest Plan B “go it alone” grandstanding by UK ministers.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/12/eu-horizon-europe-research-michelle-donelan-uk-snub-brexit?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

US friends, take note. I went to vote in Berlin today and this was the line in front of the polling station. “But wait! There is no line!” Indeed. There is no line because there need not be one. Because it’s about how polling is organised. If you are standing in a line for hours in order to exercise your democratic rights, it’s because someone wants you to.#polling #democracy #righttovote

This is all super weird and shows that we really have no idea what’s going on with these LLMs. Are we really ready for this stuff to become the backbone of internet search?

“We'll demonstrate a previously undocumented failure mode for GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models, which results in bizarre completions (in some cases explicitly contrary to the purpose of the model), and present the results of our investigation into this phenomenon.”

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldmagikarp-plus-prompt-generation

/via @clive

When the facts don't fit the theory, the practitioner doubts the theory, the theorist doubts the facts, and the skeptical empiricist doubts both facts and theory. https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1623056925523845125

The Wallace-Bolyai-Gerwein theorem says that for any 2-dimensional polygon, you can make a finite number of cuts to turn it into any other polygon that you like (of the same area). Here's a visual demonstration:

That billionaires can anonymously direct propaganda at millions of Americans during the Super Bowl is a huge threat to our democracy. That it isn’t being covered as such is an even bigger threat.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/02/jesus-ad-superbowl-he-gets-us.html

The Bradley infantry fighting vehicle and the AN/TWQ-1 Avenger air defense system, which are bound for Ukraine, have arrived at the German port of Bremerhaven

They Are Russians Fighting Against Their Homeland. Here’s Why. - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/12/world/europe/russian-legion-ukraine-war.html

People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".

Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and *add* them all to the library.

In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.

How big of a platform is @twitter? Now that @elonmusk made view counts public, we (@_mohsen_m) can find out

ANSWER: Not nearly as big as it looks! For accounts with lots of followers, only a small fraction (~1%) see median tweet 😬 (and this overcounts, as it includes RT views)

The social networks of our time in a nutshell - as seen by #midjourney.

Says a lot about what we all think about #Facebook, #Twitter, #Instagram and #TikTok.

News from the Council of Europe, which includes the European Court of Human Rights: "As a result, it is virtually unimaginable that the use of Pegasus or equivalent spyware could ever be considered in accordance with the law and the necessary safeguards as outlined by the Court."
https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/highly-intrusive-spyware-threatens-the-essence-of-human-rights