Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

I want to be like the cool kids and understand how to do fun artsy hobby things with electronics. I'm just putting that out there. 2025 wish list 🥺

lead: a story of courage that likewise involves scientific brilliance as dramatic as realizing *most measures of this entire phenomenon were tainted on a global level, that's how big the problem was*, all the time I think about how Claire Patterson knew what everyone was denying

By far the best coverage of o3 is this essay by François Chollet, it's crammed with interesting insights beyond just reporting on the benchmark score: https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough

Published my own notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/20/openai-o3-breakthrough/

@grimalkina @felipe Dr. Paige Harden (or kph3k as she is known sometimes) is an amazing communicator about all things behavior-genetics. I'll tell you a short story in the next post.

The short answer is that it's not surprising that variations in the recipe for building a brain (DNA) might have some impact on how those brains vary in their expression of a trait like conscientiousness. In fact, this is such a trivial mechanic that we see non-zero heritability in basically any trait (that is, in anything that varies across people). It's a consequence of the notion that there are no uncaused causes. DNA + environment are the causes of our behavior.

So a non-zero or even high (like h2=.50) heritability doesn't tell us that much. And it's such a complex causal web from DNA -> Behavior that even knowing the hundreds or thousands of genetic variations that are associated with variations in conscientiousness basically gives us no information about how biology impacts it. As a former fMRI neuroscientist, it's basically the same story with brains. We know that brains do the behavior, but knowing some brain-behavior associations actually isn't that illuminating re the behavior.

Re twin studies, they do have their problems but especially at the level of their general conclusions they are pretty solid, as far as I know. There is a lot to argue about in the details though. :D

I figured out a prompting pattern for getting Claude to produce fully self-contained Python scripts that execute with "uv run" using PEP 723 inline script dependencies - and now I can one-shot useful Python utilities with it https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/

Pull quotes are advertising. They advertise the article itself. I can see them as marginally useful as you flip pages in a magazine, scanning quickly as you're deciding whether to read the article.

The affordance of a single page web article seems different. I doubt people scroll down an article looking at the pull quotes instead of just reading the first paragraphs.
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GitHub added a permanent free tier for GitHub Copilot today, including access to both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/18/free-tier-for-github-copilot/

« Voir quelqu’un se branler sur un arbre, ça ne va pas exciter tout le monde »

extrait de l’article que @Medor_mag a trouvé le plus pertinent pour mettre en vis-à-vis de Bikepunk.

Merci l’équipe Médor, franchement, merci quoi ! Vous imaginez pas les blagues sur mon bouquin que me font vos lecteurices… (à commencer par mon épouse qui se marrait alors que moi je n’avais pas remarqué)

J’avoue, c’est le genre de trucs qui me fait vraiment marrer. Quand ça arrive aux autres quoi !

#bikepunk

good morning and welcome to 2023

I tried to find out about something on the internet (TM) based on the attached meme.

"what are examples for cool databases"

I found out nothing and the #ai I used said I should put in some money, but instead I wrote this post.

#cloud #architecture #database #meme #devlife

I am mildly amused that OpenAI telemetry rollout led to a classical Kubernetes control plane DoS.

In my experience DDoSing your own control plane is the #1 way people generate large failures in K8s. What are others?

Mastodon #research 🚀

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👉 https://sosci.univie.ac.at/MastodonActivity/

Your thoughts will contribute to meaningful research. Feel free to boost this post so we can reach as many users as possible. Thank you so much! 🙌

#Mastodon #Survey #FediverseResearch