tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

@andrei_chiffa
By reading it. Most student cheating is obvious to a specialist who knows what they have (and have not) been taught and has read millions of words of student attempts to write about it.

But there is a more fundamental point I need to write up in detail:

University teaching is basically a form of intensively supervised reinforcement learning on a carefully curated, small data set aiming to produce a specific capability.

It is obvious the AI didn't go to class *here*

"i use linux as my operating system," i state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. he swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision.
"actually," he says with a grin, "linux is just the kernel. you use GNU+linux."
i don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "i use alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. it's linux, but it's not GNU+linux."

the smile quickly drops from the man's face. his body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth as he drop to the floor with a sickly thud. as he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!"
coolly, i reply "if windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" i interrupt his response with "and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. even if you were correct, you won't be for long."

with a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. he lies on the floor, cold and limp. i've womansplained him to death.

The 117th & final launch of an #Ariane5 rocket is scheduled this afternoon.

Ariane 5 has played a crucial role in ESA's science programme from the very first flight, the failed launch of Cluster I, to almost the very last, with JUICE's success in April.

And between have come XMM-Newton, Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, BepiColombo, & JWST, all outstanding scientific missions 👏

Thank you Arianespace & CNES, & ad astra, Ariane 5 🙇‍♂️🚀✨

#Astrodon #SpaceFlight #EndOfAnEra #ItIsRocketScience

Apparently Zaha Hadid's firm are now generating design ideas by using "Zaha Hadid [building type] [location]" as image-generator prompts, and quite happy to say so publicly.

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/04/26/zaha-hadid-architects-patrik-schumacher-ai-dalle-midjourney/#

Howzat for efficiency, eh? The reduction of a starchitect's signature style to a tired cartoon cliche of itself used to take decades! What a time to be alive, etc etc.

Metrics
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/metrics (click for full comic)
#smbc #hiveworks

9. Why does it matter?

At a very basic level, it's important to point to the immediate causal sources of problems that one wants to remedy, because those sources are the best targets for interventions.

Telling women to cite themselves more frequently is not necessarily going to be a fruitful remedy to a self-citation disparity if men and women with similar numbers of previous publications cite themselves at similar rates, and the disparity is driven by an upstream cause (publication number).

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.

#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

TIL that „beyond the pale“ actually derives from „pale“ as in a stake driven into the ground as part of a fence (think of „impaling“ someone or „palisades“).
So its meaning of going beyond acceptable behaviour suddenly makes much more sense to me

If Ayn Rand's own life wasn't enough to show that libertarianism is a failed idea, we now have further evidence.

https://onlysky.media/alee/why-libertarian-cities-fail/

@kjhealy “That’s right:
Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty.”

😳

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/do-politicians-outside-the-united-states-also-think-voters-are-more-conservative-than-they-really-are/D21A9077EE2435F2B910394378E96450

Nice, very hands-on paper on how to run surveys in market-research panels "Using Market-Research Panels for Behavioral Science: An Overview and Tutorial" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25152459221140388 @surveystatisticsandmethodology #surveymethods #survey #surveymethodology

Stefan Löfven. PR-konsult.

Jag vet att jag inte borde bli förvånad, men jag blir förvånad. https://www.di.se/nyheter/stefan-lofvens-nya-uppdrag-pr-konsult/

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid slammed into what is today the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. The impact was so forceful that it kicked a tremendous amount of debris out of the atmosphere, which then rained back down, blanketing the Earth's surface with a layer of dust.

All that debris re-entering the atmosphere created a pulse of heat so strong that it set the world on fire.

Interesting paper on effect of distance to refugee accommodations on attitudes towards refugees in Germany. "we report a solid null effect and conclude that the placement of reception facilities does not influence locals’ attitudes toward refugees" https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcad028/7187857 #refugees #racism #SOEP

To co-sign, boost.

One of the decisive moments in my understanding of #LLMs and their limitations was when, last autumn, @emilymbender walked me through her Thai Library thought experiment.

She's now written it up as a Medium post, and you can read it here. The value comes from really pondering the question she poses, so take the time to think about it. What would YOU do in the situation she outlines?

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-the-national-library-of-thailand-f2bf761a8a83