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Joe boosted

We can expect to see a lot of this. Prof turns down a tenured job at University of Texas - to join their conservative institute no less - because of the legislature politicizing higher ed and uncertainty about tenure. Regardless of outcome, the government’s hostility to its state universities will leave a mark. texastribune.org/2023/05/23/ci

Joe boosted

Lessons, living with parents with dementia: when an app on their phone spontaneously changes it's icon, it's a fucking disaster.

Some Google engineer launched a feature that got them a promotion and now my mom can't use her phone anymore. Silicon Valley is incapable of imagining a user who isn't a 27 year old white man.

"Look at our one pager on plans for dealing with imaginary unrealized dangerous superintelligent AI while ignoring any of the problems with our current products!" - OpenAI. openai.com/blog/governance-of-

Joe boosted

AI generated fake news briefly caused markets to fall, but the only thing we have to worry about regulating is the singularity, right?

insider.com/ai-generated-hoax-

Joe boosted

Digital information technologies are having unprecedented effects on society. Both their implementations and consequences are extremely difficult to monitor, and efforts to do so are often impeded by the technology companies that deploy them.

Today we have piece out in which we make the case for an intergovernmental body, analogous to the IPCC, with the role of collating information about implementations and consequences, benefits and harms of these systems.

nature.com/articles/d41586-023

Entertaining (at least for me) physics discussion of why the problem with SUV/pedestrian accidents isn't due to the mass difference relative to sedans but the height of the SUV. SUV/sedan collisions are a different matter.

docs.google.com/document/d/1nE

Joe boosted

Looks like “a [completely uninterpretable] deep neural network [with substantial unreported hyperparameter and architecture tuning] reproduced [some aspects of] our brain data”

has replaced

“a simple computational model capturing our proposed mechanism reproduced our brain data”

as the new figure 7 strategy for high-profile neuroscience papers

Today's covid quiz - why is it remarkably stupid for the CDC to use units of "percentage of deaths" as their metric for monitoring the pandemic?

The latest version of Bard that Google announced at Google I/O thinks that you should suspend judgement on whether or not Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll.

Google's announced "paper" about their latest LLM (Palm 2) is a continuation of the trend of redefining academic papers as a list of cherry picked demos and benchmark results. ai.google/static/documents/pal

Joe boosted

Great threat by Kareem Carr about Elon's racist support for the claim that there's more black violence on whites than the converse.

twitter.com/kareem_carr/status

Joe boosted

Quite a news day.

Trump guilty, Tucker to Twitter, Stantos charged in federal proble.

Joe boosted

Mass shooting 

Retweet @Holberg

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Breath fairly taken away by this note at the end of Washington Post article illustrating with 3D models the destruction caused by an AR-15’s bullets.

It’s not just theoretical. With autopsy reports and family consent, they use those 3D models to show us how Dylan Pozner (6) and Peter Wang (15) were killed. Thoughts and prayers can fuck themselves.

If you’re up to it, I think it’s useful knowledge, and here’s a gift link: wapo.st/3B5O47K

Just cancelled my NYTimes subscription. On the verge for a long time, but this put me over the edge.

Never seen anything approaching the speed of innovation in the open source LLM world today. twitter.com/Tim_Dettmers/statu

Life expectancy is *not* the same as the age most people die. If a lot of people die as infants or children (as they did 100 years ago) then the average age of death will be substantially lower.

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Sigh. This New Yorker article confuses life expectancy with the age most people die. Interestingly, in the print edition it says "most Americans died" while the online version has "many Americans died" in their mid-fifties so they got the message from somewhere but still got the big picture wrong. newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04

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