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. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/23/civitas-institute-professor-tenure/?utm_source=articleshare&utm_medium=social
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. https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence
AI generated fake news briefly caused markets to fall, but the only thing we have to worry about regulating is the singularity, right?
https://www.insider.com/ai-generated-hoax-explosion-pentagon-viral-markets-dipped-2023-5
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.
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.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nERuJylCqR42irULLTVOMjIefb4yD63FI4yLpJpnO4A/edit
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
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. https://ai.google/static/documents/palm2techreport.pdf
AI has been a great boon for hucksters, grifters, and con artists
https://gizmodo.com/ai-frank-ocean-discord-ai-generated-songs-1850423659
Great threat by Kareem Carr about Elon's racist support for the claim that there's more black violence on whites than the converse.
Mass shooting
Retweet @Holberg
--
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: https://wapo.st/3B5O47K
Never seen anything approaching the speed of innovation in the open source LLM world today. https://twitter.com/Tim_Dettmers/status/1654917326381228033?s=20
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.
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. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/24/the-future-of-fertility
Unprofessional data wrangler and Mastodon’s official fact checker. Older and crankier than you are.