Joe @twitskeptic@qoto.org
Unprofessional data wrangler and Mastodon’s official fact checker. Older and crankier than you are.
Joined Nov 2022
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. https://ai.google/static/documents/palm2techreport.pdf
Joe
boosted
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.
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: https://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. 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
NYTimes headline in next big recession: "Massive layoffs boost US economy"
Ted Chiang's interesting New Yorker essay on AI and the need to reform capitalism reminds me very much of the higher level view David Runciman took on the problems of capitalism in this talk a few months ago.
Runciman talk: https://tinyurl.com/43mrmyxt
Chiang essay: https://tinyurl.com/pc22tpjj
Trying to suspend judgement on Bluesky after signing up a few hours ago, but already getting some bot-ish followers that I haven't seen on my six months on Mastodon.
Really enjoyed this Sean Carroll podcast with Tobias Warnecke on, among other things, the remarkable recent discovery of histones in bacteria. Very accessible even if it's been a long time since high school biology. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/04/24/234-tobias-warnecke-on-cellular-structure-and-evolution/
Joe
boosted
I've had my issues with Donald G. McNeil Jr, but this critique of David Wallace-Wells interview in the NY Times magazine is spot-on. The NY Times gets it wrong all too often on COVID. Here they go again.
Joe
boosted
Yet another revelation....
Jane Roberts, who is married to Chief Justice #JohnRoberts, made $10.3 million in commissions from elite law firms, whistleblower documents show
At least one of those firms argued a case before Chief Justice Roberts after paying his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars. #SCOTUS #corruption
https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4
Joe
boosted
I just read the best paper I've seen yet this year, Sam Zhang's work on confusion between inferential uncertainty and outcome variability.
In the context of a trial or experiment, inferential uncertainty refers to our statistical confidence that two groups are different. Outcome variability refers to how much variation there is in individual outcomes within a single group.
IMO confusion about this is ubiquitous in biomedical science.
Here's the paper: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/5tcgs/
Joe
boosted
Disney sending the lawyers down to the mouse vault to use their tiny hammer to break the "find out" glass and go for the governor lololol, extremely here for this
Joe
boosted
After hearing Sebastian Bubeck talk about the Sparks of AGI paper today, I decided to give GPT-4 another chance.
If it can really reason, it should be able to solve very simply logic puzzles. So I made one up. Sebastian stressed the importance of asking the question right, so I stressed that this is a logic puzzle and didn't add anything confusing about knights and knaves.
Still, it gets the solution wrong.
Unprofessional data wrangler and Mastodon’s official fact checker. Older and crankier than you are.
Joined Nov 2022
