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biophysboyon OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560

Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama.

Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).

biophysboyon On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Why is a "normie" better off if he hyperventilates like this? In that scenario, they would be screwed AND anxious. If it really is as transformational as you say, then no amount of preparation or awareness matters. You are infinitesimally more ready then they are. Luckily for all of us, there is more to knowledge work then technical implementation.

biophysboyon On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Why is it unlikely?

biophysboyon Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

yes, they just need to accumulate wealth until they're 47, just like previous generations. no need to rethink land use or property tax

biophysboyon Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

Old people seem to be surviving just fine in areas where property tax is based on current market value? It sucks to move, but luckily they have an extremely valuable property to sell

biophysboyon Doomscrolling ourselves to death

I think it’s fair to say that Wallace is postmodern but less self-satisfied and complacent about it. The elements of irony and cynicism are still there, but insufficient. So he synthesizes a “what next?”, which is labeled metamodern.

biophysboyon Doomscrolling Ourselves to Death

yes, the fundamental BS assumption of algorithmic social media is that human desire and curiosity is legible, and can be calculated in a straightforward way.

biophysboyon Doomscrolling ourselves to death

A lot of postmodern maximalist books like IJ try to reckon w/ these problems. Its easy to reflexively hate the meaningless, ironic, media-fried worlds they build, but they are mirrors, not instruction manuals.

biophysboyon Doomscrolling ourselves to death

I genuinely think Reddit is basically cable news for millenials.

biophysboyon Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

Yes, they can’t magically resolve ambiguities in the prompt. Hence it is better to make something clear at the outset

biophysboyon Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

I like the Claude constitution overall - I hope it becomes something representatives vote on and amend, to avoid the centralized corporate censorship you describe. In the meantime, I am fine with it abstaining from doing DHH’s bidding, especially because there are so many AI alternatives.

biophysboyon Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

Yes? The difference is often 10X or 100X with very little time lost. I’m learning how to give it enough info pretty quickly.

Edit: I also have to read the methods anyway for scientific accountability/integrity anyways, so I may as well play that role at the outset.

biophysboyon Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI

I have recently come to the conclusion that thinking for 2 seconds and using a cheap model with a slightly more detailed prompt works just as well as zero-shotting an idea with a fancy model. I work in science, and instead of asking the model “write a topic extraction algorithm”, I just say “hey look at this matrix factorization script I found in a repo, now make it use plotly and duckdb”. Have others come to the same conclusion here?

It makes me skeptical that the flagship companies are sustainable. Every company is going to maximize “fuel efficiency” to save time and money.

Then again, maybe the cheaper models have more markup for them, in which case they are probably happy w this arrangement. I’d be curious to know how the money making varies by model.

biophysboyon Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

Well, because I expect this to last for two years. Nobody likes it except for birthday boy and his sycophants. All of the signs around Lake Ontario still say the name; same goes for the people that live by it.

Google should override it but I don’t expect them to, because theyre selfish and suck. Only thing to do is win elections.

biophysboyon Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

I mean ... currently I would? The environment will be different soon

biophysboyon Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

It makes perfect sense that govs control names within their jurisdiction - I am eyerolling at both the name change and the reaction.

I am curious though - is it convention to leave the data as is, or is it illegal to modify it?

Regardless, itll just be changed back in 2 years; as long as I can type "lake ontario" and get directed to Lake Ontario, I do not care at all what the gov database calls it currently.

biophysboyon A Preview of DuckDB v2.0

You might know this already, but you can query pandas/polars/arrow tables directly w/ duckdb and use whatever stats packages you feel like alongside it in the same python script. I feel like they do a decent job sticking to the simpler statistical fans that make sense in sql.

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

> Lineage A was first found in a Wuhan neighborhood right next to the wet market (closer to the wet market than 97% of Wuhan’s population). Again, it would be a bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic was first detected at a wet market. But it would be an even more bizarre coincidence if a lab leak pandemic separated into two strains, and both were first detected at a wet market!

To the extent that there can ever be a "smoking gun" in this debate, this is it for me. Given the mutation rate of covid, the lab leak requires that two lineages transferred to the same area a week apart by mere accident.

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

There's still value in communicating with cranks. You just have to take a different tack. Just say they're a crank.

Then they hyperventilate about irrelevant details (like California) and other readers of the thread see what the whining is really about.

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

There are two kinds of vaccine skeptics: a much larger group of people who will in fact have conversations about costs and benefits, and a small group of cranks like yourself that should be treated like the drooling imbeciles that they are.

- Don't live in California

- Risks are considered, but you will never be satisfied

- Long-term risks have been studied with very good methodology.

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

Is it? There are a lot of edgy contrarians that are very overconfident - doesnt seem like a global consensus to me

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

You should elaborate on your secret knowledge of COVIDs origin. I was not aware this was completely settled knowledge.

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

Every vaccine licensed for use in the USA has a clinical review memo that list the adverse events that you claim are dismissed. You live in an imaginary fantasy world.

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

They are not the progenitors of the skepticism, but they gave the skeptics significantly more authority than they previously had. Over surveillance networks, vaccine scheduling, public health comms, etc. MAGA sees them as useful idiots for the coalition, rather than threats to the US.

biophysboyon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

Why is it bad for a public health communicator to say that vaccines stop spread by lowering the effective reproduction number of a pathogen? Its correct. Your extensive research didn't seem to work.

biophysboyon How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

It annoys me that the default AI mode is so tedious and longwinded. I read a lot of nonfiction - the house style of AI is basically marketing copy.

biophysboyon Databricks drove down AI coding spend 70%

Do you have tips for generating clean productive output per dollar?

biophysboyon Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)

TCJA made changes to corporate capital gains, no?

As for tax hikes <90%, this hasn’t occurred in income; the opposite has occurred. You could make the case that it hasn’t been worth it for the poorest brackets though, given other coincident policy changes

biophysboyon New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

Well there are much simpler “algorithms” that do not use reinforcement learning and do not have the same emergent issues at stake here (addiction, ragebait, etc). The argument would be that algorithmic curation makes you an editor, not a passive host, and you should face the risk of reasonable liability if you choose to use more lucrative extractive machine learning tools.

biophysboyon U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

bls.gov/ces is the main page for this survey and has a plot.

The error updates annually. Their handbook has a Reliability section where they detail sampling/nonsampling error.