salynchnew

Daniel Rock has done some interesting work on the ROI of AI in general (also, I believe two of his papers are referenced in this study). Note that this doesn't explicitly restrict itself to covering LLMs, but... still a very interesting body of work.

https://www.danielianrock.com/research

Honestly, DOGE seems like a disingenuous enterprise simply based on the fact that they are not starting with the DoD.

Defense contractors simply couldn't stop accidentally electricuting people in warzones[0, 1]. They have had a major negative impact on readiness while benefitting from massive contracts[2] and . There also appears to be a situation where DoD leadership has been captured by the defense industry[4].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32334682 [1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/another-mysterious... [2] https://www.icij.org/investigations/windfalls-war/us-contrac... [3] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/pressroom/articles/2023/0... [4] https://quincyinst.org/research/subsidizing-the-military-ind...

While I agree and generally feel the same way, I think it is worth mentioning that the "war for attention" is an existential issue for most online publications these days. The clickbait headlines are used specifically because it marginally increases readership/views, without which the publication would probably cease to exist.

The generous hypothesis, here, is that this is so they can automate the benchmarking itself. If that is true, then this is likely a result of the test authors being too clever for their own good and over-optimizing. If an LLM can't figure out on their own that "how many" is asking for a number, it has failed at a much more basic level.

You should be able to easily accept answers like "four" and "4" as equivalent, for example. I doubt there will be that many frontier models running against this test at any time, and a simple glance at the answers from any human should be enough to catch edge cases like this one.

Given the number of ultrarich and powerful people that already hate the Hindenberg folks... my guess would be that there is some calculus here about the incoming U.S. presidential administration's enmity towards whistleblowers and their prior statements about changing libel laws in the U.S.

One interesting part of this is a small number of companies will post multiple job listings with different locations listed for a single open headcount, to get maximum expsosure on Indeed and LinkedIn (both of which have some sense of geo-based or onsite/remote-based recommendations for job seekers).

> It might just be that the headline is bad and the literature is simply describing vole predation.

Correct!

From the article:

> Any supplementation of their vegetarian diet was historically believed to primarily occur through eating insects or, on occasion, nest predation of eggs or young hatchlings (Bradley and Marzluff 2003).

> Roughly 30 years ago, Callahan (1993) radically altered our perception of squirrels by characterizing as many as 30 species of the family Sciuridae as facultative predators of small vertebrates capable of killing and consuming adult fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals (Table S1).

The study is itself a detailed breakdown of changes in foraging behavior linkedin to "food pulses" (which I guess means the times when various food sources are available, a la acorns in the fall and sprouts in the spring).

Related article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer_Wolf

Again, with no proof and likely not real. If there was a crashed drone, you'd imagine that they'd release a photo or something. The reality is that law enforcement officers are just as susceptible to mass hysteria as everyone else.

Very, very cool-looking project!

It would be very cool to somehow make a laser tag variant, and build a persistent game and multiple players, StreetWars style.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151026121204/http://www.sfgate...

It really reads like a fun thought experiment which in practice is really impractical for real-world use cases.

"I can make your life miserable and I have enough money to do so" is something that can happen in the real world and that the average person doesn't want to happen. Tthe Statute of Anne was created b/c previously printers could essentially publish any work that wasn't already in publication by another house... which is in some ways closer to a Harberger tax situation, but was widely hated by everyone who wasn't one of the publishers who monopolized access to the printing presses.

This really assumes that money is more important that creative works (or art, heaven forbid) and that less well-off creators should only exist to serve the market.

If someone just wants to create something they like, and then own what they created, a big corp or rich jerk could easily bankrupt them through the tax/force them to sell it off.

Some things don't need to exist in the context of a market and markets are often less efficient than folks seem to assume.

"Don't trust an oil company to disrupt their own business model with renewables" seems to be the lesson here.

Perhaps the best roads are those that see the least vehicular traffic.

Hence why U.S. roads are not built to last in the long term.

It's kind of maddening how often blogs like this will make motions towards developing an educated opinion (citing multiple reports, researching stats from public datassets, etc.) but don't seem to have bothered to actually talk to any of the people who are invovled in the practice they describe in their post (in this case, building roads).

Ah, so the real problem here is for people who are "squatting" on an a large number of empty investment properties and don't want the hassle of dealing with any actual tenants.

Related phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

Fun fact is that I have at least one CD where there was an audio track misprint (one track repeated). I didn't actually notice until I ripped it and used Picard to analyze the tracks.

I also once found two tracks where Spotify's own data was wrong (wrong audio files associated with the album/track names).

After failing in my attempts to escalate it through Spotify support several times, I ended up having to reach out to Glenn MacDonald on Twitter to get it fixed.

My first thought when seeing this link was "Oh look! HN is repping that cool book about buildings."

Most tree planting efforts fail, as they ignore a lot of implementation/maintenance details and result in lots of dead trees.

Mass tree planting is like doing a massive, massive migration. You can't just stick seedlings in the ground arbitrarily and expect a stand of trees to sustain itself 'cause "nature"... the successful processes like the Miyawaki method require planning, community investment, sustained work for ~5 years, etc.

https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-...

The real endgame here isn't to just enumerate and then patent those sequences, right?

Interesting! There might be other unintended issues from transmitting heat, I suppose?

Even from transmitting heat to the phone's components itself or other items that are nearby, e.g. laptops: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5219578/.

It's pretty amazing to have an actually carbon-neutral way to create natural gas.

TL;DR: A fungus, likely spread by human activity, has been causing a large die-off of other-wise healthy amphibians.

I'll add that there are lots of other causes of mass amphibian extinctions, usually tied to localized habitat destruction and/or climate change: https://blaustein.science.oregonstate.edu/pdfs/Kiesecker_200.... These causes also increase the susceptibility of amphibians to various pathogens/disease.

Naming things is hard.

At a previous employer, I saw several cool-ish open source projects instantly doomed to obscurity by picking a name that either completely duplicated the name of an existing OSS project or were guaranteed to have terrible SEO for another reason.

However, Microsoft seems to have a unique crossover of fragmented business units and centralized marketing. That's why you end up with Azure -> Subproject -> Actual Product/Service word soup. Perviously, they did this with the Windows Live brand from 2005-2012, and "Xbox" for a wide range of gaming projects (many of which were on PC).

Companion article from Nature's news channel: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11613

As an aside, the debunkers were also quite entertaining (at least as entertaining as GGS), although they weren't generally commercialized or marketed to the same degree.

I loved the team's demonstration that showed the complexity of Easter Island's civilization, and included a demo of how the moai statues were "walked" into place.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11613

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY

Probably to lock out future competition.

Note that Webtext and OpenWebText datasets were basically scraped from Reddit. It's incredibly valuable if you can lock down this dataset vs. letting competitors use it.

Weird how oil site cleanup/remediation programs and things like DAC are essentially an indirect subsidy for what should be a brownfield's lifetime cost.