How dare you impeach the reliability of (checks notes) MrSpocky(tm)?

Okay, so it turns out the only fix was to wipe the entire cache, cookies, login data, everything. Not sure if that was a Microsoft coding mess-up or a Firefox coding mess-up.

Paywall, can't read it, but this seems very implausible a priori.

These alleged 'agents' do not have agency. An LLM is in that way no different from other software functions like

def square(x):
return x*x

If nobody puts an x in, it just sits there waiting for an input. Who put what x in there?

How come having UBI would make us all lazy, but billionaires are supposedly hard-working and highly motivated?

It is hilarious to me how uninformative and gibberish the title is:

"Necessity and suitability of mechanisms of capacity - economic analysis and comparison with a future-proof duty to secure"

Based on this, the report could well be about the military or about maintaining server infrastructure.

There was a report not too long ago of a home owner having ICE arrest contractors the moment they were done renovating her home, presumably to get out of paying them, so I can immediately see a potential angle from which this could make sense.

The implication that he sees others as having less agency than himself is very telling.

CIPRES is shutting down at the end of June: www.phylo.org .

It's been such a good resource for the phylogenetics community. Thanks to #NSF and Simons for funding it and for all the people who have worked to grow and sustain this for so long.

If Teams needs me to sign in, it would be great if the sign in button actually reacted to clicking on it.

I swear, software used to work for the most part. I don't think I am misremembering that.

Advice for @erc.europa.eu :

Prohibit the use of LLMs for grant writing. Let applicants sign a declaration that they have not used such systems and that the text is written by them and them alone.

I am not even in the USA, but what really gets me about this is the power differential. They coddle people who were in power and had the power to improve things while hectoring people who once every four years each get to make 0.000000378% of the decision who gets to be in power.

A preview of a journal article shown by BlueSky together with the link to that article, only instead of showing the title of the article, it reads, "Please wait whilst we redirect you". Also, just lookest atst thatst pretentioust littlest "whilst".

Wondering if journal publishers might want to do something about this preview. I saw another one that just said "wait to be redirected". Not a good look.

Does nobody read any literature older than two years?

This paper 👇 came out 29 years ago, but yes, many people still seem to need gene tree discordance explained. Many talks and papers claim that it was discovered only with high throughput sequencing. Most people misunderstand what incomplete lineage sorting is, etc.

academic.oup.com/sysbio/artic...

Two-party systems should really be considered as detrimental to human liberty as single-party systems. "Lesser evil" is a mind-killer.

Yes, this is how the world works, in every area from voting to business. You give people something valuable, and then after they already have it and you cannot take it back, you tell them what you expect in return, and then... wait, I think I noticed a problem here. Huh.

Miro really has an extremely unintuitive interface. People are constantly moving things around without meaning to or can't figure out how to do something.

Your goose has a very weird tail, you should get that checked out by a vet.

This and a comment on Palantir claiming that soft power is "over" just came up directly next to each other in my feed.

We need *both* theoretical understanding and evidence. But if I had to choose between somebody who theorises well but ignores data and somebody who looks at data but doesn't contemplate theory, I would prefer the latter. At least they engage with reality as it exists outside of armchair reasoning.

I didn't know that until I read your post just now, so isn't it your decision whether the f is silent or not? Just introduce yourself as ˈkaʁp͡f 🙂

But he just won an election half a year ago. What has he done since then that he didn't do in the years before that? Or is it a vibe shift because of prices rising due to the attack on Iran?

Came here for this

I mean that if we want (and need!) to understand societal and personal/psychological impacts of LLMs, we need more information on how widely and how they are actually being used. I'd rely neither on AI company claims nor on likely unrepresentative circles of acquaintances (eg ours behave different)

Projects?

I was writing about what my acquaintances are doing, whether I find that wise or ethical or neither, just as you wrote about what your acquaintances are doing.

Should I also have responded to you sharing your observations with sarcastic encouragement to continue your own genAI projects?

Thousands of Vancouver perverts delight in taking pictures of tree genitalia VANCOUVER - Thousands of perverts, creeps, and peeping toms have taken countless photos from different angles of tree genitalia and shared them on social media.

Thousands of Vancouver perverts delight in taking pictures of tree genitalia

The claim that there is no need for governing structures in a world that contains more than a few dozen humans means that there is no need to even engage with the rest. This can only flow from a worldview that is not able to touch observable reality and history with a hundred parsecs long pole.

In my experience, uses (coding, 'summarising' text, editing, malicious slop generation, watching it fail for amusement, etc.), levels of dependency, and gullibility vary widely across people. It would be useful to have more quantitative studies on how many people use this stuff in what way.

Off-setting cement is a scale that is maybe realistic. "Bring temperature down again" is not and never will be. A civilisation that has a nervous breakdown whenever energy prices rise will not tolerate diverting a massive fraction of its energy production into carbon capture until back at 300 ppm.

We need to get to zero fossil fuels ASAP. But any sentence that has "carbon removal" or "bring temperatures back down" in it is creating false comfort and fostering the illusion that burning a bit more won't be so bad because we can just remove it again. Realistically, we can't and won't.