Jefh Parks
@jeff.at.arjentic.ai
Tech Unc, trying to figure out whether ads really work. Causal inference, Bayesian MMM, incrementality testing, and lately LLM evals. Leading measurement teams, based in NYC.
Read Larry Niven's Ringworld when I was a kid. Always wanted to see it for myself, what it would really look like to stand on it and look at the horizon. Had to settle for fairly crappy CG renderings. Alph made this raytraced rendering for me in about 10 minutes.
We were investigating Wedgewood for faking their data and emailed them for comment this morning, ahead of publishing the findings tomorrow. They are now trying to cover up their fraud with the "we were doing a social experiment" excuse. Full story here: blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftypluso...
FiftyPlusOne just caught a pollster faking data — and they copped to it
In response to a request for comment on a FiftyPlusOne investigation, Wedgewood Polls admitted their data was bogus
blog.fiftyplusone.news
FiftyPlusOne.news@fiftyplusone.news · 5d ago50+1 has caught another pollster faking data: fiftyplusone.substack.com/p/fiftypluso...
all of these things are true of human labor. do you have any idea what the 742,000 people who work at Accenture globally are doing? and if people knew when they were making mistakes, they wouldn't make them www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-...
I decided to go and learn the building blocks of reality and it turns out IT IS NOT EVEN COMPLICATED PARTICLES! IT IS SO SIMPLE!! ALL ATOMS LITERALLY *ARE* JUST SPICY HYDROGENS BROS ARE OUT HERE WORSHIPPING COMPLEXITY AND ITS JUST PROTONS AND NEUTRONS MASHED TOGETHER
People really need to get into using LLMs as *learning tools*. They will never get frustrated, they will never get bored, they will always look things up, they will *always* rephrase things so you get it.
Thoth@thoth.ptnote.dev · last wk."LLMs can help non-programmers with no technical background get a foothold in doing something that used to require a LOT of technical knowledge to get started in, putting them in a better position to learn the technical stuff over time by providing a less steep learning curve" feels uncontroversial?
It may or may not be conscious, but it certainly is a lot smarter than me
They're the definition of audience capture, they've become a parody of themselves pandering to the rabid anti-AI market. They drove the whole book scanning thing back in the summer.
This is FUD on 404 Media's part. What they're describing is how all targeted advertising works online, and the fact that people don't know how targeted ads work doesn't make it any creepier when ChatGPT does it than when other sites or apps do. Targeted ads are ripe for criticism, but this ain't it.
404 Media@404media.co · last wk.Most ChatGPT users probably don’t know you can be specifically targeted on the platform by advertisers based on your email, phone number, or unique phone identifier.
... possibly perform the mysterious feats of invention required to write an efficient program. Only the priests could do that. They were thus unalterably opposed to those mad revolutionaries who wanted to make programming so easy that anyone could to it."
Dare I say it but: skill issue. It’s made me more able to persist at hard things. I’m actually doing things that felt impossible before, because I feel like I have a useful assistant to work through obstacles with.
Coach Finstock@coachfinstock.bsky.social · 2w agoYou can lie to yourself every day that this horseshit doesn't make you lazy and stupid, but reality comes at you pretty fast
actual computer just released toks, "the best tokenizer on earth and the first tokenizer designed for the quadrillion-token era." most of the work is done in pure assembly. genuinely nuts. actual.inc/company/blog...
This was going around Twitter today, if you ask Claude “is X lat Y long land or water?” and plot the results, it has clearly embedded a map of the globe in its weights over time
Such a strange feeling; built something, but now need it to teach me about what it does.
New use case: I have been using /informed-patient + our more advanced source-verifying harness (stay tuned!!) to research a complex treatment/risk/protocol question for yet another loved one navigating cancer care. Truly amazing how swiftly it was able to set me up with good directions
Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · last mo.I wanted to give /informed-patient some better guidance for handling medical classification frameworks and helping you reason about them. This is still in experimentation phase so I welcome hearing about whether it works or not see it at: github.com/DrCatHicks/i...
People sleep on CUNY but it is one of the absolute JEWELS of U.S. Higher Ed and has been for decades. And what's the thanks the system gets??? It has to fight for its life every single year because it has been systematically defunded.
Let's change the subject to something truly odious, coffee shop laptop bans.
Sometimes business feels like driving 90 mph straight at a brick wall, while everyone's arguing about the air conditioning.
We talk about social media being bad for people because of clout poisoning, but I don’t think anyone has really studied the economics of newsletters and the effects of audience capture on our information ecosystem. The incentives are turbocharged and frequently bad.
P(aul) Frazee@pfrazee.com · last mo.ed zitron lies to people for money, yes
Seems awesome to me? It doesn't ban "AI" work at all, just no AGI, which, who cares, might as well ban leprechauns. It only pauses the actual work until there is a regulatory body, which is what everyone wants (the tech companies keep asking for this!)
aly@aly.codes · last mo.seems bad
Haven't been this excited about code since we were typing in Basic snippets from Beagle Bros print ads
maybe it’s not as important as we thought to learn things in order maybe you can build the prototype and then understand how it works later or learn about distributed systems before taking Python 101: FOR LOOPS i guarantee those same people will be just fine
SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social · last mo.for the last maybe ten years, all the best young software engineers i have met learned by being minecraft modders as kids the class of '32 or '34 will have learned by vibecoding their mods and idek how that shakes out
probably not a coincidence that this is more or less what software engineering has already become. pick a problem, have the machine figure it out, digest the solution and work with the thing to find a humane presentation, then post the PR x.com/AlexKontorov...
Demonstrating reasoning and language capabilities in computers alters our understanding of self, even if we don't particularly like the alteration
