datsci_est_2015

So how will separate systems communicate with each other? Or are there no separate systems? That’s the digital singularity I suppose.

This thread started by referencing grad students, and I can vouch for it from personal experience with physics grad students.

This is a very insightful dynamic.

Probably reinforces that we’ve already surpassed the frontier threshold for LLM usability in software development and can now focus on cost and personalization. To make a comparison, no one is making a better machine vision app for hot dog classification - we hit diminishing returns 10 years ago on that front.

But also scary for both investors and the working class: AI companies want to facilitate the concentration of capital even further into the hands of the ownership class. Will they succeed?

+1

Some people write terrible code. Some people don’t proofread their own code. Some people are writing code in a second (or third!) language and the typos are harder to spot and comments are harder to formulate.

It’s a bit like the variance you could expect from asking a room full of people to write a 1-page short story on a specific topic (e.g. “death of a loved one”). Some of those short stories will be unreadable, and some of the people who wrote those terrible stories will have no idea how bad they are. Except now, enter AI, and the room generates the short story instead - who has the skills to determine whether their short story isn’t terrible?

Maybe AI will provide an impetus for change. One can only hope.

I’d be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year to be a part of a professional organization that maintains ethics requirements at this point.

The opposite of performative action is even worse: nihilism or even active support of atrocities.

Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.

I think the threat to the internet is quite real and not theoretical. Air gapping may become a lot more critical very quickly.

We may not be far away from a state where anything connected to the internet (ip-addressable) is considered a vulnerability. Ironically, maybe we would finally have an excuse to interact in meatspace more and in the digital space less.

E.g. the concepts of “keystone species”, or even just the concept of a “species” in general is a lot more gray and continuous than something computationally tractable.

> It sounds like you're arguing for a human being to die to preserve a human being to blame.

God I hate technocracy. There’s a reason we elect politicians and not technologists who think everything is simple and we just aren’t making the technically correct policy decisions.

“I’m sorry ma’am, we won’t be investigating anyone for your daughter’s death at the hands of the Sexy Deathmobile 5000 because technically no one is liable. But just think, there would have been so many other children killed this year if we didn’t allow these Sexy Deathmobiles to take over the roads! I hear there’s even a software update that will reduce toddler deaths by 5% at the expense of a 10% rise in dog and raccoon deaths, but it’s a choice our technocratic overlords are ecstatic to implement!”

You’re also arguing against a false alternative, which is the status quo. I’d rather have our money put towards safe streets and reducing demand for toddler-bulldozers (cars with raised grills) than a FSD pipe dream that would only enrich a few billionaires and the lucky SWEs who happen to pick the correct company to work for.

Ah yes, I believe one of those models was called the Strawman Model, generated by Elliot F. Strawman during his tenure at MIT. He was forced into retirement due to his deep embarrassment over his model’s inaccuracies.

Anyway, Illinois is about to break the all time record for tornadoes by a single state, previously held by Texas, during the strongest El Niño ever measured. I’ll be proud tucking my kids in and telling them as long as they pray hard enough to the Gods of technological progress, we’ll be guaranteed to stumble upon a carbon sequestration technology akin to the Haber process and they won’t have to be forced into a Sophie’s choice when there’s only enough clean water for 2 of their 3 children.

As someone with a scientific background, and the word scientist in my title I guess this comes as a “no duh” to me. Prior art is table stakes. There should be nothing more embarrassing to a researcher than learning that they’ve failed to read and consider other work on a topic that’s easily accessible.

“Who to blame” turns out to be one of the most important facets of humanity, and it turns out we structure our entire society around it: assigning liability and pursuing justice. That’s not something that can be handwaved away to technocratically chase a metric (traffic deaths).

> If you won't try and understand why people are the way they are, and instead are going with "they're all too stupid to know they're being fooled, unlike me"

Unfortunately, being more aware than - and immune to being fooled than - the majority of a specific voting bloc is not a historical anomaly. Take, for example, the Jews who were privileged and fortunate enough to have the foresight to flee Europe during the rise of Nazism. They saw the writing on the wall, and were wise to the foolishness and depravity that was on the horizon.

Most populist movements are very much the case of “they’re all too stupid to know they’re being fooled, unlike me” - although I wouldn’t necessarily use the word “stupid” and I wouldn’t necessarily limit it to “me”.

Just use git add -p and review your code as you place it into staged-for-commit. Your colleagues will thank you for proofreading the slop before pushing it and opening a PR. Only add files after you’ve read them one-by-one as well. git add . is lazy and shows a lack of diligence.

…is what I would say if I had no filter. But it does make sense what I see in PRs sometimes - have you proofread any of this before pushing?

When you vaguepost, you shouldn't be surprised when you receive follow-up comments asking for clarification, which was what I was doing. The most charitable interpretation, as another commenter noted, was that you were essentially saying "both sides bad".

> Even if you're inclined to believe the conclusions, this should recognizably be a silly rant ... If it triggers your defenses to the point where you can't see that this is a poor rant, it could be instructive to copy/paste it into an LLM and ask for an analysis or some counterarguments.

It seems to be triggering your defenses as well, to be frank. The primary claim:

> "A big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years."

Is essentially how I'm keeping my sanity living amongst people who voted for Trump. The only way I could find it justifiable is that somehow people believed that corruption wouldn't be this bad, or it was just as bad under Biden. I also know that there's a large contingent of nihilistic, psychopathic, "libertarian", chauvinistic technocrats that probably had no problem voting for Trump because they genuinely believed they would be able to make more money under a Trump presidency rather than a Harris presidency - but I choose to believe there are more people who were misled about relative corruption levels rather than pure psychopaths.

What’s the implication here? Trump actually isn’t corrupt? Or Biden was actually secretly as corrupt as Trump is?

Or more generally, the current state of affairs is somehow justifiable?

It always comes back to taste.

It’s not that they’re incapable of creativity, it’s that LLM-driven creativity is terrible, and nothing makes me cringe more than when it uses a word in a “novel” way.

But monkeys-with-typewriters, they sometimes stumble upon something that doesn’t suck. But if you don’t want to spend a fortune retrying the same task until you get a suitable result you have to inject your own taste.

Sometimes I start with a super vague prompt and see how close agents can get to something that doesn’t suck. I inevitably get frustrated about 6-7 prompts in when they’ve created a complete mess because they have no taste. So I restart and inject my taste into the process. Things like linters, test suites, which 3PLs to use, etc.

This cuts both ways: you can interpret any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct criticisms for predictions that are functionally useless.

> If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time

I think you can be even more precise here, because “AI” can be a wild success, and the Anthropic and OpenAI product strategy can blow up at the same time. Transformers, LLMs, and harnesses are all technologies with amazing utility like many machine learning methods before them. But there may be no moat that justify the current investments in “AI” - I would reckon if there is no proper moat for OpenAI and Anthropic they may be 100x (give or take an order of magnitude) overleveraged. That’s still a pretty catastrophic bubble given the figures we’re discussing.

VR still has a path to utility / viability. Meta (Zuck) just made an absolutely terrible product strategy around it. That can’t be overstated. Just atrocious judgement on display.

> You would think at a minimum AA would want to hire a journalist or similar simply to shadow him for a year, get him to dictate everything (so that he has to do as little extra effort as possible), and publish a sort-of manual from the accumulated wisdom.

This is, pardon the cliche, the exact type of “outside of the box” thinking that is completely impossible in shareholder-driven (or PE-driven) corporate America.

More and more I believe that we associate people with great ideas not because they were exceptionally capable of great thought, but because they managed to impose their ideas upon others through force of will, political chicanery, and sorcery.

100%. Literally just started writing a sentence in my previous comment and realized I was using a “It’s not X, it’s Y” (not verbatim) rhetorical structure and cringed internally.

Literally the purpose of the House of Representatives, if I understand correctly.

So it requires a critical mass of very local reps to care about executive accountability. Which is exactly why Project 2025 / Trumpism plays the endorsement game so heavily. Fealty.

> cash-pay clinic

I’ve never heard of this. Private practice? If so, count your blessings until they get hoovered up by PE and quadruple their prices overnight.

> Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.

Ah, then I’m sure Meta will be quite happy to support legislation that requires a message to be displayed every time you open the app, upload a photo, or post a comment:

  - “Social media use is shown to directly cause significant mental health distress, especially to children. Continue? Yes / Close / Configure allowed applications”

Similar to tobacco products.

The truly heinous stuff is usually green users, at least.

Already succeeded in the US. Now it’s a project of whether it can be used to maintain power. Right wing populist movements ebb and flow quite readily:

  - ebb: people realize that promises of change are empty and only enrich the few elite
  - flow: people have forgotten that the promises were empty last time

Hopefully I’m correctly sensing the shifting of the winds.

Meta platforms are more responsible for atrocities in other parts of the world, e.g. Myanmar.

Related, this result on statistics comprehension is another stepping stone on my path away from believing in technocracy - a journey I’ve been on for the past 10 years and have felt more passionately about over the past 2 years.

I was recently convinced by a rather compelling argument that technocracy (rule by the technically capable) often falls to a local minima where the people in power find the first scrap of evidence that supports their preconceived agenda. Wildly racist? Natural selection “proves” that all of your decisions are “technically” justified.

But more directly to your point about being effective communicators of statistics, I’ve found that it’s difficult to help someone form their own conclusion from statistical results. Most people want the conclusion fed to them, with the statistics supplied as evidence. It’s up to us (proper statisticians) to act ethically: provide analyses in good faith and challenge the poorly conceived analyses of amateurs and statisticians acting in bad faith.

Doesn’t sound like it leaves much room for error. How do you address PR / MR comments? Force push?

Well are we talking about commits pre- or post-merge? I don’t care how many commits you put into the PR / MR as long as they squash down to a single commit upon merge.

Let us bow and pray to the LORD of technological progress, for HE, in all HIS infinite might and glory will save us.

Sometimes shit just doesn't happen. To prime your brain for the empathy required, imagine the sensation that you feel when you jump off a bridge or building and realize that you've made a huge mistake, and you'd actually like to live a bit longer, but now there's no turning back and it is over for you.

Now imagine that same sensation, but apply it to the lives of all the less privileged people that will die due to first-order (wet bulb, drought) and second-order (war, famine) effects of climate change. But maybe we're not screwed. Maybe you actually survive the fall because a benevolent sea lion decides to keep you afloat after you impact the water and break all of your bones too severely to tread water.

Still fucked up to just jump anyway, especially if it's not your life that you're gambling with (thanks Baby Boomers, esp. oil baron Baby Boomers).