gwerbret

> Used Tesla car prices are now down 4.59% year-over-year

Their graph shows a drop from $33k to $28k since August '24, or about 18%. Did they leave a factor of 4 behind somewhere?

Fair point, but the solution I propose would only apply to those parts of the assessment involving solo writing assignments -- so excluding class participation, group assignments, etc. (Which is not to say that students can't use AI to cheat on these, but they have other solutions.)

A lot of the purposes in education for which the use of AI would be considered "cheating" involve writing assignments of one sort or another, so I don't know why most of these education scenarios don't simply redirect the incentive.

For example, in an English class with a lot of essay-writing assignments, the assignments could simply be worth 0% of the final mark. There would still be deadlines as usual, and they would be marked as usual, but the students would be free to do them or not as they pleased. The catch would be that the *proctored, for-credit* exams would demand that they write similar essays, which would then be graded based on the knowledge/skills the students would have been expected to gain if they'd done the assignments.

Advantages:

- No more issues with cheating.

- Students get to manage (or learn to manage) their own time and priorities, as is expected of adults, without being whipped as much with the cane of class grades.

- The advanced students who can already write clearly, concisely and convincingly (or whatever the objectives are of the writing exercises) don't have to waste time with unneeded assignments.

- If students skip the assignments, learn to write on their own time using ChatGPT and friends, and can demonstrate their skills in exam conditions, then it's a win-win.

This all requires that whoever is in charge of the class have clear and testable learning goals in mind -- which, alas, they all-too-often do not.

Maybe someone in the field can speak up -- I'm not sure what is new about this study. It seems to be about an analysis of the double-slit experiment using individual atoms, and the press release implies that this is novel, but that experiment was first done over 30 years ago [0]. Is there anything to this study that is actually new?

0: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.70...

> We are well on our way to being a rich country, but not there yet.

Q: Why will Ireland eventually be the richest country in the world?

A: Because its capital is always Dublin.

(I'll see myself out.)

Pedant here!

> NIST researchers have made the most accurate atomic clock to date — one that can measure time down to the 19th decimal place.

That's precision, not accuracy.

> Or were they just not aware that the same information (and more) is freely available on people search websites today? (one of which has the same namesake as that large white book)

This -- while people realize that Google et al. have hordes of personal information about them, they don't expect that information to be available to the general public (thus the horror). Similarly, I expect people would be horrified to find out just how much personal information the data brokers have. There's an aspect of cognitive dissonance at play.

I think you can still get a real sense of overall societal trust from such stories. Not too long ago I horrified a relatively-young person by explaining how in the not-too-distant past, people used to have their names, phone numbers and home addresses automatically listed in a large, White-covered book whose Pages were distributed freely to everyone in the city.

The journal is not Nature, it's Scientific Reports. This is a journal by the same publisher as Nature (which is why it's on the same domain) that will publish anything deemed "scientifically sound" by the reviewers, regardless of the (lack of) novelty and significance. It is very much not Nature.

This perspective is supported by

a) the sentence structure and overall phraseology being significantly different from the user's prior posts, and

b) the flagrant (ab)use of the em dash.

This is the short story that provided strong thematic inspiration for the movie WALL·E.

You should have read the paper (or at least the abstract) first, as they used macaque and human organoid models, too. :) But yes, the overall effects of the region of DNA in question (an enhancer) are fairly small.

The preprint is available here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.10.588953v1....

> The Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act (SAMA)

> Boom boasts a number of big-name VCs and tech luminaries as funders, including AI poster child Sam Altman

This... can't be a coincidence. Can it?

> Stopping an experiment once you find a significant effect but before you reach your predetermined sample size is classic P hacking.

Although much of the article is basic common sense, and although I'm not a statistician, I had to seriously question the author's understanding of statistics at this point. The predetermined sample size (statistical power) is usually based on an assumption made about the effect size; if the effect size turns out to be much larger than you assumed, then a smaller sample size can be statistically sound.

Clinical trials very frequently do exactly this -- stop before they reach a predetermined sample size -- by design, once certain pre-defined thresholds have been passed. Other than not having to spend extra time and effort, the reasons are at least twofold: first, significant early evidence of futility means you no longer have to waste patients' time; second, early evidence of utility means you can move an effective treatment into practice that much sooner.

A classic example of this was with clinical trials evaluating the effect of circumcision on susceptibility to HIV infection; two separate trials were stopped early when interim analyses showed massive benefits of circumcision [0, 1].

In experimental studies, early evidence of efficacy doesn't mean you stop there, report your results, and go home; the typical approach, if the experiment is adequately powered, is to repeat it (three independent replicates is the informal gold standard).

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17321310/

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16231970/

Without going into the aforementioned detail, would you say he burned his bridges on the way out?

> The alternative to divorce isn't perfect marriages, it is failed marriages that are inescapable.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with you, but by your comments in this thread, I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend on a bus one day. We were talking about the unfortunate tendency, in daytoday, of people to shuffle their elderly parents off to nursing homes, rather than to support said parents in some sort of independent living. A nearby passenger jumped into our conversation to argue that there are situations in which the nursing home situation is for the best. Although we agreed with him, he seemed to dislike the fundamental idea of caring for one's elderly parents at all, and subsequently became quite heated.

I suspect that what's happening internally (at Microsoft) is that someone's leveraging your work towards their next promotion packet. They went to their manager with "hey I've got this great idea" and followed it up with your code a few weeks later. Of course, this only works if they claim they were "inspired" by Spegel to "write their own code".

> So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...

With this sort of surgery, they wouldn't be cutting into the uterus (womb) itself when extracting it from the donor, but instead will cut around it to remove it, along with some very essential plumbing. The receiving mum will also be on industrial-strength immune suppressants anyway.

Where you DO have to worry about leaks and weak stitches is with said plumbing (uterine arteries and veins) -- they have to support virtual firehoses of blood through the duration of pregnancy, and their damage is one reason why a delivery can go south very, very quickly. Obstetric medicine is definitely a high-risk sport, which is why their malpractice insurance rates are head and shoulders above any other medical specialty. But I digress...

> You're making a bit of a leap with "made no difference."

I was paraphrasing the results of the study, which was designed specifically to see if fasting would reduce visceral fat as compared to a non-fasting regimen. If you read the abstract I cited, you'll see that there's not even any mention of overall body weight in the abstract -- that finding is buried in a figure of the paper, and mentioned basically in passing.

As for losing losing visceral fat versus other fat, that's partially true, but reality is a little bit more complex than that. Two people with the same 20% body fat can have radically different proportions of visceral and subcutaneous (under the skin) fat, and it's the person with more visceral fat who is at risk. This is why you have studies like this designed to find ways to target visceral fat.

The title in HN ("(Any) 8-hour time-restricted-eating window effective for weight loss") is heavily editorialized from that of the NIH blurb ("Timeframe of 8-hour restricted eating irrelevant to weight loss"), but actually better reflects the findings of the actual paper ([1], unfortunately paywalled). They found that people who fasted for 16 straight hours a day lost (a little bit) more weight over 12 weeks than those who followed a Mediterranean diet. However, the weight loss didn't represent a loss of visceral fat (around the abdominal organs, fat which is more likely to be associated with diabetes and cardiovascular disease) and so the essential finding was that the time-restricted fasting made no difference.

1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39775037/

Both are very reasonable features, of course. Here are (some of) the real-world challenges to their implementation:

#1: Requires competence, and/or management that isn't too focused on velocity and features to listen to their engineers' warnings about exactly the sort of problem being discussed here.

#2: Many firmware updates explicitly and specifically want to strip away features that the hardware shipped with (by introducing DRM, paywalls, etc.), so see the comment about management above.

It's interesting to see that as of the time I'm writing this, half the top-level comments in this thread are being downvoted.

I am NOT writing in support of the current slash-and-burn approach to government, but I suspect that the downvoted half are addressing a significant deficiency in this article -- it doesn't mention what has been meaningfully accomplished by the Minerva Initiative in 17 years, given that the program had a fairly discrete set of objectives. Did they prevent any terrorist attacks? Did they forestall any destabilizing uprisings in significant countries? Did they develop a real and actionable understanding of radicalization or similar movements?

This is not to say that those accomplishments don't exist (I wouldn't know, I'd never heard of the program before), but it's extraordinarily lazy writing by a supposedly-premier science publication for these not to be identified and highlighted, if they exist.

Edit: clarity.

I suspect there's value to both your perspective and GP's insofar as both can help understand international affairs in the present day. The "avid book readers" vary widely in quality but are more likely to write down what they've learned; as someone who doesn't know enough to discern the quality from the trash, I guess I'm asking whose writings are worth the effort.

Oh, and thank you both.

Bit of a tangent, but I wondered if anyone here is particularly into the serious business of foreign affairs/international relations, and can recommend a primer -- or even a curriculum -- for someone wanting to become more knowledgeable about the field. As with anything, I suspect one is better able to appreciate the ramifications of events of this sort with a more nuanced and informed perspective.

Very interesting case! Just one question: to what extent do changes in database schemata fall under FOIA in Illinois? That is, if they should change the database schema to conceal whatever it is they're fighting tooth and nail to hide, are they compelled to retain detailed information about that change? Or can they later present you (should the legislation pass) with a cleaned-up, nothing-to-see-here updated version?

Heh. You've just captured the reason why (the better) clinical journals explicitly and specifically forbid having a statement of results in the title of a paper.

"Note, modifying these settings means your score will not be added to the leaderboard!"

Yes I see that now, thanks!

There's an important discussion in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead, so I thought I would comment on it here instead. I suspect teddyh is being criticized for use of the word "obligation", so maybe I can clarify.

People can create and operate channels on YouTube for free. Yet we frequently see reports of Google acting unreasonably towards people who come to depend on YouTube, often for their livelihood. We expect Google to act morally by providing the bare minimum of human oversight when a person's channel has been banned by an AI mistake. But there is no legal or ethical obligation, because YouTube is "free", and Google just doesn't care enough about morals.

We also see lots of examples of FOSS authors getting burned out when their sense of morality is used and abused by users. That's also not okay. But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium where the "norm" assumes people can be reasonable, mature adults. No one wins when we optimize for the outliers.

No issues with NextDNS (I've deployed it for people who don't have the chops to wrangle a Pi-hole), but this reads very, very much like an ad.

That aside, I've had pretty much the same issues with NextDNS that I've had with Pi-hole -- issues that have nothing to do with the infrastructure per se. (The classic example is of an app that doesn't work because domain `X` is being blocked, thus kicking up the usual 15 - 30 minute-long log search and DNS cache-clearing to find and whitelist the domain.)