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jslezak

279 karma · joined October 4, 2016

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jslezak··on Physicists capture rare illusion of an object moving at 99.9% the speed of light
Hm I don’t follow. The objects aren’t moving, and what’s the point of pulsing the light
jslezak··on Mass Firings for Charlie Kirk Comments Appear Coordinated
What an appalling comment. You can’t possibly justify what you’re doing so you pretend it’s something “the left” did first. Did the left deport students because they wrote an op-ed article, or went to a protest? Did senior administration officials call for jailing opponents for thought crimes?
jslezak··on A Boy Genius Who Killed 14M Poor People
What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?
jslezak··on 75% of US scientists who answered Nature poll are now considering leaving the US
More than 1,600 readers answered our poll; many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada.
jslezak··on Trump signs executive action to dismantle the Education Department
They are the billionaire Silicon Valley people who thought it would be cute to use their insane wealth to back a fascist seizure of power by Musk and Trump
jslezak··on Trump signs executive action to dismantle the Education Department
Please direct questions on this to Marc Andreessen, Peter Theil, David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, Mark Pincus, Joe Gebbia
jslezak··on FCC to get Republican majority and plans to "delete" as many rules as possible
We’re about to watch a bunch of “libertarians” and anarcho-capitalists with kindergarten-level opinions about how societies function realize that markets require strong state regulation in order to function

There’s a reason there’s no stock exchange in the jungle

jslezak··on [dead]
A show-down between a politician and a court whose majority was either appointed by him directly as naked partisans, or by his party

At least one of whom flagrantly accepts “gifts” from right wing activist business leaders with business before the court

jslezak··on [dead]
By my count we’re down to 1 co-equal branch then
jslezak··on [dead]
I must have missed the part where a bill was passed on this

Or where the incoming administration announced this policy during their campaign

Maybe it was in the announcement where they committed to canceling pediatric cancer research and US AID, which I also missed

jslezak··on [dead]
That’s 3.3 million estimated deaths caused by DOGE illegally shutting down a congressionally established and funded agency of the US government:

- 1.65 million deaths from AIDS

- 500,000 from lack of vaccines

- 550,000 from lack of food aid

- 290,000 from malaria

- 310,000 from TB

“are the effective altruism guys mad about this or are they still trying to figure out how buying a castle will prevent AGI robot attacks in the year 300” -@whetmoser.com

jslezak··on Universities are facing big cuts to research funding
Yes they are. Because Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and half the people in this community have been working for a decade to make that happen. Now joined by Marc Andreesen and a bunch of people who’ve gotten rich off the back of the exact kind of research they’re now decimating for their extremist insane ideological agenda

And when people post about it, they just lie: “no it’s not happening”

jslezak··on Mistral OCR
Has anyone tried it for handwriting?

So far Gemini is the only model I can get decent output from for a particular hard handwriting task

jslezak··on Finland applies the “Housing First” concept (2020)
Effective US policy is that people must serve whatever corporation wants their labor or else they will be left to die without healthcare, shelter or food

Other countries do not have this policy

jslezak··on Open AI in Trouble
Exactly. He has a dishonest and predictable schtick. We need skeptics for any industry, but he is just grifting in an ecological niche as a knee-jerk reactionary. There is near-zero value to anything he writes or says in that role
jslezak··on Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts
You are saying words. They make little sense however. The total cost of running these institutions can be broken down however you want. If the total doesn’t add up to the necessary amount they can’t operate
jslezak··on Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts
Dude this IS the grant funding they’re slashing. The NIH (and other grantmakers) make research grants and the overhead fee from that goes to the university. This is precisely what they’ve cut
jslezak··on U Pittsburgh pauses all PhD admissions amid DOGE funding cuts
Private industry does not run campuses full of graduate courses and basic research that America’s technological prosperity depends on

Those overhead fees go to fund that, so universities don’t have to be even mere full of nepo baby donor legacy admissions than they already are

jslezak··on The foundations of America's prosperity are being dismantled
MAGA dudes would like America to be “Great Again” but would like you not to Google what the top marginal tax rate was in the pre-civil rights era they are taking us back to (hint: it was 90%)
jslezak··on The foundations of America's prosperity are being dismantled
The important thing is that Marc Andreessen still gets 2% of all funds under management regardless of what happens, and his accumulation of material wealth is our priority

Your job as a technologist is to try to get into his good graces

jslezak··on NASA says 'City killer' asteroid now has 3.1% chance of hitting Earth
What would you need to be paid to accept a 3 percent risk in Russian Roulette?
jslezak··on Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find
This has been obvious since day 0, for the same reason that doing elaborate industry-funded R&D to develop piss-extraction technology to filter and sequester piss from your swimming pool will never be more efficient than simply not pissing in your pool
jslezak··on Is the ArXiv safe from the current US Government attacks?
We need teams of people working on decentralizing any important information sources like this, with mirrors and open protocols that don’t have single points of failure
jslezak··on White House bans AP journalists from Oval Office amid continued Gulf dispute
“Print what we tell you or you’re banned”
jslezak··on Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM; retains Black Friday
Emancipation was politics too bro
jslezak··on Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
Their next move - and the Rubicon none of us can uncross - will be defying the court orders that are inevitably issued to stop the flagrant criminality

Once they defy those, it’s done.

The enforcement of federal laws including court orders requires the Trump justice department to act. And his first moves (naturally) were to fire all oversight people, install extremist hardcore loyalists at the top, and fire anyone underneath who was not equally loyal. Anybody who thinks any other administration has done anything remotely comparable in the modern era is just uninformed

All of us should take a moment to acknowledge all the Peter Thiel-adjacent folks in this community who drove us directly to this moment

jslezak··on [dead]
Pretty clever of the school administrators to spend a year criminalizing protest

They did it on behalf of pro-ethnic cleansing donors, who at most write $10 M checks.

The schools need those checks to make up for the public funding cuts that these same guys are largely responsible for

Now the schools are losing NIH grants ten times larger, courtesy of the same right wing politics

jslezak··on Markov Keyboard: keyboard layout that changes by Markov frequency (2019)
Yes! I have been wanting this forever. Keys are in too predictable a position
jslezak··on GPT-4 LLM simulates people well enough to replicate social science experiments
They did this. Read the paper
jslezak··on GPT-4 LLM simulates people well enough to replicate social science experiments
Predicting the actual results of real unpublished experiments with a 0.9 correlation factor is a very non-trivial result. The human forecasts comparison is not the central finding
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