• 5 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • While in general, I’d agree, look at the damage a single false paper on vaccination had. There were a lot of follow up studies showing that the paper is wrong, and yet we still have an antivax movement going on.

    Clearly, scientists need to be able to publish without fear of reprisal. But to have no recourse when damage is done by a person acting in bad faith is also a problem.

    Though I’d argue we have the same issue with the media, where they need to be able to operate freely, but are able to cause a lot of harm.

    Perhaps there could be some set of rules which absolve scientists of legal liability. And hopefully those rules are what would ordinarily be followed anyway, and this be no burden to your average researcher.


  • Taking 89.3% men from your source at face value, and selecting 12 people at random, that gives a 12.2% chance (1 in 8) that the company of that size would be all male.
    Add in network effects, risk tolerance for startups, and the hiring practices of larger companies, and that number likely gets even larger.

    What’s the p-value for a news story? Unless this is some trend from other companies run by Musk, there doesn’t seem to be anything newsworthy here.



  • DALL-E was the first development which shocked me. AlphaGo was very impressive on a technical level, and much earlier than anticipated, but it didn’t feel different.
    GANs existed, but they never seemed to have the creativity, nor understanding of prompts, which was demonstrated by DALL-E. Of all things, the image of an avocado-themed chair is still baked into my mind. I remember being gobsmacked by the imagery, and when I’d recovered from that, just how “simple” the step from what we had before to DALL-E was.
    The other thing which surprised me was the step from image diffusion models to 3D and video. We certainly haven’t gotten anywhere near the quality in those domains yet, but they felt so far from the image domain that we’d need some major revolution in the way we approached the problem. The thing which surprised me the most was just how fast the transition from images to video happened.