I've flipped out on multiple family members, including my own wife, for posting pictures of my kids on whatever site (not for money or "influence", whateverthefuck that is, but just for sharing). I know it's de rigeuer in today's world, but I feel like we don't let kids get tattoos, because tattoos are forever. Well the internet is forever, too, right? It's really shitty to let a kid do that to themselves, let alone to make that choice for them.

I'm in total agreement with Marcus on this one. The authors' misapplied statistics notwithstanding, I am a qualified expert on designing biologic assays, and I have used GPT-4 very successfully to help design a couple assays. My experience has been that it is a really good crutch for that sort of work, insofar as it can point you in the right direction. It can't point you to papers, but it can help you refine search terms which can then be brought to PubMed or another database as a refiner. All that said, the things that GPT has helped me with are things I could have done without it, but it sped the process up dramatically. It stands to reason that similar would be true for any arbitrary assay design.

As for the abused stats in the paper, my guess is that it was intentional, and that Marcus is giving them too much benefit of the doubt by saying it was probably someone who doesn't know what they're doing. If it were biologists I'd buy it. But these are math nerds who likely know very well what a Bonferroni correction is and how it's meant to be used. Bonferroni is one of the strictest post hoc correction methods. It's meant to weed out all but the most robust results. There are other less severe methods that are just as common, so the choice to use a strict methods has the air of deceitfulness. As in, it would make a lot of sense to use the strictest statistical methods if what you were doing was trying to prove a point and not just following the data.

Not really worth a post of its own, but Bolton out here railing against a second Trump term is the best broken-clock-right-twice argument I've seen in a long time.

Polling has really wide margins of error at this early stage. I think people are likelier to say challenger over incumbent the farther from the vote you actually are. And in this case, it's probably more pronounced, because you know Uncle Joe is going to hammer J6 footage on TV ads until our eyes bleed. Mitt Romney had a lead in MI in early polls in 2012 and lost by like 9 points. Trump will fade. He may be more senile than Biden, and that will become more clear the more people have to actually watch him. He can't even keep Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi straight anymore. The Big Mac gunk is degrading his synapses by the day, and I don't think 50% of people are that stupid no matter how little they think of Biden. Call me an optimist. I've been wrong a lot.

An incumbent candidate whom the majority of his party views as the victim of a stolen election mustered 51% of primary votes in mutherfucking Iowa.

I think it's worse than that. There were like 110,000 voters out of 700,000 registered republicans in the state. So that 110,000 represents the most die hard republicans. Caucuses do not represent a valid statistical sample. So if anything, I think that his numbers are worse than the early indications. This is a very far cry from 2020 when they literally made their entire platform "MAGA, bitches!" The NH result was probably even worse, given that Haley won over 60% of independents. Biden may be unpopular generally, but there's no way those independents split more than 50% for Trump in the general. I think the pollsters say he needs 90+% of GOP voters and more than half of independents to have a realistic shot of winning. IA and NH seem to be really dim for the Trump campaign, despite all the catastrophizing from NYT today.

My 4 year old son asked me just this morning at what age kids usually get phones. I was like, um, a lot older than you. Kids want to be like older kids a lot more than they want to be like authority figures (even though all the authority figures have phone addictions, too, so no difference, I guess), so it's natural for them to emulate. I'm terrified of that day when we relent and get them phones (early teenager? Tween? Don't know exactly).

Here in the US you'll hear many parents say their kids need phones in school because of the school shooter phenomenon. Could have a flip, I suppose.

Hubski is the only social media (are we social media?) I use, so I'm not immersed in that world. Although I see the allure and have been sucked into Twitter vortices at times in the past, I see the whole endeavor as a cancer on society, and I hope eventually we will treat TikTok, FB and the rest just like we did PhilipMorris and RJ Reynolds. You make a product that is a giant net negative to humanity while making billions and defending it against all evidence, then you should be sued out of existence. Period. I do not care one whit about how much wealth would be destroyed by that action. Took 40 years in the case of Big Tobacco. Social media is destroying the world a lot faster, so I'm guessing less time here.

I've worked both in person and remote jobs in my career, and I can say in my N of 1 study that my productivity depends wholly on how interested I am in the work and nothing more. Working remote has the advantage that you don't have to pretend to work when you don't have anything pressing to do.

I worked for many years in healthcare. Healthcare regulations are onerous, to say the least. I don't know if they're more or less onerous than banking regulations, but I even though I've never worked in banking, I'm at least aware that banking probably challenges healthcare and aviation as some of the most heavily regulated sectors. All that is to say that my healthcare company, a regional hospital system with >$10 billion revenue and about 20,000 employees, made sure EVERY GODDAM PERSON FROM THE CEO TO THE JANITORS was aware of the communications retention policy. When they wanted to make a change to that policy, they would give everyone several months of warning and an uncountable number of reminders that the policy was set to change in the weeks and months leading to such change. To say that you think you might have had a policy but the policy was more or less "sometimes we delete stuff and I swear at some point I told my lawyer about it even though I, ironically, don't have a copy of that" is, I think, one of the most damning things I've read in this whole saga, which is of course filled with lots upon lots of damning things. I think Lopatto, brutal as she is, is actually underselling how fucked up this is.

The money quote:

To get there, though, what we need is a much smarter AI, a kind that can reason, and not hallucinate, grounded in reality and not just corpus statistics

Kind of reminds me of when Airbus said that they're working on a fully electric jumbo jet and all they need to get there is some cheap, robust room temperature superconducting batteries.

My mom was hospitalized with covid pneumonia as recently as May of this year. And an anti-vaxxer buddy of mine who was in his early 50s with two high school aged kids died from it in late 2021. I mention these not to elicit sympathy, but to highlight that I'm well aware of the damage it has wrought. That said, I'm actually more upbeat about the future than you (haha, big surprise, right?). There are two main reasons I think that covid will fade into the background as time goes on.

First, our best recent comparator is the Spanish flu. We think of it as the 1918 flu, but it was actually killing people from 1917 to 1923 (maybe it was 1922...anyway it was a hell of a long time). Eventually it just disappeared. We've seen this movie before. It's an ugly movie to be sure, but eventually the credits roll. Hopefully it won't be six years, but maybe???

The other reason is that the closest scientific comparator we have are the other coronavirus pandemics that have occurred in recorded history. There are at least 2 of the common cold viruses that started as high-death-rate pandemics. The viruses never went away, but either mutated or we just got inured to them or some combination thereof. Again, horror fades to background noise.

That's pretty fucking cold comfort for the families of the dead or the people suffering with long term or even permanent lung injuries. In fact it's no kind of comfort. It's just a reminder that no matter how shitty things are, they always get better. This will too.

The CDC squandered the best opportunity any has ever had to show how effective government can be when the situation is dire. Their leadership should all be ashamed. Not once in the entire pandemic did I hear an official statement from CDC that said, "This is what we currently believe, but the situation is evolving and we will update you all AND OUR RECOMMENDED POLICIES as facts on the ground change. Bear with us, because we're in the dark and doing our best with limited information." What a shit show. And they'll never be trusted again as long as there is living memory of 2020.

I can't for the life of me figure out why people aren't more up in arms about the covid thing. One doesn't need to have a perspective on lab vs. natural to be 100% sure that the CCP screwed the entire world in their response to the early covid signals. The world would respect them a lot more, not less, had they been forthright about the spread, even if they continued to stonewall and obfuscate on its origins.

They don't mention it in the piece, but I believe there is a regional treaty in place all over east Asia for novel pneumonia monitoring that was signed in the wake of SARS. It has a reporting system and a bunch of protocols that were just torn to shreds at the first second it was needed. To me, this is grounds for kicking them off the Security Council, ending all sorts of economic coordination, etc. There's almost no punishment too severe, so long as there's a defined path to rehabilitation so that they can be coaxed to behave better next time. And there will be a next time given their cavalier attitude.

Not a word from the Biden administration on it, so far as I've heard. I'm sure there are things that go on behind the scenes we'll never be aware of. But the public, not just the American public, deserves way better from our leaders.

Good on the Post for highlighting this. I am sensitive to whipping up anti-Chinese sentiment. I 100% do not want that. But this isn't about ethnicity. It's about accountability, and something's gotta give. They can't be just let off scot free.

Has there ever been a more open and shut case than "Find me the 11,780 votes"? It wasn't like he was oblique about it to try to preserve plausible deniability. He literally said make sure I win this by a single vote or I'm going to make sure you're charged with a crime. I mean, this will likely be a long trial but it should last for maybe like 6, 7 minutes.

Not even sure what he means by that. DC is already federally administered. Their mayor and city council basically only have any power because Congress says they can. Not a real details guy.

On a mini vacation in nyc for a couple days with my wife. We try to get away from the kids for a few days a couple times per year. Good for everyone, and I can never really believe it when I meet so many parents who never leave their kids.

Hired my first employee for my business. Recent PhD grad who I have high hopes for. Keep praying for me that the government will fork over some dollars or else her tenure may be a bit short! It’s cool to dream in the hypothetical about having a company, but it’s a whole other level when you suddenly commit to supporting someone’s livelihood. All good shit though. My hopes have never been higher than now.

Krugman hypothesized that when people become billionaires that they can’t square their own sense of infallibility with the fact that they can’t really change the world around them exactly to the specs they want, so it’s a small leap from there to “It’s gotta be a cabal running things” rather than the more hopeless but logical “I guess the world is complex and stably self-sustaining”. Most of us are ok with the latter because we don’t think of ourselves as demigods.

Right. Isn’t the point of Wagner in those locations that regular army doesn’t have to be there?

My brother is in the commercial finance business and just got laid off yesterday. Survived the whole financial crises 15 yrs ago unscathed, so I guess the banks are pretty wise to the reckoning that’s coming.

I think tits are a shorthand way of thinking about the ways in which romance is portrayed on screen these days, and the ways it's portrayed in little-to-none. Top Gun has a great romance story, e.g., and there's no tits. You just don't really see that in the action-thrillers of today. Like no one is contemplating a remake of Basic Instinct, which was a cultural phenomenon in like '92 or whenever. It's easy to forget that Rom-Coms can be good, because they're so, so, so bad nowadays. But in the 80s you had when Harry Met Sally, and in the 90s As Good as It Gets. WTF even passes for a rom-com these days? Nothing that's ever going to attract a co-ed audience. Admittedly, I don't read cis-hetero as a pejorative in the way one is supposed to these days. But romance is dead in movies and in real life, and bringing it back in movies is a good start to bringing it back in real life.

Even though I'm the same age DeBoer (2000 grad), I actually don't know if things were better in the 90s or not--not because I had a different lived experience, but because I have so little connection to what it's like to be a kid now. I have a 3 and 5 year old, so they're not yet in a mode where they're discovering friendships and culture for themselves. My guess is that some things will be much better than they were for me and some things will be much worse, but most things will be similar.

My millenial cred is high. I failed out of high school while trying to drink myself to death on two separate occasions and doing as much LSD as I could get my hands on. But outside of movies and record stores, which were objectively better than what we have today (and I'll fuckin' go to the mat on both accounts, though maybe not with you!), I don't remember it nearly as fondly as DeBoer. That's probably because I took my flunkie ass to community college, then to a third tier state university that wouldn't rank in US News' top 1000 schools and got an education that was productive and useful.

One superpower I have is the ability to see what's useful in the long run, and I think that separated me from many contemporaries. The late 90s were when first tier state schools started really preferring students with high test scores and high GPAs (though nothing like today's rat race), and everyone was focused on getting to the good school rather than what comes next. For me, what comes next has always been paramount, and probably insulated me from the broader anxieties experienced by many peers. You'd hear all the time, "You can't do that," but followed by an empty stare when you asked why not?

I think where a lot of the millenial bitterness comes from is that we were all banned from biking more than a half mile from the house, but everyone thought the covenant was that we'd always be protected. The forced tradeoff of security for freedom only turned out to be a one way street. But I never bought into that bullshit, and just kind of went my own way. And I find myself at 40 with a high-paying job that doesn't really stress me out too much, but I'm still thinking about what comes next. The whole security for freedom trade still isn't working in my mind, and I hope it never does.

But enough with the navel gazing. I think that the one thing that is inarguably horrible about being a kid these days (and again, I'm not too adjacent, just trying to synthesize what I see around me) is social media. I am not being hyperbolic when I say I think there is nothing redeeming about it. (Hubski isn't social media, so no, I'm not being hypocritical.) In fact, I think given the permanence of anything posted on the internet, we should treat it more like a tattoo than an ephemeral moment in time. I would argue that social media should be illegal for anyone under 18, and I actually don't think that's an unreasonable position. I don't know at what age kids start using it, but I am certain that it will spark fights and outrage in my house. But other than that, I would imagine being a kid these days isn't so bad. I think parents are more interested in their kids than my parents' generation was (I literally think my mom has no idea what I do for a living and I see her about once per week), and most people seem happier and less apathetic to me (surveys of self-reported mental health notwithstanding...I think there's a lot of reason to doubt many of those) than they were in the 90s. Being interested in anything in any serious way in the 90s was enough to get you bullied. Apathy was the coin of the realm, and that is not something to be nostalgic about.

Having kids is an optimistic act, and I definitely wouldn't have had them if I didn't feel good about the future. I guess that's against the grain of a lot of millenials, but to me the world, shitty as the news cycle can be, is in a really good place.

That a team of three academics with limited access could find such a huge network should set off alarms at Meta

It’s almost like they don’t want to deal with it, but that can’t be right.

This is an aggressively stupid take (Sach's, not yours), and I appreciate your thorough takedown. He apparently, despite all his credentials, has seemingly zero interest in contextualizing the Ukraine invasion in the broader Russian and Soviet history. NATO is a defensive alliance, and even Putin recognizes that, as evidenced by the fact that he doesn't try to hide any of his men, ordnance or supply lines from our very capable satellites. It is true that he hates NATO, but it's not because it threatens Russian security. It's that it threatens his ability to re-establish the Russian empire. That pesky article 5. If anyone needs any evidence of that, just look what happened to Georgia during the Bush administration after their membership was discussed. I guess according to Sachs, their suffering was our fault, too???

Apropos of nothing, it's somehow taken me until age 40 to ever have had a sidecar, and holy fuck if I'm not in love after a mere two dates.

See, now this is actual overt corruption. No matter my skepticism of some of Thomas’s dealings, I firmly believe he should be impeached. The weight of evidence is so ridiculously strong. He has no business wielding that much power over all of America.

My prediction is that the abortion pill thing is going to blow over quickly when the Circuit court says the plaintiffs have no standing to sue, and then severely rebuke the judge who wrote that drivel. No matter the 5th Circuit's policy preference, this is one of the least conservative rulings one could imagine. Even the WSJ EB was like wtf is this shit? However, the GOP activists judges are remarkably similar to the raptors in Jurassic Park who keep testing the electric fence in different spots. We all know there's another legally dubious ruling just around the corner, and eventually (like the Dobbs case) one of the creatures will get into the kitchen and cause havoc. Vigilance is always a must.

Imagine that you wanted to do your job and you just figured you didn't need to know anything about physics. Now imagine trying to make laws for a living and deciding that you really don't need to know anything about the law. It's pretty remarkable that anyone could have that level of cognitive dissonance, even though cognitive dissonance is precisely what conservative media tries really hard to create day in and day out.

Apropos of nothing, I love how the raptor hunter dude is now Elmer Fudd. Beautiful mixing of metaphors.

Can you imagine the hysteria if Sotomayor went on vacation with George Soros?! They already try to claim that Alvin Bragg is just doing his bidding.

Gotta watch your P's and Q's with this beast. I have found that it gives a mix of really reliable information and complete and utter garbage. Like I'll ask it about a protocol for doing some assay, and it'll give great instructions and pull catalog numbers for the reagents and everything. And then I'll follow up by asking if it can give me a citation for such-and-such protocol, and it will literally make up scientific paper titles and authors, and then point to a PubMed page that has fuck all to do with what I've been asking about. This has happened multiple times, so I know it's not just a fluke I ran into one time. Really fascinating actually. Conscious, it is not.

Trying to apply for a government grant to support my burgeoning business. I tell ya, I've written plenty of grants in my life, so I thought I was familiar with what to expect. But I've never done the administrative legwork before, and holy fuck if that isn't another beast entirely. There are at least 4 separate entities you have to register with to actually submit the grant proposal. And each entity has a verification period on which the next registration is dependent. And when I originally tried to do that late last year the system for the top level registration was experiencing technical difficulties, so I put it off. I have a submission deadline of May 27, and now I might miss it since I just started the registration process this week...a full 8 weeks in advance! That's our government at its finest. "We'll give you free money, but only if you don't kill your self out of despair after having jumped unsuccessfully through the thirtieth hoop." It's funny, because you're like, wow I like democrats because they want to give me free shit, but also like I am so fed up with this meaningless bureaucratic bullshit that I think I'll become a republican.

Finally got around to reading this, though it's been on my list since it was posted here. One nit I have to pick with it, is the assertion that GPT is on the same order of magnitude of efficiency as the human brain. It is not. It is not actually close. The brain has an estimated 100,000,000,000 neurons, sure (that's a SWAG actually, but that's another topic--we'll stipulate it here, since it's an oft-quoted number), and GPT has 175,000,000,000 "neurons", but all of GPTs ersatz neurons are focused on language, while only a tiny fraction of a human's are. In fact, like half of your neurons are in the cerebellum, which you can literally live without, though you'll have some problems (albeit not with language, per se). A giant part of the cortex and an even bigger proportion of the mid-brain, brain stem, and spinal cord deal almost exclusively with motor/sensorimotor function. So while I have no idea what the strict proportion of neurons that can be said to be doing language processing is, I'm sure it's more than an order of magnitude lower than GPT. That isn't to say that GPT isn't impressive...it's just to say that the difference in power is so strikingly obvious that it suggests that whatever GPT is doing is qualitatively different that what a brain is doing.

I enjoyed the read immensely, however. Great primer for a total noob like myself.

I think there’s very little chance that a sophisticated depositor let alone an average depositor can accurately judge a bank’s risk profile. However when someone is paying a point higher than everyone else, it maybe makes sense to ask some tough questions.