07.03.2026 22:37
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Tired: paperclip maximizer problem
Wired: datacenter maximizer problem
We turned away from the light when we invented a way to go online without the computer screaming in warning.
A comment on Research Gate notes that it is roughly consistent with this calculation of cognitive control capacity as 3-4 bits per second.
The Capacity of Cognitive Control Estimated from a Perceptual Decision Making Task - PubMed share.google/5Y3QyWaol9Oq...
Ok I'm in a rabbit hole. If you search "how many decisions do we make in a day" the reported number is almost always 35,000, often reported that this is according to "multiple sources". Yet I can't actually find a single source that backs up that number. Anyone know where this number comes from?
I have a marvelous proof of the conditions under which an empirical project will be quick and straightforward, but this skeet is too short to contain it.
A long time ago, I used to know a lot about foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) and study them.
I guess that makes me qualified to write a thread about them, especially in wake of Trump bombing Iran.
So here goes nothing. 🧵
A screenshot of a story by Wired, "Inside the Gay Tech Mafia" featuring a bizarre image of a handshake with the hands emerging from within two mens' pans
Let's talk about the history of "the gay mafia" 🧵
My new book on fairies (out next month) deals with homunculi as a kind of fairy - or, at least, as fairy-adjacent beings. I'm just a bit worried that the popularity of 'Small Prophets' could lead to a spate of people trying to make them, without the proper skills or preparation
After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.
If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.
eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...
I am. But there are three things at play here regarding ICE collecting private data. Quick rundown on the issue, why you should be paying attention, and what I'm doing about it:
Moderna CEO says Trump’s policies have so curtailed vaccine market they won’t be investing in new research. So that’s awesome. Good luck when the next pandemic hits. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8fWErMy/
Rubbish paper "Is Pee Stored in the Balls" with broken diagram, broken, table, and bullshit text.
So initial experiments with Open AI's vibe-coding science tool Prism are going about as well as expected.
We talk about importing social graphs and at the same time many of us also keep thinking about eg Google Circles and the general difficulty of maintaining different degrees of friendship/maintaining/presenting different facets of personality.
People hack around this by having pseudonymous alts...
If you're elderly like me and planning a small quiet NYE with a few friends, here's a game I came up with a couple years ago and have enjoyed a lot: I call it Song Relay. It's simple. Someone picks a song. The next person follows up with a song that's connected to the previous one in some way.
Radio station kexp.org calls this 6 degrees and will do a day of programming with pairs of DJs alternating song choice. Also each pair declares their 1st song and the previous set has to end with a connection to it. Always makes for a good day of listening. I love it as a party game idea.
Since time scarcity is felt in the present, people may neglect to see that their time may remain scarce in the future as well. People tend to expect that they will have more time available in the future to work toward goals than they do now, leading them to overcommit their future selves and underestimate how long it will take to complete tasks (Kahneman, Slovic, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Zauberman & Lynch, 2005). This biased expectation may lead people to believe that difficult goals are achievable, since they anticipate having more time to work toward those goals in the future. However, this may create issues down the road when people discover that they actually have less time available to complete their goals than they anticipated.
As you make your New Year's resolutions, remember to be kind to your future self, who will likely have less time to work on those resolutions than your current self thinks.
@stephanietepper.bsky.social and I wrote about this longstanding time (mis)perception problem a few years ago.
We’re getting closer and closer to the version of this pocket universe I actually want to see, which is Lars von Trier taking over the whole thing
INBOX: Former NIAID director Jeanne Marrazzo is suing the Trump administration.
She alleges the NIH violated her constitutional rights and illegally fired her after she blew the whistle on actions that jeopardized public health and violated federal law.
First Director of the @um-src.bsky.social with the current Director’s new mug.
What an amazing way to visualize early human migration. Lovely map by @HarvardCGA. A great colour scheme and an appropriate map projection! Source: buff.ly/3lbxonJ
William Poundstone has two pop press books on the trajectory of this style of interviewing "how to move Mount Fuji" and "are you smart enough to work at Google?" where you could probably find some entry points into literature on this
The earliest reference to the 1000 to 1 word picture exchange rate I could find is from Locke’s essay:
Increasingly concerning that the Trump Admin is obliterating data so we can’t document what they’re destroying. In this case, gold standard tracking of health care access, insurance coverage and costs. It’s a study that will help us understand the impacts of the Big Beautiful Bill.
In our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
Chicago pope sings
Brandy you're a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
But my life my love and my lady
Is the See
So I was going to try to code solutions to Frederick Mosteller's *Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions*, (I don't know, when my kids go to college?). But it looks like there is already a hipper version of out there in Project Euler
loriculus.org/blog/euler-45/
What's your favorite song about the rain?
youtu.be/GpBFOJ3R0M4?...
Y’all wanna hear a wild story? Charlie is right — this medley Prince made 30 years ago, blending many of his greatest hits & fan favorites into an extended mashup, is one of the most fun “only Prince could do this” things he made in the 90s. BUT: he told us he was gonna do it. In an AOL chat room…