skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on These travel influencers don’t want freebies. They’re AI. in ~travel
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Comment on These travel influencers don’t want freebies. They’re AI. in ~travel
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Comment on These travel influencers don’t want freebies. They’re AI. in ~travel
skybrian (edited )LinkWarren Buffett on the Geico gecko: Maybe they could make these influencers animated characters, to avoid confusion?Warren Buffett on the Geico gecko:
The gecko, I should add, has one particularly endearing quality – he works without pay. Unlike a human spokesperson, he never gets a swelled head from his fame nor does he have an agent to constantly remind us how valuable he is. I love the little guy.
Maybe they could make these influencers animated characters, to avoid confusion?
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Comment on These travel influencers don’t want freebies. They’re AI. in ~travel
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Comment on How Europe is gearing up to follow Australia's teen social media ban in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think it's reasonable for parents to expect some cooperation from the community. For example, it would probably be harder to keep kids from smoking if any store will sell them cigarettes. They...parents need their governments to pass laws to prevent their kids from doing something
I think it's reasonable for parents to expect some cooperation from the community. For example, it would probably be harder to keep kids from smoking if any store will sell them cigarettes.
They might get cigarettes anyway, but that doesn't mean it has to be easy.
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Comment on Firewood Banks aren’t inspiring. They’re a sign of collapse. in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentI don't like the framing of that article much either. It's expected that there will be more power outages in rural areas. There are plenty of trees that can fall on power lines, so it's a lot more...I don't like the framing of that article much either. It's expected that there will be more power outages in rural areas. There are plenty of trees that can fall on power lines, so it's a lot more fragile infrastructure to maintain. It's not a conspiracy against the poor; it's the nature of the problem.
I like the idea of putting in more battery backups like they're doing in Vermont.
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Comment on Firewood Banks aren’t inspiring. They’re a sign of collapse. in ~finance
skybrian (edited )LinkThis seems more of a "city people are out of touch with country people" story than a "people are getting poorer" story. Buying and selling firewood is something commonly done in rural areas. Trees...This seems more of a "city people are out of touch with country people" story than a "people are getting poorer" story. Buying and selling firewood is something commonly done in rural areas. Trees have to be taken down sometimes and selling the firewood is a way to recoup the cost.
I guess the new thing is having an organized way to give it away? It seems like this would normally be done informally, like putting free stuff on Craigslist.
I don't understand how burning firewood is supposed to be a sign of collapse. A wood-burning stove is a common, inexpensive way to heat a house that will appeal to people who are frugal-minded. My father put in a wood-burning stove in the 1970's because our house was all-electric and electricity prices were going up. (As a kid I didn't like it because bringing in firewood was a chore we had to do.)
Nowadays I wouldn't do it because we live in a suburb and I don't like the idea of polluting the neighborhood. Gas heat is cleaner if if you can get it.
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Comment on Immigrants ‘plucked out of line’ at US citizenship oath ceremony at Faneuil Hall, group says in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/UGW2j From the article: .... ...From the article:
Just before taking the final step of the US naturalization process, two Massachusetts residents prepared to pledge allegiance to the United States were asked to step out of line at an oath ceremony last week, an immigrant services group said.
Four people who have been in the country lawfully for years and fulfilled every requirement on their path to US citizenship had their oath ceremonies at Faneuil Hall canceled Thursday by US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials, said Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship, which helps people across New England with their citizenship applications. The four people were all clients of the group.
At least two people were told to step out of line after they arrived at the ceremony, according to the group’s associate director, Marissa Rodriguez.
The reason for their removal appeared to be that they were originally from countries the Trump administration has labeled “high-risk,” pausing all immigration applications from those nations.
“Officers were asking what country people were from, and they were told to step out of line and that their ceremony had been canceled,” Breslow said Monday.....
All told, more than 20 of Breslow’s clients have had their oath ceremonies canceled through early next year — and many more cancellations will likely follow, she said.
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People from the following 19 countries are being told their citizenship ceremonies are canceled: Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, and Yemen.
Citizenship interviews and other steps that come earlier in the naturalization process are also being canceled, Breslow said.
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Immigrants ‘plucked out of line’ at US citizenship oath ceremony at Faneuil Hall, group says
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Comment on Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL? in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentSometimes companies will provide web API's that customers can use to perform actions automatically. With LLM's and MCPs, there is more incentive to do this. Also, a nice thing about MCP is that...Sometimes companies will provide web API's that customers can use to perform actions automatically. With LLM's and MCPs, there is more incentive to do this. Also, a nice thing about MCP is that the company can just update the API and the LLM's will adapt; they don't need to maintain backward compatibility to the same extent as with traditional programming.
It seems promising when everyone cooperates, but often they don't. An example of a query that most chatbots fail on is "summarize this YouTube video." I've found that the best way is to go to the YouTube page, press the "Ask" button, then "Summarize this video." So, Google can do it, but there's no API for this.
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Comment on Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL? in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentI doubt that caching requests would work very well because requests are rarely exactly the same. A better approach might be to improve their documentation so that an LLM is needed less often....I doubt that caching requests would work very well because requests are rarely exactly the same. A better approach might be to improve their documentation so that an LLM is needed less often. Having better documentation can also improve LLM query results, because LLM's can search the documentation too.
They should also be coming up with their own benchmarks that they can use to see how well LLM's do on the problems they care about. Also, maybe collect training data to do their own fine-tuning, using an open weights LLM.
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Comment on Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL? in ~comp
skybrian LinkAn important difference is that AOL was targeted towards consumers only, while all the big AI companies have API’s, allowing other companies to build on them. There do seem to be some successful...An important difference is that AOL was targeted towards consumers only, while all the big AI companies have API’s, allowing other companies to build on them. There do seem to be some successful companies going after specialized markets, like Harvey for law and OpenEvidence for doctors.
These companies could switch to a different LLM when a new model appears,either because it’s better or because it’s cheaper.
I suspect that, at least for businesses, using general-purpose chatbot for specialized queries isn’t going to last.
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Comment on Campus characters: Identical twins, the Byers, live identical lives (2014) in ~life
skybrian LinkI didn’t find a good article about what they’ve been up to since this article was written, but they both have accounts on Instagram.I didn’t find a good article about what they’ve been up to since this article was written, but they both have accounts on Instagram.
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Campus characters: Identical twins, the Byers, live identical lives (2014)
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Comment on Mutability, twins, and "hereditarianism" versus "nurturism" in ~science
skybrian (edited )LinkFrom the blog post: …From the blog post:
There has been a flurry of discussion on missing heritability over the past few weeks, so I want to highlight a few articles worth reading for different perspectives on the topic. I have quoted some sections I found most relevant alongside my own commentary (which conveniently lets me get the last word in), but I encourage you to read them in full.
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Kathryn Paige Harden has a typically thoughtful piece on what is actually interesting about missing heritability (and missing “environmentality”):
Heritability is missing, but so is environmentality. Let’s say we halve every heritability estimate from a classical twin study, presuming that the estimate is inflated, and attribute that variance to the “shared environment.” Where are the causal effects of specific environmental influences that add up to anything remotely close to that shared environmental variance component? They don’t exist. Even when you change literally everything about a child’s life by adopting them into an entirely new family, or adopting them out of hellacious institutional care, you still don’t get effect sizes big enough to explain the incredible similarity of identical twins. The “missing heritability problem” is just another manifestation of a much more general problem—the granularity problem, the reductionism problem. Human lives are both undeniably structured by naturenurtureluck and very poorly predicted by individual variables, at least the ones we currently know how to measure.
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Mutability, twins, and "hereditarianism" versus "nurturism"
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Comment on China’s growth is coming at the rest of the world’s expense in ~society
skybrian Link ParentA Chinese company exporting goods to the US earns money in US dollars, so their problem is how to convert at least some of what they earn into yuan, so they can pay their suppliers and workers....A Chinese company exporting goods to the US earns money in US dollars, so their problem is how to convert at least some of what they earn into yuan, so they can pay their suppliers and workers.
Apparently they will exchange dollars for yuan with their bank, so the bank ends up with US dollars. Banks can sell dollars to the Chinese government to get yuan. So, a result of China being a large exporter is that the Chinese government ends up with US dollars that they can use to buy foreign investments.
It’s difficult for the Chinese to get their money out of the country due to capital controls, but I suppose exporting goods would be a way to do it, if it’s profitable.
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Comment on China’s growth is coming at the rest of the world’s expense in ~society
skybrian Link ParentA problem with this kind of analysis is that it leaves out investments. A country that exports more than it imports is increasing its investments in other countries (since they don't do it for...A problem with this kind of analysis is that it leaves out investments. A country that exports more than it imports is increasing its investments in other countries (since they don't do it for free) and that's not necessarily a bad thing for either side.
The US has historically been a very good place to invest, which is why it can run trade deficits.
I wonder how much of US tech stocks are foreign-owned and how that will work out for them? So far, so good I suppose.
In case of a war, owning US assets might turn out to be a bad move, though, as Russia found out when they were frozen.
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Comment on Oliver Sacks was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality. in ~health
skybrian LinkContent warning: the article is at times explicit about Oliver Sack's relationships and sexuality, as well as that of some of his patients. https://archive.is/d0ywJ From the article: ... ... ... ...Content warning: the article is at times explicit about Oliver Sack's relationships and sexuality, as well as that of some of his patients.
From the article:
“I have some hard ‘confessing’ to do—if not in public, at least to Shengold—and myself,” Sacks wrote in his journal, in 1985. By then, he had published four books—“Migraine,” “Awakenings,” “A Leg to Stand On,” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”—establishing his reputation as “our modern master of the case study,” as the Times put it. He rejected what he called “pallid, abstract knowing,” and pushed medicine to engage more deeply with patients’ interiority and how it interacted with their diseases. Medical schools began creating programs in medical humanities and “narrative medicine,” and a new belief took hold: that an ill person has lost narrative coherence, and that doctors, if they attend to their patients’ private struggles, could help them reconstruct a new story of their lives. At Harvard Medical School, for a time, students were assigned to write a “book” about a patient. Stories of illness written by physicians (and by patients) began proliferating, to the point that the medical sociologist Arthur Frank noted, “ ‘Oliver Sacks’ now designates not only a specific physician author but also a . . . genre—a distinctively recognizable form of storytelling.”
But, in his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” He tried to reassure himself that the exaggerations did not come from a shallow place, such as a desire for fame or attention. “The impulse is both ‘purer’—and deeper,” he wrote. “It is not merely or wholly a projection—nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” He called it “symbolic ‘exo-graphy.’ ”
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It speaks to the power of the fantasy of the magical healer that readers and publishers accepted Sacks’s stories as literal truth. In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.” He explained that “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” He added that Marcus would likely call them “confabulations”—a phenomenon Sacks explores in a chapter about a patient who could retain memories for only a few seconds and must “make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses,” but the “bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance . . . cannot do service for reality.”
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The “most flagrant example” of his distortions, Sacks wrote in his journal, was in one of the last chapters of “Hat,” titled “The Twins,” about twenty-six-year-old twins with autism who had been institutionalized since they were seven. They spend their days reciting numbers, which they “savored, shared” while “closeted in their numerical communion.” Sacks lingers near them, jotting down the numbers, and eventually realizes that they are all prime. As a child, Sacks used to spend hours alone, trying to come up with a formula for prime numbers, but, he wrote, “I never found any Law or Pattern for them—and this gave me an intense feeling of Terror, Pleasure, and—Mystery.” Delighted by the twins’ pastime, Sacks comes to the ward with a book of prime numbers which he’d loved as a child. After offering his own prime number, “they drew apart slightly, making room for me, a new number playmate, a third in their world.” Having apparently uncovered the impossible algorithm that Sacks had once wished for, the twins continue sharing primes until they’re exchanging ones with twenty digits. The scene reads like a kind of dream: he has discovered that human intimacy has a decipherable structure, and identified a hidden pattern that will allow him to finally join in.
Before Sacks met them, the twins had been extensively studied because of their capacity to determine the day of the week on which any date in the calendar fell. In the sixties, two papers in the American Journal of Psychiatry provided detailed accounts of the extent of their abilities. Neither paper mentioned a gift for prime numbers or math. When Sacks wrote Alexander Luria, a Russian neuropsychologist, about his work with the twins, in 1973, he also did not mention any special mathematical skills.
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After “Hat,” Sacks’s relationship with his subjects became more mediated. Most of them were not his patients; many wrote to him after reading his work, recognizing themselves in his books. There was a different power dynamic, because these people already believed that they had stories to tell. Perhaps the guilt over liberties he had taken in “Hat” caused him to curb the impulse to exaggerate. His expressions of remorse over “making up, ‘enhancing,’ etc,” which had appeared in his journals throughout the seventies and eighties, stopped. In his case studies, he used fewer and shorter quotes. His patients were far more likely to say ordinary, banal things, and they rarely quoted literature. They still had secret gifts, but they weren’t redeemed by them; they were just trying to cope.
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Kate Edgar, who worked for Sacks for three decades, had two brothers who were gay, and for years she had advocated for gay civil rights, organizing Pride marches for her son’s school. She intentionally found an office for Sacks in the West Village so that he would be surrounded by gay men living openly and could see how normal it had become. She tended to hire gay assistants for him, for the same reason. “So I was sort of plotting on that level for some years,” she told me.
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Oliver Sacks was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.
10 votes
I don’t follow any travel influencers, but it seems to me that, if they do it professionally, they could do it well or badly. Similarly for whoever might be generating videos using AI.