Things that I think should be noted and filed in an orderly fashion but which I have no time to address right now. Content here will change incessantly; I would advise against linking to it.
Links and notes
Normies vs Statistical Normality | Compass Rose
Normies claim to be a larger and more powerful coalition than they actually are by conflating their conformity target with statistical normality.
The AlphaFold2 Method Paper: A Fount of Good Ideas « Some Thoughts on a Mysterious Universe
IvanMathy/Boop: A scriptable scratchpad for developers. In slow yet steady progress.
Academia should incentivize mathematicians to make their work more accessible
Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Unicorn
The need for customization points to a deeper problem for Palantir. The customization is what clients like, but it’s also what could prevent the company from scaling. All those software engineers sleeping under their desks may have been great in 2005, when the company was flush with venture capital, but employing an army of humans to endlessly tweak the software doesn’t exactly presage huge profits. “I used to have a metric when I was in the government,” said the former senior intelligence official who visited Palantir’s engineers back in their sleeping-bag days. “People would come in and say, ‘We’ve got this fantastic automated translation system,’ or automated anything. I would say, ‘Does this use RFOP?’ And they would say, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ ”
The acronym stood for Rooms Full of People, meaning the army of analysts required to clean up the data and crunch the numbers. How good any given data-mining system is depends in large part on what’s lurking behind the curtain. Is it artificial intelligence parsing large data sets of complex financial transactions to find the next terrorist? Or is it a room full of eager software engineers sleeping on the floor? Palantir portrays its software as like its namesake — a crystal ball you gaze into for answers. The company emphasizes that it has reduced the time needed to get its software up and running, and former officials told me Palantir has made big improvements to its back end over the years. But the truth is that it still appears to take a lot of manual labor to make it work, and there’s nothing magical about that.
Doing maths on the internet » Heidelberg Laureate Forum » SciLogs - Wissenschaftsblogs
Cheat-maker brags of computer-vision auto-aim that works on “any game” | Ars Technica
Causal inference 4: Causal Diagrams, Markov Factorization, Structural Equation Models
Vance AI Image Sharpener | Sharpen Image Online Free with AI
It is obscene: a true reflection in three parts | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ketamine and the Return of the Party-State | Palladium Magazine
The Myth of the Expert Reviewer – Parameter-free Learning and Optimization Algorithms
Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository
Construction of arbitrarily strong amplifiers of natural selection using evolutionary graph theory
State Power and the Power Law, State Power and the Power Law 2
Inside Burj Al Babas, The Abandoned $200 Million Turkish Ghost Town
The wealthy are hoarding livable homes as climate change makes land uninhabitable
This Blog is Systematic: Diversification and small account size
[2106.02589] On Ensembling vs Merging: Least Squares and Random Forests under Covariate Shift
Regression, Thermostats, Causal Inference: Some Finger Exercises
Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages - (or any static file hoster)
Little Soldiers – Inside the Chinese Education System – Dormin
ISPs Funded 8.5 Million Fake Comments Opposing Net Neutrality
Biggest ISPs paid for 8.5 million fake FCC comments opposing net neutrality
80% of the 22 million comments on net neutrality rollback were fake, investigation finds
Nicolas Cellier / scikit-fdiff/Welcome to Scikit FiniteDiff’s documentation!
Reciprocal Convexity to reverse the Jensen Inequality - B.log
Industrial Policy, Innovation, and Decline with Ben Landau-Taylor
Schneier, When AIs Start Hacking
https://www.statista.com/chart/23905/change-in-homicides-in-us-cities/
Eigenvalue Inequalities for Hermitian Matrices – Nick Higham
An information maximization view on the \(\beta\)-VAE objective
Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks/ Distill version of Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds for Stochastic Gradient Descent
Linear Models from a Gaussian Process Point of View with Stheno and JAX · W.
[2010.11223] Meta-trained agents implement Bayes-optimal agents
Alex Danco’s Michael Scott Theory of Social Class has a couple of insights in it, although … although how you are supposed to interpret them in the light of the fact that under the author’s own hypothesis he is maximally detached from reality? That is left as an exercise for the student. Let us call it ”an interesting perspective that is not actually a theory good try though”.
Bravery Debates “I feel pretty okay about both being sort of a libertarian and writing an essay arguing against libertarianism, because the world generally isn’t libertarian enough but the sorts of people who read long online political essays generally are way more libertarian than can possibly be healthy.”
Why a Universal Society Is Unattainable is a rebadged and refreshed version of the “societies need common enemies” trope.
Yuling Yao, The likelihood principle in model check and model evaluation
Jaan Altosaar: My friend radicalized. This made me rethink how I build AI
Algorithms for Decision Making: Decision making, in the sense of reinforcement learning
Sacred Values Are How Ethical Injunctions Feel From The Inside
Very Deep VAEs Generalize Autoregressive Models and Can Outperform Them on Images, Child 2020
Generalised additive models (GAMs): an introduction – Environmental Computing
Liquid Information Flow Control, a confidential computing DSL
jupyterhub/repo2docker: Turn repositories into Jupyter-enabled Docker images
On the Generalization Ability of Online Strongly Convex Programming Algorithms
William Buckner at the Human Systems and Behavior Lab based in the Department of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University has a blog on conflict in cross-cultural perspective and other fun stuff.
Thomas Lumley visualises data pooling simply and well.
This tool lets you simulate keyboard input and mouse activity, move and resize windows, etc. It does this using X11’s XTEST extension and other Xlib functions. Additionally, you can search for windows and move, resize, hide, and modify window properties like the title. If your window manager supports it, you can use xdotool to switch desktops, move windows between desktops, and change the number of desktops.
A Wayland substitute for xdotool seems to be ydotool.
The Catalogue of Bias:
To obtain the least biased information, researchers must acknowledge the potential presence of biases and take steps to avoid and minimise their effects. Equally, in assessing the results of studies, we must be aware of the different types of biases, their potential impact and how this affects interpretation and use of evidence in healthcare decision making.
Taiwan’s digital minister sounds interesting.
Anne Applebaum, Performative Authoritarianism.
COVID psychological first aid course.
China requires malware for people doing business there.
The Gumbel trick is ingenious for sampling from things that look like categorical distributions and simplices.
UTS has a podcast: The New Social Contract is a podcast that examines how the relationship between universities, the state and the public might be reshaped as we live through this global pandemic.
Clearview’s Controversial Facial Recognition AI Automates Mass Surveillance.
Meaningnesss, on wonder (highbrow Insane Clown Posse).
A collection of links advocating learning a new language.
Danny Dorling, Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives..
I keep meaning to bookmark entertaining contrarian Cory Clark.
I should lobby citation styles for URL support to prevent the entire project being quaintly mired in woodpulp. Here is where to do it.
Illustrations
Sarah Perry
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