Things that I think should be noted and filed in an orderly fashion, but which I lack time to address right now. Content will change incessantly.
Notes
I need to reclassify the bio computing links; that section has become confusing and there are too many nice ideas there not clearly distinguished.
To post to team chat
darrenjw/fp-ssc-course: An introduction to functional programming for scalable statistical computing
by Eric Topol, When M.D. is a Machine Doctor
Women in AI awards
Notes for an adult intro to machine learning
- Do organizations have to get slower as they grow? (with Alex Komoroske) | Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg
- Learn Python, Data Viz, Pandas & More | Tutorials | Kaggle
- Community Developed Lessons
- carpentries-incubator/ml-python-supervised-learning: Supervised Learning with Python
- Introduction to Machine Learning with Scikit Learn
Links
I didn’t notice this movement break out
The Carr–Madan formula is really just a special case of a Taylor expansion. For completeness, let’s rederive the Taylor expansion with an integral remainder.
When explaining becomes a sin—by Tom Stafford file under taboos and tetlocka nd compassion/comprehension
Karloo Pools and the hidden alternative swimming spots nearby—Walk My World
Cult Classic ’Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China
A Turkish Farmer Tests Out VR Goggles on Cows To Get More Milk
How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg—The Verge
Fake Feelings—ai emo. When post-hardcore emo band Silverstein… | by Dadabots—Medium
Why the super rich are inevitable
Meanwhile, the richer player will gain money. That’s because, from their perspective, every game they lose means they have an opportunity to win it back—and then some—in the next coin flip. Every game they win means, no matter what happens in the next coin flip, they’ll still be at a net-plus.
Repeat this process millions of times with millions of people, and you’re left with one very rich person.
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Getting The Word Out—by Steven Johnson
I wrote about the disappointing—though I suppose not surprising—lack of coverage of the death of Dilip Mahalanabis, the Bangladeshi doctor who played a critical role in popularizing Oral Rehydration Therapy, the amazingly simply medical intervention that has saved millions of lives around the world over the past fifty years. I noted that as far as I could tell, no mainstream news organization outside of India had run so much as a brief obituary of Mahalanabis, despite the heroic nature of his initial adoption of ORT in the middle of a refugee crisis in the early 1970s, and the long-term legacy of his work. (The Lancet once called ORT “potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century”.) …when we talk about the history of innovation, we often over-index on the inventors and underplay the critical role of popularizers, the people who are unusually gifted at making the case for adopting a new innovation, or who have a platform that gives them an unusual amount of influence.
Pluralistic: EU to Facebook, ’Drop Dead’ (07 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
In Which Long-Time Netizen & Programmer-at-Arms Dave Winer Records a Podcast for Me, Personally
DRMacIver’s Notebook: Three key problems with Von-Neumann Morgenstern Utility Theory
The first part is about physical difficulties with measurement—you can only know the probabilities up to some finite precision. VNM theory handwaves this away by saying that the probabilities are perfectly known, but this doesn’t help you because that just moves the problem to be a computational one, and requires you to be able to solve the halting problem. e.g. choose between \(L_1=p B+(1-p) W\) and \(L_2=q B+(1-q) W\) where \(p=0.0 \ldots\) until machine \(M 1\) halts and 1 after and \(q\) is the same but for machine \(M 2\).
The second demonstrates that what you get out of the VNM theorem is not a utility function. It is an algorithm that produces a sequence converging to a utility function, and you cannot recreate even the original decision procedure from that sequence without being able to take the limit (which requires running an infinite computation, again giving you the ability to solve the halting problem) near the boundary.
Supervised Training of Conditional Monge Maps—Apple Machine Learning Research
How To Be an Academic Hyper-Producer—Economics from the Top Down
A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories—PNAS
Desmos—Let’s learn together. graphing calculator online
The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think—Quanta Magazine
What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention—The New Yorker
Actually, Japan has changed a lot—by Noah Smith — japanese real estate is surprsising
One Useful Thing (And Also Some Other Things) | Ethan Mollick—Substack
The radical idea that people aren’t stupid paired with How to achieve self-control without “self-control”
Colonialism did not cause the Indian famines—History Reclaimed
Erik van Zwet, Shrinkage Trilogy Explainer on modelling the publication process
Mathematics of the impossible: Computational Complexity—Thoughts
Download the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font—Braille Institute What makes it different from traditional typography design is that it focuses on letterform distinction to increase character recognition, ultimately improving readability. We are making it free for anyone to use!
Low-Rank Approximation Toolbox: Nyström Approximation—Ethan Epperly
-ise or-ize? Is-ize American? (1/3) – Jeremy Butterfield Editorial
Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them—Aceso Under Glass
The Australian academic STEMM workplace post-COVID: a picture of disarray
torchgeo—torchgeo 0.3.1 documentation/microsoft/torchgeo: TorchGeo: datasets, samplers, transforms, and pre-trained models for geospatial data
Merve Emre, Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?
Matt Clancy, Age and the Nature of Innovation “Are there some kinds of discoveries that are easier to make when young, and some that are easier to make when older”?
Tom Stafford, Microarguments and macrodecisions
Kevin Munger, Why I am (Still) a Conservative (For Now)
Kevin Munger, Facebook is Other People
Randy Au, in Data science has a tool obsession talks about Gear Acquisition Syndrome for data scientists.
Clive Thompson, The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions
omg.lol - A lovable web page and email address, just for you
Donate to a highly effective charity - Effective Altruism Australia Very Powerty focussed, which is important.
What are the best charities to donate to in 2023? · Giving What We Can
karpathy/nanoGPT: The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs.
What is the “forward-forward” algorithm, Geoffrey Hinton’s new AI technique?
Simon Willison, AI assisted learning: Learning Rust with ChatGPT, Copilot and Advent of Code
Fission: Build the future of web apps at the edge incubates several decentralized protocols
danah boyd, What if failure is the plan?. I’ve been thinking a lot about failure…
Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers
Michael Nielsen on science online
Great bloggers are rare, weird, and not team players – Kevin Drum
Swayable: RCTs for marketing campaigns via ingenious audience recruiting network
Zoomers Co-Working Community (co-working for accountability)
Normconf Lightning Talks/Normconf: The Normcore Tech Conference — a conference on the stuff that we actually need to do in ML, as opp. the stuff we would like to pretend is what we do.
Jean Gallier and Jocelyn Quaintance , Algebra, Topology, Differential Calculus, and Optimization Theory for Computer Science and Machine Learning, 2188 pages as of 2022/10/30, and growing.
Terence Eden, You can have user accounts without needing to manage user accounts
Adam Mastroianni, Ludwin-Peery, EJ, Things could be better
Adam Mastroianni, The great myths of political hatred
Big correlations and big interactions ([2105.13445] The piranha problem: Large effects swimming in a small pond)
How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century
Distribution testing
GPflow/GeometricKernels: Geometric kernels on manifolds, meshes and graphs
George Ho, How to Improve Your Static Site's Typography (for code formatting)
Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
Marc ten Bosch, Let's remove Quaternions from every 3D Engine (An Interactive Introduction to Rotors from Geometric Algebra)
Michele Coscia, Meritocracy vs Topocracy
oxcsml/riemannian-score-sde: Score-based generative models for compact manifolds
Public-facing Censorship Is Safety Theater, Causing Reputational Damage
Ti John’s Publications
Starboard, a shareable in-browser notebook that runs pyton (!)
Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are
Treehugger Introduces a Modern Pyramid of Energy Conservation
Vast.ai “Rent Cloud GPU Servers for Deep Learning and AI”
Vast.ai “Rent Cloud GPU Servers for Deep Learning and AI”
[Decentralized autonomous organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization#:~:text=A%20decentralized%20autonomous%20organization%20(DAO,words%20they%20are%20member%2Downed)
Adam Mastroianni, Things could be better
Michael Burnam-Fink, What is Scientific about Data Science?
Christian Lawson-Perfect’s Interesting Esoterica is a collection of weird papers in maths.
Erik Hoel, Why do most popular science books suck?
Étienne Fortier-Dubois, The Vibes Are Off
George Ho, Understanding NUTS and HMC
Gordon Brander, Coevolution creates living complexity
Gordon Brander, Thinking together
Kate Mannell, Eden T. Smith Alternative Social Media and the Complexities of a More Participatory Culture: A View From Scuttlebutt
Peter Woit, Symmetry and Physics
Rob J Hyndman, We need more open data in Australia
Vicki Boykis, How I learn machine learning
Oshan Jarow, Markets Underinvest In Vitality
Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous (not convinced tbh)
Erik Hoel, The gossip trap
The Developer Certificate of Origin is a great alternative to a CLA
I. Risk Management Foundations - Machine Learning for Financial Risk Management with Python [Book]
jkbren/einet: Uncertainty and causal emergence in complex networks
Darren Wilkinson’s Bayesian inference for a logistic regression model 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
Stephen Malina — Deriving the front-door criterion with the do-calculus
Census is a tool which links all the weird different data storage systems and CRM stuff
Michael Lewis podcast on illegible experts
Nemanja Rakicevic, NeurIPS Conference: Historical Data Analysis
Yanir Seroussi, The mission matters: Moving to climate tech as a data scientist
Keir Bradwell, #1: In-group Cheems
Samuel Moore, Why open science is primarily a labour issue
Adam Mastroianni, Against All Applications
Have The Effective Altruists And Rationalists Brainwashed Me?
Anthony Lee Zhang, The War for Eyeballs
Digital artists’ post-bubble hopes for NFTs don’t need a blockchain
Flow Network based Generative Models for Non-Iterative Diverse Candidate Generation
I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Work & Scale
ClearerThinking.org’s courses, e.g.
- Introduction to Decision Academy: The Science of Better Decisions
- Rhetorical Fallacies: Dodging Argument Traps
- Learning from Mistakes: A Systematic Approach
- Probabilistic Fallacies: Gauging the Strength of Evidence
- Explanation Freeze: Interpreting Uncertain Events
- Aspire: A Tool to Help You Improve Your Life
- The Sunk Cost Fallacy: Focusing on the Future
Reddit for AI-generated and manipulated content
PJ Vogt, Selling Drugs to Buy Crypto
Michele Coscia, Pearson Correlations for Networks
The DAIR Institute “The Distributed AI Research Institute is a space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.”
Machine Learning Trick of the Day (1): Replica Trick— Shakir Mohammed
Machine Learning Trick of the Day (7): Density Ratio Trick— Shakir Mohammed
ApplyingML - Papers, Guides, and Interviews with ML practitioners
Ryan Broderick, We were the unpaid janitors of a bloated tech monopoly
fastdownload: the magic behind one of the famous 4 lines of code · fast.ai
Steven Buss, Politics for Software Engineers, Part 1, Part 3
Schneier, When AIs Start Hacking
Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks/ Distill version of Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
On the Generalization Ability of Online Strongly Convex Programming Algorithms
Illustrations
Not quite sure what to do with this incredible and no-longer appropriate band photo, but what a time capsule.
Homeless links
Bookmarked but where will they ever go?
Dispel your justification-monkey with a “HWA!” - Malcolm Ocean
Roger’s Bacon, Living and Dying with a Mad God
washable & breathable flexiOH cast adapts to the patient’s skin
‘We can continue Pratchett’s efforts’: the gamers keeping Discworld alive
AO3’s 15-year journey from blog post to fanfiction powerhouse - The Verge
today I took a desk lamp whose Halogen light had burned out, whose crappy transformer always made those bulbs sputter, and whose mildly art-deco appearance I’d always liked, and swapped it out to run an LED bulb off USB power. It took about an hour’s work to replace the light with an LED, the switch with a nice heavy clicky one and now the whole thing runs off USB-C instead of wall voltage. It emits no appreciable heat, and if these calculations are to be believed, will run for decades for a few cents per year, assuming I leave it on all the time.
I hadn’t really appreciated how big a deal USB-PD voltage negotiation was until I found out that the little chips that handle that negotiation are about the size of the end of a pencil, that if you include the USB-C port you can replace basically any low-voltage transformer with something smaller than a quarter.
The magic search string, if you want to try this yourself, is “usb-pd trigger module”,
vscode-paste-image/README.md at master · mushanshitiancai/vscode-paste-image
mhoye/awesome-falsehood: 😱 Falsehoods Programmers Believe in
Gary Brecher, The War Nerd: Taiwan — The Thucydides Trapper Who Cried Woof
Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty. Looks bad for Dan Ariely. Damn.
on programming humans (Amir’s work)
Communications' digital initiative and its first digital event
Playable Half Earth Socialism simulator
flatmax/vector-synth: Old 2002 era vector synth code based on XFig
Nick Chater, Would you Stand Up to An Oppressive Regime.
Lambda School’s Job Placement Rate May Be Far Worse Than Advertised
I would like to read the diaries of Usama ibn Munqidh
The latest target of China’s tech regulation blitz: algorithms
State Power and the Power Law, State Power and the Power Law 2
Yuling Yao, The likelihood principle in model check and model evaluation “We are (only) interested in estimating an unknown parameter \(\theta\), and there are two data generating experiments both involving \(\theta\) with observable outcomes \(y_1\) and \(y_2\) and likelihoods \(p_1\left(y_1 \mid \theta\right)\) and \(p_2\left(y_2 \mid \theta\right)\). If the outcome-experiment pair satisfies \(p_1\left(y_1 \mid \theta\right) \propto p_2\left(y_2 \mid \theta\right)\), (viewed as a function of \(\theta\) ) then these two experiments and two observations will provide the same amount of information about \(\theta\).”
Liquid Information Flow Control, a confidential computing DSL
Jag Bhalla, Vaccine Greed: Capitalism Without Competition Isn’t Capitalism, It’s Exploitation
Kostas Kiriakakis, A Day At The Park
By analyzing medical text and extracting biomedical entities and relations from the entire history of published medical science, Xyla can facilitate better real-world evidence-based clinical decision support and help make clinical research—such as research into new treatments, including de novo drug design as well as the repurposing of existing drugs—smarter and faster. In so doing, Xyla is fulfilling its mission of organizing the world’s medical knowledge and making it more useful.
My2050 calculator - create your pathway for the UK to be net zero by 2050
Is Pandemic Stress to Blame for the Rise in Traffic Deaths? Nope apparently it is decreased congestion making drivers drive faster on shit roads.
Marisa Abrajano has a provoking list of research topics. I would like to read the work to see her methodology.
Do normal people need to know or care about “the metaverse”?
Apple acquires song-shifting startup AI Music, here’s what it could mean for users
Black Americans are pessimistic about their position in U.S. society
Smart technologies | Internet Policy Review
Speaking of ‘smart’ technologies we may avoid the mysticism of terms like ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). To situate ‘smartness’ I nevertheless explore the origins of smart technologies in the research domains of AI and cybernetics. Based in postphenomenological philosophy of technology and embodied cognition rather than media studies and science and technology studies (STS), the article entails a relational and ecological understanding of the constitutive relationship between humans and technologies, requiring us to take seriously their affordances as well as the research domain of computer science. To this end I distinguish three levels of smartness, depending on the extent to which they can respond to their environment without human intervention: logic-based, grounded in machine learning or in multi-agent systems. I discuss these levels of smartness in terms of machine agency to distinguish the nature of their behaviour from both human agency and from technologies considered dumb. Finally, I discuss the political economy of smart technologies in light of the manipulation they enable when those targeted cannot foresee how they are being profiled.
Concurrent programming, with examples
Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems disappear.
We won’t run to either extreme here. Instead we’ll cover the production workhorses for concurrent software – threading and locking – and learn about them through a series of interesting programs. By the end of this article you’ll know the terminology and patterns used by POSIX threads (pthreads).
A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth
DIY Collective Embeds Abortion Pill Onto Business Cards, Distributes Them At Hacker Conference
Penny Wyatt, Developer Innovation and the Free Puppy
Elizabeth Van Nostrand, A Quick Look At 20% Time
Chalk is a non-terrible calculator for macos, incorporating useful things like matrices and bitwise ops
2 comments
Fredrick Alonso
Barbra Bugnion