It's not just systemic media head-up-the-assery, there's also the whole thing about oil companies and petrostates bankrolling climate denialism since the 70s.

I could go over Wolfram's discussion of biological pattern formation, gravity, etc., etc., and give plenty of references to people who've had these ideas earlier. They have also had them better, in that they have been serious enough to work out their consequences, grasp their strengths and weaknesses, and refine or in some cases abandon them. That is, they have done science, where Wolfram has merely thought.

Huh, it looks like Wolfram also pioneered rationalism.

Scott Aaronson also turns up later for having written a paper that refutes a specific Wolfram claim on quantum mechanics, reminding us once again that very smart dumb people are actually a thing.

As a sidenote, if anyone else is finding the plain-text-disguised-as-an-html-document format of this article a tad grating, your browser probably has a reader mode that will make it way more presentable, it's F9 on firefox.

why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest

I'm thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.

I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it's the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.

You mean swapped out with something that has feelings that can be hurt by mean language? Wouldn't that be something.

Are we putting endocrine systems in LLMs now?

IQ test performance correlates with level of education

I read somewhere that this claim owes a little too much to the inclusion of pathological cases at the lower end of the spectrum, meaning that since below a certain score like 85 you are basically intellectually disabled (or even literally brain dead, or just dead) and academic achievement becomes nonexistent, the correlation is far more pronounced than if we were comparing educational attainment at the more functional ranges.

Will post source if I find it.

Current flavor AI is certainly getting demystified a lot among enterprise people. Let's dip our toes into using an LLM to make our hoard of internal documents more accessible, it's supposed to actually be good at that, right? is slowly giving way to "What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?"

I am overall very uninformed about the chinese thechnological day-to-day, but here's two interesting facts:

They set some pretty draconian rules early on about where the buck stops if your LLM starts spewing false information or (god forbid) goes against party orthodoxy so I'm assuming if independent research is happening It doesn't appear much in the form of public endpoints that anyone might use.

A few weeks ago I saw a report about chinese medical researchers trying use AI agents(?) to set up a virtual hospital in order to maybe eventually have some sort of a virtual patient entity that a medical student could work with somehow, and look how many thousands of virtual patients our handful of virtual doctors are healing daily, isn't it awesome folks. Other than the rampant startupiness of it all, what struck me was that they said they had chatgpt-3.5 set up up the doctor/patient/nurse agents, i.e. they used the free version.

So, who knows? If they are all-in in AGI behind the scenes they don't seem to be making a big fuss about it.

if bitcoin mining can only be profitable at scale by (among other things) not letting proper noise reduction solutions cut into your profit margins, saying that lax noise pollution laws are the issue seems disingenuous.

Wasn't he supposed to be a romantic asexual at some point?

Emil Kirkegaard of all fucking people shows up in the comments to call him out on misunderstanding variance.

It's used for actual payments because it's shamelessly crime friendly even by crypto standards, not because it has better block size handling.

This is why it's being increasingly blacklisted by exchanges facing regulatory pressure, which I would assume is why it's supposedly not speculated on that much.

Note that near the end of the original post the writer claims to have unilaterally decided to pay his sources a whistleblower fee of $5K each, which will probably muddy the waters a lot if this ever were to get traction outside ea/lw circles.

I’m very grateful to the two staff members involved for coming forward and eventually spending dozens of hours clarifying and explaining their experiences to me and others who were interested. To compensate them for their courage, the time and effort spent to talk with me and explain their experiences at some length, and their permission to allow me to publish a lot of this information, I (using personal funds) am going to pay them each $5,000 after publishing this post.