Friday, February 28, 2025

More thoughts on criticism -- critics and reviewers

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 Both reviewer and critic are honorable professions, with, if anything, the former being more valuable. The best reviewers by a wide margin ...
3 comments:
Thursday, February 27, 2025

Two completely unrelated news stories

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From the Arkansas Times: Bill deregulating raw dairy products passes Senate, heads to governor’s desk  by Phillip Powell A bill to deregulat...
Wednesday, February 26, 2025

"There seems to be a plague of jellyfish and really a plague of anything is usually not considered good."

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As previously mentioned ( "The city would naturally form a line as it tried to get away from itself." ), Patrick Boyle is one of t...
Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Thiel is Dr. Mabuse. Musk is Cobra Commander.

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From Josh Marshall: Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this w...
Monday, February 24, 2025

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LLM part 2 -- a proof-reader, not an editor

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I have two dictation options which, being a horrible typist, I use frequently. The first is Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my laptop, which wor...
2 comments:
Friday, February 21, 2025

"What was Clive James thinking?" Maybe the question is when was he thinking it?

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From Andrew Gelman : From The Dreaming Swimmer (1992), one of Clive James’s classic essay collections:     The best Hitchcock film was direc...
1 comment:
Thursday, February 20, 2025

In the cold war, all the cool kids had toys with nuclear warheads

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 And yes, the M65 atomic cannon was real. "Ideal Atomic Cannon" - 1958 Most people blame boomer cynicism and distrust of auth...
Wednesday, February 19, 2025

A tale of two tweets

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 This is Joseph. There is a new claim that the US is filled with vampires by Elon Musk, who is concerned about a database query of social se...
Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Fifteen years ago at the blog (does anyone else feel old?)

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My first degree was a BFA in creative writing. When asked why I was switching to statistics, I said I thought it would be easier to find mat...
Monday, February 17, 2025

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LLM part 1-- coding

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I used to ask, only half-jokingly, how any of us learned to code before Google.  I went to grad school in the mid-90s, so I'm old enough...
2 comments:
Friday, February 14, 2025

Listen to the last three minutes of Thursday's Marketplace

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Kai Ryssdal's closing statement is a template for how non-partisan mainstream journalists should frame this moment. Measured and object...
Thursday, February 13, 2025

In defense of LLMs, they are considerably more polite than the typical 9th grader

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 Andrew Gelman recently shared the following from Gary Smith : I [Smith] tested OpenAI o1, Copilot, and Gemini Flash, along with DeepSeek,...
3 comments:
Wednesday, February 12, 2025

In the aftermath of a disaster that took a great human and environmental toll, your first response should always be to loosen regulations and lower safety standards

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[And yes, I realize that, despite being an urban apartment dweller who doesn't have a backyard, raising these issues will get me labeled...
Tuesday, February 11, 2025

The rich and famous of Southern California have always loved living in isolated spots with gorgeous mountain views, and it has always been a bad idea

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 We'll be coming back to this excellent story from the LA Times on the history of catastrophic fires in the region and how we keep ignor...
Monday, February 10, 2025

F&A costs and why they matter

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This is Joseph. So on Friday afternoon this new policy dropped, to take effect Monday morning. Like many things in the new world, the lack ...
1 comment: