To do it, we need to (paradoxically) ignore house prices and instead, focus on income. The root driver of the housing crisis is that poor people can’t afford to buy houses or pay rent. And yet the rich have their cake and get to eat it too. Maybe … just maybe … if we took some of this money and gave it to the poor, then these folks could afford a place to live.

What makes monopoly a monopoly:

If you are a monopoly and then you do something to maintain that monopoly or to extend your monopoly, that's what makes it illegal. Like, if I just create a new product category, some widget that no one's ever heard of before, and I start making it and it's popular, I'm by definition going to have a hundred percent of the market. That’s not illegal.

What would be illegal is if I had a hundred percent of the market and then I said to my distributors: “Hey, if you want my thing that everybody wants, you can't distribute my rival's thing.” That's what turns it into an illegal conspiracy.

About connection between authoritarianism and monopolies:

John Sherman, of the Sherman Antitrust Act, said that if we will not be ruled by a monarch, we should not be ruled by an autocrat of trade. He was very explicit about the link between monarchy and authoritarianism and monopoly. And they were using the term monarchy because fascism hadn't happened yet, but monarchy did exist. In the 19th century, Americans were looking across the ocean and they were seeing a bunch of kingdoms. There was a little bit of democracy, but that's what they were really looking at. And they were like, we don't want that.

Михаил Трофименков о кодексе Хейса

I read the terms before signing up with cloudflare for any of my sites, and it was quite clear it's not meant to be used as an image proxy

Bring back the old days where we engineered software to be used long term, instead of the current day world of: "Move fast and break things... oh, and don't bother thinking about what'll happen in 10 years, because your CV will be full of bleeding edge stuff, your bank account will be loaded and the troubles with most of the projects behind you won't be the slightest of your concerns." Realistically, you probably don't care about this stuff, but on the grand scale of things, perhaps you should.

Last week, HR platform Lattice announced that it would be, to quote CEO Sarah Franklin, "the first company to lead in the responsible employment of AI ‘digital workers’ by creating a digital employee record to govern them with transparency and accountability." This buzzword-laden nonsense, further elaborated on in a blog post while adding absolutely nothing in the process, suggested that Lattice would be treating digital workers as if they were employees, giving them "official employee records in Lattice," and "securely onboarding, training and assigning them goals," as well as performance metrics, "appropriate systems access, and even a manager, just as any person would be."

The truth is that we need more Jim Allisons and fewer Ignaz Semmelweises. Innovation takes more than having ideas and expecting others to immediately accept them. If your idea is important enough, then it is your job to take responsibility for it and see it through.

Sensory input comes in and causes minicolumns to fire in certain patterns. The resulting pattern is influenced by the input and the "tendencies" of the minicolumn that have been spatially encoded over time. Each firing pattern, each message, competes with other messages from minicolumns within its network. Through this competition each network settles on the most fit message, the message that best correlates with sensory input and the tendencies of its minicolumns.

The training data crisis is one that doesn’t get enough attention, but it’s sufficiently dire that it has the potential to halt (or dramatically slow) any AI development in the near future. As one paper, published in the journal Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, found, in order to achieve a linear improvement in model performance, you need an exponentially large amount of data.

Weird interaction with a student this week. They keep coming up with weird “facts” (“Greek is actually a combination of four other languages”) that left me baffled. I said let’s look this stuff up together, and they said OK, I’ll open a search bar, and they opened … Ch*tGPT. And I was like “this is not a search bar” and they were like “yes it is, you can search for anything in here”.

Rarely are digits tokenized consistently. Because they don’t really know what numbers are, tokenizers might treat “380” as one token, but represent “381” as a pair (“38” and “1”) — effectively destroying the relationships between digits and results in equations and formulas. The result is transformer confusion; a recent paper showed that models struggle to understand repetitive numerical patterns and context, particularly temporal data. (See: GPT-4 thinks 7,735 is greater than 7,926).

The command key (⌘) has been a ubiquitious part of the Mac for over forty years. It was chosen by legendary icon designer Susan Kare, who picked it from a symbol dictionary – this shape was already being used in Sweden to highlight an interesting feature on a map.

Medical research is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, papers ghostwritten by the pharmaceutical industry and influencers paid by the pharmaceutical industry. Regulators are not independent either and so it is that most doctors have become pawns in a system, used to deliver the drugs which provide the fundholders with the maximum profit. So far, the system has failed to eliminate corruption and bias, for one reason only, that is there is no such thing as a free lunch.

These findings have wide-ranging implications. First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards. Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees. Third, students need to realize that acceptance into university is no longer an invitation to join an elite group. Fourth, the myth of brilliant undergraduate students in scientific and popular literature needs to be dispelled.

Out of the tens of thousands of developers surveyed by SlashData’s Developer Nation, a mere 14% can get code into production in a single day.