James Wilson …

We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

via Ted Chang in The New Yorker

Training may want the large data center, but we’ve long since hit the point of diminishing returns. There is effectively no more text to train on, as even the LLM systems of a few years ago were trained on almost all the coherent text in existence

via Pivot to AI

So good. One Battle After Another 🍿

Finished reading: Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi 📚

Boring machine learning is where it’s at

go grab a spreadsheet and figure out how to get the best result on a boring economics problem with a boring algorithm; Don’t worry so much about making a painting or movie with GANs, we’re already really good at doing that and enjoy doing it.

Store git credentials for a day from the command line. As of Aug, 2021, a ‘personal access token’ must replace your password.

git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=86400"

via https://stackoverflow.com/a/5343146/992999

Python decorators

I finally understand Python decorators!

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Link list of programming tips

Link list of programming tips A crowd-sourced list of recommendations for learning good programming style from the lab group. Software Design in Python Pragmatic Programmer Clean Code Philosophy of Software Design Code Craft The Missing README Beyond the Basic Stuff Refactoring code All the little things Nothing is something

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iA Writer to micro.blog

I just discovered that iA Writer publishes to micro.blog. How cool! Am going to see if I can use this to improve my writing habits as per Andrew Gelman's recent comment: Eventually everything makes its way from conversation to blog to publication. A great philosophy.

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Far from being an aberration, Dominic Raab might be the right man for the job – an out-of-office foreign secretary for an out-of-office country.

Via Marina Hyde

… working through the logical implications of our assumptions

What’s the purpose of mathematical modeling? « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Scientists — not just in epidemiology, but in physics, ecology, climatology, economics and every other field — don’t build models as oracles of the future. For them, a model “is just a way of understanding a particular process or a particular question we’re interested in,” Kucharski said, “and working through the logical implications of our assumptions.

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Machine learning toolkit in the browser from a single docker image.

docker run -p 8080:8080 mltooling/ml-workspace:0.12.1

Today I learned that to access netrw (Vim’s inbuilt file browser) I need to call :Explore.

dalex.drwhy.ai

On a mission to responsibly build machine learning predictive models

Git submodules

Maybe the nicest explanation I’ve read so far. But then, they should know!

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By harnessing randomness, a new algorithm achieves a fundamentally novel — and faster — way of performing one of the most basic computations in math and computer science.

Not just a cool scientific advance, but a very cool explanation of a new technique. For that matter, a lovely explanation of matrix multiplication for the non-mathematician. New Algorithm Breaks Speed Limit for Solving Linear Equations By harnessing randomness, a new algorithm achieves a fundamentally novel — and faster — way of performing one of the most basic computations in math and computer science. Quanta Magazine quantamagazine.orgquantamagazine.org https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-algorithm-breaks-speed-limit-for-solving-linear-equations-20210308/

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Karl Broman

What a cool set of resources including notes on R, make and more!

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