• 34 Posts
  • 297 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Pretty weak analogy. Wikipedia was technologically trivial and did a really good job of avoiding vested interests. Also the hype is orders of magnitude different, noone ever claimed Wikipedia was going to lead to superhuman intelligences or to replacement of swathes of human creative/service workers.

    Actually since you mention it, my hot take is that Wikipedia might have been a more significant step forward in AI than openAI/latest generation LLMs. The creation of that corpus is hugely valuable in training and benchmarking models of natural language. Also it actually disrupted an industry (conventional encyclopedias) in a way that I’m struggling to think of anything that LLMs has replaced in the same way thus far.





  • Agreed, de facto, budget cuts have been and would be racist.

    Fiscal conservatism actually does mean something though. Like you could imagine a left leaning fiscally conservative government that maintained a balanced budget by raising taxes on corps and the wealthy. That would be basically fine (though I think on balance not as good as running a modest deficit to fund nice policy). If you just go, yeah no those words are henceforth no-bueno, aren’t you just buying into their doublespeak?


  • Trumps “platform” was by any measure or definition less fiscally conservative than kamala. Pretty sure the reps left fiscal conservatism in the wasteland with Romney.

    The new bullshit dogma for the right wing is “growth”. But I don’t think the Trump parade really even tried to explain that was the goal, or really any coherent economic policy.

    Edit: the article seems to make the same point. That previously at least outwardly normal people have gone off the deep end.



  • Quick Google suggests healthcare costs for obese people are <50% higher than non-obese and the US has 15-30% more obesity than these countries. So maybe 15% at most of the 100% higher cost per capita of healthcare is obesity related. The killer for me for that hypothesis is that within the set of countries with normal healthcare costs, there’s huge variation in obesity (10% in France to 30%in ireland) with limited variation in cost.

    Maybe the life expectancy side does have more to do with obesity?






  • So when the meme was wrong about 5% vs 20% it was “outright lying” but when you were shown to be wrong about your 30% you just continue on your high horse. Cool beans.

    Not a political issue for me anymore thank goodness. Lived in the US for a while but very glad that public health is available for everyone where I live now (as is literally everyone else I know).

    I mean private healthcare is strictly worse for everyone except business owners (and doctors without morals I guess). So that’s my best guess at your motivation, but please correct me. Why?



  • “needs to be a balance” this is exactly the problem right. There is zero balance, to the extent that even projects that set out to be operated for the benefit of humanity (open AI, looking at you) get converted to just enrich the already ludicrously wealthy. The corporation is a lever to concentrate wealth. Really important projects being closely controlled by billionaires is the natural consequence of this. Their unfettered power puts us all at risk from their capriciousness.



  • Yup

    Homeschooling: A comprehensive survey of the research, Robert Kunzman, Milton Gaither Other Education-the journal of educational alternatives 2 (1), 4-59, 2013

    "A final consistent finding in the literature on academic achievement is that parental background matters very much in homeschooler achievement. Belfield (2005) found greater variance in SAT scores by family background among homeschoolers than among institutionally-schooled students. Boulter’s (1999) longitudinal sample of 110 students whose parents averaged only 13 years of education found a consistent pattern of gradual decline in achievement scores the longer a child remained homeschooled, a result she attributed to the relatively low levels of parent education in her sample. Medlin’s (1994) study of 36 homeschoolers found a significant relationship between mother’s educational level and child’s achievement score. Kunzman’s (2009a) qualitative study of several Christian homeschooling families found dramatic differences in instructional quality correlated with parent educational background. "