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• Post #2500981

• Post #2345972

  Meta. OpenAI. Google. Your AI chatbot is not *hallucinating*. It's bullshitting. It's bullshitting, because that's what you designed it to do. You designed it to generate seemingly authoritative text "with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence," i.e., to bullshit.

• Post #2162730

  Possible context for Musk's attacks on the ADL. For a while now, he's been going after groups that research and document online hate speech. I wonder if the antisemitism is just an added bonus as far as he's concerned.

• Post #2107880

  Next up: Tesla's Autopilot is actually just some dude in India driving your car with a Playstation controller. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=topbar

• Post #1935811

  Crows at play #birdphotography #corvids #crows

• Post #1853566

  My favorite paper that I've read this year — a look at how confusion between inferential uncertainty and outcome variability creates all sorts of problems — is now out in PNAS. Here's the paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2302491120 Here's the thread I wrote about the preprint last April: https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/110267907188002904

• Post #1844723

  It is now painfully clear that no local government, state or federal agency, or other civic institution should be using Twitter for any purpose other than directing people to alternative platforms. Using the platform for anything other than a last ditch backup for any kind of emergency communication is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

• Post #1832359

  For the holiday, a thread on how to befriend crows. -- Befriending crows is a wonderful thing. I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described. This thread is an updated version of one I posted at the bird site in July 2019. #birding #birdwatching #birds #urbanbirding #crows #corvids #crow #corvid #crowfriends

• Post #1787124

  So who woke up one morning and thought "hey, I know, I'll name my educational video surveillance company after a Jeremy Bentham's thought experiment in designing the ultimate dehumanizing prison"? #panopto #panopticon

• Post #1778461

  My daughters and I are feeding cows 10,000 pounds of macadamia nuts each and that's what makes us so relatable and makes it so clear we don't need to be taxed at 95+ percent of our income.

• Post #1767173

  This week, Science published a stunningly irresponsible news story entitled "Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common" and claiming that upward of 30% of the scientific literature is fake. https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common Below, the first two paragraphs of the story. Headline and intro notwithstanding, the story itself later notes that the detector doesn't actually work and flags nearly half of real papers as f...

• Post #1760295

  An opioid expert from Texas A&M gave a guest lecture and mentioned that Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick’s policies were costing lives. Within hours, Patrick’s office got her suspended, formally censured, and nearly fired. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/25/texas-a-m-professor-opioids-dan-patrick/

• Post #1760284

  A brief crow story (bear with me). Young seagull had made quite a good catch. #crow #crows #corvid #corvids #birdphotography

• Post #1700112

  Help out, #birding #birdphotography mastodon!

• Post #1461858

  Here's a glitch/bug/MASSIVE-FSCKING-PRIVACY-RISK associated with the new #Bing #chatbot feature that I haven't seen documented. Answers from one query bleed over into another. Earlier today I asked it about the black power salute that Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave at the 1968 Olympic Games. Tonight I asked it about headlines referencing chatbot halluncinations. Look what it did. It returned an utterly irrelevant answer, reflecting my previous query. How can this be produc...

• Post #894088

  I've figured out what pisses me off so much about Facebook's Galactica demo. It's not because people can use to to write bad essays for their homework. There are plenty of large language models that can do that. It's because Facebook is presenting it as something that it most definitely is not. Facebook is selling it as a knowledge engine, a "new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe." Actually it's just a...

• Post #872201

  So you're thinking about getting #ChatGPT to write something for you... (Adapted from https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tyulkanov_a-simple-algorithm-to-decide-whether-to-use-activity-7021766139605078016-x8Q9)

• Post #737958

  I'm headed down to San Diego for the Society for Judgement and Decision #SJDM2022 annual meeting. I'm really excited about it because it's a group of researchers I don't know well and who relatively unconnected to my own social network — yet who are nonetheless working on very similar things to the ones I'm interested in. If you're going to be there, please say hello. Hope to see a few of you there. https://sjdm.org/