technology
- Survivorship Bias
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Finished an intensive course on AGI with BlueDot Impact this week. Strong endorse regardless of your career. Very helpful in getting up to speed about AI safety.
🎥 The New Firefox Browser, YouTube.
Built in VPN! I already have one but this might be there best feature to encourage wider adoption.
🗞️ Doomsday Warnings About AI Reveal a Simplistic Conception of Human Affairs, Yuval Levin, National Review
The idea that if you can just pile enough computational intelligence together then you can overcome all obstacles not only in the digital world but in the physical and social worlds is implicit in the hopes as well as in the fears we have about AI.
🗞️ Curate your own newspaper with RSS via [Citation Needed]
A year or so ago I quipped about RSS at a panel; later that day a younger colleague thanked me for the comment. He never heard of RSS. In light of Google Zero, one has to wonder if, in hindsight, this was the goal of Google all along.
🗞️ Colbert and the End of Late-Night TV, Ben Sass, Wall Street Journal
That, ultimately, is why the end of the Late Show matters historically. Mr. Colbert wasn’t attempting something as important as what Carson did—or his heirs David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. As much as they made a meaningful mark on American culture, they weren’t essential to the life of the republic. But this fading of an era is occasion to acknowledge that having some shared things does matter to a stable political culture.
🗞️ The Real Reasons Your Appliances Die Young | Reviews by Wirecutter
🎥 I bought an UNUSED 70-year old Rolls-Royce crate engine, YouTube.
Yup. Get some popcorn and settle in. This is going to be good.
🗞️ I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie. I need this ban
There are other, stronger reasons, for the ban. But she’s not wrong.
📰 Mathematical Thinking Isn’t What You Think It is, Quanta Magazine
Whenever you spot a disconnect between what your gut is telling you and what is supposed to be rational, it’s an important opportunity to understand something new. And then you can start this game of back-and-forth. Can you articulate your gut instinct and place it within a rational discussion?
FYI you don’t need a separate cross-posting service. Instead, cross-post to Bluesky, Mastodon, etc., using MicroBlog.
📰 Brian Potter, The Influence of Bell Labs, Substack
Rebuilding Drafts from backup. Very straightforward. But those warnings. They mean it when they say, don’t do it unless someone in support tells you. (Someone did, and I’m glad to have my full database back.)
That feeling in which you realize that your University’s IT is actively blocking Apple’s Migration Assistant or its backdoor monitoring is preventing the app from opening.*
* The same IT that will let older machines upgrade to Sequoia but not the new machine they just bought for you.
Elon Musk activated free Starlink for areas affected by Hurricane Helene.
New MacBook Pro Day, M3 Pro Edition
I got my first new laptop since fall of 2019. I ordered the last MacbookPro on an Intel chip when I arrived at ASU. It was—is—a wonderful machine and still serviceable. But every 4–5 years, my university authorizes faculty to order new machines. I held off for a year but finally pulled the trigger over the summer. After two months of waiting my new MacBook Pro arrived.
The new machine is a 14inch, M3 Pro, 32GB Ram, and other misc bells and whistles. It’s overkill for 99.99 percent of my workload, but for that other 0.01, the extra power and bandwidth will make it worth it. Mostly the few times a year I run large regressions or other data science style work. For what I do right now, I could have gotten an M2 or even less RAM. But since this has to be my work machine for the next 4 to 5 years, I opted to get a little more than I need so I can remain current with whatever new stuff comes up. I figured this was an especially true rule of thumb with the advent of AI. My buddy from grad school already wants me to start playing with Ollama.
Of course, the irony of it arriving today is that I have a hard deadline on an article with a co-author, and I’m taking my oldest camping this weekend with Cub Scouts. Thus, other than a few basic things (email, iCloud, password manager), all the fun stuff of setting up the new laptop will have to wait until next week.
A Psychiatrist Tried to Quit Gambling. Betting Apps Kept Her Hooked, WSJ
Betting companies “…can track when customers last used the app and offer credits and other incentives to persuade their most-valued gamblers–by definition, the biggest losers–to return.
Social-media companies are embracing this new type of push because people are posting and interacting less publicly on social media… While the number of notifications on any given app fluctuates over time, they have risen on nearly every major social-media app since July 2023…
The incredible shrinking podcast industry | Semafor
Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry … Apple wrote in a blog post, … had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.