mattkrause

昨日議論

Why is that sad?

It does feel like it’d be “better” if good behavior came from the company’s intrinsic behavior but laws like this help (re)establish norms that encourage those sorts of actions.

Likewise, it’d be better if kids say please and thank you because of a genuine sense of gratitude, rather than just to avoid parental nagging—-but that nagging helps develop appreciation for others’ actions.

mattkrause

9 日前議論

Because the customers don’t trust that you won’t just flip those switches whenever you’re planning something nefarious.

mattkrause

16 日前議論

The web-routing thing is especially gross because a different example shows off pattern-matching.

mattkrause

16 日前議論

It's also misses the point. People don't want "glam" papers for ego boosts and bragging rights. They want them to keep the current jobs and perhaps get better ones.

Any replacement system needs to somehow serve as a token for people who can't/won't actually read your papers.

mattkrause

16 日前議論

Some analog devices are "DSP" in a wig, but all digital signal processing is really just a convenience wrapper around analog current flow. A very handy one, admittedly, but one that might not always be worth it.

There’s also a lot of path dependency. SHA256 makes a lot of sense once you already have lots of digital data but you’d probably do something else entirely in a more analog world.

mattkrause

16 日前議論

PLOS Biology and PLOS Computational Biology are pretty well-regarded (the others are outside of my field).

PLOS One does publish pretty much anything, but that was always meant to be the point: "here's some data, make of it what you will. "

mattkrause

16 日前議論

On top of that, the whole thing is done in fits and starts. You send in the final revision, it vanishes into the void for some unspecified time, and then they offer[*] you 48 hours--sometimes not even lined up with two working days!--to figure out what they "fixed" and repair it yourself.

[*] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!

mattkrause

24 日前議論

True—-but half of them forget to actually show up and many of the ones that do try to renegotiate the deal.

mattkrause

25 日前議論

And it's still true!

I appreciate a birthday text/email, but a thoughtful email is nicer and an physical card/letter is better still.

mattkrause

先月議論

It’s literally a trigram (character) language model. Check any NLP book from before 2015 or so.

LLMs have more stuff bolted onto them (embeddings, RLHF) but the autoregressive core is a direct descendent of that sort of language model.

mattkrause

先月議論

That's uhh...a language model?

mattkrause

先月議論

Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented?

Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

Ha! I’d never thought about it like that but…yeah.

I suspect another big part of it is that marketing and sales are relatively easy to measure and to scale.

You can hire one, two, or three new salespeople and expect that revenue will change more or less proportionately. Fixing (or ignoring) a handful issues doesn’t scale so smoothly—-there are jumps where the product suddenly seems much better/worse.

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

And I’m sure those companies also have “backlogs" due to limited labor/labor costs. There are always shelves to face, vehicles with deferred maintenance, and so on.

Obviously, there are limits: I’m not sure what my local grocery store or bus line would do with 100 new workers, but I have no doubt they could put a few people to work right away.

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

I wouldn't say "called into question", as if the whole idea is bunk.

MRI is, in general, a lot harder than people often imagine. It uses complicated physics to measure convoluted physiological changes to indirectly measure brain activity, which is obviously stupifying involved--and then relate that to other, often complicated factors like behavior, lifestyle or disease state.

I think it's reasonably well-known that the BOLD response is complex and doesn't directly reflect "average" spiking activity. Some studies find that it's sensitive to the amount of synchrony (=more neurons firing together in time) rather than the rate. The paper you mention shows another dissociation: neurons can get more fuel by extracting oxygen more efficiently OR have having more overall oxygen to extract at the same rate. Thus, it's not noise, but it is complicated.

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

I'd be surprised if it were possible to directly measure muscle activity with millimetre wave radar. It looks like they're detecting motion, which is related to motor activity, of course.

EEG "spellers" c. 2000 required a cooperative participant who's actively engaged in a behavioural task: you attend to the letter/word you want to send and thereby produce a different response when it (vs the other letters) flash.

Implanted electrodes can do a lot better but it's still not something that will let someone "slurp" your thoughts out of you -- it'd be like subvocalizing them.

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

The man who mysteriously disappeared whilst swimming has a Naval Communications station and a pool complex named after him?! Amazing!

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

There’s a cute study demonstrating this effect by comparing career success in economics and psychology.

The author lists for economics papers are traditionally alphabetized, so more of your output will be known by your name if it occurs early in the alphabet. Abbie Ableson gets lots of mentions as "Ableson et al." while Zhang Zhu will almost always be relegated to the "et al". If name recognition matters, you’d expect successful academic economists to be clustered at the beginning of the alphabet—-and this appears to be true.

In most psychology journals, the author list is instead ordered by contribution/senority, and this effect disappears. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677652608...

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

Cmon…We’re saying that a certain style of reference gives her less credit than might be due. Not none at all.

One paper doesn’t make a career (she wrote many dozens), it’s not always cited weirdly, and even if it is, some people may remember the coauthors (as they should).

But since you mention lived experience, I’ll add that I’ve certainly been asked if I’m "even aware" of results from co-authored papers where my name was listed second—-and I don’t think this is very uncommon experience.

mattkrause

2 か月前議論

I don’t know that everyone would label it like that, but it’s inarguably true that success in academia comes from your reputation/name recognition.

Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.

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