"You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." --- Joanna Maciejewska (@AuthorJMac on X, 6:50 AM Mar 29, 2024; 3.2M Views)

And it's Brittany Moone, not Moore

It's "4x" or 4 times and 15x, but the original blog post cleverly used the typographically correct multiplication symbol which exposed the well-known limitations of Slashdot. This is one reason to avoid abbreviations -- unless you want to catch lazy or inattentive copyists.

At least this isn't as bad as the person who posted at least ten times a plaintive "Please help in making this viral" along with copied text including the irrelevant notice "opens new tab". Lazy or inattentive.

You may be giving the word "allegations" too much power. An allegation is an accusation; it isn't proof; it isn't even evidence.

From The Guardian: "Investigations by the Washington Free Beacon and the New York Post .... turned up nearly 50 instances of alleged plagiarism in Gay’s academic writing. ... According to the Harvard board, a school subcommittee and independent panel charged with investigating the plagiarism allegations against Gay found "a few instances of inadequate citation” but “no violation of Harvard’s standard for research misconduct"

"No doubt, a top administrator accused of being a chronic cut-and-paster is a bad look for the nation’s foremost institution of higher education."

So: allegations, investigation, no violation.

That seems valid: if it's possible to get the model to disgorge a substantial fraction of a book unchanged, does that imply that the model has stored a copy of part of the book?

"Better Place was a venture-backed international company that developed and sold battery charging and battery switching services for electric cars. It was formally based in Palo Alto, California, but the bulk of its planning and operations were steered from Israel .... The company opened its first functional charging station the first week of December 2008 at Cinema City in Pi-Glilot near Tel Aviv, Israel. The first customer deliveries of Renault Fluence Z.E. electric cars enabled with battery switching technology began in Israel in the second quarter of 2012, and at peak in mid September 2012, there were 21 operational battery-swap stations open to the public in Israel. ... Better Place filed for bankruptcy in Israel in May 2013."

"The Better Place approach was to enable manufacturing and sales of different electric cars separately from their standardized batteries .... the Better Place monthly payment would cover electric "fuel" costs including battery, daily charging and battery swaps."

"The QuickDrop battery switch system would enable Renault Fluence Z.E.'s battery, the only vehicle deployed in the Better Place network, to be swapped in approximately three minutes at dedicated battery exchange stations.[64] The actual robotic battery switching operation took about five minutes in the deployed stations."

In this case, team size is an outcome variable. Mixed native-immigrant startups both form larger teams and are more likely to receive funding. They may be more likely to get funding because they have a larger team, but they (presumably) have a larger team because they're mixed native-immigrant.

Their other outcome variables seem strange: "larger employment three years after founding"; "more likely to exit through an IPO". The paper seems to be intended specifically for venture capitalists, who would care about the exit strategy. I'm not sure why larger employment is necessarily better for the company.

That's a valid point: everybody dies from something eventually; if people don't die from cancer, they'll die from something else. Ideally, they'll die from something else later. (And not from sheer neglect.)

This is a quibble I have with the stated goal of the Biden Adminstration's Cancer Moonshot: "to cut the cancer death rate by at least half by 2047". There's a very simple way to do that: just kill everybody before they get cancer. That's what Logan's Run was about, wasn't it? Obviously that wasn't what they meant.

I would have preferred something like "extending quality-adjusted life-years", but I'm sure that's kind of what they intended.

Technically, the plural of "egg" is eyren. (At least, on the Kent side of the Thames in 1490.)

I also noticed that ambiguity, but if thought does nothing, then reforestation would still do more. Which means "thought" could be replaced by any number of other ineffective nouns or verbs.

Here's a description of the trucker case.
And an opposing view: comma doesn't matter; the intent of the law matters.
The usage in all these cases is called the "Oxford comma" or "serial comma".

You know who to blame for that:

I like ostriches.

Pull! Bang! Whooosh! Finding the lede while totally missing the joke.

This is interesting ... the LLM may not be learning from You Tube comments, but it seems like the Slashdot readers have learned, from their training material, that "any thinking thing exposed to the equivalent of a billion years of reading YT comments tautologically means it’s brain is gone. Goo." is a comment to be taken seriously and criticized on that basis.

Or maybe it was intended seriously, and I'm wrong, in which case I'll add this to my rule set.

Come back when you're 50 years old and have poor eyesight from doing nothing but close-up work all day, arthritis in all your fingers, and constant back pain from hunching over a desk. Then you'll get fired because you can't do the work any more, and you'll find out how much drugs and health care cost without insurance.

Interesting way to prevent back pain: "Photo shows French knife grinders who worked on their stomachs in order to save their backs from being hunched all day. They were also encouraged to bring their dogs to work to keep them company and also act as mini heaters by having them rest on their owners’ legs." There's your employer-sponsored health care.

Good point. The whole popular uprising and NATO bombing in Libya makes more sense under that assumption.

Very interesting point. I would guess that most US citizens aren't familiar with the full text of the Declaration of Independence, but it includes a list of grievances against King George: "they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

It goes on, but it all begins to seem depressingly familiar.

How do you know they aren't? We know that at least three US citizens, including Anwar al-Awlaki, were killed by a drone strike under the direct authority of President Obama on September 30, 2011, violating their rights under the Fifth Amendment (and maybe the Sixth). al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed by another drone strike on October 14, in, officially, an "accident". Have they stopped?

How about Iran under the Shah Reza Pahlavi? The US did that: helped the UK to overthrow the parliamentary government in 1953 and the supported the Shah for 25 years, until he was overthrown. And then supported Saddam Hussein while he was using poison gas against Iran, until suddenly someone decided he was Totally Evil and Had to Go and started a war that resulted in some unknown number of deaths, at least 500,000, plus over 2 million refugees. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan -- and so did the US, so I guess we're even on that score. Before that, the US invaded Viet Nam, resulting in how many deaths? One million? Four million? Estimates differ. We can also give Nixon and Kissinger credit for the Cambodian genocide, since Pol Pot wouldn't have been able to take power without their unauthorized secret bombing of the country. For a few more oppressive regimes, there were Rios Montt in Guatemala, Pinochet in Chile, the military dictatorship in Brazil, the "dirty war" in Argentina, the mass murder of "at least 500,000 to 1 million" (Wikipedia) suspected communists in Indonesia in 1965-1966, all supported or instigated by the US. I'm sure there were more.

The US has been trying to overthrow the government of Venezuela since 2003 for some reason. I seem to recall there was a recent candidate for the US presidency who claimed the election was "stolen"; it takes a lot of arrogance for the US to try to lecture another country on their electoral processes and try to tell them who their president should be.

I haven't added up all the scores, but it's my impression that the US overthrew more governments in the 20th century than anybody else. There's definitely a pronounced history of supporting right-wing regimes.