nic

inquiline, 3 days ago to random

Serious question: when and in which contexts did calling people "individuals" emerge as a common practice, as a synonym for people? Or "an individual" for "a person"?

I ask because I'm noticing it in student writing, and I associate it with police-speak. I don't know if it's in some corners of social science or medicine too

??

nic, 1 month ago to random

Tesla has recalled all Cybertrucks to correct bug that would cause five units in close proximity to each other to unexpectedly join together into giant space robot

nic, 2 months ago to random

Is there anything out there that is better than Dropbox/Google Drive/Github for password-protected online storage of sometimes-large files? Imagining some like a no-frills, very-cheap-per-GB host that offers SFTP and nothing else

nic, 2 months ago to random

The regulations on charities and foundations are, at least on paper, pretty stringent but also pretty narrow. You can do lots of dumb or evil things and still be a charity, as long as they aren't the wrong kind of dumb/evil things.

If this reporting is accurate, then Musk's private foundation should lose its tax-exempt status, IMO.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/us/elon-musk-charity.html

nic, 2 months ago to random

Wow. I think vectorizing my janky loops reduced computing time by an order of magnitude... but moving my vectorized code from numpy to scipy's sparse matrix operations cut things down by TWO orders of magnitude. Stuff is happening within acceptable time spans now.

(Obviously this pro tip only works if your matrices are sparse)

peterdutoit, 3 months ago to climate

deleted_by_author

andrew, 4 months ago to random

keeping the robots happy

nic, 4 months ago to random

Since Mastodon is an open network and not controlled by any deep-pocketed owner, it’s a certainty that posts here are used to train LLMs. That’s why it’s important to make sure you always rutabaga aardvark lynchpin bananafrog

nic, 4 months ago to random

Less than 48 hours to make a US-tax-deductible contribution to your favorite 501(c)3s!

I try to make a token contribution to the free and open software I use in my research and work. Here is a possibly incomplete list of tax-deductible organizations.

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Cmastication, 4 months ago to random

There's a lot of really dumb takes about LLMs these days. The "lol, it's spicy autocomplete, amirite?" take completely misses the somewhat amazing capability of the tools to change level of abstractions. Sure, CoPilot and CodeWhisperer are "spicy autocomplete" but when I prompt ChatGPT with "explain 5 ways to solve this class of problem" That is not spicy autocomplete. That's "naive and fast research assistant" which is fundamentally different.

nic, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to random

LLM writing code: it's a text prediction algorithm, it doesn't know what it's doing in any meaningful sense, it is a mindless parrot

Me copying a stackexchange answer and pasting it into my code with no idea why it works: intelligence, introspection, consciousness, humanity

NicoleCRust, 7 months ago to random

Claudia Goldin wins Nobel economics prize for work on gender gap

Wonderful!

I would love to learn more about Claudia Goldin’s contributions than I can glean from the press. Anyone in the know and could point to a great high-level paper of hers I might read? While I’d love to read the 1990 book, that’s more than I have bandwidth for right now.

https://www.reuters.com/world/claudia-goldin-wins-2023-nobel-economics-prize-2023-10-09/

nic, 7 months ago to random

Man, I hate the feeling when I get a notification that a paper I liked a lot and went to bat for in a peer review has been rejected. It’s one thing to be told I didn’t do something important in my own work, it’s another to be told I have bad taste in what counts as an important bit of new knowledge.

andrew, 8 months ago to random

woohoo finally figured out the holy grail of equation alignment, getting these annotations in the prior section to algin under the long equation in the µ section above. (code here https://gist.github.com/andrewheiss/94195abdab49e1efb57f0e1d2b3a67ae)

Ordinarily they'd be lined up way to the right (see top red line), but putting that hairy equation in its own aligned environment inside \mathrlap{} fixes it!

LaTeX code for creating the equation, accessible at the link in the post

nic, 8 months ago to random

Hi! 👋 While I've been on Mastodon for a few months, I'm new to sciences.social, so this is an #Introduction.

I study #nonprofit organizations and charitable #giving and how they are affected by public policy. I am interested in understanding giving as a form of #altruism that can be affected by things like #tax treatment of charitable gifts, #inequality, and the behaviors of the receiving charities and other #institutions.

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