Big Muddy

TongFen is a Chinese term referring to the conversion of two fractions to the least common denominator.

A friend told me the other day that I might enjoy the writer Chuck Klosterman.

Sometimes you read a piece of writing that grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you.

The Canadian provinces of Quebec and Alberta have signed a five-year agreement to share AI knowledge and tools.

Here’s a round-up of a few recent prediction market stories.

Professor Mike Moffatt of the Missing Middle Initiative explains in this article why Canadian data on housing starts are problematic.

I read a lot of Tom Clancy novels as a teenager.

I have been spending more time on LinkedIn recently.

I recently read this post from Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham on why the number of economics preprints submitted to arXiv and similar preprint servers is not exploding quite as dramatically as some charts suggest.

The other day I was curious what kind of hockey games were on Steam and came across this review of Franchise Hockey Manager 12 by someone who had built an AI assistant general manager for his OHL team.

My most cancellable academic take is that honorary degrees are bad.

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are organizations governed by votes on the blockchain, typically with votes proportional to tokens held.

Yesterday I used ChatGPT to generate a dumb parody logo for a post.

Parody logo generated by ChatGPT.

I was walking through my neighbourhood yesterday when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, burning plastic and cinders falling into the shrubs next to a house.

That’s right, I’m mad at myself.

There’s a line in C.S.

Yotta was everywhere on YouTube a few years ago, sponsoring an army of personal finance and general-interest creators.

People talk about beliefs as if they are choices.

I recently asked an LLM to infer my ideological leanings purely through my post history on this blog.

Twitter’s head of product recently had the following revelation about the platform’s revenue sharing program: As predicted by everyone when Twitter announced their revenue-sharing program in 2023, paying people to ragebait your users is not a recipe for l…

Europe just experienced a heat wave that literally cooked thousands of people to death.

Just before the pandemic started, I attended a talk on the ethics of genome editing using CRISPR.

Looks like that probably AI-generated story that won the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize last month has won the overall prize, too.

Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of SoftBank, the Japanese investment giant, dropped this profoundly weird slide deck a few days ago for his company’s 46th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders.

Soccer (sorry, fútbol) is the only universal sport.

Kim, Chang, Pham & Iyyer have a new paper on what they call argument collapse: the tendency of LLMs to produce arguments that converge on the same small set of perfectly reasonable, perfectly plausible, perfectly hedged points.

If you’ve ever had to fill out a digital form for the Canadian government, there’s a good chance you’ve come across an XFA PDF.

Ye, Cui & Hadfield-Menell wrote up their recent preprint on the mechanisms behind prompt injections as a highly readable blog post.

By now, p-hacking is a familiar research vice.

Local journalism in Canada is dying.

Alvin Chang has a lovely new piece in The Pudding about what the pandemic did to American relationships.

Anya Martin has a great piece in Works in Progress about how the Squamish Nation reclaimed 11.7 acres of land in Vancouver and decided to build a huge housing development on it, called Senakw.

This interesting paper from social scientist Ryan Briggs and colleagues attempts to quantify the widely believed bias against the publication of null results using a dataset of 100,000 articles published in political science journals.

Economist Justin Diamond created The Data Aquarium to visualize datasets as fish in an aquarium after being inspired by this thread about Chernoff faces.

This piece is a great follow-up to David Oks’s previous piece, “A lot of population numbers are fake”, which was the subject of my first post to this blog.

This post from Sam Kriss…uh, discouraging people from passing off AI writing as their own is pretty damn funny.

The excellent Our World in Data published a tool for simulating international population trends by 2030, 2050, and 2100 under different assumptions for fertility rates, life expectancy, and net migration rates.

In this article, Jonathan Jarry of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society offers up a kind of typology for pseudoscience.

Andrew Carnegie was the godfather of modern philanthropy.

It seems that every week we read about another compromised package uploaded to PyPI or npm.

The US Department of Commerce recently announced new rules governing disclosure avoidance in statistical products from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

This article from epidemiologist Adam Kucharski describes a neat sanity check he conducted on Microsoft Copilot.

It is fairly well known that tomatoes are culinary vegetables but botanical fruit.

I replayed Dragon Age: Origins and its DLCs on PC about a year and a half ago, and it still slaps.

Daydream / I fell asleep amid the flowers / For a couple of hours / On a beautiful day —Wallace Collection, “Daydream” Every year in Montreal, sometime between late May and early June, it snows—sometimes for days on end.

I recently came across this article “Is logistic regression regression?”

J.

I was listening to Ezra Klein’s latest interview with Yuval Noah Harari and was interested by the section on AI relationships (emphasis mine): HARARI: AIs, which are experts in pretending to be conscious entities that have feelings for you.

Yesterday, leaders across AI, biotech, and national security signed on to an open letter calling for laws requiring companies selling synthetic DNA/RNA to screen customers and orders to prevent misuse.