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I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.

I'm curious if the quality of AI answers will get worse without public sources like Stack Overflow or if LLMs have gotten to a point where that doesn't matter as much.

I'm doing time series forecasting for a biological system. I haven't used these foundation models but my experience is that knowledge of how things are related is baked into what variables you put into the model (which can be more than raw data, you can make any derived product you think would be useful) but it's up to the model to figure out how they are related (if I knew exactly how they were related I wouldn't be training a forecasting model).

I'm sure someone who actually knows this stuff has a better easy to view it but my impression was that these time series foundation models aren't trained for a specific dataset but more they are trained on a procedure for how to look at datasets and make predictions. It doesn't seem to lump things into a bucket much more than any other model type (which also are just consistent procedures to look at datasets). It's not like you have radically different model types across different fields.

Is crazy that production databases at places I've worked are often harder to access than this. So much stuff they do with Flock access I would be fired for if I tried it with even vaguely sensitive customer data.

Somewhat more surprising to me is there's already evidence for this in baby chickens so it appears to exist even across very different animals.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7188

I definitely would not describe implementation of solar as "fanatical" by most governments, especially 20 years ago. The growth of solar is very recent, it's beat nuclear rather quickly and it's also growing very fast. A huge portion of the world's solar infrastructure is just the last 5 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

I'm always surprised to hear online that it's so bleak. I know a very wide variety of men in real life who have eventually found someone just fine on dating apps (the people I know who haven't are mostly places with a small dating pool or there's a particular reason women don't like them when they get to know them).

What you're describing is a linear model, it just has an ad hoc construction instead of something like a least squares training (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_model). Also linear models are about linear associations and work even with non-linear predictors. Your assumption in the model is explicitly a linear association so how the predictors vary shouldn't affect it.

I don't mean to disparage amateur statistics since often there are interesting things that experts miss that amateurs have insight into but this sort of data with few data points (the data you have doesn't sound independent) and a lot of confounding factors is not trivial to accurately model. Not that everyone needs to learn statistics but this sort of data (and also this topic) probably deserves a bit more of a rigorous approach.

As a very simple example, picking a time range for the model because the model doesn't work when you go farther back adds a lot of potential bias into the model and that along with the non-independence issue (and without looking at the data myself I don't know if there are other issues) are going to lead to overconfidence in conclusions.

I was checking if there was a response and upon reading your comments again, looks like your method is less a model and more just some ad hoc procedure. Based on what your conclusion is it sounds like a linear model based on demographic data would work and linear models are easy to train. Though by your summary there are probably going to be issues with the model and you have the same issues with your procedure, you just can't tell because it hasn't been rigorously specified.

There's a channel on YouTube called Statquest that teaches statistics in a pretty accessible way if you're interested in analyzing this sort of data.

If you're seeing trends in your residuals that's a violation of the independence assumption of linear models (assuming you're using about a linear model since you're talking about "linear predictions").

I'm in a different field but an arbitrary 27 years (1998-2024) of data and the autocorrelation both would get flagged in a review for me. Not to give statistics homework but you should test and correct the autocorrelation issue you're describing in the model and if the data goes farther back I would go farther back, too (with how you're describing the errors going off pattern then back on it sounds like the inference here would be at least somewhat unstable depending on year chosen).

Edit: these are the assumptions and basics of how to correct for violations, in particular you're describing a violation of assumption 2 but you should test for all of them - https://www.statology.org/linear-regression-assumptions/

Does this actually track over time or is it coincidence? I'm a bit confused why 1998 was chosen out of all years

I've heard people say "theft" of intellectual property a lot. Also stealing an idea is common parlance. Maybe it's regional or something but I hear "theft" or similar used all the time for things other than physical goods that you lose access to.

The general scam of unrealistic promises then under-delivering is such a well worn trope that while gender surely played a part in it (as it is a big part of social perceptions in general) I hesitate to blame it here. I think for anyone who has been in tech for a while it doesn't take an imagination to picture a man doing pretty much the same thing

With how low many wildlife populations are, surprisingly small areas can be ecologically important

Democracy works best as a diffuse institution and is more than just voting. People are supposed to have rights and power themselves and I want them to try to make things better (whether I agree with them or not) and "corporations" are just groups of people. Needing to just go with the government, especially on something so clearly within their rights, is counter to the ideals of the system.

I can understand Google somewhat here (if I was running a business I wouldn't be happy wading into a political issue like this) but the idea that they are above criticism for just falling in line still doesn't resonate with me.

It looks like they are using audio. Even with poor audio on my phone I find that it works very well. Once in a blue moon I'll get an ID I am doubtful of from BirdNet but it's rare in my experience.

I feel like "guy" is weird in that I often hear people say "you guys" (and similar phrases) to groups of women but "guy" on its own is referring to a man at least 99% of the times I hear it. I'm curious if other people actually use it completely non-gendered (it's definitely gendered in the places I've lived in the US).

I would guess if you really put it up to the people many wouldn't be a fan of this sort of broad warrantless surveillance (or at least want more controls or limits on it). Good luck finding a candidate that matches this and your other values in one of the two political parties you have a choice between. Also good luck effecting any political change in whatever gerrymandered district you are in. I think the US government with a more actually representative democracy would look very different.

I'll always support someone taking a personal stand about what they can or cannot do. Ethical issues always invite the most criticism but my experience is that it's rare for anyone to really give anything up for their ethics (this person likely has money saved up and will land on their feet but even this situation is more than most people would do).

Most of the people very against Flock are more left wing and I feel like another left wing protest about it isn't particularly engaging. I'm sure putting Republican there gets way more interest as Republicans turning against them is necessary to have anything actually happen.

You can get healthcare outside of employers and it's incredibly expensive. The cost of private healthcare (either employer sponsored or not) is what is responsible for what the article is talking about, it's certainly not just employer provided plans. Are you saying that if employers didn't provide health insurance that it would help the situation somehow?

I feel like it will only get worse, too. I don't want to waste my time responding to a bot so as a human it makes me less likely to participate.

I want a social media again where I actually just see my friends (my friends use Discord for this and it works okay).

From knowing many different types of engineers, not only does software engineering fall pretty neatly within that group of jobs but also software is an integral part of their engineering practices. I know some people who are designing planes and if software isn't an engineering discipline I guess I need to tell them they recently became not engineers (though maybe because they occasionally use physics equations the author would say they still are. It's a silly distinction). The argument seems mostly based on their personal definition of engineering, which doesn't seem useful to me (a quick reading of a dictionary would make it seem that software engineering false very neatly within definition 2b https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering)

Overall though I found this post incredibly hard to read. It's incredibly long and wordy though that's par for the course for these petty semantic arguments.

They are winning recall votes and getting a lot of pushback at in person city council meetings. People keep saying it's astroturfed (and I do expect a lot of communication online to not be in good faith) but you can also see the real grassroots pushback. I mean the article is talking about recalling mayors, you don't get that without pretty extreme local opposition.

I've found that everyone has some hypocrisies that they cling to (it's really hard to see it in yourself). I believe I do a better job of it that Facebook employees, it would be really hard to be more blatantly hypocritical than this, but it's not like I don't make similar errors all the time.

Especially on a post about them doing something decent, I can accept they are obviously hypocritical and just not be concerned with it right now.

Edit: for something like this I think about the advice "don't punish someone for doing what you want them to do". This is Facebook employees publicly signing a pro-privacy document. It's obviously self serving so it would be weird to really praise them as people who protect privacy but I'm happy to support them in this regardless.

People uphold a million cruel systems every day, their sort of hypocrisy is so common I've found it just to accept that it's how humans work (especially in a situation like this where their paycheck requires them to not see all the privacy problems they all support). I know I'm hypocritical about a bunch of stuff in my life.

Your perspective might be the more reasonable one but the way I see it, the hypocrisy is frustrating but it's sort of like getting mad at a dog for barking through a fence (dogs gonna dog) so I personally don't find it hard to be sympathetic still.

It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!

I haven't bothered to keep up with all the frontier drama, are the latest Anthropic models more dangerous or easier to get around safeguards than other models?

He was a top Democrat donor (the article says he was their number 2 individual donor in 2022) so I doubt he could buy one. Not that he seemed particularly left leaning himself and he also donated to Republicans but 5.2 million publicly to Biden seems like a dealbreaker.

https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...

I don't think it's odd for a middleman to have some functions in a market (as long as they aren't actually producing anything) but also the definition of a middleman is unimportant to me. I am just highlighting how he glides over a lot in this article (some of which are actually common progressive critiques of the insurance system) and I don't come away from it sympathetic to medical insurance companies at all.