Rod Van Meter

Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went?

i wonder if you could make an algorithm where you post a joke and it shows up in the feed of all the people who would get the joke, and no one else

AI is too broad and fuzzy to cleanly decompose into a proper hierarchy, but there are a few ways to impose a messy order on it. At the broadest level there’s maybe a distinction between Symbolic AI and Machine Learning (though there are things that you might call “AI” that really fit into neither category, like the Google PageRank algorithm or the algorithm that your GPS uses to determine point-to-point directions). Under ML, you might have some subcategories like Classifiers or Recommenders, and one of these subcategories might be Generative AI. One of the categories below this could be LLM-based generation systems, of which ChatGPT is one example. This isn’t the only way to organize all of this, or even necessarily the best way, but the point I am trying to make is that ChatGPT is just one little point in a vast universe of technologies, somewhat analogously to how a hammer is one example from the general class of tools, alongside screwdrivers, dishwashers, cars, telescopes, and matter replicators.

My reigning favorite discussion of this is here:

Generative AI is a hammer and no one knows what is and isn’t a nail
medium.com/@colin.frase...

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

I take on average 10,000 stills and a half hour of video every week. Most I'll never think about again. This I'll hold onto until I grow old. 4 hours ago.

Zero edits. No recoloring. No cropping. Nothing. Just straight up reality. 🦑

I would absolutely eat that.
(And I'm from West Virginia.)

Watched one of those "musician hearing it for the first time" videos featuring "Karn Evil 9" more than a week ago, and can't get the music out of my head. Hadn't listened to it in too long.

1/ The Kyiv Independent is reporting that Trump envoy Steve Witkoff is "running a shadow operation inside the White House in an effort to sideline pro-Ukraine officials", cutting out Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in an effort supported by Vice President J.D. Vance. ⬇️

Roughly 100 MT of TNT, which is about twice the size of the largest nuclear weapon ever tested.

KC and the Sunshine Band’s hits #1 with “That’s the Way (I Like It)” — 50 years ago today.

“People always thought [the track] was some kind of crazy accident, like we just stumbled onto a hook,” said Harry Wayne Casey. “But we worked that groove over and over until it felt like a living thing.”

Thanks for the answer, and for the work you do.

So how does 140m compare to, say, the largest nuclear weapons we have built? I know it depends on velocity and maybe a bit on composition, but just qualitatively roughly.

The second, sort of. An impact from a 1-km object would be a serious problem for all humankind, so those were the first to find. Then a study showed that after those were found that 90% of the remaining risk (in an actuarial sense) could be retired by finding possible impactors down to ~140 m.

A glorious selfie with the official MAHA lanyard seconds after I made it past Secret Service screening.

About that exclusive, "closed-to-press" MAHA summit last week with RFK and JD Vance: I got in.

Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

P.S. Thanks for the great thread, all three of you!

Where does the 140m diameter number come from? Is that threshold driven by choice of detection tech+scope diameter, or are tech+diameter chosen because 140m is an important threshold in terms of damage potential?

What's still a matter of current thought and research is stuff like "How much should we care if we bust a 50-m object into a zillion pieces and leave some 10-m pieces on an impact trajectory?" and "When is busting a 150-m object into a zillion pieces better than taking a hit from an intact object?"

I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.

I'm probably betraying my age, but I don't think there has ever been a bigger two-decade shift in American culture than the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

I vaguely remember Laugh In, but it's possible that was reruns.

The 70s and 80s were like the 50s and 60s?

I remember first run Happy Days, and boy, we thought that era was...quaint. (Happens to be the era my parents grew up in.)

Goodreads never got good in the first place.

And I don't always succeed.

I think I missed that same question...

But a lot of mine are more contemporary. I don't mind being the dumbest person in the room when there are things to learn, but I strive to live up to what my students and staff need me to be when my shortcomings can leave them in a lurch.

If only I could do this!

Phone from The Rockford Files

Okay I’m just gonna post Jim Rockford voice messages for the next 24 hours

“Hey Jim, it’s Darryl, remember when I said the check’s in the mail? Well it still is because I forgot to put the little flag up on the box”

In honor of Larry Summers, I asked the female members of my college class (1987) to say if they had any experiences with sexual harassment by teachers/professors, back when this was tolerated as, I dunno, the cost of attending college, and OH MY GOD.

More importantly, the writing is, as always, fantastic. Gripping plots, real characters, comfortable dialog. Always hard to put down a #LadyAstronaut book!

Everybody rightly focuses on The Big Three -- food, water and oxygen -- and repairs. But sustainability means eventually being able to build and repair bulldozers and cranes on the surface of Mars. And make concrete.

Reading @maryrobinettekowal.com's #LadyAstronaut novel The Martian Contingency is claustrophobic the same way good generation starship novels are. What does it really take to survive out there? Do you have to be able to make sheet metal? Copper wire? Capacitors? Ceramics? Glass?

I've had a missile blow up next to my airplane, been shot at dozens of times by anti-aircraft fire, and launched into orbit — all for my country. I never thought I'd see a President call for my execution.

Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution, and we're all less safe for it.