@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

betsythemuffin

@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop

autodidactic to a fault. nolite te bastardes carborundum. technically not a Hugo award winner. she/they.

Chemical biology re-entry undergrad; into plastic valorization, soil remediation, and other cleantech. Former software engineer, for my sins. Unabashedly techno-utopian, #solarpunk, #hopepunk. Working to make partially-automated luxury anarchism more evenly distributed.

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betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

I'm upset about losing affirmative action, but letting the educational-equity frame center on Harvard admissions is losing the plot.

What's tuition like at your local community college? Does it have a range of class times and structures (in-person, hybrid, online) to accommodate different learning needs & adult commitments? How does it balance both technical/trades education and liberal arts education? What kind of on-ramp does it have for less academically prepared folks?

emilygorcenski, to random

I have long said that synthetic data does not work for training models, from a statistical, mathematical, or even thermodynamical point of view.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-feedback-loop-researchers-warn-of-model-collapse-as-ai-trains-on-ai-generated-content/

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@emilygorcenski Tangentially, would you mind giving me your hot take on the "compression" analogy for models?

emilygorcenski, to random

One nice thing about this year: I’m reading actual books at the highest rate in almost 20 years. It feels nice. I didn’t bring enough books on this trip. To slow myself down I bought a book in German about the Nazi era.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@emilygorcenski this reminds me of a question I've wanted to ask you: how deep do you go on bioinformatics-relevant math? Because I've been feeling a hankering and was wondering if you had any recs.

inthehands, to random
@inthehands@hachyderm.io avatar

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:

  1. I was (and am) named Paul.
  2. The prof, Cal Roetzel, was (and is) cool.

I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

WHAT LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IS FOR: A THREAD

1/

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@inthehands Thinking of a tweet from a little while ago, something like: "forget humanities vs STEM, let's unite against our common enemy: business majors."

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“EU lawmakers back transparency and safety rules for generative AI - TechCrunch”

This is pretty important. Includes limitations on the use of facial recognition for surveillance as well as transparency rules for foundational models. https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/eu-ai-act-mep-committee-votes/

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@baldur My read is that this is effectively a requirement to throw out existing foundation models and start over with cleaner training sets.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@baldur I worry that, as an optimist, I'm reading the law that way because I find it one of the better possible outcomes.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@baldur I worry that regulators won't have appetite to actually hit Google/MSFT/etc with the full 6% revenue hammer.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@baldur I wish I knew more about the actual implementation status of provenance tracking within large-model-generating orgs.

I know that the technology for effective provenance tracking exists, but I don't know whether it's being used. And AFAICT, if you haven't been using it from the beginning of model training, you can't really reconstruct provenance retrospectively.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“We Have No Moat And neither does OpenAI”

This is an interesting document, ostensibly a leaked Google doc. There’s an opportunity here for the OSS community to do better than OpenAI or Google and I have to hope we don’t botch it https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@baldur

"They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B" is particularly interesting -- feels like a smoking gun for the failures of the "throw more parameters at it and cross our fingers for emergent behavior" school.

betsythemuffin, to random
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

Looking for Rails or frontend coaching, architecture consulting, or good ol' hands-on-keyboard delivery?

I have some availability beginning mid-May and stretching through mid-August. 15+ years experience. References consistently describe me as "one of the best folks I've ever worked with when it comes to helping folks reach a shared [technical] understanding."

Email at betsy.haibel@gmail.com.

mishellbaker, to random
@mishellbaker@wandering.shop avatar

I really like small birds.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@mishellbaker Sometimes the hummingbirds in our neighborhood perch on the power line to our house. When not in motion they're even smaller-looking, and you can see how long their beaks are relative to the rest of their bodies.

mishellbaker, to random
@mishellbaker@wandering.shop avatar

I have given up on all pretense of a "daily" question, but I still like to ask questions now and then:

What's the thing that made you happiest this week?

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@mishellbaker Brunch on the back porch with my partners yesterday, with sunlight but not too much heat, looking at the tiny new leaf buds on the manzanita.

betsythemuffin,
@betsythemuffin@wandering.shop avatar

@betsythemuffin @mishellbaker Also, discovering that Leonard Bernstein did a whole album’s worth of settings of contemporary-ish poetry — think Millay and Hughes — and they are weird and Sondheimy and delightful.

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