Journalists actually have very weird and, I would argue, self-serving standards about linking. Let me copy paste from an email that I got from a journalist when I emailed them about relying on my work but not actually citing it:

I didn’t link directly to your article because I wasn’t able to back up some of the claims made independently, which is pretty standard journalistic practice

In my opinion, this is a clever way to legitimize passing off research as your own, which is definitely what they did, up to and including repeating some very minor errors that I made.

I feel similarly about journalistic ethics for not paying sources. That’s a great way to make sure that all your sources are think tank funded people who are paid to have opinions that align with their funding, which is exactly what happens. I understand that paying people would introduce challenges, but that’s a normal challenge that the rest of us have to deal with every fucking time we hire someone. Journalists love to act like people coming forth claiming that they can do X or tell them about Y is some unique problem that they face, when in reality it’s just what every single hiring process exists to sort out.

Unfortunately, COP28 is taking it seriously, seen here with “both sides” reporting from the NYT.

Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

Glad you enjoyed!

I’m feeling better and better about my “pornetariat” theory.

All these always do the same thing.

Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.

From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Yet here’s their conclusion :

The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.

It’s literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.

We need to set aside our petty differences and fight the true enemy: bloated IDEs.

Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.

It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:

I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.

As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.

I think people see it the same way a movie is made by the director, even though a ton of people work on it, and, according to Kaiser, that is a misunderstanding of how it happened based on the information made available by the government.

Well, I should’ve said “build or design,” maybe.

But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it’s just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.

It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.

The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he’s ever written.

I know this is just a meme, but I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn’t build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).

David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.

This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.