Rotundus.com

Tony Bennett’s Nazi Hunting Past Is Just One Reason He’s the Greatest Living American

Can you resist reading an article with an opening sentence like? "Only one man can say that he has both recorded a jazz album with Lady Gaga and liberated a Nazi death camp, and that man’s name is Tony Bennett." Unfortunately I only bumped into it on the date of his death so the title doesn't quite apply anymore.

Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods? Evidence from Activity on Stack Overflow

"We find that relative to its Russian and Chinese counterparts, where access to ChatGPT is limited, and to similar forums for mathematics, where ChatGPT is less capable, activity on Stack Overflow significantly decreased. A difference-in-differences model estimates a 16\% decrease in weekly posts on Stack Overflow. This effect increases in magnitude over time, and is larger for posts related to the most widely used programming languages. Posts made after ChatGPT get similar voting scores than before, suggesting that ChatGPT is not merely displacing duplicate or low-quality content." As one of the authors observes on Twitter "LLMs like ChatGPT are displacing their own future training data".

To Fight Bias, Consider Highlighting Your Race or Gender

A sign that the situation is more complicated than many suggest (and, I'd say, not what this article suggests it is): "When female or minority senders explicitly mentioned their identities, they were just more than 24 percent more likely to receive a response, compared with e-mails that had the same signature but did not mention identities. E-mails that mentioned identities received higher-quality replies"

From this interview:

To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are powerful. So if you’re still reacting against whatever you used to struggle for, but actually you’re in control, then you end up creating great damage in the world.

To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats

"He calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising."

Child Deaths Resulting From Inflicted Injuries: Household Risk Factors and Perpetrator Characteristics

"Children residing in households with unrelated adults were nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries than children residing with 2 biological parents ... Children in households with a single parent and no other adults in residence had no increased risk of inflicted-injury death"

AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can't Go Quietly

"we've also been primed in another way for the AI takeover of art: Endless reboots, remakes, sequels, next chapters, and prequels have replaced new stories. We've basically be doing AI by hand, pulling in all the old stuff and spitting out an amalgamation of that past work."

Food for thought. Suspect most people think most of these go a lot further back:

Today’s traditions are yesterday’s innovations. pic.twitter.com/wFOoBQ7PVB

— Lionel Page (@page_eco) November 28, 2022