Ben Radford 🐼

@benradford.bsky.social

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Asst. Professor @ UNCC. Machine learning, NLP, political conflict, forecasting, cybersecurity, international relations.

https://www.pandas-lab.com

www.benradford.com

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The fact that it took the alt-right viewers until season 4 of The Boys to realize that they're the baddies is so on brand I love it

I don't see the problem here

The Phoenix police union is warning that more than half of its officers are thinking about quitting unless city leaders fight oversight from the Justice Department

Phoenix police union: 56% of officers thinking about quitting unless city fights DOJ oversightwww.kjzz.org The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association is the largest union of rank and file police officers employed by the city. The group is warning that more than half of its officers are thinking about quitting...

If I could go back in time I'd study astrobiology (or maybe astronomy) and Bayesian statistics Real neat opportunities there

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Ben Radford 🐼

One of the reasons TA work is sometimes (AND OFTEN NOT) repetitive lower-skilled tasks is bc these are training tasks for early career scholars. If we automate them and eliminate the positions associated with them, we are explicitly gutting the future of these fields.

Also known as “training your replacement.” 😩

Morehouse to be the first university to use virtual AI teaching assistantswww.axios.com The Atlanta HBCU will have AI teaching assistants this fall.

Look. Modern AI is fucking amazing. Like among the most incredible things humans have achieved, amazing. But maybe it's just not (yet?) a consumer product.

Yeah Biden is too old to be president. And so was basically every other president except 8 or 9 of them. For real normalize retirement in the USA

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Ben Radford 🐼

Reply to

Gerry Doyle

The Supreme Court just today said presidents can do crimes. The media, of which we are a part, can receive that message of existential threat if the president is willing to do more than just make a plea for November. But the president has to make a case and cannot be afraid to appear in power.

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Ben Radford 🐼

I am so tired of the already elected saying that things hinge on the next election. Do more now and run on it. If I was president the day I learned that crimes were legal for me I might act on that knowledge and get the Supreme Court in line.

Yikes

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Ben Radford 🐼

The correct response to Chevron being overturned is for every single environmental group to start filing millions of lawsuits, right now, today, arguing that various regulatory decisions didn't go far enough. Absolutely flood the zone.

It's gonna be one of _those_ decades

Yikes

Oh, your billion dollar AI cashier couldn't figure out how many mcnuggets the customer ordered but the highschooler could? Sounds like that job is harder than you thought and you owe that employee a lot more money

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Ben Radford 🐼

Seems like a good day to reup this tweet from two years ago:

The "it's straining our power grid" counter-AI narrative kind of gives the lie to the "there's no popular demand for AI services" narrative

something like 50% of dunks on LLMs by otherwise smart people on social media are due to misunderstanding tokenization and it's effect on an LLM's interpretation of letters

Polisky game night

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Ben Radford 🐼

Removing most or even many of these departments would mean ceasing to function as a university for all intents and purposes. Looking for cost savings by analyzing department “cash flow” is extremely short sighted, there are a lot of interconnected pieces here that are difficult to disentangle.

AUGH shiiiiit. UNC Asheville's Physics program is on the consultants' radar for reduction/elimination. this freaking timeline mountainx.com/news/14-unca...

14 UNCA academic programs highlighted for potential reductions, eliminationmountainx.com An outside consultant recommended the University of North Carolina Asheville examine 14 of its 35 academic programs for potential course reductions or program eliminations.

I know everybody is like "Microsoft should just be better" but deep down you know they were never good and Linux is actually super easy now

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Ben Radford 🐼

Reply to

Ulrike Franke

no snark: because it's not an information problem, it's a political problem. The IPCC and similar are packed with natural scientists when they need policy and political scientists and economists. People who understand and can design mechanism that generate policy outcomes not just ride them.

The Acolyte is great so far. Good music. Good sets. Good acting.

It scares me how dogmatically many "AI thinkers" hold to the idea that the brain is inherently different from a sufficiently complex mathematical model. Human thought is *intrinsically* valuable. If you tie that value to the magic of "conscious" or "creative", humans will lose value as AIs improve

Guess who's got a (the first?) working Stan model for KANs of arbitrary shape and depth 😈

I don't want an email with a date and a zoom link. I want a calendar invite. Whose teaching students apps these days?

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Ben Radford 🐼

Reply to

Jordan Nafa

Your average observational researcher is just a Bayesian with uniform priors

I spend so much of my time correcting students' misunderstandings of multicollinearity. Why oh why are their faculty mentors so worried about it? I'm going insane

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Ben Radford 🐼

"Okay, I reset the document permissions, but you’ll need to sign into the email [email protected] via the password I texted you via iMessage. Once you sign into the email, it’ll ask you to create a Microsoft Teams account."

My Comments Are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slackwww.mcsweeneys.net Thanks for sending this along. I left my comments in the Google Doc. You don’t see my comments? You’re looking at the old document. I copied your G...