Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:

If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.

Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.

Comment · 1 year ago
Median, normal lead exposure for toddlers in the 1960s and 1970s in any urban or suburban area would be 99th percentile by today's standards due to leaded gasoline vapors (and lack of awareness about paint dust).

So the crime hypothesis is more about baseline level of criminality being higher throughout the entire leaded gasoline era and for a few decades thereafter. It's generally framed as social science based on aggregate trends rather than individual dose-dependent epidemiological hypothesis.

Comment · 1 year ago
Primary source of exposure in Chicago is from household dust contaminated by old paint. Water is secondary or tertiary issue, but can be bad. The article is a bit off the mark as they did not interview the Chicago DPH inspectors who respond to high serum reports.

Also, the average lead level of urban or suburban toddlers in the 1970s was 10-15 µg/dL, due mostly to vapors from leaded gasoline. Gen X had eye-popping lead exposures as kids.

So 6-8 µg/dL doesn't guarantee cognitive disability, but it is still bad.

[Edit: also want to add that quality monitoring doesn't necessarily fully solve the water situation either. For example, it is known that a chunk of leaded detritus or solder can drop into rice or pasta water from stream or aerator and raise serum precipitously, but won't be seen in a test as it is intermittent. The problem of lead is ubiquitous and not entirely tractable, but a lot of progress is possible over time.]

Comment · 2 years ago
True. Designer I worked with believes the eyes focus easier on text if there is a small amount of low contrast fuzz surrounding it. I don't know if that is based on science but it seems plausible at least on white backgrounds.
Comment · 2 years ago
I second the reply about incentives. Funding curriculum materials and professional curriculum development is often seen as more of a K-12 thing. There is not even enough at the vocational level.

If big competitive grants and competitive salaries went to people with demonstrated ability like the engineer of this viz, there would be less stem dropouts in colleges and more summer learning! Also, in technical trades like green construction, solar, hvac, building retrofits, data center operations and the like, people would get farther and it would be a more diverse bunch.

Comment · 3 years ago
For profit subsidiaries can totally influence the nonprofit shell without penalty. Happens all the time. The nonprofit board must act in the interest of the exempt mission rather than just investor value or some other primary purpose. Otherwise it's cool.
Comment · 3 years ago
I don't really think this is true in non-charity work. Half of American hospitals are nonprofit and many of the insurance conglomerates are too, like Kaiser. The executives make plenty of money. Kaiser is a massive nonprofit shell for profitmaking entities owned by physicians or whatever, not all that dissimilar to the OpenAI shell idea. Healthcare worked out this way because it was seen as a good model to have doctors either reporting to a nonprofit or owning their own operations, not reporting to shareholders. That's just tradition though. At this point plenty of healthcare operations are just normal corporations controlled by shareholders.
Comment · 3 years ago
Yep, the lay audience conceives of AGI as being a handyman robot with a plumber's crack or maybe an agent that can get your health insurance to stop improperly denying claims. How about an automated snow blower?Perhaps an intelligent wheelchair with robot arms that can help grandma in the shower? A drone army that can reshingle my roof?

Indeed, normal people are quite wise and understand that a chat bot is just an augmentation agent--some sort of primordial cell structure that is but one piece of the puzzle.

Comment · 3 years ago
Being first to openly generate from billions of copyrighted documents would not have been a sane move for Google's management.
Comment · 3 years ago
Seems unusual for a nonprofit not to have a written investigative report or performance review conducted by a law firm or auditor. Similar to what happened with Stanford's ousted president but more expedited if matters are more pressing.
Comment · 3 years ago
First mover advantage and Microsoft integration is nothing to sneeze at.
Comment · 3 years ago
That's not quite right. However, before explaining, it is moot because OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary probably captures most of the value anyway.

The nonprofit shell exists because the founders did not want to answer to shareholders. If you answer to shareholders, you may have a legal fiduciary responsibility to sell out to high bidder. They wanted to avoid this.

Anyway, in a strict nonprofit, the proceeds of a for-profit conversion involves a liquidation where usually the proceeds must go to some other nonprofit or a trust or endowment of some sort.

Example would be a Catholic hospital sell out. The proceeds go to the treasury of the local nonprofit Catholic dioceses. The buyers and the hospital executives do not get any money. Optionally, the new for-profit hospital could hold some of the proceeds in a charitable trust or endowment governed by an independent board.

So it's not as simple as just paying tax on a sale because the cash has to remain in kind of a nonprofit form.

I am not an accountant either and obviously there are experts who probably can poke holes in this.

Comment · 3 years ago
Does the time change for you with season and light exposure? I sometimes experience this sort of thing too, where I will have a consistent window of productivity at an unusual time, but it never lasts for a more than a few months.
Comment · 3 years ago
That's fairly common. Think back to old school paper workflows or studying for school. Some people can concentrate with 5 books open and papers strewn all over the place. Others can't stand to have but one book open and one sheet of notes.
Comment · 3 years ago
Basically, copyright is not too different from other paper assets like publicly traded stocks. There is little intrinsic moral imperative for profit-seeking entities to make filings based on government mandated accounting principles and to not engage in insider trading schemes. Other systems, such as partnerships and private ownership, exist concurrently.

Copyrights are transferable intangible assets created by the legal instruments of the capitalist system. If you were to buy the copyright to the Metallica catalog, you can license that catalog for a return on your investment. It would be an asset of your estate like any other paper investment.

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