No economist will ever come up with a better description of why being poor is so expensive than Terry Pratchett. Such a great quote.

Cogent and persuasive.

I would like to say this is beyond belief, but….

Beautiful work and explanation!

“our system actually rests upon the collective who are trying their best, not upon the exceptional few.” How true of everything, and yet, how seldom acknowledged.

This toy example may change how you look at tSNE & UMAP. They find clusters in the most uniform data possible.

GitHub Copilot and LLM chatbots are causing a big drop in StackOverflow traffic. What's fascinating about it is that these systems work largely thanks to the user-generated content from StackOverflow. Is this feedback loop sustainable?

1/n: There are some academic papers that are so brilliantly and so accessibly written and so universal in scope that they transcend disciplines and stand as timeless testaments to both great thinking and great writing. Here's a short personal selection:

Funny to see the PCA vs UMAP debate start to take on a culture war angle. In reality, the latter simply doesn't identify basic population structure correctly. Here's an example with three-way admixture: admixed individuals get mapped almost arbitrarily.

Good point very well made on the distribution of rare variants.

Have you ever wanted to train LLMs in pure C without 245MB of PyTorch and 107MB of cPython? No? Well now you can! With llm.c: github.com/karpathy/llm.c To start, implements GPT-2 training on CPU/fp32 in only ~1,000 lines of clean code. It compiles and runs instantly, and exactly

Very much agree with this and much of what Yann LeCun has been sating on these subjects recently.

This letter is very tricky for the Conservatives.

So Sunak didn’t just lie about the tax rise, he was TOLD in advance of #itvdebate NOT to say it What was that about “integrity?”

Incredible anecdote by Daniel Boffey in the Guardian A Labour MP tells a story about meeting a voter who said he wasn’t voting for him because Labour was taxing condoms

Philip hits the nail on the head. "You're having your kitchen refitted... the bloke's a little fella & his trousers are too short.. " #LBC

Clearly our UK electoral system is grossly unfair and no longer appropriate. I say this even though I an quite happy with the outcome in this case! Let’s hope Starmer heeds Robert Peston ‘s advice!

A thread on some of the fascinating noncoding genetic discoveries from 2024. I've written long form posts and discussed on The Genetics Podcast about these stories. I'll share links to all below with a brief summary.

Noticing myself adopting a certain rhythm in AI-assisted coding (i.e. code I actually and professionally care about, contrast to vibe code). 1. Stuff everything relevant into context (this can take a while in big projects. If the project is small enough just stuff everything

Interesting exercise…