I think a lot of “gifted kid burnout” is just “burnout” combined with a poor theory of mind for kids that weren’t labeled as “gifted”

Mexico, truly the heart of Asia

The death of the URL (“gibberish”) is tragic imo

getting asked to explain the 5 diff-in-diff estimators you used in your job talk

This kind of thing is great, but you have to wonder how much of it depends on the reams of lecture notes out there explaining these older papers. I worry about the future incentives to produce that kind of important training (for humans and LLMs) material

No it wouldn’t be cheating in the same way as using a simple calculator wouldn’t be cheating for a calculus exam. But using Mathematica probably would be cheating.

Sounds encouraging until you see the 5 books

(whispering into my phone during the job talk) grok is that true?

It’s interesting to compare how people react to sending the same image through a diffusion model 1000x to how they react to two AI instances “talk” to each other. I think people see images as natural stochastic drift of the model where they see something more purposeful in text

bouba / kiki

A Republic, if you can keep it

New, from me - I wrote an essay for U.S. News & World Report on the conflict between the Trump Administration and higher ed, with some thoughts on the origins of the animosity Link in replies

The final mission impossible is good but it’s hard to take a movie seriously when it uses the word “cyberspace” multiple times in dramatic scenes

It’s impressive that it can find it in 8 out of 100 iterations of the same setup, but the stochastic nature of the outcome renders it only useful to someone who can and is willing to verify the answer.

Nothing has made my want to quit social media more recently than seeing someone that has tweet >100k times in 5 years. That’s 55x a day on average…

I think some introspection is needed by the industry about their own unrealistic narratives about AI. These are useful tools, of course, but when people constantly hear that we’re 3-6 months from some job being completely automated, we’re getting into boy cried wolf territory