Phil Steitz
Animal lover, trail runner, mathematician, product and tech leader, open source developer
- This really is unbelievable. We used to say that this kind of thing was impossible in the US because if it ever happened it would be all over the nightly news. The problem is there is more nightly news.
- Reposted by Phil SteitzTowards Better Statistical Understanding of Watermarking LLMs @amstatnews.bsky.social @tandfresearch.bsky.social #LLM www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
- There is nothing more fundamentally American than neighborism.
- In Minnesota and elsewhere across the land, grassroots “neighborism” and outrage at Trump’s tyranny are creating an extraordinarily powerful movement. robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-thought-gr…
- “…decrying how no one had alerted him to the inherent instability of digital currencies except for dozens of coworkers, family members, podcast hosts, and respected economists. “
- Agreed on the props for supporting the research. I also agree that understanding and skills loss is not inherent and in fact skills *gain* is possible. It all comes down to leaning in instead of sitting back and watching.
- “We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
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- Reposted by Phil SteitzMy Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd
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- Stylin’ like Macron
- Enter the cool blue Midnight Parrotfish; rocking a Canadian tuxedo and a smile 😁🌌🦜🐟👖 #midnightparrotfish #parrotfishjungle #parrotfishcapitaloftheworld #canadiantuxedo #coolblue #coral #coralcitycamera #miami #portmiami #biscaynebay #coralcity
- www.wsj.com/tech/europe-... There is a real innovation opportunity here. Over-priced bloatware, cloud services and slop engines are ripe for replacement. EU has talent and core infrastructure to do it.
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- From today’s WSJ. Either the LLMs are way better at “executive” tasks, executives are way better at promoting or result quality is less important for them. I suspect it’s mostly the last thing.
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- Reposted by Phil SteitzI was present for the birth of the web, the explosion of personal sites, and the blogging revolution, and you know what we never had to do? Beg people to use our shit.
- One of our newer donkeys from the BLM roundup. Rare coloring for a wild one.
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- Reposted by Phil Steitz🧵 Trump administration AI policy is widely described as deregulatory. This description is misleading. What's happening is not the absence of governance but its rearrangement--intensive state intervention operating through mechanisms we don't typically call regulation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
- www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt... I wish I could see this as a paradigm shift, but I am still waiting for the science on the other side.
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- Reposted by Phil Steitz"The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down." data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-l... Several people I know have used the word "beautiful" for this piece, and that's exactly right. A beautifully phrased essay on the bind we're in— until we aren't. Recommended, in an extreme way.
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- wallstreetjournal-ny.newsmemory.com?publink=2207... 🎶Nice work if you can get it. 🎵 - Sung with feeling, sitting on a crate of bootleg gin.
- www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202... Ok, we almost have observability now. It’s like we could see the call stack before but no actual parameters.
- “Journalism can thrive if it demonstrates, story by story, what a machine cannot: the courage to look directly at the world, the judgment to interpret it, and the willingness to stand behind every word. That is a value worth defending, because no algorithm can recreate it…”
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- completeaitraining.com/news/salesfo... Whenever I see the word “guardrails” regarding AI, I cringe. Here is a better idea: dump the bloated erp, do some hard analysis and write some simple code to drive your business. AI tolling can accelerate that but it can’t model your business for you.
- A little holiday humor
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- Reposted by Phil SteitzEssentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.
- I had five fascinating conversations for this RPS piece, gathering perspectives on genAI chatbots in games, as seen in Where Winds Meet. Thanks to @meghna.bsky.social, @pyrofoux.bsky.social, @maxkreminski.bsky.social, and @chrisgardiner.bsky.social www.rockpapershotgun.com/horrible-bor...
- Reposted by Phil SteitzLove this short opinion piece on “mechanical bypass” in analogy to “spiritual bypass”.
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- Shows how these guys are just playing on a different level. Imagine how stupid retailers must feel that they could have been calling 2 for one sales 200% price reductions. Even just taking a penny off is a 100% cut.
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- This is cool. One way to look at parameter change in NN training is as orbits in dynamical systems. Loss functions + training data induce basins of attraction. I would expect to see chaotic orbits near basin boundaries. Interesting to think about pre-images of these in training data.
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- It is worth following this guy just to get these delightful book reviews
- steerlabs.substack.com/p/confident-... I have not tried using this, but the need is real.
- Beautiful morning for a trot in the preserve.
- www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Interesting article in Nov TAS. Not surprising (pun intended), but interesting.
- I’ve been hearing the words “these aren’t serious people” a lot recently. DJT, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr, Kevin Hasset, Kristi Noem… It’s easy to point and laugh. But at some point we have to ask, are *we* serious people?
- Reposted by Phil SteitzThoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Phil SteitzCrypto Leaders Call For Infusion Of 20 Million Dopes To Stabilize Market
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- At the end of a rainy run in the desert, here’s a happy thought: all the tanks are full for the wildlife!
- tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/... ““We discovered that this missile had pretty old type of technology,” Night Watch said. “They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have. So there is nothing special, there is nothing new in those types of missiles.”
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- Rooting around in the racks at Home Depot, Wallace picked up a price tag. Great deal!
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- www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/... The kid are, um, not all right.
- Yes, they can absolutely “keep their storied pomp!” At least the city where she stands has not forgotten who we are.
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- devansh.bearblog.dev/ai-slop/ This is a hard problem.
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[Not loaded yet] - What a moon last night! This pic was taken with no flash around 9:00PM.
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- Reposted by Phil SteitzI've received an 'exclusive' invite to try Nature's new 'research assistant', which will burn down a forest to provide a 'summary of the paper' I'm reading and I have SUCH exciting news for them, that's called an 'abstract' and the actual authors already wrote it for me, no forest-burning required.
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- www.schneier.com/blog/archive... This is obviously sick and un-American, but the second order effects are really scary. Imagine what the US would be like if this crap had been going on for say the last 10 years. We really have to get rid of these guys.
- techtrenches.substack.com/p/the-great-... Nice rant.
- Had fun with Claude today. I gave it a problem that is painful for humans but right in the LLM wheelhouse. Given an arrow ipc file, read its schema and write a java class that can create List<Thing> from the records in the file. Like what avro does, but for tables. Claude crushed it in python.
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- news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/... This is every pricing team’s nightmare: consumers starting to watch the time series. An app to do the tracking and identify real discounts would be cool.
- Reposted by Phil SteitzUT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics! Asst or Assoc. We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.) faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793 🤘
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- Fred says, “Save animals, save the planet!” Happy World Animals Day!
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