All posts
tech, startups, internet
· May 2024
Human forecasting accuracy gets much better when aggregating predictions from a lot of individuals. LLMs are especially bad forecasters compared to these human crowds. But what about crowds of LLMs? “Our finding opens the door for simple, practically applicable steps like forecast aggregation to increase current AI models’ forecasting ability—to predict future events in politics, economics, technology, and other real-world subjects—to a level on par with the human crowd.” ~…
tech, startups, internet
· May 2024
“This sequence of events illustrates how the AI arms race is making geopolitical divides simultaneously more fraught and simpler. In its quest to defend US companies’ IP and prevent China from accessing the most advanced capabilities, the US government is gradually losing its tolerance for ambiguous partnership: you’re either with us or against us.” ~ learn more
to your health
· May 2024
“Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for each $100 per month budget decrease (24.4%).” ~ learn more and original paper
to your health
· May 2024
Kristen Holmes is in an enviable position for many health researchers, given the large proprietary dataset she has access to. In addition to the data streams from millions of fitness trackers, the company has a pile date-stamped and labeled event and action data from its users. She previews many insights that her team is in the process of publishing in this interview. ~ learn more
under the microscope
· May 2024
Who’s ready for this future? “Our proposed framework successfully reconstructed both seen images (i.e., those observed by the human eye) and imagined images from brain activity. Quantitative evaluation showed that our framework could identify seen and imagined images highly accurately compared to the chance accuracy (seen: 90.7%, imagery: 75.6%, chance accuracy: 50.0%).” ~ learn more
under the microscope
· May 2024
Much better than a placebo, says this study of over 4,000 participants. It measured changes to “weight-related quality of life (WRQOL) and health-related quality of life (HRQOL)” scores. What I found interesting was that even with the drug, only 40-50% of participants had improvements that reached “meaningful within-person change (MWPC) thresholds.” ~ learn more
big ideas
· May 2024
“In this essay, we consider whether some very special computers will become black holes before they become gods.” ~ learn more
big ideas
· May 2024
There’s big money going into things that could lower carbon. Here’s the launch of a $1.4 billion new fund. “The fund, Decarbonization Partners Fund I, has already invested in seven companies including low-carbon hydrogen firm Monolith, biotechnology firm MycoWorks and electric battery material firm Group14.” ~ learn more
big ideas
· May 2024
There is this weird case of carbon accounting. “Shell sold to Canada’s largest oil sands companies millions of carbon credits tied to CO₂ removal that never took place, raising new doubts about a technology seen as crucial to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.” Matt Levine explains. ~ learn more
on the blockchain
· May 2024
No need to take this candidate seriously, yet the idea of a truly transparant government budget sounds lovely. “During a Michigan rally on April 21, he proposed the idea and said the move would allow every American to look at “every budget item anytime they want, 24 hours a day.” ~ learn more