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davidpfau.com
So far I have not found the science, but the numbers keep on circling me. Views my own, unfortunately.
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Were there people who had been working on ARPANET since the '70s who, when the web came along, went "nah, seems like a bubble, I'll sit this one out"? What are they up to now?

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I don't often beat up on the NYTimes, because I think the alternatives are mostly worse, but every once in a while they are so egregious my jaw literally drops. Left: NYTimes. Right: The Telegraph (a paper so right-wing it's often called "the Torygraph")

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

So, it's been over four months now. Shouldn't a lawsuit challenging the cuts on the basis that they violate the Impoundment Control Act have made it to the Supreme Court by now?

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Stochastic vs deterministic Lotka-Volterra: smooth theory vs randomness! Individual realizations (Gillespie algorithm) show populations can crash or go extinct despite stable deterministic cycles or equilibrium. Randomness changes everything! 🦌🐺🧪 Made with #python #numpy #scipy #matplotlib

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

My father worked in a tire factory in Appalachia. Friends and family in the military. Used to vote Republican. Got into college on a diversity program for the underprivileged. Ended up a Harvard professor. And now my funding is terminated because we're trying to stick it to the elites.

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

The war on science in the US is already having an effect on private sector research like AlphaFold. Bears repeating but the private sector builds on top of things created by academic research for the public good. This hurts everyone.

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

For what it's worth, NEJM, JAMA and the Lancet are basically the medical equivalent of, like, Science, Nature and Cell.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

I'm enjoying Andor season 2 but every couple of scenes I see something that looks obviously AI-generated and I feel like I'm going insane.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I feel like I drop off this site for a month and now everyone is a furry.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

I wish more people understood the difference between criticizing something because you want to fix it and criticizing something because you want to destroy it.

submitted 8 days ago • 4 comments

It is hard for me to even clearly express the extraordinary value of this research work and how multifaceted it is in how it benefits the US. It goes *way* beyond just the result itself. This thing is the golden goose of America. It is not farmers or the Constitution or whatever. It’s this.

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

It's just a nonstop stream of things that make me feel like my brain is broken, but somehow his total conviction that no one uses the word "groceries" any more still manages to stand out.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Worth noting that the entire plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey was driven by an AI going insane trying to satisfy logically contradictory instructions from its creators.

submitted 19 days ago • 3 comments

read this please www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/o...

submitted 20 days ago • 125 comments

You might as well set national policy with a Ouija board or tarot cards.

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

theonion.com/you-people-m...

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

some interesting historical context re: stories of "chatGPT-induced psychosis" is that when the radio and telephone were invented, there were similar reactions — some people believed they could tune their radio to the frequencies of heaven or received instructions from the dead via the telephone

submitted 26 days ago • 24 comments

The idea of "AI alignment" grew out of a community that thought you could solve morals like it was a CS problem set. Nice to see a more nuanced take.

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Also extremely telling that Starmer, who somehow has a bizarrely good relationship with Trump, has enjoyed no bump in the polls whatsoever.

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

One of grants frozen at Cornell: $6.7M (4 yrs) to develop heart pumps for babies born w/ heart defects. It took decades of work to get to point of prepping device for in-human clinical trials. No private company could do this. The cruelty of the Trump administration is heartbreaking. So to speak.

submitted 26 days ago • 90 comments

An enormous amount of society's ills can be traced to an inability to properly understand the magnitude of things.

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

There was an entire subplot in Pynchon's Against the Day about this.

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

🚨 New #ICML2025 paper!
"Bongard in Wonderland: Visual Puzzles that Still Make AI Go Mad?" We test Vision-Language Models on classic visual puzzles—and even simple concepts like “spiral direction” or “left vs. right” trip them up. Big gap to human reasoning remains. 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19546

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

My latest paper got way less engagement on here than on the other site. Real talk: I think this place has become too much of an echo chamber, and done too much to drive away communities that might hate Elon but not align 100% with the orthodoxy.

submitted 27 days ago • 15 comments