iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 03/06/2025

Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

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Pekka Lund @pekka.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

This article is now predictably popular on Bsky but key parts of it are, well, hallucinations. They try to claim "errors are rising" on "new reasoning systems" primarily based on Vectara hallucination leaderboard and one OpenAI document. So let's look what those actually show.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 07/05/2025

One of those things that says what it doesn't say by saying it

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 28/04/2025

Vibe coding is going to re-open the web. It's never been easier to make an interesting website, page, or single page app.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 26/04/2025

A long but and worthwhile essay on where we are with technocracy/expertise and populism and how difficult the problems we face really are. Too few academics seriously think about their role as experts in society, apart from the ways that position serves their personal career.

rbnmckenna86.substack.com

Weaponization of Expertise

Some Thoughts on Elites, Populism, and The Mess We Are All In

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 25/04/2025

On Bayesian background priors, the long trail of failures in health tech (RIP Theranos) give me pause about companies making similar claims. Many people also get their blood tested in the course of routine doctor visits. It's not that hard to upload bloodwork to <leading general purpose model>.

techcrunch.com

Superpower wants to help people detect and address health issues before symptoms appear | TechCrunch

A startup called Superpower is publicly launching what it calls the world’s first super app that is designed to help people better understand and take

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 23/04/2025

Troubleshooting AI systems is hard, because sometimes the AI solves its own problem, and sometimes it doesn't. This makes the fundamental task of measuring things harder.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 31/03/2025

Let's try Google's new "AI Mode"... Right on the splash page, they suggest an interesting query: "houseplants that improve air quality and don't need much light". (1st image) I went ahead and clicked it and was given a long reply with extensive citations (2nd image). Very cool! .... right?

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 26/03/2025

First time in basically ever I've been added to a long (10,000+) queue for the archive.today. Pages are super slow to load too. Noting alongside reports of serious uptick in web-enabled bots and crawlers recently.

arstechnica.com

Open Source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries

AI bots hungry for data are taking down FOSS sites by accident, but humans are fighting back.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 23/03/2025

American policy is pretty easy to understand right now. Trump desperately aspires to be a “great man”. One of his simplistic views of history is that great men conquer foreign lands and grow their empire. One man’s ego, and hundreds of cowards in congress who fail to stop him, explains it all.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Warren Wells, AICP @warrenjwells.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

I don't think people understand the *massive* gulf between fire injuries/deaths and traffic violence. Here's an example: Average annual fire injures in Berkeley: 2 Average annual traffic injuries in Berkeley: 694

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 15/03/2025

The first principal component of the internet (or perhaps all mass media) is attention. Intention is a rounding error.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 11/03/2025

We don’t need to outlaw cars in America. We merely need to legalize human-centric development in the highest density regions.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 08/03/2025

So many harmful tropes of the dominant academic culture on display here. If you have editorial/institutional power and you’re not trying to address this problem, you are doing a great disservice to science and young scientists.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Ethan @ethanrosenthal.com · 23/02/2025

Ok that’s enough

Menu at a salad restaurant that says “SaladAI: Meet your personal recipe assistant”

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

ArXiv Paperboy (Stat.ME+Econ.EM) @paperposterbot.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

link 📈🤖 Pareto optimal proxy metrics (Zito, Greaves, Soriano et al) North star metrics and online experimentation play a central role in how technology companies improve their products. In many practical settings, however, evaluating experiments based on the north star metric directly can be diff

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 17/02/2025

Good video on the evolution of nonchalance. I think with AI making the outputs of art easier to create, we will naturally start to place much more value on things only humans can do. One of those things is to exercise agency and show people that you actually care enough to try.

youtube.com

How Trying Became Cool Again

YouTube video by Nathan Zed

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Noah Haber @whaleactually.com · 16/02/2025

If we have any hope of preventing the collapse of US scientific and research environment, we also have to rip off our blinders on the ways our institutions are weak and how they have failed so many. Those weaknesses are points of leverage for people trying to tear the whole thing down.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Cartoons Hate Her! @cartoonshateher.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

On the white liberal woman as the Omni-villain for the right and the far left www.cartoonshateher.com/p/liberals-w...

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 21/01/2025

Science is in an impending crisis of epistemology. Old, trust-based methods which many were happy to claim were sufficient will stand no chance in the future.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 16/01/2025

David Lynch was a master of capturing the inchoate darkness and beauty that exists outside of what we can articulate in words alone. He inspired me and countless others with his work. RIP to a true artist, visionary, and virtuoso of vibes.

variety.com

David Lynch, Visionary Director of ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Blue Velvet,’ Dies at 78

Director David Lynch, who radicalized American film with with a dark, surrealistic artistic vision in films like 'Blue Velvet,' has died. He was 78.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

WE ARE HIRING! Are you interested in LLMs, metascience, and their intersection? We’re hiring a full time postdoc on a three-year contract to help us develop, evaluate, and extend RegCheck (regcheck.app), our app for automatically comparing research papers with their preregistrations.

regcheck.app

RegCheck

RegCheck is an AI tool to compare preregistrations with papers instantly.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Arvind Narayanan @randomwalker.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

New AI Snake Oil essay: Last month the AI industry's narrative suddenly flipped — model scaling is dead, but "inference scaling" is taking over. This has left people outside AI confused. What changed? Is AI capability progress slowing? We look at the evidence. 🧵 www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-ai-prog...

Declaring the death of model scaling is premature.

Regardless of whether model scaling will continue, industry leaders’ flip flopping on this issue shows the folly of trusting their forecasts. They are not significantly better informed than the rest of us, and their narratives are heavily influenced by their vested interests.

Inference scaling is real, and there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, which could lead to rapid capability increases in the short term. But in general, capability improvements from inference scaling will likely be both unpredictable and unevenly distributed among domains.

The connection between capability improvements and AI’s social or economic impacts is extremely weak. The bottlenecks for impact are the pace of product development and the rate of adoption, not AI capabilities.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Colin Camerer @cfcamerer.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

USC athletics staffer Heinel who did prison time for Varsity Blues: “Buildings don’t get built by FAFSA kids, you know,” she said, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. “A private school needs donations to exist.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

latimes.com

She went to prison in Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Now she says she was a scapegoat

In her first-ever interview, Donna Heinel recounts her time at the epicenter of the Varsity Blues scandal, four months in prison and her continued devotion to USC.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 15/12/2024

Insane levels of ludditism in response to this. I wonder if the reactions would be less extreme if it wasn’t branded directly as a “TA”. Many are sensitive to a “job replacement” framing of AI products (even tho the dynamics behind AI job replacement are identical that to all of existing technology)

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 11/12/2024

Some people don't have the comfort of a 1990s/2000s grunge/rock band album to throw in the stereo and thrash out to, and it shows.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I'm teaching a grad seminar this winter on Prediction for Decision-making. We'll look at what it means to make good predictions for decision-making from various angles, with a focus on decisions for & about people. Reading list: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/06/n... Suggestions welcome!

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

New Course: Prediction for (Individualized) Decision-making | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 04/12/2024

Every mathematician studying knot theory has a new example to include in the “relevance/applications” section of their presentations for the next 20 years. (I studied knot theory in undergrad)

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

In a classic experiment, 12 articles were resubmitted to same journals in which they had already been published - - 3 were recognized as resubmissions. ✅ - 8 of the 9 articles reviewed again were rejected, often due to "serious methodological flaws"! 😮 😕 ⁉️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧪

Abstract from article titled, "Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again" by Douglas P Peter and Stephen J Ceci.

Abstract says, "The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.

With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.”

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 03/12/2024

Walmart is advertising company, Amazon is an advertising company, professional sports leagues are advertising companies, ... you get the picture.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 02/12/2024

Basic income has never seen like a good idea to me. People, men especially, get immense non-monetary value from work. If we are going to do universal anything, it should be a job-guarantee. We need to identify more opportunities for low-skilled labor to do meaningful work.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 29/11/2024

+1 for Kenji’s spatchcock turkey with lemon herb mayo. Easily the best and highest return to effort ratio on a turkey I’ve ever had

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 28/11/2024

Comments be like: “I invoke the Rome Statute and declare that Mr. Zuckerberg does NOT have access to my data”

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 27/11/2024

Altered States (1980): A professor obsessed with his research into the meaning of life pushes the envelope and nearly becomes permanently transfigured by his auto-experimentation. He realizes there is no answer he will find satisfying, finding meaning in his relationships with his wife and family.

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Cory Zue @coryzue.com · 25/11/2024

After seeing @emilyliu.me 's post this morning about using Bluesky for the comments section on her site, I had to try it. Here's a writeup on how to do it, with everything you need to set it up yourself in five minutes. Leave a comment on this post to test it out! www.coryzue.com/writing/blue...

emilyliu.me

Emily Liu

Emily Liu's Personal Website

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Reposted by Alex P. Miller

Emily Liu @emilyliu.me · 24/11/2024

While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network. I blogged about it here:

emilyliu.me

Benefits of an open network

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 25/11/2024

Thought about doing something like this myself a while ago, but it was obviously going to happen soon enough. This is the way.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 24/11/2024

Tons of NFL posts on the "Discover" feed. Things are moving in the right direction

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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

This classic work in the history of nationalism argues that the rise of widely available print (esp. newspapers) made it possible for geographically dispersed groups of people to imagine themselves as a roughly coherent entity called "a nation" in which there was an ongoing conversation.

An intellecrual giant'
ECONOMIST
BENEDICT ANDERSON
IMAGINED
COMMUNITIES
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

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New New York Times @nyt-first-said.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

cyberambitions

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 20/11/2024

Wtf is going on with xAI? Literally what is the business model?

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Kenneth C Wilbur @kennethcwilbur.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Good overview of current bluesky ecosystem for technically minded people. Imo the best bet for long term usage, but there arel important platform design choices yet to be made. anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/m...

anderegg.ca

Maybe Bluesky has “won”

November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I...

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 19/11/2024

I saw $2.89 in Minneapolis this past weekend.

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