iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 04/06/2025

Try switching from "Ask" mode to "Agent" mode (if it works on Positron)

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Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a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

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

The end of the treat economy.

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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

3. How much of the prior questions matter if people *feel* better about the types of analyses/advice AI is able to provide? Even if the AI doesn't add a ton of health-improving value, there might be a case for smart, accessible, empathic AI to simply improving the customer experience of healthcare.

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

Other other questions that remain for health + AI 1. How much genuine insight is there to be gleaned by giving AI access to your blood test history? 2. What value does AI bring to addressing those deeper problems? Can an AI-driven brand motivate you to make meaningful changes to your life?

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

What's more, the bigger problems healthcare actually needs to solve to add value extend far beyond predicting the future; they are problems of patient compliance, physician communication, empathy, motivation, self-esteem and other human-oriented problems.

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

I'm not that bullish on companies precisely predicting your future health/diseases with infinite data points about your life. We know many of the most predictive data points already, and they aren't all that precisely predictive of anything.

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

The open questions for health + AI companies are: How much data are people willing to share and which comparies are they comfortable sharing it with? OpenAI? Google? Superpower?

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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 · 25/04/2025

Politics is bigger than one election cycle.

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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 · 15/04/2025

This is not a game that can be won though. Playing it means losing it.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 12/04/2025

What evidence is there that added fluoride improves neurologic functioning?

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 03/04/2025

This is kind of a metaphorical version of regularization (could probably made more literal). We would never say λ=1 is always optimal. There may be contexts where that is good enough, but optimal advice would always be “it depends”. I view your Q like asking when should λ>1 and when λ<1?

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 01/04/2025

Are you using Cursor or something else?

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

P.S. It's not a good sign for Google as an organization that this is the query they are *suggesting* to showcase their new search engine. It means the humans involved aren't even aware and/or are not thinking carefully about these tradeoffs.

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

Where does Google fit into a world with AI search? I don't know! But there remains a significant amount of iteration/innovation that remains to find an interaction model that strikes the right balance between acqueiescence and pushback. I hope Google (or someone else) is up to the challenge.

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

Any human with knowledge of the topic being asked in the initial query would raise my point about effectiveness. Right now, AI models are far too creduluous toward junk content, and there is no mechanism to signal ambiguity or pushback to users in a way that will win out on "engagement" metrics.

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

This model of search and interaction with knowledge is just so fundamentally different from the past. While 10 blue links had its own flaws, there was something robust and credible about the pages that showed up on the first page of Google. That seems completely gone now.

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

Because I am a human with my own intelligence and agency, I asked a simple follow up question (1st image). The response completely undermines the whole premise of the question. Some research suggests you might need hundreds of plants per square meter to make any difference in air quality!

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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 · 28/03/2025

We shouldn’t publish null results of publicly funded science because it doesn’t help scientists sort out their pecking order?

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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 · 26/03/2025

Justification I’ve heard is that when completion rates are a concern or people may have some hesitation around sharing demographic data, placing demographic data at the end increases completion. Though I can’t say there’s a single source I can cite as canonical.

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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 · 12/03/2025

d = 0.46 is huge for depression isn’t it? Like that on its face is also concerning

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

Just write your code in tidy and tell ChatGPT to conver to data.table?

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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 · 11/03/2025

Social media incentivizes and elevates those who can attract attention, regardless of truth. And the rise of video content also is shifting us from a text-based society to an oral one, which prioritizes debate team tactics over careful thinking and analysis.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 09/03/2025

Yeah… Union politics make this kind of inevitable too.

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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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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 07/03/2025

One where Donald Trump isn't president.

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Alex P. Miller @alexmiller.phd · 06/03/2025

Saying "the data/research design is unsuitable for studying the relationship" is an extremely different thing than saying "there is no relationship".

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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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