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Time for me to author my devastating takedown of micro-botany…



I spent the better part of a month doing just this. Really fascinating. There are also several public satellite imagery repos (mostly European sources, but they’re satellites, so they aren’t limited to Europe).


For those interested in remote sensing, there's also Landsat with freely available multi-band imagery https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/


> insert “Jurassic Park” meme


I want a social media where all of that is true of its owners.


I know when I think “open source”, I am always thinking “heavily redacted”.

/s


My understanding is that IQ tests can measure a type of intelligence, but fixation on its narrow metrics can lead one to overlook other attributes that are just as likely to be relevant, but aren’t something that necessarily shows up in standardized tests. Add to that the fact that IQ tests can be heavily biased, and leave a lot of ambiguity for the proctors to interpret, it’s not a surprise that they’re so controversial.

I personally would be very suspicious if asked to sit for an IQ test as part of a job evaluation. I have worked for places that blindly worship context-free performance metrics, and it was insufferable.


IQ is a correlation variable that pops out when you measure any group of people's aptitude at a battery of tasks that involve thinking. Basically, if someone's good at one task that involves thinking (say, chess), they're more likely to be good at another task that involves thinking (say, reading comprehension). Apply some Bayesian statistics, and boom, you've concluded that there's some confounding variable (that we call IQ). Then you can start measuring how strongly certain tasks correlate with variable. Turns out abstract pattern recognition very strongly correlated with this unknown variable, so we can use that to predict what someone's IQ likely is.

The point is, due to the very definition of IQ, it's not a narrow metric, and selecting for it does tend to find you individuals who are going to be better than average at most anything. That said, it would seem alarming to me for a job to give me an IQ test instead of cutting out the correlation coefficient and just judging me on the task they're hiring me for.


Ah, I was hoping this would teach me the maths to start understanding the economics surrounding LLMs. That’s the really impossible stuff.


AI wastes a lot more than time. I hope these lawsuits make investors run full-speed from the whole lot of it, and this entire cursed industry collapses in on itself with all of its incestuous nonsense economic sleight-of-hand currently setting us up for the next Great Crash.


LLMs are very different. All of the other things you mentioned found wide, eager adoption among the broader public within two years.


They were/are also profitable.


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