Interesting Links for 23-03-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Here's the full analysis of newly uncovered genetic data on COVID's origins

(tags:pandemic virus animals genetics china )

2. How fast does spring travel? About 2mph

(tags:time uk weather viaSwampers )

3. GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question

(tags:ai memory exams )

4. Fungus! Attacks! America!

(tags:fungus usa doom )

5. One of history's most famous psychological experiments was probably fake (Sending well people into psychiatric hospitals)

(tags:psychology research history fraud OhForFucksSake )

6. Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic

(tags:computers history windows programming microsoft billgates )

7. Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer

(tags:ethics ai art )

8. Comparing the cost of living in the UK and Germany

(tags:UK Germany austerity society Doom )

9. Life hacks from the 90s

(tags:history advice funny )

10. Scientists can now separate sperm based on whether they carry X or Y chromosomes with 80% accuracy

(tags:gender children sperm )

11. Female Afghan judge living in fear of Taliban denied sanctuary in Britain

(tags:UK Afghanistan asylum OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

#3 I think professional exams do two things that mean that a LLM AI passing them does not say much about whether AI could do the job of the professional. First, they are often tests of whether you can go on the next stage of your training which is dealing with actual examples of problems, real but small, easy and supervised. There is a lot more learning to come after passing the early professional exams. Competence at that is evaluated on the job by peers and superiors. Secondly, they are a test of whether a human who passes these tests is likely to go on and do well in the real work of the profesion. Humans have developed some tests that do a not bad job of predicting if another human is going to the right sort of human to do this job. Things like, are you able to learn and manipulate this sort of information? Are you hard working and diligent? Do you like this profession enough to study it? Can you answer difficult questions under pressure? They are personality tests for humans in part.

[andrewducker]

Agreed. Computers are "naturally" good at many things humans are mediocre/bad at and vice versa. Memorising the answers to tests and spitting them back out strikes me as the kind of thing we shouldn't be surprised that they do well at.

[danieldwilliam]

#10 Now is the time to have daughters. There is going to be an over supply of men in 25 years time and then a demographic problem 30 years after that.

[andrewducker]

I chose* wisely!

*No.

But also, I am not sure that a society with women in short supply is going to be great for women either. I think we might have issues with any kind of imbalance.

[danieldwilliam]

I genuinely think it could go either way and will do so in different jurisdictions and different cultures.

If you live in a culture where women genuinely have high levels of economic and social autonomy then the relative scarcity probably favours women. Why put up with relationships with an idiot man when you have the choice. In other cultures I can see de factor or de jure control over women being increased.

And I suppose that the sort of society where women have high levels of economic and social autonomy is also going to be the sort of society where there is less demand for male preference sex selection.

[andrewducker]

Oh no. You'll want more women - I hear that once we hit a sex ratio of 4:1 in favour of women they'll be able to take an equal share of the boardroom.

[danieldwilliam]

Has nobody learned the appropriate lesson from the Silicon Valley Bank?

[channelpenguin]

Even with cruder methods, there is ALREADY an oversupply of men in certain countries.

Spare men, especially young ones, are trouble for a society.

I did read that from a pure evolution POV, women do better sharing the "best" (highest status, richest) men ... but having too many unattached men makes society so much more unpleasant that a default *roughly* monogamous setup tends to win out (with exceptions at the extreme, plus the usual levels of cheating)

[danieldwilliam]

That was my understanding too.

And I think we've seen some examples in polygamous societies in the past where wealth imbalances were so pronounced that, even though the ratio of men to women was not hugely skewed the effect on poorer and lower status men was noticable because the wealthy men were involved in relationships with several women at once. The impact was some destabilisation of the polity.

[danieldwilliam]

#4 Good, I was thinking that what the early 21st century was clearly missing was a dangerious and drug resistant fungus.

[andrewducker]

There were a *lot* of comments about The Last Of Us on the site where I encountered that story.

Also, we seem to have bred a whole bunch of drug-resistant things in the last few decades. We are definitely going to have issues.

[threemeninaboat]

90's? I'm wearing my flying pants next week!

[calimac]

Some of those 90s hacks are still valid. "Take it out and blow on it," where "it" was a mobile phone battery, turned out to be the answer to a nonfunctioning phone that had baffled many tech-savvy people.

Same thing for a computer mouse. There were others.

No. 8

[channelpenguin]

The apartment costs seem LOW in that article - at least for major cities. Berlin is probably the cheapest one and you might get my apartment for 660 - one small bedroom, 41 square metres, not a trendy area, not hugely central (but not bad). Rents can only go up by a certain amount per year, but service costs can be fiddled and chucking old ladies on cheap rent out to get new peeps on much higher rents in is a popular shitty move among the unethical.

Transport is cheap - now have €49 per month ticket that covers ALL regional trains (not intercity trains) plus all public transport in many major cities (including Berlin). Not that it is hugely reliable, better than the UK, but not as good as it once was or should be.

Food is randomly more expensive than the UK.

THERE IS NO NHS. As long as you are working healthcare is fine. But you pay still as a pensioner. And if you are neither employed or claiming benefits (like between jobs), you have to pay yourself. About €150/month in that case.

Pensions can be goodish (bit not luxurous) if you have been a high earner. Lots of folks are not though. There are many single old ex-East-German ladies on 400/month and the like (paying healthcare out of that...)

It is MUCH harder and more expensive to start a company here. Self employed is awkward. It is all very bureaucratic.

That which lives not, cannot die...

[hairyears]

6) The 'History of VB' excludes the unmentionable stepchild living in the attic: Visual Basic for Applications.

VBA is still being written: in all probability, more lines of VBA are written in a day, every day, than all other languages put together.

Everybody who has Microsoft Office has a VBA IDE (the integrated Development Environment) which brings an object model of the Office applications they're using into a simplified VB editor with a 'forms' builder.

It's been the language for Excel macros since 1998, and somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of spreadsheet users write macros.

Full-time spreadsheet developers write substantial VBA extensions to Excel, every day, using event-driven object-oriented code, with calls to the Windows (or Mac) API.

Ask me how I know.

And I don't think that the first-generation VB coders abandoned the orphaned language for Java and JS: most of the ones I knew moved over to C# on the DotNET framework, rather than VB.Net.

Re: That which lives not, cannot die...

[andrewducker]

True. And a fair number of people went from VBA to VB to other languages.

8. Cost of Living

[trailer_spot]

Interesting cost of living comparison. Since we also have an overall shortage of doctors (GPs and specialists), the situation in the UK must be really bad.