In this case, it was just randomness. Some grey squirrels got randomly transported with cargo between North America and Europe and they found a good spot. There was no human intent behind it… (does it make it better?)

Totally me in the US! Deers in Europe are stuff for natural parks!

Not only UK. As far as I know the same problem is spreading around all of mainland Europe. US squirrels have a better immune system and a more varied diet, they are also more aggressive and territorial. They are slowly replacing indigenous red squirrels.

I teach, nothing is evident to anyone 😭

If you want, any work that does not encompass the whole world is applying a filter and therefore a bias of some sort. We don’t expect a photo to X-ray the roots of a tree, because we understand the physical constraints of photography. Sure, something could be just out of frame, something else could have been photoshopped out, you can create a different story by selecting different photos and so on. But we understand the “what” a photo represents. I doubt we have the dang understanding of “what” an LLM represents, what are the constraints of the possible answers, and we definitely don’t understand why a specific answer is chosen over the infinite other possibilities.

Depends. For an expert, that is self evident (even if it might not be clear which biases have been incorporated). But that is not how it has been marketed. Chatgpt and similar are perceived as answering “the truth” at all times, and that skews the user’s understanding of the answers. Researching how deeply the answers are affected by the coders’ bias is the focus of their research and a worthwhile undertaking to avoid overlooking something important

AI is getting a much more widespread use than people with a technical background. So its application, namely in education but in all other non-CS disciplines will be through people with limited understanding of the biases. It is importing them to make them explicit, to underline that an LLM will produce the same biases it deduced from testing data and its loss function. But lots functions and test data are not public knowledge, studies need to be performed to understand how the coders’ own biases influenced the LLM scheme itself.

A photo has less bias because we know what it is representing: a photo only shows what can be seen. But the same understanding is not clear AI. Why showing a photo-realistic tree versus a biological diagram? Choices have been made, of which a broader audience needs to be aware of.

Did you read the rest of the article? The tree drawing was just the triggering element to an evaluation of the AI capabilities, in particular underlining how “tree” (but also “human”, “success”, “importance”) are being strongly restricted in their meaning by the AI itself, without the user noticing it. Thus, a user receives an answer that has already undergone a filtering of sorts. Not being aware of this risks limiting our understanding of AI and increasing its damage.

Theoretical research in AI is both necessary and hard at the moment, with funding being giving more to new results over the understanding of the properties of old ones.

I am really impressed with your ability to break free of your educational mold. That’s an incredible achievement in itself. You were constantly in an environment glorifying war and war related activities, and you stiff alone against that. That’s awe inspiring.

I am but an internet stranger with a completely different life history and background, and i can bring small snippets of a different world to you.

An example: I have a clear memory of a defense contractor coming to my uni to give a talk, and asking my professor off he was interested in collaborating. Money was good and plentiful, but it was painfully clear that the research they wanted us to do could be used both for peace time and in very scary applications in war time. I was queasy about it, but my professor had been looking for funding left and right to keep our group going, so it seemed that was the golden ticket. Unexpectedly, instead of jumping on the opportunity, my prof send the contractor out of the room, and asked the group how we felt about it. Nobody really dared saying anything negative. Prof invited the contractor back to tell him we wouldn’t be participating. No excuses, just a pretty rough no to his face, never brought up the topic again.

People can and do turn down flowing cash when it clashes with their morality. You are not alone.

In a very nuanced approach, I state: “Airbnb is the cancer of tourism, an already problematic industry”

I think, a lot. The shift during the pandemic of requesting uniquely online presence definitely sped up a trend that could already be detected. And because it was unprecedented, “adults” weren’t able to guide younger ones along the transition.

On the other hand, I see the lasting effects isolation did to social skills in kids and teenagers…

True, on the other hand US is often a canary indicator. Often, not always.

In general, I have heard many variations of “people don’t read anymore” soooo many times, I wonder why it’s still news. Yeah, people read less books, more blog posts, more stuff on the internet and so on. It has significant effects on long term information connection, creation and maintenance of neural patterns and so on. Either we restructure the internet or that’s how it’s going to go…

Good safety standards are wildly different in EU and US. In many parts of EU some form of raw meat or other is common, raw milk is not too unusual. Consuming these items in US is a small step away from voluntary food poisoning. Not considering all the cases of unsafe foods delivered to the US supermarkets. Anecdotally, I would say some call back or other happens once a month in US (would love more precise data, too lazy to look)

The role of school is not (only) to prepare for a job, but to develop your knowledge, such that you can build further from there. In this context, a lot of online working environments are counterproductive: they break down tasks to minimal, destroy overarching meaning, erode concentration. They don’t sustain learning, they oppose it.

“There is a homeless problem, look there”

“But if you don’t look you don’t see the problem”

Rents in NYC are rising higher than salaries, squeezing out the poorer segment of the population. This, between other symptoms, generates homelessness. That’s what I see in NYC.

I went through Penn Station more times than I would have wanted. Arriving and leaving from there twisted my stomach in a knot, I wouldn’t be able to handle it every day.

I could never live in NYC… the homelessness problem is too widespread in pretty much all of US cities.

Thanks for the chuckle! Considering the health advise is specifically about two beers, saying a couple in context seemed confusing. Thus the quotation marks.

I’m a social drinker, so I’m more likely to drink “some” drinks once a week than a little every day. The latter is really not appealing!