Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
@samth
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Associate Professor, @IULuddy · Core Developer, @racketlang · Member, @TC39 · Handler, @NaptownUltimate · @[email protected]
Bloomington, IN
Joined October 2008
One week with an e-bike and I'm definitely an "e-bike guy" now.
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Amazing that this was written 15 years ago and feels like it is about today.
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Increasing service sector productivity is one of the main things people hate about the economy today.
Call it Anti-Industrial Policy: we need policies to nudge Americans to own and operate more little public-facing businesses. Speciality shops. Six-seater bars. Esoteric services. Restaurants serving two or three dishes. It would lower productivity and increase quality of life.
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One of the big challenges with making this (correct!) point in America today is that Cornell's vision is not available at the university he founded.
To put it mildly, I am much more interested in Ezra Cornell’s vision of the American university—“an institution where any person can find instruction in any study”—than whatever the hell this is
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Not only was it a big political issue, but it was relevant to everyone's everyday life in a way that many issues are not (immigration or gay marriage or voter id).
I think it’s hard to convey to people the extent to which various issues related to cigarette regulation were a top tier political issue in the 1990s and aughts.
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For example, if your job involves reading an email, then taking information from the email and some random webpage to one custom internal application, and then to another custom application, and then replying to the email, all in 10 minutes, LLMs are really bad at that right now.
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I think the most significant difference is people whose work involves producing new individual digital artifacts that take 1 hour+ to produce (a document, a piece of code, an image, a spreadsheet) and people who don't.
I think a lot of gap between people who “get” LLMs and people who don’t is that some people understand current capabilities to be a floor and some people understand them to be either a ceiling or close enough to a ceiling.
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RT @frawaurhts: Holy shit I finally used agents for coding and the productivity whiplash is insane. I did 3 days of work in 15 minutes then….
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RT @JHWeissmann: Finally watching the clips of this, and getting a little teary-eyed too. Leaving aside Torres' robotic responses, Friedlan….
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It's not mostly about "woke" -- Chicago has been trying to become a more generic Ivy+ university since before I started there 25 years ago.
Chicago also did a lot of damage by going hardline anti-woke. The board felt it was trading at a discount and rebranded as anti-activist. Bitter irony: it was once a great haven for offbeat thinkers - and free speech! - now it’s Econ majors in monclers who ranked it after Yale
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The goal of elite university admissions is to maximize the degree to which their alums are at the top of every field and institution. This is sufficient to explain all of their admissions choices.
If you *only* used SAT to admit to elite colleges, share of admits from top 1% income falls 15.8% → 9.9% and representation from <$200k rises by +8.8%, with no reduction in post-college outcomes. It's 'holistic review' and 'ban SAT' policy that allows the most wealthy and
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RT @indystar: Opinion: IU is being transformed into a sad shell of a once-proud global research university.
indystar.com
IU is being transformed into a sad shell of a once-proud global research university.
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RT @racketlang: Racket - the Language-Oriented Programming Language - version 8.18 is now available from See https….
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RT @emilyriehl: Kudos to Terry Tao for this:.
newsletter.ofthebrave.org
The “Mozart of Math” tried to stay out of politics. Then it came for his research.
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All the institutions of modern American life, from art museums to schools to PhD programs to mortgages to health insurance were set up in the postwar era and we now have neither the inclination nor the capacity to make real adjustments.
something i've been thinking about. lots of institutions, either volunteer-run organizations or the school system, got a kind of subsidy from women who would today be lawyers, executives etc working in them, now they have to compete for their time in a real labor market
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"uniquely good at tasks that are algorithmically scorable" is the key attribute of modern AI.
One key takeaway is that there’s a gap between what can be easily measured with automated evaluation metrics, and all of the goals/constraints developers and users actually care about. One hypothesis is that this is a result of models being trained with reinforcement learning.
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