Matt Blackwell
@matt_blackwell
Followers
16K
Following
6K
Media
1K
Statuses
10K
data, causal inference, experiments, politics
Cambridge, MA
Joined January 2009
Reminder that I have a textbook on an introduction to mathematical statistics and regression, designed for first year PhD students in poli sci, but maybe useful to others. Let me know if you use it and have feedback! https://t.co/XDB34FiCXk
7
137
699
Negative seed is unhinged behavior.
In today's episode of programming horror... In the Python docs of random.seed() def, we're told "If a is an int, it is used directly." [1] But if you seed with 3 or -3, you actually get the exact same rng object, producing the same streams. (TIL). In nanochat I was using the
0
1
21
Quickly and easily evaluate borrowers' income with our award-winning Income Calculator. Let our technology work harder for you, so you can do great work for your borrowers. Learn more.
2
10
109
GOP reps and state legislators filing away all of the humblebrag QTs (“I get paid so much to do so little”) in their “Reasons to Defund Higher Ed” folders
0
0
21
The groupthink on this website is admittedly very funny, but it’s also weird to come back after a while away and see everyone still shadowboxing with the same woke boogeymen
0
0
4
I taught a fairly large undergraduate class at Harvard and I did not have 20% of students seeking accommodations.
This is a great piece with some mind-boggling statistics. - At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled - At Amherst: more than 30 percent - At Stanford: nearly 40 percent Soon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving
12
4
65
Gentle reminder: you are allowed to not really have strong opinions about something that’s happening in the world
1
0
9
I wonder if LLMs will end up more like airplanes than the internet. Non-trivial marginal costs means that most people will experience a relatively unchanging product focused on cost-effectiveness over technological progress.
1
0
5
On his deathbed, surrounded by his loving family and friends, he was gripped by a single paralyzing regret: “I wish I had spent more time posting about the differences between Twitter and Bluesky”
1
0
5
Let me explain this to the leftists suddenly deeply concerned about cancel culture. Digging up decade old tweets of jokes or hacking a political donation to get someone fired is cancel culture. People getting fired for currently, openly cheering murder is not cancel culture.
0
0
3
President Trump says it perfectly. A patchwork of 50 different state systems creates a maze of conflicting regulations, resulting in chaos. Follow me to join the conversation on leading the AI revolution.
90
156
797
I think some introspection is needed by the industry about their own unrealistic narratives about AI. These are useful tools, of course, but when people constantly hear that we’re 3-6 months from some job being completely automated, we’re getting into boy cried wolf territory
For some reason, a lot of journalists and academics have decided that AI is useless because it sometimes gives wrong answers. Fine if they don’t want to use such useful tools, but I feel sorry for “civilians” who take such claims at face value and get put off using AI too.
2
2
10
Nothing has made my want to quit social media more recently than seeing someone that has tweet >100k times in 5 years. That’s 55x a day on average…
3
0
11
It’s impressive that it can find it in 8 out of 100 iterations of the same setup, but the stochastic nature of the outcome renders it only useful to someone who can and is willing to verify the answer.
o3 for finding a security vulnerability in the Linux kernel: https://t.co/n6BCoQgkh3
1
0
4
The final mission impossible is good but it’s hard to take a movie seriously when it uses the word “cyberspace” multiple times in dramatic scenes
1
0
0
Train smarter, store freely - no egress fees on Cloudflare's R2 object storage.
4
14
168
A Republic, if you can keep it
At this point the TROs are basically an automatic judicial veto on all new policy, and then the courts of appeals decide whether the judicial veto should be suspended. Whatever form of government that is, let’s please not call it “democracy.”
0
0
4
bouba / kiki
1
0
1
It’s interesting to compare how people react to sending the same image through a diffusion model 1000x to how they react to two AI instances “talk” to each other. I think people see images as natural stochastic drift of the model where they see something more purposeful in text
When Claude instances talk to each other, in ~90% of open-ended interactions they spiral into discussions of consciousness, then profuse gratitude, then abstract spiritual/poetic expressions with Sanskrit and emojis.
0
0
5
(whispering into my phone during the job talk) grok is that true?
0
0
9
University Hospitals groundbreaking work in immunotherapy is shaping the future of cancer care. At the Wesley Center for Immunotherapy, scientists are reprogramming immune cells to detect and destroy cancer—delivering precision treatments and hope for patients worldwide.
0
0
6
Sounds encouraging until you see the 5 books
you’re 5 math books away from redirecting your entire life trajectory btw
1
0
9
No it wouldn’t be cheating in the same way as using a simple calculator wouldn’t be cheating for a calculus exam. But using Mathematica probably would be cheating.
Microsoft Word first had a spell check feature in 1985. It had a grammar checker in 1997. Would you consider these to be "AI tools"? Would you consider it cheating if a student used these features to improve an essay that they wrote?
2
0
2
This kind of thing is great, but you have to wonder how much of it depends on the reams of lecture notes out there explaining these older papers. I worry about the future incentives to produce that kind of important training (for humans and LLMs) material
5
2
25