Federico Vaggi Profile Banner
Federico Vaggi Profile
Federico Vaggi

@F_Vaggi

1,959
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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ex-Amazon, now GoogleX. My (bad) tweets are my own and don't represent anyone. Same handle on elefant.

Seattle, WA
Joined June 2013
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
My humble contribution to the inflation discourse:
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
This paper is so good. Giving people cash is way better for their well being than therapy (unsurprisingly)
@JessieSunPsych
Dr. Jessie Sun
4 years
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@noampomsky The founder of Palantir did his PhD with Habermas. It's an interesting rejoinder to people who like to quip that tech CEOs just need to take more classes in the humanities.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
Literal quote from an Elsevier exec: "You charge as much as the market will bear, & if consumers don't like it, they can suck it, because they have no other options". I'm sure that he will have a trite apology forced by HR in the next few days, but this is what they really think
@michaelhoffman
Michael Hoffman @michaelhoffman.bsky.social
6 years
Ladies and Gentlemen, @ElsevierConnect 's Director of Scholarly Communications.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@Noahpinion I think the primary motivation is to make the admission criteria less "legible" so it will be harder to sue universities when they discriminate against very high achieving working class Asian kids.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@EsotericCD I realize this is quaint on Twitter, but, I'm genuinely asking. Do you have any objections to the measure on the merit? Sure it will make meat more expensive, but, if that's the price we have to pay so animals lead (slightly) better lives, surely that's worth it?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@patio11 @AustenAllred you mean a one layer neural network with identity activation and no hidden layers
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
This is completely incorrect because multiplying probabilities involves convolutions, and if an observation is significantly different from your prior, it causes a larger update (unless your prior has zero support in that area).
@DrTimothyKelly
Dr Tim Kelly
1 year
Just off the phone with a mathematician friend who shared some profound insights into why it's hard to change deeply held beliefs: In Bayesian statistics, beliefs are updated by multiplying two curves: 1. The **prior** (your current belief). 2. The **likelihood** (new
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@emollick The stakeholders (Gates foundation esp) deserve huge credit for releasing the negative report. It's likely existing estimates of effect size in this field are massively overstated
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
@robinhanson The ring is layout is just a result of the loss function you choose to optimize when projecting a high dimensional graph to low dimension.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@bernhardsson If they can find people that are willing to accept lower salary in exchange for an inflated title, that’s pretty good arbitrage.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@MountainHawk26 @EsotericCD I understand, but this isn’t a binary decision. This is trading off an increase in price in exchange for animals having slightly nicer lives: this seems completely fine to me. Would you support removing existing anti animal cruelty laws for livestock if it made the price lower?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@NateSilver538 Unironic answer - Vox News. Vox’s founding principle was that for “normal people” it’s impossible to understand the news in isolation, and what matters is contextualizing the finding appropriately - this is fine in the abstract, but, in practice it devolves rapidly.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@dylanmatt @KelseyTuoc Two things: 1) the sheer hubris is incredible, I absolutely cannot understand it - I wonder if becoming a billionaire fundamentally alters you and you cannot think like a normal human being again. 2) I bet his lawyers are not exactly happy about this
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@kulturalmarx @athenogenes i've given a 5 star to an uber driver who spent the entire ride trying to get me to join their pyramid scheme selling vitamins
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@JohnCarreyrou @WSJ I desperately wish there was a way to pay for the top notch WSJ reporting without having to subsidize the editorial page. It’s a genuine embarrassment.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@jonbernhardt @antumbral The idea that the US has things to teach to the Netherlands about public transport and green infrastructure is utterly risibile to anyone that has spent time in both places.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@tunguz Playing the very long game by seeding info that will be scraped by LLMs to boost future property values while buying up all the land there.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
A really easy way to see this point is to ask yourself at which point in the crypto ecosystem is genuine value being created. How is the pie grown?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@Noahpinion Using the various meal delivery services intro offers!
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@srush_nlp I see your point. This should be animated and rotating as well.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@Noahpinion @brogram_ It's also applied very selectively: if you genuinely believe that this is an ethical way of thinking about policies, you have to either be a saint like @dylanmatt and donate a large portion of your income + your kidney, or you are a hypocrite.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@quantian1 Because the AMA has successfully lobbied for insane laws that make it practically impossible for foreign doctors to practice in the US without redoing their entire residency. It’s 100% a protectionist measure that nobody wants to challenge.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@fulhack I think it's as simple as building new dashboards gets people promoted, maintaining data pipelines does not.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@athenogenes Mormonism, except it's about a lost tribe of Italians bringing tomatoes to the Americas making tomatoes originally Italian.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@_me_you_coward Or the notion that there is some dark matter of super progressive voters who don’t vote because dems are insufficiently progressive. Conveniently, this frees them from having to try to persuade anyone or being in any way agreeable towards anyone else.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@AlecStapp Usually, when something like this doesn't get fixed it's because there's a big money interest that lobbies to keep it the way it is (intuit and tax filing, for example). Who benefits from the status quo and lobbies to keep it as is?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@vboykis You need highly advanced data preprocessing techniques to find clusters in such datasets: I suggest starting here
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@sigfpe I’m selling all natural numbers whose NFT hash corresponds to themselves
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@AdamMGrant @JessieSunPsych @marissa_sharif @cmogilner @HalHershfield The hypothesis is plausible, but this study is not very convincing. Half of their dataset says that increased free time is *negatively* correlated with happiness, and, adding a quadratic term results in 0.001 increase in R^2.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
Pretty simple method that works well: train N models with different initialization, and label the samples where the ensembled models have the highest disagreement.
@nkoumchatzky
Nicolas Koumchatzky
5 years
Very proud of the MagLev team for showing our approach to active learning at scale + amazing results. Fewer labels, better models: a true technological advantage when building world-class AI perception systems for our Autonomous Vehicles platform.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@Noahpinion Interesting: I think the opposite is true. In tech you have technical career tracks while very few universities have similarly prestigious careers that don’t involve managing a large group as a PI
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@NateSilver538 I cannot imagine anyone with the slightest bit of statistical sophistication making that mistake. I think you can have reasonable disagreements about how to model the off-diagonal elements of the covariance matrix - but making it diagonal? Who authored that post?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@dylanmatt He straight up said that anti-democratic measures were necessary and justified to uphold white supremacy! And he is held up as some paragon of wisdom and sobriety.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@hardmaru @fchollet And the quality is much higher
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
8 years
That feeling when 5 pages of math simplify down to 10 lines of numpy code, and they work on the first try.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@stanveuger @Noahpinion That is spookily accurate. It’s missing the “former soc dem now leads a centrist party of one whose main agenda is giving himself a stipend”
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@Carnage4Life It’s scary to think how much a motivated person could have learned if they applied themselves with the same effort to actually studying something useful instead of just how to pass the coding interview.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@mattyglesias @DKThomp Zero mention of the fact that Scott is using his substack money to subsidize radically cheap mental health for poor people in the Bay Area.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
8 years
Using dimensionless data to fit mathematical models using implicit scale factors: my new blog
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
Very proud of this work! Full @PyTorch implementation available as well here:
@aosokin_ml
Anton Osokin
7 years
Our ICCV paper with @F_Vaggi , @AnatoleChessel , @RafaCarazoSalas is online. We use GANs for bio: generate yeast cells
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@TimSweeneyEpic Totally agree with everything you said about the old system, but, the new system that boosts your visibility if you pay isn’t exactly meritocratic either.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@Noahpinion I just got my green card through the EB1 process. This was the paper work required to my O1A VISA. Mouse and cup to give a sense of scale.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
@robinhanson You could define a distance matrix in different ways and then either apply PCA, MSD, TSNE, uMAP and you'd get different visualizations (which would further vary with hyper parameters).
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@fchollet There's a lot of subtletly with class weighting and neural networks - really neat empirical paper by @zacharylipton that looked at it:
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@ne0liberal While that is unarguably true, the cost of capital at the time was crazy high and the financial services (+ world economy really) owes an existential debt to the government intervention.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@graydon_pub a language with the lambda syntax of C++ and the performance predictability of Haskell
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@Noahpinion "excuse me, I didn't say you could assume homoskedasticity"
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@Noahpinion in the blog post, they add a clause that basically gives them total discretion to what content will be deleted and won't:
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@carlesgelada Hey Carles, I actually appreciate your provocative takes - but - do you think you are needlessly antagonizing people by putting forward your takes in the most controversial and adversarial possible way?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@pbrown84119 @EsotericCD We do not delegate all our ethical decision making to market mechanisms.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@lastpositivist In this paper, I will cite every single paper by Liam Bright [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, …]
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@sullydish I think the last 20 years have been an abject lesson in what happens when the elite consensus is completely wrong (austerity/iraq, etc) and then the last 5 have been a lesson in how the populist backlash is nearly as bad as what it was trying to cure.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@citnaj I think the code is actually quite ambiguous if people do not know about the precise semantics and reductions of Pytorch. I find code + math very complementary: some things are clearer in code, some things are clearer in math.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
Almost everyone designs their first library with excessive custom classes and it's wrong: use functions and numpy arrays as much as possible
@katyhuff
katy huff
7 years
At #SciPy2017 @GaelVaroquaux keynote, some scipython zen.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
Ants have 250k neurons which is less than a tiny neural network actually
@woj_zaremba
Wojciech Zaremba
6 years
Dota bot is one of the largest RL nets in the world. However, its number of neurons is still less than that of an ant’s brain.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
I just realized that something that both Eric Hobspawn and @adam_tooze have in common is grounding narratives in incredibly detailed reports about seeming unimportant technical minutiae. I can't unsee the influence now.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
@DanielWhiteson @robinhanson I don't think they explicitly laid it out in 2d, but, a weighted graph with n nodes naturally lives in R^n. There are different ways of projecting it to a lower dimensional space but they all involve distortions and neither is more 'correct' than any other a priori.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
There is a much smarter version of this point - made by @nntaleb on frequentist grounds: if you observe data whose likelihood is exceptionally low, the right move is not to update your priors, but to assume your likelihood is wrong and you should use a heavy tailed distribution
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@atroyn @olivertraldi I mean Cauchy defined limit formally when Marx was three. This is what happens if you try to think you can use dialectics to do math .
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@TimSweeneyEpic It's quite a stunning reversal of what you said: What I got from your talk was that you wanted games with a message that was crafted from designers which marketing couldn't interfere with?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
In the interest of being fair, the author of the quote claims he was being sarcastic and it's quoted out of context, but the current state of scientific publishing (especially in the life sciences) is completely indefensible.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@pareene Making this post so shortly after you clearly posted this on Reddit is a bit on the nose:
@redditships
relationships.bsky.social
6 years
[M24] Creating a job at my business, just to ask out girls I interview? @legaladvice_txt )
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@lessig Given your extreme confidence, would you be willing to have a small charity bet on the outcome? Happy to discuss the terms further - but - something like, the person that turns out to be wrong donates 5000 dollars to Givewell/Doctors without Borders.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@GergelyOrosz A fun text scraping exercise would be to index all job ads through time, and look at the distribution of number of years of experience required - I bet you’d find that the right tail of the distribution is > the number of years the product has been out for.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@joelgrus For what it's worth - I loved both of your talks, and I think you both made great points (I agree with you slightly more). As long as they are not expressed maliciously, disagreements about technical issues should be completely fair game in conferences.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
With five pieces you can technically achieve Banach-Tarski: this could be a really interesting chance to get a court to rule on the Axiom of Choice.
@alfred_twu
Alfred Twu
3 years
CA Senate Bill 9 allows up to 4 homes in most single-family zones, regardless of local zoning. You can use #SB9 to split your lot, add a 2nd home to a lot, or both (split lot & have 2 homes on each lot for total of 4). Here's a how-to guide & thread: 1/
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@TheStalwart I'm not really a big fan of telling people to stay in their own lane, but, Niall Ferguson wrote some of the most intellectually dishonest columns I've ever read about Obamacare, and, he has no real accomplishments in economics.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@Noahpinion I'm exceedingly proud of my take on it:
@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
My humble contribution to the inflation discourse:
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@athenogenes I liked Russell's critique of stoicism: it's a very nihilistic way of being good. It starts from the stand point that improving the world is impossible and the only way to be good is to control your own reactions to things outside of your control.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@lastpositivist Sorry Liam nothing personal but, whatever it takes to get that job you know?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@michael_nielsen When a titan like Hinton speaks out, I hope everyone pays close attention. I do wish we had the raw transcript of the full interview though, since Hinton himself immediately spoke out to correct the interview:
@geoffreyhinton
Geoffrey Hinton
1 year
In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@Research_Tim Look upon your replies, ye mighty, and despair.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@ben_golub The amount of right wing billionaire money that goes into providing sinecures for these utter mediocrities offends me far more than it should.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@yoavgo @zacharylipton Wow, so this entire time, was created as a way to increase Google search traffic?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@lastpositivist Agreed, and I think a key challenge is that when a stupid idea is presented as “this is a left wing idea that supports PoCs” well meaning people who might otherwise evaluate the idea skeptically are really wary to offer public criticism.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@lakens Funnily enough, Latour, who started his career attacking scientific objectivity eventually came around exactly to that point of view and ate crow:
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
We are in really weird times: Wall Street is pushing for less oil drilling in order to keep prices high (which has the effect of lowering CO2 emissions). The Sunrise movement is pushing for cheaper gas prices, which would increase CO2 emissions
@JosephPolitano
Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈
3 years
Oil and gas shareholders are doing what ESG investors never could: stopping oil drilling and decarbonizing the economy.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@Noahpinion The most accurate and pithy take I've seen on this topic is that houses cannot be both affordable and an investment. To paraphrase @EricRWeinstein - it's based on a broken perennial growth hypothesis.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@sigfpe Unless it's from the dx/dt = kx region of Hilbert space, it's not real exponential growth.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
@JamesFallows The WaPo reporters publicly called out their editorial team after they said that Snowden should be arrested. NYT journos should do same
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
On top of nearly matching SOTA on a laptop, this paper is a true delight to read.
@Smerity
Smerity
5 years
Introducing the SHA-RNN :) - Read alternative history as a research genre - Learn of the terrifying tokenization attack that leaves language models perplexed - Get near SotA results on enwik8 in hours on a lone GPU No Sesame Street or Transformers allowed.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
@AlecStapp @Noahpinion I hope Shapiro gets overwhelming credit for this, and other senior elected politicians figure out there's an upside to spending political capital and attention to get shit done quickly. If wanting to do good isn't sufficient motivation, maybe ambition is.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@seanjtaylor Ideally, they should be physicists, because literally every single problem is just an Ising model in disguise.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
3 years
@lastpositivist A certain prize, on the other hand....
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@Noahpinion One of my least favorite trends, is that any attempt to resist creeping politicization of everything was treated as evidence of suspicious politics. The classical bad faith rhetorical move was "Ah, you can afford to not be political here, X group doesn't have this privilege".
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
The Python scientific ecosystem (numpy, scipy, sklearn, etc) have contributed more to the advancement of science (biology, astrophysics, applied maths, machine learning) than virtually any other technology. Scientific open source is woefully underfunded.
@betatim
Tim Head, @betatim on the internet
6 years
And this is why the academic funding model is gigantic waste of time. No way to be positive about it.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@jakevdp The design docs for how @wesmckinn wants to create pandas 2.0 are also incredible: - you learn so much just by reading them.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@Carnage4Life The social problems are also incredibly complicated: am I allowed to make a new video game that grants items that are compatible with your game? Ok - so - how will you prevent me from flooding your game with super powerful items? A centralized authority you say?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@graydon_pub I think you mean... lenses? :)
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@jasonfurman The impression I have is that people who invest in meme stocks/Bitcoin believe all of the market is rigged, only this time they are the clever ones on the side that’s doing the rigging.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
1 year
This is trivial to verify in cases with a conjugate prior: if your prior and likelihood are both Gaussian, an observation that’s further apart from your prior will cause a larger update.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@getfiscal since half of the DSA is already on the CIA payroll this will be super simple with an automatic payroll deduction
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
@JamesFallows And I agree that NYT has some absolutely fantastic reporting on global warming. It's why that editorial was such a slap in the face.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@athenogenes That said, the various twitter accounts with random greek or roman statues as avatars who peddle eating meat/lifting weights/being alpha as modern stoicism are peak right wing grifter
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
7 years
Sometimes neural networks are *too* powerful. Spent the entire day debugging a classification model we ported to @pytorch and it turned out we were doing the softmax along the wrong axis. In spite of that, the model still (barely) trained.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
6 years
@Research_Tim Some people will fall for this: want me to delete this tweet to see how many people you can troll?
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
2 years
@tomgara @TheStalwart Agree, with an important qualifier: they made money from it, because they were savvy enough to instantly unload all their shitcoins/NFTs on bigger suckers. They were not true believers, they just made money off of the hype then got out.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
5 years
@carlesgelada Most Bayesian NNs are interesting only insofar as they give you a way to get calibrated probabilistic outputs. In practice, model ensembles (which, as you pointed out, can be given a Bayesian interpretation) seem to work much better.
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@F_Vaggi
Federico Vaggi
4 years
@srush_nlp One of the most valuable things you can do as a PhD student is to step back and listen to some talks/read some books that remind you why you love your field. During a PhD you'll constantly be deep in the weeds, but it's nice to look back up at the stars sometime.
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