17 June 2024

The folks at Wielded.com benchmarked the performance of the major LLMs. GPT-4o came out on top, with Claude-3 Opus a close second, and Gemini 1.5 Pro a close third. I like Claude-3 the best anyway, in my experience.

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Mozilla acquired Anonym, an advertising company, but one supposedly dedicated to privacy, whatever that means. I don't like Mozilla's interest in advertising. If I wanted to be marketed, I'd stop using adblock software.

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Why student loan forgiveness sparks anger. Is it really that hard to understand? Democrats think that having people go to college is an investment by society. Maybe that was true in the past, when students actually took courses that taught meaningful and helpful skills and knowledge. That's certainly not true anymore. Besides, it makes inflation worse.
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It's called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. Some people that lost their jobs are getting work helping to train AI models sound more human.  It started with InstructGPT and helped ChatGPT be the success that it is.

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High-far diets may fuel anxiety? How do they know? Maybe when you're anxious, you seek out high-fat diets for their comfort-food properties.

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How to do the jhanas.

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Doesn't it feel that AI is insinuating itself into healthcare and doctors are just watching it happen? Techies are pushing their idea of how medical care should be delivered, based on their experience in the tech world. And executives like it, and foist it on the doctors. Take Color Health's Cancer Copilot. It "helps doctors create cancer screening plans, as well as pretreatment plans for people who have been diagnosed with cancer". Sure, by following some template, designed by a small group of individuals. It's supposed to work by "eliminating some administrative work that leads to burnout".  I would prefer to have human assistants deal with administrative work instead of leaving up to an algorithm that is tied to OpenAI. Physicians had better get organized or their profession will be transformed from under their feet before the realize it.

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A new treatment for glioblastoma involves having a "skull-implantable ultrasound device...enhance the penetration of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin and immune checkpoint blockade antibodies—a novel immunotherapy treatment combination—into the human brain".  Innovative treatment for a very tough malignancy.

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Does Miami have the solution to homelessness? Maybe. "Miami has managed to avoid large-scale chronic homelessness."  That's worth taking notice. How do they do it? The article is long-winded and doesn't just give you the answer right away. But it does say this:

The Cicero Institute was founded by Joe Lonsdale, an ex–San Francisco venture capitalist and co-founder of Palantir Technologies. Since 2021, the institute—now based in Austin, Texas—has been drafting model legislation for statehouses. The goal is to break the current model restricting how homeless grant funding is used across the country and expand the boundaries of how municipal governments can police homelessness. So far it has seen versions of its model bills passed in Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida.

The think tank opposes what it calls the "homeless-industrial complex" and specifically the "Housing First" approach that currently dominates federal and state responses to the problem

One of the bill's most controversial provisions also requires local governments to construct encampments with adequate sanitation and security to place homeless people if shelters are over capacity.
Yes! Get the homeless off the streets, and eliminate all those agencies that don't want to solve the problem, lest their usefulness be eliminated. We need new solutions. The existing ones aren't working.
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Beware of urgent care clinics. You may still get billed as if you went to a hospital.  It could be an expensive mistake. 

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