One of the things I enjoy doing- and a must for people with a creative streak who like singing but can't compose music- is rewriting the lyrics of songs while keeping the same basic rhythmic structure. This allows us to sing with different words to the same tune and instrumental track- great for Karaoke. Here's … Continue reading Song rewrites
UPDATE: performance jump in two very interesting natural language benchmarks (it’s gone away)
Early I reported on a sudden jump in two important Natural Language Processing benchmarks- The ARC-Easy and the OpenBookQA. A new methodology apparently reduced by two thirds errors in the first, and made no errors whatsoever in the second- giving it solidly superhuman performance. These achievements would be, to say the least, extremely impressive. However, … Continue reading UPDATE: performance jump in two very interesting natural language benchmarks (it’s gone away)
Some good takes from Twitter: A collection
Richard Seymour on the "dammed if you do, dammed if you don't" nature of responding to accusations, re: Corbyn & """anti-Semitism""". @Andraydomise on the inanity of attempts to redefine slavery so as to exclude everything that isn't chattel slavery: "At some point we really are going to have to develop better language and frameworks around … Continue reading Some good takes from Twitter: A collection
Massive performance jump in two very interesting natural language benchmarks
NOTE: This story is now subject to an update which likely invalidates its central premise: https://deponysum.com/2020/11/22/update-performance-jump-in-two-very-interesting-natural-language-benchmarks-its-gone-away/ "BERT Ensemble - MBGA Optimization" is a new entrant to two leader-boards natural language understanding tasks on the the Allen AI Leader-boards. Without trying to sound clickbaity, I audibly gasped when I read its results. It scored 97.6% on … Continue reading Massive performance jump in two very interesting natural language benchmarks
Brief observation on the political economy of the welfare state
It is often observed by conservatives that the existence of a welfare state reduces the incentive to have a job. Of course it may also provide people with a means to pull themselves out of poverty, take greater entrepreneurial risks etc counterbalancing this incentive. It occurred to me though that there's another incentive effect which … Continue reading Brief observation on the political economy of the welfare state
A theory of a lot of what gets called cringe, owing to Partha Dasgupta
I was reading through the The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics like the nerd that I am when I noticed this passage from Partha Dasgupta describing why economists don't talk about values much: "It is almost as though the protagonists are embarrassed to air their values, because to do so would be to state … Continue reading A theory of a lot of what gets called cringe, owing to Partha Dasgupta
Google searches on the subject “coup” in the United States, 4th of November to 11th of November
Edit: Please note that this is NOT a prediction of a coup on my part. Just an observation that people seem suddenly very worried, which is interesting in its own right.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol as a rejection of all law and politics, or: humanism as anarchic aspiration
For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die. -Section III They think a murderer's heart would taint Each simple seed they sow.It is not true! God's kindly earth Is kindlier than men know,And the red rose would but blow more red, The white rose whiter blow. -Section IV 1. When I was young, … Continue reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol as a rejection of all law and politics, or: humanism as anarchic aspiration
Some hard but important truths for the left
*If you are doing politics, you are a politician. It doesn't matter if you're a political theorist, a trotskyist activist, an Instagram tankie, a podcast host or if you just tweet sometimes. Just because you're not getting paid doesn't change this. As a politician it is your job to win people over to your point … Continue reading Some hard but important truths for the left
A modest proposal concerning University admissions
In my country we use a system called the ATAR, which is based on internal and external grades and rankings. The only thing I will say to commend it is it's vastly superior to the American system. This is because doesn't require any students to write a cloying, narcissistic admissions essay in which they outline … Continue reading A modest proposal concerning University admissions
