yoavg

A criticism of "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Languae Models be Too Big"

Yoav Goldberg, Jan 23, 2021.

The FAccT paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Languae Models be Too Big" by Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and Shmitchell has been the center of a controversary recently. The final version is now out, and, owing a lot to this controversary, would undoubtly become very widely read. I read an earlier draft of the paper, and I think that the new and updated final version is much improved in many ways: kudos for the authors for this upgrade. I also agree with and endorse most of the content. This is important stuff, you should read it.

However, I do find some aspects of the paper (and the resulting discourse around it and around technology) to be problematic. These weren't clear to me when initially reading the first draft several months ago, but they became very clear to me now. These points are for the most part

plogacev

# based on the great vignette on specifying custom response distributions in brms:
# https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/brms/vignettes/brms_customfamilies.html

library(languageR)
library(brms)

danish$RT <- exp(danish$LogRT) 
danish$cSex <- ifelse(danish$Sex == "M", -1, 1) * 0.5 
danish$cPrevError <- ifelse(danish$PrevError == "CORRECT", -0.5, 0.5)

grugq

Operational PGP

This is a guide on how to email securely.

There are many guides on how to install and use PGP to encrypt email. This is not one of them. This is a guide on secure communication using email with PGP encryption. If you are not familiar with PGP, please read another guide first. If you are comfortable using PGP to encrypt and decrypt emails, this guide will raise your security to the next level.

tmalsburg

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# Written by Titus von der Malsburg <malsburg@posteo.de>, March 2014.

# This is a simple script for converting vCard files to
# org-contacts.  There is one mandatory argument: the name of the
# vCard file.  The result is printed to standard out.

# Usage:

syohex

(require 'cl)

(defun parse-csv-file (file)
  (interactive
   (list (read-file-name "CSV file: ")))
  (let ((buf (find-file-noselect file))
        (result nil))
    (with-current-buffer buf
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (not (eobp))

mads-hartmann

(defun toggle-maximize-buffer () "Maximize buffer"
  (interactive)
  (if (= 1 (length (window-list)))
    (jump-to-register '_)
    (progn
      (set-register '_ (list (current-window-configuration)))
      (delete-other-windows))))

;; Bind it to a key.

masak

Ok, I geeked out, and this is probably more information than you need. But it completely answers the question. Sorry. ☺

Locally, I'm at this commit:

$ git show
commit d6cd1e2bd19e03a81132a23b2025920577f84e37
Author: jnthn <jnthn@jnthn.net>
Date:   Sun Apr 15 16:35:03 2012 +0200

When I added FIRST/NEXT/LAST, it was idiomatic but not quite so fast. This makes it faster. Another little bit of masak++'s program.