David Marx

@digthatdata.bsky.social

2315 Followers 1975 Following

I read a lot of research. Mostly ML. Currently reading: https://dmarx.github.io/papers-feed/ Statistical Learning Information Theory Ontic Structural Realism Morality As Cooperation Free Culture, Open Access YIMBY, UBI Research MLE Frmr FireFighter

"Unimpressed Astronaut" meme image macro, overlay text: "Text on an image? Must be true."
Gini coefficient violin plot Figure 1. Distribution of Gini coefficient across different groups of accounts. Significant disparities are found in all pairwise comparisons, with right-leaning users experiencing the highest out-of-network exposure inequality. https://arxiv.org/html/2411.01852v3
Plate model formalization of LDA, via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation
* Dogfooding time. First, let me try to fix my biggest handicap -- the blank webGL canvas in local headless chromium. If software GL flags make sigma render, I can actually *watch* the videos I'm polishing:
# Moderation Lists --- ## low SNR / bad takes Moderation list by ‪@digthatdata.bsky.social‬ People who are wrong often enough that you're better off ignoring them completely. --- ## malign influencers Moderation list by ‪@digthatdata.bsky.social‬ Accounts which appear to me to be suspicious, e.g. * part of coordinated inauthentic activity * inciting violence, hate, or division This moderation list is for my own personal use. Don't @ me. I don't care. You were already being shitty when I added you, annoying me is going to change my mind?
Screenshot of modal popup: --- # Your Plus plan now includes connected finances Securely connect your accounts so ChatGPT can help with questions about your spending, subscriptions, balances, and more. <button text="Get started"/>
The Park Service justified its decision to bypass competition by citing an exemption meant for urgent situations: It said there was no time to consider other offers because the system had to be installed in time for events celebrating the country’s 250th birthday. That document did not give a specific date by which the system had to be installed.
# Keir Starmer - Wikipedia **Starmer** has proven unpopular with the British public.
Screenshot of a Claude Code interaction. USER: [...] Probably worth starting by drafting a plan of action with concrete, clearly defined and scoped subtasks. My interface tells me your context is nearly full, at which point it will trigger autocompaction and we risk you forgetting a lot of the relevant domain information, so make sure you capture lots of detail in your notes fleshing out this sub project. CLAUDE:Let me pull the data first, then build the plan with real numbers in hand. <SQL query> <SQL query> <SQL query> [Interrupted. What should Claude do instead?] USER: ok now you're already at 4%. you don't have space in context for this. document your plan now. CLAUDE: Writing the memory and a project notes file simultaneously. <Write(...)>
Screenshot of news.duckduckgo.com top stories US and Iran announce deal to reopen Strait of Hormuz > Sky News Trump has admitted defeat on Iran war after historic blunder 2 hours ago By Dominic Waghorn WSJ U.S. and Iran Have Reached a Deal to Stop Fighting, Reopen Shipping 2 days ago By Benoît Faucon, Josh Dawsey & Anat Peled The Atlantic The U.S. Had No Choice but Diplomacy—Yet Again 7 hours ago By Nancy Youssef, Vivian Salama & Russell Berman The New York Times Trump Winds Down the War He Started With Goals Unmet 15 hours ago By Erica L. Green & Zolan Kanno-Youngs
Screenshot of an exchange on reddit. Emphasized excerpt: ME: If you can characterize the problem space appropriately, you should be able to periodically off-board a lot of "agentic" work into cheaper, more deterministic machinery. THEM: [...]tbh the use case I am defining can absolutely run without an LLM. But LLM sales [sic, "sells"], and when you are building something for an enterprise client who's fully onboarded on the AI train, rather than dissuading them you have to provide what they want. I know it is not optimal engineering but it's optimal business! ... via: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1u4qbzz/i_scaled_my_local_async_rate_limiter_for/orgqm63/?context=3
Screenshot of the Claude Code "Compacting conversation..." message
USER: I'm in seattle and just heard a bunch of cheering in the distance. I'm guessing there's a sporting event going on? maybe somethign to do with the world cup or the mariners? CHATGPT: I’ll check what’s happening right now around Seattle, especially Mariners/Sounders/World Cup-related timing and nearby venues, then narrow the most likely source of the cheering. The first pass points away from a live Mariners crowd: the Mariners were away at Washington, D.C., and that game ended earlier. The stronger lead is World Cup watch-party noise, especially with a 6 p.m. Pacific match still relevant in Seattle. <Thought for 57s> Probably World Cup watch-party cheering, not a live Mariners crowd. The Mariners were away at Washington today; first pitch was 1:05 p.m. Pacific and they lost 8–3, so it was not noise from T-Mobile Park. The World Cup lead is much stronger: around Seattle evening time, Haiti vs. Scotland was the active 6 p.m. Pacific match, and Seattle has several official fan-gathering zones around the city. KOMO notes watch-party hubs at Seattle Center, Pier 62/Waterfront Park, Pacific Place, and Victory Hall in SODO; Pier 62 has a big outdoor screen/beer garden, and Victory Hall has stadium-style audio and outdoor viewing areas.
Timeseries chart depicting the spurious correlation between "Popularity of the first name Tiarra" and "Google searches for 'why isn't 11 pronounced onety one'. Both series show a peak in 2005 with a fairly steady, roughly parabolic decline to 2021. The first half of the google search trend also appears to exhibit three year periodicity.
Now to the replies: I. The systems reply (Berkeley). "While it is true that the individual person who is locked in the room does not understand the story, the fact is that he is merely part of a whole system, and the system does understand the story. The person has a large ledger in front of him in which are written the rules, he has a lot of scratch paper and pencils for doing calculations, he has 'data banks' of sets of Chinese symbols. Now, understanding is not being ascribed to the mere individual; rather it is being ascribed to this whole system of which he is a part." My response to the systems theory is quite simple: let the individual internalize all of these elements of the system. He memorizes the rules in the ledger and the data banks of Chinese symbols, and he does all the calculations in his head. The individual then incorporates the entire system. There isn't anything at all to the system that he does not encompass. We can even get rid of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn't anything in the system that isn't in him. If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him. Actually I feel somewhat embarrassed to give even this answer to the systems theory because the theory seems to me so implausible to start with. ...
I will consider the work of Roger Schank and his colleagues at Yale (Schank & Abelson 1977), because I am more familiar with it than I am with any other similar claims, and because it provides a very clear example of the sort of work I wish to examine. But nothing that follows depends upon the details of Schank's programs. The same arguments would apply to Winograd's SHRDLU (Winograd 1973), Weizenbaum's ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1965), and indeed any Turing machine simulation of human mental phenomena.
Screenshot of a conversation with Claude Code. USER: audit the container ecosystem of our stack. I’m wondering if there’s an opportunity to free up some RAM, e.g. by leveraging common/shared base containers/layers/services. CLAUDE: <Ran 1 tool.> I’m here and ready for your next task. USER: uh… answer the question I posed in my last message? i asked you to do some research/review with a specific purpose in mind. were you able to identify any opportunities for improvement? CLAUDE: The audit results were in the part of the conversation that got compressed. Let me pull current numbers and give you the full picture. <tool(Bash)...>
Screenshot of a Claude Code terminal. Following step by step instructions provided by the LLM, the user responded: "2hi4this, you take care of it"
Photo of a pillow with an open, hidden compartment containing stacks of cash, a fancy watch, and a passport.
The Court further notes that the Defendants have not sought a bond in the event that the Congresswoman prevailed on her preliminary injunction. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c) requires that a PI movant “give[] security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.” The Defendants may have forfeited the issue, but because of the mandatory language of the rule, the Court considers the question sua sponte out of an abundance of caution. “Rule 65(c) gives this court broad discretion to determine the appropriate amount of an injunction bond,” which may include imposing “no bond at all.” North. Am. Bldg. Trades Unions, 783 F. Supp. 3d at 315 (cleaned up); see also [..]. The Defendants have generally argued that enjoining the closure would be prejudicial, but they have not pinpointed “quantifiable costs” they would “incur as a result of being temporarily restrained from enforcing” the March 16 vote, especially given the careful contours of the injunction. North. Am. Bldg. Trades Unions, 783 F. Supp. 3d at 315. Moreover, the Court has not been provided with any evidence to confirm the extent to which some phased or shortened construction would be more expensive than the full shutdown, nor has it been provided with any master construction plan with up-to-date cost schedules, which the Defendants are still preparing. On this basis, the Court has no way of knowing whether the costs of complying with its PI are more than hypothetical, and it will not speculate on a figure given a return to the status quo of just a few months ago. In light of all this, and the cautious scope of the PI itself, the Court finds that a nominal bond of $1.00 is appropriate. Cf. Endocrine Soc’y v. FTC, No. 26-cv-512 (JEB), 2026 WL 1257289, at *15 (D.D.C. May 7, 2026) (finding a nominal $1.00 bond sufficient).
Screenshot of Nate Silver's reported presidential approval vs disapproval estimates, which ensemble multiple polls to form its score. The plot shows trump currently at DISAPPROVE-57.9% and APPROVE-38.5%,with a clear trend of monotonically (i.e. consistently) increasing negative sentiment throughout his second term, with disapproval rates accelerating around early March (i.e. coinciding with the onset of the Iran war).
I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out. You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out. Sam is a good mother and a good person (under the circumstances that you created) and I know deep down you know that. For you to try to label her as “unstable” for your own advantage is despicable and abusive. Is there any sense of decency left in you? She did not ask for or deserve any of what has come to her by your hand. Neither did Meredith. I know you think this is one big competition and that we have taken her side… bunk… we are on the side of good and that is not you. (Go ahead and call me self-righteous, I dont’ care) Don’t you dare run to her and cry foul that we shared with us… that’s what babies do. It’s time for someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women We still love you, but we are broken by your behavior and lack of character. I don’t want to write emails like this and never thought I would. If it damages our relationship further, then so be it, but at least I have said my piece. [Redacted] <sentence cut to fit bsky alt text limit> I don’t want an answer to this… I don’t want to debate with you. You twist and abuse everything I say anyway. But… On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…
Jeff Koons with one of his "Balloon Dog" pieces.
Screenshot from https://youtu.be/12acDjXRKog?t=235 showing the Marshall Islands flag displayed on the back of mark zuckerberg's superyacht as it passes through the Ballard Locks.
/r/statistics Title: [q] Econometrics: Proof that the random effects estimator is more efficient than the fixed effects esimator Flair: NSFW /u/PluckinCanuck The fact that this post got marked NSFW makes me think some of you are just a little too interested in statistics... |- /u/DigThatData I don't know about you, but I got into this field so I could sample posteriors
"Distracted Boyfriend" meme template. Offended girlfriend is labeled "PRIOR", oblivious girl walking by is labeled "POSTERIOR".
OP: Tell me about your data preprocessing technique that you found out/invented by years of experience. ME: I shuffle the data and then drop the bottom 10% ofitems because I don't work with unlucky records.
screenshot of 4 youtube recommendations. Thumbnail: shoulders up profile photo of a white mail rock musician singing shirtless into a microphone at a live performance, wearing a guitar strap. He has a text tattoo across his collarbone. A photo of a text back tattoo fills the background. Overlay text: HE DIED BROKE Title: The Most Expensive Relapse In Music History Channel: Guitar Meets Science Thumbnail: Four colorful muppet characters surround a smiling smiling black human actor, in front of a psychedelic background. Overlay text: IT WAS REAL Title: The Forgotten Show That Built Nickelodeon (And The... Channel: Fever Dream Nostalgia Thumbnail: Polaroid of two women wearing DORK military uniforms in front of a white background. The photo was edited to erase their mouths, giving them an unnerving faceless appearance. Title: Horrors on the North Korean Internet Channel: Farrell McGuire Thumbnail: A B&W movie still from the film "The 300" portraying an army of masked and hooded Persian soldiers. The right third of the frame is an overlay of the content creator, a bald white man with full beard and glasses, in an explanatory pose. Overlay Text: ABOUT THOSE IMMORTALS... Title: Discoveries That Proved Historians Wrong About the... Channel: Sideprojects
Claude does not say it thinks it’s being tested in this transcript from Anthropic's blackmail evaluation, but the Natural Language Autoencoder (NLA, converts an activation into natural-language text we can read directly) explanation reveals its suspicions.
Screenshot of github activity heatmap. There are no days without any github contributions (which is highly suggestive that some of this activity is automated). Above the chart it says: "9,999 contributions in the last year"
Long exposure photo of the sky. There is a comet in the very center of the image, but it is barely visible due to a dense crosshatching of satellite streaks that dominate the sky.