I don’t internet without uBlock. I honestly couldn’t imagine it any other way.

ONLYOFFICE (sorry for the caps, poor name) has better docx compatibility than WPS or any other suite. It’s the only thing I’ve found that can do everything in an academic style paper without issue. In addition, its source code is open (unlike WPS) and it has Zotero and Mendeley integrations. Its Zotero integration was better than its Mendeley integration last I checked.

I’m a professor and use ONLYOFFICE as the only word processor on my office computer.

Edit: apparently the Zotero plugin needs to be updated.

Same. I still occasionally browse Reddit, but I have a rule that I don’t post or comment there. I do post and comment here.

I completely agree on all points.

I can’t imagine that flags will get awards automatically cancelled. Any human (f)MRI work is going to describe its participant inclusion or exclusion criteria, because you can’t put people with any risk of metal in their bodies within an MRI machine. Republicans tend to like brain research because the military really likes it. Additionally, virtually all NSF broader impacts will contain at least some speculative verbiage like, “this could help to increase representation.” My guess is that flags return an AI or actual person review, which then makes a decision. Some folks at my university have been told that their awards have been cancelled. My awards that have some of these words haven’t been cancelled.

I’ve heard that most, if not all, of their stations outside of NY are essentially for training other police departments. Is that not true?

This study this meme is based on is completely incorrect and should be retracted. Here’s a lay summary of its issues:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/03/04/new-paper-debunks-the-prevalence-of-women-hunting-in-early-societies/

And the published article detailing the problems with that study’s issues:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000497

Trogdor was popular way before Reddit

Examples? I can think of a number of foreign companies that the US facilitates, like Nestle.

(⌐■ ͜ʖ■)

This makes sense, thanks

Why would China turn against Putin for them using their nukes? I don’t keep up much on their relations.

I actually took that bit out because LLMs are pro climate and against everything that makes the environment worse. That’s a result of being trained on a lot of scientific literature. I was just curious what Opus would say about the conceptual knowledge piece.

Claude Opus disagrees, lol (edit to add: all of what follows is Claude; not me):

I respectfully disagree with the claim that current language models are logically incapable of mapping language to actual concepts. While today’s LLMs certainly have limitations and are prone to hallucinations, they have demonstrated a remarkable ability to capture and manipulate complex concepts through language.

A few key points:

LLMs are trained on vast amounts of human-generated text which is grounded in real-world concepts, allowing the models to build rich representations that go beyond surface-level word associations. Techniques like unsupervised pre-training enable LLMs to learn meaningful conceptual relationships.

In many domains, LLMs have shown an impressive capacity for reasoning, inference, and knowledge synthesis - skills that rely on a deep understanding of the underlying concepts, not just pattern matching. Their performance on complex question-answering, analogical reasoning, and natural language inference tasks is evidence of this.

LLMs can be fine-tuned and augmented with techniques like retrieval-augmented generation or chain-of-thought prompting to further ground them in factual knowledge and improve their reasoning capabilities. This allows more robust conceptual mappings.

Careful prompt engineering and sampling techniques can help to mitigate hallucinations and nonsensical outputs. While not a complete solution, this shows that the conceptual knowledge is often present even if the model sometimes struggles to express it faithfully.

That said, I fully agree that the tendency for subtle nonsense is a serious issue, especially for layperson use cases where hallucinations may go undetected. Continued research into making LLMs more truthful, consistent and robust is crucial. Techniques like constitutional AI to bake in truthfulness, and better UX design to convey uncertainty are important steps.

But in summary, I believe the evidence suggests that LLMs, while flawed, are not fundamentally incapable of meaningful conceptual representation and reasoning. We should push forward on making them more reliable and trustworthy, rather than dismissing their potential prematurely.

I’m back on my BS is also a solid contributor

Sorry, but this makes clear that you aren’t in science. You should avoid trying to shit on studies if you don’t know how to interpret them. Both of the things you mentioned actually support the existence of a true effect.

First, if the treatment has an effect, you would expect a greater rate of relapse after the treatment is removed, provided that it treats a more final pathway rather than the cause: People in the placebo group have already been relapsing at the typical rate, and people receiving treatment–whose disease has been ramping up behind the dam of a medication preventing it from showing–are then expected to relapse at a higher rate after treatment is removed. The second sixth-month period was after cessation of the curcumin or place; it was a follow-up for treatment-as-usual.

Second, people drop out of a study nonrandomly for two main reasons: side effects and perceived lack of treatment efficacy. The placebo doesn’t have side effects, so when you have a greater rate of dropout in your placebo group, that implies the perceived treatment efficacy was lower. In other words, the worst placebo participants are likely the extra dropouts in that group, and including them would not only provide more degrees of freedom, it would theoretically strengthen the effect.

This is basic clinical trials research knowledge.

Again, I have no skin in the game here. I don’t take curcumin, nor would I ever. I do care about accurate depictions of research. I’m a STEM professor at an R1 with three active federal grants funding my research. The meme is inaccurate.

Why are you completely ignoring the second paper I linked, which doesn’t suffer from any of the limitations you mentioned?

The meme says no trial was successful. Any trial with any small difference is a successful trial.

I’m not saying the study is good, just that the meme isn’t true.

Also, you can level almost every single one of those criticisms against many studies for SSRIs and they’d hit just as hard. The exception being sample size.

Not true:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032714003620

https://www.cghjournal.org/article/S1542-3565(06)00800-7/fulltext

I found more, too.

Edit: I have no skin in this game. I don’t take turmeric and won’t ever because of the risk of lead. I’m just pointing out that the meme is inaccurate. The person who replied to me pointed out some flaws in the first study (not the second), but none of the flaws mentioned makes the meme accurate. Even the shitty first study I linked found a significant condition difference in its primary endpoint at 8 weeks. Yeah, it’s got flaws (which the second doesn’t), but a successful trial with heavy limitations and conflicts of interest is nonetheless a successful trial, making this meme inaccurate. The second study I linked is stronger.

Also, the limitations in the first trial are standard for many clinical trials. For example:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jsr.12201

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X14001266

I could list 100 more with the same limitations of the first study I linked above. High dropout, small sample sizes, funding by an industry with a conflict of interest etc. are standard for clinical trial studies.

Ich lebe in Amerika. Ich lerne Deutsche sprechen, aber das kostet Geld. Vielleicht wollen die Migranten Deutsche lernen, haben aber nicht das Geld dafür?

Sorry if the above is poorly worded; I’m still new to the language. My point is that there are lots of reasons that someone might not know a language well, including a lack of money, or a lack of time from needing to work full time to support one’s migrant family on a low wage.

Mexican immigrants to the US are wonderful, but their culture is very different from non-Hispanic US culture. I don’t expect them to learn English. They work like 60 hours per week to support their families. Like the person you’re replying to has said, though, their children learn English and integrate into, but also uniquely contribute to, US culture. Rather than expecting the first-generation immigrants to learn English, I’ve learned Spanish specifically to speak with them. It’s not like there are many more immigrants to Germany than there are immigrants to the US–even discounting the fact that the US has always been a country of immigrants, Hispanic and Latino/a/e Americans (the majority of which are Mexican Americans) are expected to exceed 50% of all Americans within a couple of decades. In some states, they are already the majority.

Diversity is a good thing, and we shouldn’t require immigrants to become like us culturally or linguistically before accepting them.