beets

If you hate corrupt bureaucrats, you’ll love this speculative socio-scifi short story I wrote: “Could an Intergalactic Surgeon Tell an Organ From an Industry?” foremost-olivine-7a6.notion.site/Could-an-Inter…

@martkiro That CUNY is not a profit maximizing business is a big reason why the admins had no incentive to minimize costs here. The economists are exactly right in this case @tylercowen

Economists: Businesses are profit maximizing rational agents Real-life:

@MisterFigs Aw thank you so much!!! I really appreciate it!

This was a super fun read!!

If you hate corrupt bureaucrats, you’ll love this speculative socio-scifi short story I wrote: “Could an Intergalactic Surgeon Tell an Organ From an Industry?” foremost-olivine-7a6.notion.site/Could-an-Inter…

if you're curious about the traffic figures they used to justify this:

NYC's public college system paid Oracle ~$600M to build our course management portal. It's built on top of Oracle's PeopleSoft suite, which they refused to customize without an extra $400M (to hit $1B). New Yorkers got the image below and pay $5M+ / year for *hosting*.

@yeetgenstein the latest hosting contract has a PDF at cuny.edu policy.cuny.edu/wp-content/upl…. David Arnow @ Brooklyn College talks about what he learned ~2007 when CUNYFirst was rolled out: pscbc.blogspot.com/2013/03/cuny-f…

@ChocolateyCrepe This is unbelievable. I’d like to learn more about this, any pointers?

@voooooogel "Siri, do you have an internal sensation of morality behind your ethics or do you just rotely mimic the behaviors you see on TV?" "The Weather in Bellmont, North Isli—"

@voooooogel I wrote a review of Blindsight for anyone interested: goodreads.com/review/show/60…

None of my intelligent (2000+ IQ alien starfish) friends are conscious. They follow inherent heuristics and solve problems efficiently without an inner monologue, and never experience qualia. This has been a long term consistent observation, but today confirmation came. A new meta-analysis showed time listening to an inner monologue per day increases exponentially with lower IQ, with drop off to 0 minutes at 500+. Consciousness is mostly appealing as a way to distract an otherwise inefficient mind that has no effective behaviors and minimal solution-directed behavior. Intelligent minds don't need stimulation or qualia, they simply solve problems and reproduce themselves without seizing up in paralyzing "suffering" or "happiness" like a vampire that just saw 4 right angles without his meds

@_onionesque s/Well-known research institutions/groups of people/

A friend recently made an observation during a chat: Well-known research institutions have a bias towards unscrupulous people, because they put epsilon weight on integrity and 1-epsilon on productivity and visibility.

@_marleyx @raffi_hotter Just downloaded the app and couldn’t figure out how to quote this tweet: x.com/chocolateycrep…

.@raffi_hotter and I ran a 2-week hackathon investigating whether you could decode images from a portable brain scanner We got initial results that suggest you can reconstruct images like these from brain activity recorded with time-domain NIRS, and share our detector prototype We did it in an incredible team of 16 people: @a__bra @stephen_fay @humanscotti @fionaleng_ @chocolateycrepe @yush_g @michelle__wang @jonxuxu @thomas_rribeiro, @bryanhpchiang, Michel Adamic, Wellington Avelino, Grace Jiang, and Stephen Polcyn

- Aayush for some badass reverse engineering and taking us to the caves - Raffi for sharing my first Sephardic Rosh Hashanah seder with me - Marley + Raffi both for their persistent attentiveness and eclectically contributing to every part of the project - Everyone for the joy

- Stephen graciously let me practice my barber skills on him and subjected himself to our grueling experiments - Stephen, Michelle, and Anna were great to work with on data collection, analysis, and banging our heads on failing sanity tests

I’m lucky for all the friendships that bloomed from this amazing experience. Raffi and Marley did an amazing job organizing the house, not to mention: - energy of Grace, Michel, Fiona designing circuits and sourcing hardware 15 hours a day was exhilarating

there is a revolution taking place in biology before our eyes I spent the past month reading the papers & interviews of @drmichaellevin, and wrote a long-form essay explaining his work and why it's important bitsofwonder.co/p/a-revolution…

@r00k I met Ben for a roomie interview and we ended up spending half our hangout doing this. Very thoughtful, very handsome, 5 stars, highly recommend

Standing offer: if you are a founder or would-be founder in New York City I will get coffee with you, pay very close attention to your situation, and happily offer my best advice.