Melody Yang

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February, and is available for pre-order now.

decision to leave DESTROYED me but this review destroyed me even more.

@laurel_joy_gd Convinced my past lab to change to Notion! It has all the functionality of Trello in the database views, and can include coding.

hey academics, what's your preferred project management tool for your lab? New year, new organizational scheme in PINE Lab!

@seascapes63dive @nilikm @ProtonSupport It’s so sad that it’s constantly women being gaslit by men when death threats are issued.

At RC, we encourage you to follow your interests and do the things that bring you joy, instead of doing you think you should do. Sometimes that means that abandoning your original plans to chase something new and shiny!

@RobertRMorris @threadreaderapp unroll

UPDATE: Looks like there was some large misperceptions about what we did. Some clarifications are here: twitter.com/RobertRMorris/…

We provided mental health support to about 4,000 people — using GPT-3. Here’s what happened 👇

@BLemieuxRealtor @davenewworld_2 Tone deaf to the real issue here.

@davenewworld_2 Very dramatic tweet. This happens all the time. The likelihood here is they walked in, kindly explained why he couldnt have it, and wrote him a ticket based on the simple fact they had to at a minimum issue a citation. I know, because I’ve been a part of these calls many times.

Police in Kansas raided the hospital room of a 69-year-old man who's terminally ill just for vaping THC to relieve his pain. Greg Bretz is in the final stages of an inoperable cancer, but unfortunately, medicinal weed is illegal in Kansas. This is your tax dollars hard at work.

I mentor a young lad with poor literacy skills who is starting a landscaping business. He struggles to communicate with clients in a professional manner. I created a GPT3-powered Gmail account to which he sends a message. It responds with the text to send to the client.

“Suicides in Canada went up after MAID’s introduction in 2016, but in 2020, after the government sent $2,000 CERB cheques to so many, rates fell by 15 per cent. That raises even more uncomfortable questions.” thestar.com/amp/politics/p…

@nabeelqu There’s nefarious uses, and there’s great uses- like identifying it in AI generated propaganda

Wasn't aware of this, but sounds like Scott Aaronson at OpenAI is working on cryptographically watermarking GPT outputs. Means it should be easy enough (in principle) for e.g. teachers to check if students used GPT to do their homework, StackOverflow to check for GPT use, etc.

@patrickmineault @arankomatsuzaki has been summarizing papers all year— tell us what you think!

What are your neuroAI paper highlights for this year? Am preparing an end-of-year state-of-the-field post

@KozlMarta @HigherEdPR As someone who ran a student org and had to be the one to break the news on both sides, I’m so thankful for academics like you. Often, the student team is just 3-5 committed undergrads with less than $500 in funding for the whole year’s events.

I was invited to do a talk recently that would have helped a lot of people. Want to know what their budget was? They just told me: $500. Dr. Sheena Howard and I went live just yesterday to talk about how academics should charge a minimum of $3500 for a 1 hour talk.

Yes, ChatGPT is amazing and impressive. No, @OpenAI has not come close to addressing the problem of bias. Filters appear to be bypassed with simple tricks, and superficially masked. And what is lurking inside is egregious. @Abebab @sama tw racism, sexism.

Microaggressions & systemic racism manifest in many ways. The idea that white is right & whiteness = professionalism coupled with hypervisibility and racialized micromanagement - not trusting that something can be done just as well a different way is harmful and exhausting. 8/8

@philipcball @laurel_joy_gd Truthfully, social work volunteering made me a better scientist for this exact reason. Even if the person across from you believes in Angel energies guiding their every move, it forced me to empathize and understand before judging.

@patrickmineault Cryptography! Yeah there’s crypto, but have u ever been body slammed into ciphers for animal crossing dodo codes?

What’s a really mindbending class you took? A whole universe opened up when I first learned data structures. Abstract algebra, classical mechanics, information theory, all very juicy. Now I’m learning Haskell and jumping on the category theory bandwagon. What’s your fave?

@maybealynx @blackfanglabs Hard agree. It’s unethical, and it calls into question the AI’s own biases. If the AI is meant to continually scrape the web, what’s to stop governments from flooding a corner and having the AI reproduce their propaganda?

@blackfanglabs i just do not think it is ethical to use an AI whose data is sourced unethically. i understand you may not agree and that it may seem harmless on the surface, but please listen to what artists and writers are saying about AIs that scrape their data without consent.

We should just copy #ChatGPT straight into our twitter

@soghaatol Bigger takeaway: think of a memory diagram! I also forgot and had b point to a, but variables upon creation will point to a memory address of the value, not to ea other.

Day 102 of #100DaysOfCode: What's the value of b? let a = 7 let b = a a = 10 b = ?

@AfricaKenyah Not really an immediate leave, but it’s unapproachable if it’s got a lot of clashing colours and ads between page-long “paragraphs” 🥲