Red Neck Harry Potter
YouTuber DemonFlyingFox is an AI artist who creates videos that bring pop culture figures to zenith of their narrative purposes.
Oh what AI has wrought.
New AI Model Predicts Human Behavior With Uncanny Accuracy
By studying real humans completing tasks (such as playing chess or solving a maze), researchers have determined a way to model human behavior. They did this by calculating a peron’s ‘inference budget’. Most humans think for some time, then act. How long they think before acting is called their ‘inference budget’. Researchers found they could measure a person’s individual budget by simply watching how long a person thought about a problem before acting.
“At the end of the day, we saw that the depth of the planning, or how long someone thinks about the problem, is a really good proxy of how humans behave,”
The next step was to run their own model to solve the problem presented to the person. Then, by watching how long the monitored agent took to solve the same problem, they could make very accurate inferences as to when the human stopped planning and know what the person would do next. That value could then be used to predict how that agent would react when solving similar problems.
The researchers tested their approach in three different tasks: inferring navigation goals from previous routes, guessing someone’s communicative intent from their verbal cues, and predicting subsequent moves in human-human chess matches and beat current models.
If we know that a human is about to make a mistake, having seen how they have behaved before, the AI agent could step in and offer a better way to do it. Or the agent could adapt to the weaknesses that its human collaborators have.
In an example from their paper, a person is given different rewards for reaching the blue or orange star. The path to the blue star is always easier than the orange star. As the complexity of the maze grows, the person will start showing bias towards the easier path in some cases. The difference between when they choose the higher reward vs the easier, lower reward can determine a person’s inference budget. When the system determines a problem will be harder than the person’s inference budget allows, the system might offer a hint.
Links:
- Research paper: “Modeling Boundedly Rational Agents With Latent Inference Budgets” by Athul Paul Jacob, Abhishek Gupta and Jacob Andreas, ICLR 2024. OpenReview
- Article:
Holy pipe riding Batman
Dean Tennant MTB takes a ride across a pipeline bridge.
Latest Local Legal extortion
Conner Slevin, a local resident paralyzed in an accident in 2020, is suing his former attorney Jessica Molligan who he claims made legal arrangements, sent communications, and negotiated settlements without his knowledge. Molligan allegedly made dozens of ADA violation lawsuits in his name against local Portland businesses with the real goal of making herself rich.
In many cases, the property owners said they didn’t know there was an ADA compliance issue until they received a demand letter from the Portland lawyer. The initial letter didn’t specify what needed to be fixed but proposed a settlement agreement. Molligan wouldn’t sue if the owner agreed to make repairs, bring the property into compliance, and pay attorney’s fees of roughly $10,000 or more.
The only problem is that Slevin didn’t know she was doing all this in his name. She’s now being sued by Slevin.
Articles:
Less not more
Synthet has a set of fun music/mixing tutorials in which he teaches his various editing and tweaking techniques using the very techniques to do the teaching. They’re really creative and enjoyable. Give one a listen:
Einstürzende Neubauten, Autobahn
Welcome to 6:47 of complete, bonkers industrial music played by the experimental music group Einstürzende Neubauten. Formed in West Berlin in 1980, here they are in 1984 playing on piles of junk in a piece they called ‘Autobahn’. Scraping steel, chainsaws, grinders, and screaming. Just what’s you expect from a 1980’s German punk/industrial/what-the-heck-was-that band.
https://youtu.be/odKf7_sA5HQ?si=MeexFWLxeYmO8X–
What are they doing now? One member became a music lawyer/label owner, and others are still doing ‘art’:
If you like the bizarre, try out the Swedish band Silencer that release one bonkers album and then largely disappeared.
Programming wisdom
“Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer”
Filipe Fortes
“The code you write makes you a programmer. The code you delete makes you a good one. The code you don’t have to write makes you a great one.”
Mario Fusco
Read more on X: https://x.com/CodeWisdom
Myst book
Riumplus built his own Myst linking book – in which you can see not only video; but play the actual game. He used a copy of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume LIV, Issue 312, December 1876 to May 1877 to make the outside of the book.
Cool Japanese Stationary
You haven’t lived until you’ve gone to a stationary shop in Japan. They have the most amazing products, pens, papers, calligraphy, notebooks, binders, pencil cases, sharpeners, and gadgets.
JetPens has a Youtube channel that goes over a lot of amazing products available on Jetpens.com
How interpreters at the UN work
It turns out, there are only 6 officially supported interpreted languages at the UN – so how does that work with dozens of languages (hint: via a clever relay system)? How much to interpreters get paid? What are some interesting facts about interpreting and brain usage?