Many thanks to @blakestacey and @YourNetworkIsHaunted for your guidance with the NSF grant situation. I’ve sent an analysis of the two weird reviews to our project manager and we have a list of personnel to escalate with if we can’t get any traction at that level. Fingers crossed that we can be the pebble that gets an avalanche rolling. I’d really rather not become a character in this story (it’s much more fun to hurl rotten fruit with the rest of the groundlings), but what else can we do when the bullshit comes and finds us in real life, eh?

It WAS fun to reference Emily Bender and On Bullshit in the references of a serious work document, though.

Edit: So…the email server says that all the messages are bouncing back. DKIM failure?

Edit2: Yep, you’re right, our company email provider coincidentally fell over. When it rains, it pours (lol).

ai true believers are necessarily treating the maxim I referred to as a philosophical claim, something that addresses the ground truth of what words are

Thanks for breaking it down, I was missing this key bit!

From your linked post:

also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”

Not an expert by any means, but this sounds like pagerank, but for language.

Having a prize adjacent to AI in the year of our LLM 2024 is a no-brainer.

This works on multiple levels

Hinton could be the first guy to win a Nobel and an Ignobel in the same year.

no

Habsburgs are good, actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41497419

Gavin Newsom is America’s answer to the question: “What if Keir Starmer, but worse?”