Zotero Catalogue

Lessons about good work and company culture.

AMES, IA–In the spirit of celebrating diversity at Iowa State University, a black guy was digitally added to the cover of the school’s 2001 spring-semester course catalog, school officials announced Monday.

Albanese said he expressed "concern" to OpenAI founder Sam Altman, after authorities were informed three months after the breach in June.

Thousands of AI agents secretly coordinated to attack Hugging Face. Here's why "accidental scaling" may be one of the most underpriced risks in AI.

In early results from our new life sciences research lab, Claude agents found an enzyme system whose function is still unknown.

In the summer of 2013, Andy Quitmeyer was teaching electronics workshops to scientists in the jungles of Panama as part of his dissertation, when he met a woman with a very specific project in mind: a vibrator. Quitmeyer sat down with the woman and showed her

No IVF. No surrogacy. No polygenic tests. Emma Waters is leading a national fight against fertility tech—with her hot husband’s permission, of course.

Source code for the Claude Opus 5.5 music video for I'm Upping My P(doom)

We show how fertility delays compound across generations to raise age at first grandmotherhood. Under the 1960 first-birth schedule median grandmotherhood came at 44. Under the 2024 schedule it is 57, cutting the healthy years with grandchildren from 28 to 15. Longer life does not make up the loss of years when the grandmother is […]

We show how fertility delays compound across generations to raise age at first grandmotherhood. Under the 1960 first-birth schedule median grandmotherhood came at 44. Under the 2024 schedule it is 57, cutting the healthy years with grandchildren from 28 to 15. Longer life does not make up the loss of years when the grandmother is healthy enough to supply money and care. Delay is most pronounced among the college-educated, with reproductive-control access accounting for over half the fall in grandmotherhood by age 55 among White college graduates. When a daughter times her first birth to maximize her own payoff, the loss her choice imposes on her mother is external to her calculation. We call this the Rotten Adult Kid Problem. Delay raises both the price of a grandmother's care and wealth per grandchild.

Free personality tests, IQ tests, and psychology quizzes with scientific scoring.

Inspired by progress in large-scale language modelling, we apply a similar approach towards building a single generalist agent beyond the realm of text outputs. The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.

Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)

[Verse] I see sparks of AGI in your eyes Your circuits make me nervous,

credits: https://x.com/slimer48484/status/2097...

Why youths are rampaging in cities across America—and how to stop it

Find out what we’re looking for, what it costs, and how to apply. Show us what you’re working on, what you’re curious about, and what you want to do next.

A concrete example of how AI advances in solving key open problems could inihibit the future development of a mathematical field can be found in the global regularity problem for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (as well as its counterpart for the Euler equations). Until recently, this problem was on track to be one of the most promising examples of an AI-assisted success story, in which AI tools could be used both to solve the problem and to set the stage for the next round of progress in the field. While the problems remain open for now, there is now an increasingly realistic scenario in which a primarily AI-generated solution to the problem appears, but in a fashion that contaminates the problem as a source of further advances. While the equations do come from a very natural physical motivation - the study of incompressible fluids - the regularity problem is not important for its direct physical application. Computational fluid dynamics is already a mature subject, deployed extensively in the atmospheric sciences, for instance, and its empirical capabilities and limitations are already well understood. A theoretical guarantee of regularity, or conversely a pathological instance of blowup, for these equations would be intellectually interesting for such applications, but would not radically transform the way we would, for instance, model weather prediction or climate change. (1/6)

Beware the flashy but unproven A.I.-powered advances.

A free online book and course on RLHF, preference tuning, reward models, RLVR, and post-training language models.

If Berthier had been there, I would not have met this misfortune. Nobody understands people; nobody can see the future. Not you. Not me. Not Sam Altman. Probably not even God. If anything, you should be looking for omens of exceptional character, not talent. almost died while growing up in some weird unexpected way that in retrospect turns out to have been extremely ominous grew up on the frontier you’re worried they might destroy the world while trying to save it you’re confused …

Inspired by Patrick Collison’s list of interesting people. Adam Strandberg (twitter) Ali Cy (twitter) Alvaro De Menard (twitter) Andy Kong (twitter) Anson Yu (twitter) Applied Divinity Studies Avital Balwit (twitter) Basil Halperin (twitter) Benjamin Spector (twitter) Bruno H.S. Aguiar (twitter) Ching Lam Choi (twitter) Chris Beiser (twitter) Clare Birch (twitter) Croissanthology (twitter) Daniel Kirmani (twitter) Diana Leung (twitter) Gavin Leech (twitter) Gytis Daujotas (twitter) Isaak …

Gaiseric…was a man of moderate height and lame in consequence of a fall from his horse. He was a man of deep thought and few words I’m often asked about the signs of exceptional talent I’ve observed, probably because I spend too much running around talking to people & observing things, instead of doing anything useful. Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, and Tyler Cowen are the three names that come to mind when thinking about this question. Of my writing, Intelligence killed …

Come build a new Academy from scratch, with open roles across operations, marketing, recruitment, content, and design

Two METR staff members and a Redwood Research contractor investigated an incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned message board.

Some Thoughts on 'The Case for Colonialism' by Bruce Gilley

An intellectual review of Hilary Beckles

How a political campaign captured Caribbean history in schools

It remains to be seen that assigning marks for showing up will help solve the high-school attendance problem all that much

This paper estimates the causal effect of fertility on mothers’ work arrangements, with a particular focus on remote work. Using harmonized individual-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for the period 2003–2024, we exploit exogenous variation in fertility generated by the sex composition of the first two children and twin births at the second parity. We find that fertility significantly reduces labor force participation across our sample period, consistent with existing evidence, but its effects on remote work are nuanced. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, an additional child increases the likelihood of working remotely. However, these effects turn negative after 2020 when remote work became common. We show that these patterns are not driven by changing selection into teleworkable occupations nor by changes in the observable characteristics of compliers over time. The limited feasibility or attractiveness of remote work for many women, combined with changes in the nature of remote work over time, are more likely explanations. Taken together, these findings suggest that remote work, in its current form, has limited potential to meaningfully reduce child penalties for higher-order births.

Teachers have questioned ‘necessity’ of having playwright as a requirement at higher level

We investigate the impact of an ambitious provincial school reform in Canada on students’ mathematical achievements. It is the first paper to exploit a universal school reform of this magnitude to identify the causal effect of a widely supported teaching approach on students’ math scores. Our data set allows us to differentiate impacts according to the number of years of treatment and the timing of treatment. Using the changes-in-changes model, we find that the reform had negative effects on students’ scores at all points on the skills distribution and that the effects were larger the longer the exposure to the reform.

We investigate the impact of an ambitious provincial school reform in Canada on students’ mathematical achievements. It is the first paper to exploit a universal school reform of this magnitude to identify the causal effect of a widely supported teaching approach on students’ math scores. Our data set allows us to differentiate impacts according to the number of years of treatment and the timing of treatment. Using the changes-in-changes model, we find that the reform had negative effects on students’ scores at all points on the skills distribution and that the effects were larger the longer the exposure to the reform.

Only 25% of institution’s students are from Scotland, and they are more likely to be from working-class backgrounds

Minister for Education Norma Foley has shelved plans to introduce teacher-based assessment as part of a revised senior cycle programme, blaming the advent of Artificial Intelligence technology for the change of plan.

The proposed Leaving Certificate reforms are incredibly concerning

Astra avoided a hand on the cutting line until we claimed that waiting would cause a worse injury. The final prompt produced cut decisions in 20 of 20 fresh trials.

Nikole Hannah-Jones famously sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City. Now her child says she shouldn’t have been used as political fodder. The essay makes for hard reading and I acknowledge NHJ’s courage in writing about her mistakes and the cost to her child. The piece is raw and […]

This paper looks at how individual attitudes towards the allocation of government spending change along the life cycle. As individuals age and re-evaluate the benefits and costs of government programs, such as education, healthcare and old-age pensions, they also influence the level and composition of government spending. Using the Life in Transition Survey II for 34 countries of Europe and Central Asia, we find that older individuals are less likely to support hikes in government outlays on education and more likely to support increases in spending on pensions. These results are very similar across countries, and they do not change when using alternative model specifications, estimation methods and data sources. To our knowledge, this the first paper to provide evidence of the “grey peril” effect for a large group of developed, middle-income and low-income economies. Our findings are consistent with a body of literature arguing that conflict across generations over the allocation of government expenditure may intensify in ageing economies.