dave kasten Profile
dave kasten

@David_Kasten

Followers
1,014
Following
3,182
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263
Statuses
24,489

Do what seems cool next. Formerly: McKinsey, VaccinateCA, Activision Blizzard.

Joined March 2011
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
15 days
In too many conversations lately, I've heard that everyone _hopes_ we have a playbook to mitigate the risks of AI, but no one HAS one. I’ve been helping the folks at @ai_ctrl work on the first draft of just such a plan for a while now. Excited to share that it's now released!
@_andreamiotti
Andrea Miotti
15 days
A NARROW PATH If attempts to build superintelligent AI succeed, we face extinction as a species. We must choose a different path, one where we control what we create. One where AI is a tool for human advancement, not a successor species. Humanity has no plan, so we built one.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
You know, it's odd that Slack said, "hey, <100 person IRC channels had moderators since the 1980s, but let's not tell CEOs they need one for corporations >10K" while Discord has a detailed moderator advice guide with chapter titles such as, "Section 531: Parasocial Relationships"
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@meredithdclark @olivermb What other crimes do you baselessly accuse students of? Tax evasion if they don’t give you a shiny red apple?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@revhowardarson Ummm...isn't deleting evidence of CSE without reporting literally a straight-to-jail issue?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@JohnJBlatchford I'd love to move back to Ohio, but I don't know how I pitch, "if you have a miscarriage or need an abortion, we can't get you care; if our kids are trans, they'll be forced back into the closet" to any potential life partner. Do you see those things changing anytime soon?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
TIL that shipping companies are Actually At Scale using AR glasses to plan, conduct, and inspect repairs and maintenance on ships now, resulting in time savings that could best be described as "hilariously large" by comparison to previous best practices
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
5 years
@jsidman @MayorBowser The Mayor should shut them down. Tonight. And then yank all their liquor licenses. I plan on opposing every liquor license renewal their group applies for, because of this.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 years
Jaw-dropping details here: diplomatic negotiations in a public restaurant; aides pointing cell phone cameras at briefing docs
@prchovanec
Patrick Chovanec
8 years
The dining room at Mar-A-Lago is the new White House situation room, and if you can pay the fee, you're invited.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
4 years
@ArmsControlWonk Weird to think that in ~75 years we've gone from "everyone knows that big warehouse explosions make mushrooms clouds" as a cover for the Trinity test to "everyone knows that nukes make mushroom clouds" as a conspiracy theory about a warehouse explosion...
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@100daysofgarlic
표트르 교포트킨
2 years
oh my god this isn't even a joke
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
“In your pockets you hold two notes. One says, ‘no one is working on any problem,’ the other says, ‘we are a vast and powerful civilization’”
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
3 years
At this point, I’m calling for a complete pause in letting @cstross write his so-called “fiction” until we better understand his eldritch powers
@nick_kapur
Nick Kapur
3 years
The Sessho-seki, a famous rock in Nasu, Japan that was said to have imprisoned the evil nine-tailed fox demoness Tamamo-no-Mae, was found broken in half. After nearly 1,000 years, the demon vixen is presumably once again on the loose.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
4 years
One of the deeply weird things about modern American life is that "I made a well-formatted letter" is a secret test that greatly affects the likelihood of getting the results you're already owed by law.
@abigailseldin
Abigail Seldin
4 years
Our best features in @swiftstudents emerged from the focus groups. One financial aid officer focus groups organized by @nasfaa produced the following features. ⭐️Student name + ID # in header ⭐️Prompt to use school email address ⭐️"Table" in childcare allowance request
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 months
Have a conversation 3 times, tweet about it rule: People who work on AI policy outside of the DC area cannot _imagine_ how different the conversation is in DC. Berkeley: "AI will kill us all.." Inside DC: "Here is our process for industry to comment on AI use cases"
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@zck Honest question: do you believe that they should take that rooting seriously as feedback, and re-evaluate some of their past decisions?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@SCOTUSblog You really need to take a breath here and actually think about what this means for real human beings. What you're doing right now is not helping.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 months
As a speculative exercise once, I attempted to ask (roughly) every major US public policy school whether they taught a class in procurement. Almost none of them -- and none of them anywhere near the top of the ranking tables -- had _even one elective_ on it. That is...a choice.
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
8 months
These businesses are generally not very tech-forward because that is not a requirement of the RFP. In fact, anything which makes it look less like the abomination that Agency X uses makes it less likely to win Agency Y’s bid, since their requirements document was copy/pasted.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@ahardtospell The metro, while annoying when it breaks, is convenient to get around town even late at night
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
What is extremely weird is that I had my first trans coworker in the early 2000s, in Ohio, when I was a Republican, and my reaction _then_ was, “ok, whatever.” Why do the DC Gen X blogger pundits have such a weird phobia about this?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
This is news worth crying with joy about, and I’m absolutely unashamed that I did. A 75% effective vaccine. Tens of thousands of kids’ lives are going to be saved every year thanks to this.
@_HannahRitchie
Hannah Ritchie
1 year
The world now has a 2nd vaccine against malaria. Incredible. Malaria kills more than half a million people every year. Over half of these deaths are in children younger than 5.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@golikehellmachi I have a friend who teaches college students in the arts. These students _literally_ do not understand the career paths of many of their mentors, because "I had to ensure I never got off healthcare for even one minute to avoid pre-existing condition rules" just doesn't compute
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
(Without commenting on the underlying issue) A shockingly large percentage of Kremlinology on statement release times boils down to, "the decision-maker finally got out of their work dinner and checked their email" or "people are on hour 25 without sleep and gotta call it"
@eigenrobot
eigenrobot
10 months
why would you release the statement when everyone on the east coast is asleep anyway the point of making a statement is usually for people to see it right? and you have to drag an administrator out of bed or w/e to post this so it sure seems like some kind of crisis move
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
11 months
Ah, yes, another round of the, "why are the students picked in the most Darwinian meritocracy contest in human history doing so well at school" debate
@Tyler_A_Harper
Tyler Austin Harper
11 months
I find it *insane* that the Ivy League does crazy grade inflation and — seeing that — so many people at non-Ivies insist on grading “rigorously,” thereby re-enforcing the pre-existing opinion of employers that elite uni kids are geniuses (he’s a 4.0!) and state school kids idiots
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@pennstatetom @jonkarl @lisamurkowski Wow! Such hijinks for this woman who's taking away my family's rights! Love it!
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@vghaisas I need to find the source I saw on this again, but my understanding is that they believe they should have few moderation features since they think that’s outside their scope. Put another way, they think HR is the moderation function for email, and should be for Slack too.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
Ok, because if you have a convo at a con 3 times, you should tweet it: The AI industry's estimate of max US govt competency is wildly too low, resulting from them not encountering the A team, mainly. (Note, I am often harshly critical of USG competency when it is lacking).
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
3 years
@TezlynFigaro This is literally a gas station famous in LA for having prices regularly $2 above any other station. I (and lots of other people downthread) knew which station it was before even looking at the photo.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
9 months
@ESYudkowsky @mizabitha Women couldn’t testify in court, generally, under Roman law, so no ability to press an adultery case in that instance (needed to avoid an aristocratic feud)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@patio11 Hypo: it’s mainly not loss prevention, it’s mainly about trying to enable greater $/sqft and enabling digital cross/up sell
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
11 months
I'll admit, I didn't have, "Senior Partners at the extraordinarily risk-conscious management consulting firm I used to work for now comfortably use @ManifoldMarkets prediction markets in their LinkedIn posts" on my 2023 bingo card, but apparently that's a thing now?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@patio11 @moronicrepublic Can report, “write a terse but polite letter, in the style of Patrick ‘patio11’ McKenzie,” is an effective prompt. (“Terse” is necessary because otherwise using your name in the prompt results in an effusive and overly long letter)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@JohnJBlatchford Look, to each their own. But I personally wouldn’t bet my family’s future on a preliminary injunction. If it becomes a permanent injunction, and if there’s a similar one to protect trans kids…maybe. But given the current Statehouse and Governor, I’m not holding my breath.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
11 months
@packyM @DanielleFong Heaven willing, America gonna get one American dream stronger on Tuesday
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@nonmayorpete So, this is a structure that basically is an effort to thread the needle between, a) scaling, b) "I need to help my current employees take money off the table or else they'll be stolen away by competitors", and c) what-if OpenAI just becomes all of the economy?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
5 years
The Crypto Wars panel at #rsac is a car crash — Adi Shamir is straight up defending a crypto weakening back door for phones that relies on physical vibrations to emit part of key. Yeah, that’s right. He wants keys to be emitted via sound. On devices with accelerometers and mikes.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@patrickc So I fully understand that I’m 3 years late to this story, but how the heck did we not have a ticker tape parade when a 90% effective therapy for cystic fibrosis that could be used in kids got approved?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
Much less is actually planned in human civilization in a crisis than you might expect.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
4 years
@NickWolfinger Hi, I'm curious, did your tenure application include providing proof of your willingness to threaten junior colleagues? Or was that more sort of a "roles and responsibilities" thing covered in the job description?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 months
If you told the average US policymaker that "AI will kill us all," their default assumption is that you mean, "because a Certain Nation in Asia powers up and we fight WW3", not "we all get paperclipped".
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
3 years
Reminder that if you're someone with the power to fix issues, you can almost _immediately_ find some to fix by going to the right subreddit or facebook group. This is underappreciated, even by people who know they're underappreciating it.
@TaskandPurpose
Task & Purpose
3 years
A story that played out on Reddit…
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@revhowardarson A lot of people have not sufficiently contemplated that many algos that seek min(trolley_problem) can, with a single bit-flip, instead become max(trolley_problem)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@DCist I’m sorry that those car drivers will learn that they are, in fact, not above the law
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
3 years
(Or when you inadvertently learn that a key volunteer who’s operating at “would hire them for my Dayjob” levels is actually under 16, because of when they are able to get vaccinated…)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@IanColdwater Tell people that using unemployment and food banks is their right and that they’re not making anyone else starve by taking advantage of the resources their community offers them, and that their tax dollars last month probably helped pay for
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@StrongTowns Hmm...has anyone tried getting a special zoning rule created for these by calling them "Founding Fathers" or "Constitutional Communities"? or something?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
They have not fully reasoned through several points, including: 1. If you live in a society with too-few truly competent general-purpose problem-solvers, the ones you have will run on 120% utilization prioritized mostly by _urgency_ not _impact_ and you will rarely meet them
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
Look, I understand that it isn’t always intuitive what value prop business offers, but each of the public corporations owning these brands are legally compelled to publish detailed quarterly descriptions of how they make their money, and they’re usually surprisingly interesting
@anothercohen
Alex Cohen
2 years
I don’t understand how the following restaurants are still in business: - Chilis - Applebees - Olive Garden - Red Lobster
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
(Your default understanding of think tanks in DC should be far more, "place for burned-out high-performing people to recover and remember what their kids look like between tours of duty" than "weird para-academic institution". Same goes for, e.g., war colleges.)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
New crazy singularity just dropped: hire every unemployed liberal arts major in America to frantically churn out blogposts describing new advances as input data to ensure AI models can describe the future they create
@revhowardarson
feedlack boop
2 years
okay so this is dumb but the insight that makes it less dumb is that language is, itself, a sparse representation of the internal human model of the world. it only works because words have a relation to each other corresponding to the relations of their referents.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
Follow/up thought on this: there are entire parts of the DC ecosystem that only make sense if uou understand that they are part of a mechanism to enable lifecycle cash smoothing for experts needed by government
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
1 year
To the extent that we want competent specialists and executives in government, I look at things like the pay for GS-13s and wince.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
11 months
One of the very weird things about much of American non-tech business culture (versus, e.g., much of the American federal-level public sector culture), is that _lots of managerial folks_ don't see doing what Patrick describes _as their jobs_.
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
11 months
Culture is a real thing in the world, and in a healthy engineering culture, someone not involved in immediate firefighting would take that engineer aside within minutes and say “You are probably worried for your job right now. Don’t be. Let me explain incident postmortems.”
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
One of the persistently weird things about American business life is that people fear Legal's "No", even though average F500 GC is one of the most creative and ethical business problem-solvers you'd ever meet. (Their job requires, essentially, understanding the whole business.)
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
10 months
“I bet the lawyers wouldn’t let you do that.” I bet 10,000 people think they understand what Legal will say for every person who actually asks Legal for a memo on the topic, to say nothing of how many people understand that if Legal has an objection it knows how to raise it.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@R_McNeely I would buy that argument more if Slack didn’t explicitly refuse to ship message management tools I have in Outlook now, like filters, spam buttons, skip my inbox, etc.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
@docentdemagogue The google string you want to look for is "Hololens shipping industry" or "Hololens maritime maintenance" (My original source here was a personal discussion so I'm being vague to avoid pointing at a given shipping company. But trend is widespread apparently.)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
One of the absolutely _wild_ things you learn as an adult is that people will frequently cite policies that they have literally _never_ read, and make claims that are disprovable by a single Ctrl+F
@mnolangray
M. Nolan Gray
10 months
The secret to being the most powerful person in the room on policymaking: actually read the dang-flab statutes and bill text!
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
4. If the defense and security establishment comes to share the view of AI risk held by, e.g., the average person at Manifest 2023 conference (thanks, @ManifoldMarkets ), I believe we will rapidly falsify @ESYudkowsky 's beliefs that there aren't competent USG people out there.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@thejb_stan Not to mention average hrs played per game has gone up _significantly_ for the average gamer...
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
3 years
@Theophite I would also like to briefly point out that the Soviet ethnolinguistic census system, while _very convenient_ for political science papers, is also LITERALLY USED AS A PUNCH LINE by poli sci for the ways in which it is inconsistent and driven by communist ideology under the hood
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@revhowardarson One of the weirdest things about Twitter is that it’s taught me that some people literally cannot see the is/ought distinction
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
@patio11 My hypothesis is that many, many people thought of it for years, but it was only implemented because it was led by senior doctors -- ORs have a strong culture of deferring to doctors' preferences, however tempermental (they're the "fighter pilots" of that culture)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
11 months
I honestly think that one of the reasons @ManifoldMarkets is catching on with news super-consumers is that it just looks prettier than other prediction markets in a screenshot
@TheStalwart
Joe Weisenthal
11 months
Sam is up to 0.50 now
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@swolecialism It has always been very unclear to me why we would want other countries to have access to people that demonstrate they have the heart of an American inside them
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 years
"You need to learn WHY things work on a starship."-Admiral James T. Kirk
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
2. Even if this was not the case, their estimates of USG competency are informed mainly by talking to people with skillsets most like theirs, which is essentially the global max of industry-outbids-government-for-talent
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
11 months
@realtonysm1th Why should we lie and say students didn’t master a body of knowledge, just because others did too?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 months
("Industry" is how federal government folks refer to all of capitalism. On my good days, I think it is charming anachronism; on my bad days, I think it demonstrates an unhealthy power relationship)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
I just asked chatGPT to draft me a letter to send to my councilmember opposing the appointment of a dangerously unqualified man to a role with the prompt "formal and chillingly polite letter" and it honestly crushed it to an unsettling degree. Literally edited one word and sent.
@jbrowder1
Joshua Browder
2 years
The first major use case of GPT-3 and LLMs for ordinary people will be consumer rights. Negotiating medical bills, fixing credit reports, waiving fees, lowering bills, cancelling subscriptions and suing robocallers.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
@danegerbravo Wouldn't surprise me -- the use cases for shipping, as I understand it, are much less spatially fine-grained
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
There are reasons, detailed in the article, why this is moderately challenging for government. Very few of them stand up to the, “a motivated product team could solve this,” test. Instead, the government focused on awareness, instead of building a repeatable process.
@BoKnowsNews
Bo Erickson Reuters
1 year
Startling stats: After many US kids lost a parent during COVID, a large % of families are NOT receiving federal survivor benefits to help w/costs, including an estimated ~717,000 Black children. Our new reporting on the Social Security program> @CBSNews
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
Counterargument: these perks will come back just like apartments have rooftop grill stations: they seem like compensation for everyone even though on a per-cap basis the expenditure is actually pretty small
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
7 years
I always thought that scene at the end of science fiction shows where all the passers-by forget about the apocalypse after it was averted was a narrative convenience. Now I’m not so sure.
@zeynep
zeynep tufekci
7 years
For more than half an hour, more than a million people thought they might be about to die—and we weren’t sure the world was about to end. *Today*, that threat is ignored. People’s ability to compartmentalize away real threats will never cease to amaze me.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
5 years
@patio11 The shibboleth here is conveying that you understand that they're treated purely as an API and get lots of malformed requests, and you want to ask the _right_ question
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@EconAndrew What I generally hear from friends visiting: 1. They're impressed by how clean the streets are. 2. The variety of food impresses even visitors from major Euro cities. 3. They see Americans as surprisingly friendly and willing to help them with tourist questions.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@alisonmartino I’m sorry you don’t want LA residents to have more homes
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
The very funny thing about having worked in management consulting is that this is, indeed, roughly true _at all times_ for at least the MBB consulting firms (I assume others as well). So you constantly have to overindex in training and cultural messaging, or else you're done for
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
1 year
@asmartbear The thing which most broke my mind about hypergrowth, the math of which I could have explained in high school but the implications of which were entirely opaque: If you’re growing at 2X a year, half the team has less than a year of tenure. In a year, half the team will…
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
3 years
I don't know how to explain how disquieting it has been realizing THERE ARE VERY FEW ROOMS where people are working hard on this problem has been.
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
3 years
I realize this is petty Twitter sniping but we’re stochastically killing people this year through bad web UXes because decreasing marginal propensity for people to vaccinate through unnecessary errors causes them to forsake lifesaving medical treatment.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@nonmayorpete The funny part is that this instantly makes all the, “but when will regulated industries and risk averse companies use chatgpt” takes outdated. (Hint: ask an enterprise how easy it is to turn off a feature from your domain, like Teams, that MSFT really wants you to start using)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
This article is an excellent example of how adverse selection can get nested all the way down, and what bad things result. Demonstrates the principle @jonrog1 articulates about all the cons in Leverage: the reality can be so bad that you wouldn’t believe it in a fictional work
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
1 year
Today in Bits about Money: what happens to credit card debt where it crosses the boundary between financial institutions and the debt collection industry, and how that and other structural issues cause the unsavory behavior of that industry.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
3 years
It’s extremely weird to have deep, “I trust your moral judgment implicitly” feelings about people that you not only have never met, but may not even know their full name.
@patio11
Patrick McKenzie
3 years
We made an internal video to thank volunteer callers for and it struck me that I've never been in an org before where I had no idea what 75%+ of my coworkers looked like.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
5. Someone needs to think through, in greater detail, what the helpful things could ask for from government would be, rather than just sticks to avoid, for if and when the Eye of Sauron TRULY focuses on AI safety. (If you think it already has, this thread didn't do its job.)
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@Captain74205 @annehelen @geoffpilkington Same here, my friend! I'm happy to let you know -- we both won at capitalism, and that's pretty cool. I'm pretty darn happy for all my friends today who hadn't yet won, and got some extra relief today. Isn't that cool, too?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@igorbobic It’s important to remember that the House had an actual bar then, and we have fragmentary evidence that they served very good cocktails compared to era standards
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
11 months
One of the very sad things about aerospace and defense circles in the LA region is that all of the folks nearing retirement genuinely don't understand (and don't want to understand) how the 20somethings can't afford homes, because it was so wildly cheap there in the 1970s
@servomechanica
autism hexafluoride
11 months
this is informative, and disappointing
Tweet media one
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
It is very, very interesting to my Midwestern heart that “polite but firm” is a very powerful instruction to give chatgpt…
@BobVonDrummond
Bob Drummond
2 years
@paulg Recently my daughter’s flight was cancelled. Lufthansa announced theyd cover accom. When it came to reimbursement - no, that was a mistake, we’re not liable for weather. I asked chatGPT to explain their legal and moral obligations in a polite but firm letter. Lufthansa paid up.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
10 months
This is true even once accounting for this principle.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
As a side observation, it's really revealing of Western culture that the main response to chatGPT is, "oh no! well-written things will be fake!" instead of "oh yes! I finally can write all the sincere thank you notes I lacked time and energy to say!"
@ByrneHobart
Byrne Hobart
2 years
A relevant corollary is that as it gets easier for computers to approximate the outputs people used to laboriously create, more of the human labor premium comes from being a person who other people like to work with. So if you're worried about AI, practice being nice.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 months
I am not trying to convince you of either Berkeley or K Street's view on this topic -- I am merely trying to convince you that if you have the Berkeley mindset, you should be talking to folks in DC 100x as much as you are
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 months
Note that they will, e.g., require everyone to take a class in econometrics, a skillset that vanishingly few of my friends with policy degrees _ever use again_. The average senior government employee _lives their life buried in contract and proposal management_.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
4 years
And I know what you're thinking, reader. Do we, y'know, teach kids how to do this sort of thing in school as part of civics education? Heavens, no. In fact, most efforts to explicitly teach students how to use their rights get intense community pushback.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@patio11 Totally; I often begin by thinking about an experiment like this by asking, “what’s the PowerPoint page you’d make for the decision meeting?” It would have a scale from bodega on one end to Amazon super warehouse on the other, with a Walgreens in the middle. And who knows?
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@jdcmedlock @balajis Wait, I don’t understand. If the swap is 1 BTC for 1M USD, can’t you just hedge it now by taking the bet, borrowing $25k or so from a bank, buying 1 BTC at spot rates now with that borrowed USD, and then delivering the BTC in 90 days? You’ll be up $975k, even if hyperinflated
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
@MikeBlack114 @philewing I personally enjoyed how SAMs capable of engaging evading F-18s somehow were incapable of shooting at a large number of cruise missiles going in a straight line
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
4 years
@PhillyInquirer @Fahrenthold Don't order anything from Amazon in the two weeks before the election! Keep the mail free for ballots!
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
9 months
It turns out to be surprisingly hard to describe the _why_ behind the philosophy of "everything needs to be tracked as a task." You usually, honestly, don't in "peacetime." But people who do care, care fanatically because of a deeply scarring memory that happened in "wartime."
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@DavidAstinWalsh @daveweigel I strongly suspect that many people in blue suburbs are unaware that the state they live in has a Roe trigger law that auto-band abortion if Roe is overturned. Maybe that won’t matter! But I think voters just don’t generally know that fact and will be very surprised to learn it!
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
4 years
@NickWolfinger @SadieCreel Dare you to put "mansplains and threatens students" on the "service" section of your CV, you hack.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@revhowardarson Apparently a meaningful percentage of all inquiries my public librarian friends get are suddenly hallucinated sources that do not exist
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@maustermuhle @VinceGrayWard7 @trayonwhite @CMBrookePinto Extremely bad idea. You want to pay them more? Pay them more. But don’t exempt them from the duty of supporting our schools, our roads, our waterworks, our streetlights. Saying they don’t have the duties of a resident insults them and implies their only value is their service.
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
8 years
I can't emphasize the degree to which I now wish to buy all future trade paperback orders from this Fort Wayne, IN, shop
@anamariecox
Ana Marie Cox
8 years
Not all heroes wear capes but sometimes the ones with capes are pretty important. (Read the whole thread.)
Tweet media one
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
1 year
DC apparently has lost $400K net to a single data scientist who bets from a poke shop. Honestly, this sort of thing is why I love This Town
@dcsportsbog
Dan Steinberg
1 year
Here's a new one to me: D.C.'s sports gambling operation actually LOST MONEY in June, according to a report The Post received in a FOIA request. Like, the house lost. Remarkable
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@David_Kasten
dave kasten
2 years
@ESYudkowsky Prediction: if this technology is used in law enforcement, we will 10-20 years later discover that a large number of people convicted had just seen relevant images on the media and were not actually at the crime scene at all
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