2026-01-01 03:28:27
Despite developing tech that some think might take over our day-to-day work, data things got made by people this year. These are my favorites.
2025-12-31 18:01:16
Kashmir Hill reports for the New York Times:
Schneiderman, the computer science professor, calls the desire to make machines that seem human a “zombie idea” that won’t die. He first noticed ChatGPT’s use of first person pronouns in 2023 when it said, “My apologies, but I won’t be able to help you with that request.” It should “clarify responsibility,” he wrote at the time and suggested an alternative: “GPT-4 has been designed by OpenAI so that it does not respond to requests like this one.”
Margaret Mitchell, an A.I. researcher who formerly worked at Google, agrees. Mitchell is now the chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face, a platform for machine learning models, data sets and tools. “Artificial intelligence has the most promise of being beneficial when you focus on specific tasks, as opposed to trying to make an everything machine,” she said.
For those who don’t know that data and probability drive chatbots, let alone knowing the technical bits, computers might as well have become magic machines that think for themselves. Building the models to sound like humans probably doesn’t help.
My only hope is that people grow more wary of the words they enter into chatbots and more skeptical of the probabilistic output that comes out. Every time my kids point out generative AI voice, pictures, or video feels like a win.
Tags: anthropomorphism, chatbot, ethics, New York Times
2025-12-30 17:50:59
Kalshi is a prediction market that aims to let users bet on everything. The weird thing: almost all revenue comes from sports and the company never talks about it in interviews. For Financial Times, Sam Learner reports on how Kalshi looks a lot like gambling, which is illegal in most states and carries stricter regulations and fees. So the CEO tends to focus on Taylor Swift decisions.
Tags: betting, Financial Times, Kalshi, prediction, Sam Learner, sports
2025-12-30 08:00:02
On New Year’s Eve in New York, a ball drops 139 feet for 60 seconds. Will Lindberg and Brian Moore extrapolated to start the countdown much sooner and from much higher.
Tags: Brian Moore, humor, New Year, Will Lindberg
2025-12-30 07:35:32
For the Washington Post, Emily Giambalvo, Kati Perry, and Artur Galocha, ranked college football teams by amount of happiness and misery served to the schools’ fans.
The rankings span 70 teams and consider more than a dozen metrics, including national championships, playoff appearances, conference titles, winning percentage, wins over ranked opponents and other markers of success. The goal: measure how fans would feel if they abandoned their irrational disposition and focused on how the performance of their team compares to other programs.
I’m not a college football fan, but during my first year at Cal, eager to hang out with new friends and strangers, I bought season tickets. Cal lost every game that year, except the very last one against Rutgers. Near maximum college football misery.
Tags: college, football, rank, Washington Post
2025-12-30 00:33:29
The current administration is bent on deporting people from the United States. For the New York Times, Raj Saha, Zach Levitt, and Albert Sun mapped where thousands of people are being moved within and out of the country.
Tags: deportation, government, New York Times
