Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

LightNews

Greg Faletto

@gregoryfaletto.com

380 followers 700 following 530 posts

Statistician, Data Scientist.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · Jul 5

Interested in doing some causal inference over the long weekend? Version 1.5.0 of the {fetwfe} package for difference-in-differences under staggered adoptions is now on CRAN!

Details on what's new below:

cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

fetwfe: Fused Extended Two-Way Fixed Effects

Calculates the fused extended two-way fixed effects (FETWFE) estimator for unbiased and efficient estimation of difference-in-differences in panel data with staggered treatment adoption. This estimato...

cran.r-project.org

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 20h

If it flags, say, that your employer retains rights to use your likeness in marketing and you hadn't caught that, you could consider whether you want to make a fuss about it. There are lots of things where you probably don't need a JD to decide if you think it's fishy or don't care for it

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 20h

Reading the explanation, deciding how you feel about the term, maybe doing some googling. I'm sure you're not going to get as good of results as what you'd get from hiring a top 10% lawyer. I'm sure it won't 100% of the time clear the bar of "better than nothing." But I bet it often will 🤷‍♂️

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 20h

It seems useful for legal questions where what most people use in practice is "basically nothing." For example, looking over apartment leases or employment contracts. If you were about to sign it anyway and the LLM says "seems fine," no harm caused. If it flags something, you can look into it.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

Dumbest guy in the district got the lowest-paying job, kind of checks out

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

I will never forget that when a totalitarian federal government turned the military on its own citizens, not a single 2nd Amendment nut was anywhere to be seen. They told us this was the whole point! They told us this was why we had to tolerate all those school shootings

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

Common misunderstanding. That crossover point is when Obama made the "deal" with conservatives that nobody else knew about but they always talk about, where they would let Obama be president in exchange for him never mentioning race ever again. Ben Shapiro can explain the details if you're curious

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

To the extent the question is "should congressional districts whose representatives voted for this get extra carveouts?" the answer is "they already did--this is their carveout." Question #1 for Democratic representatives and senators should be "how can I protect my constituents?"

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

Mostly I'm thinking of GPT-5 (not GPT-5 Pro)

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

Ok, but Trump has killed any offramp where he can save health care to Democrats' satisfaction without appearing to have caved.

A bet that Trump will refuse to appear to bend to Democratic demands that he initially took a stand on is a pretty good bet, as far as bets go.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

I've also definitely had times this year where I felt like the cited link didn't fully back up the text claim, less sure about the recency of that though

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

I've definitely had hallucinated (or at least sources I was unable to verify after a search where I was motivated to do so?) sources in the last few months. It's worst when it's providing a bibliographic citation with no direct link.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

"We identified the triangle and the circle, and we did it very strongly"

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

I do think that AI investment that, e.g., Nvidia is spending as investment at one of their biggest customers (OpenAI) suggests that they don't have a productive real-world use of those dollars, which likely means a less-than-optimal allocation of investment dollars, which is bad

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

I think the right question is looking at each invested dollar and asking "did this dollar get a higher ROI from AI investment than it would have gotten at the best alternative?" My guess is that for the last batch of these dollars the answer will be "no" but for many of them it will be "yes"

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

fully amortizing training and capex isn't the right way to think about overall economic effects I don't think. We didn't donate the money to aliens as tribute for their tech, it was given to businesses, and in turn largely workers (many in the US), who got to keep & spend it, often at US businesses

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

I think a 25% productivity gain in some high-productivity industries (at least in a significant proportion of roles within those industries) that might take as many as 5 full years to fully unfold is quite possible.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

I'm not sure I agree. The technology industry alone is a pretty big one and we're already seeing productivity gains. We're certainly already seeing productivity gains in customer service. I think lots of white collar industries will also see productivity gains.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

As you've pointed out this is also why the discourse is so one-sided--one side feels they have something they need to prove, the other side doesn't, and always has a new model or tool they've been meaning to check out anyway

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

yeah the thing people don't think about enough is: if what AI amounts to is "increases the productivity of the most productive industries by 5%ish every year for 5 or so years" that's PLENTY for transforming the economy.

("productive" just in the sense of GDP / time worked)

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

The "inevitability of collapse" stuff is especially funny. Ok then why not just sit around and wait for it to happen if you're so sure? Go get a hot dog or something, don't risk carpal tunnel over something that's going to happen whether you write an article or not

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

both a legitimate power granted by the constitution and precedented. Pretty tame move these days.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

"Snake eating its own tail" deals like Nvidia investing in OpenAI certainly seem to suggest "more money floating around than can be put to productive use."

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

I think it's fair to say later, I think the 2008 election was basically unaffected by any of the dynamics that we today attribute to social media/online misinformation/unabashed lying etc.

(I was tempted to say the same for 2012 but birtherism was before that.)

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

Technically a sufficiently motivated Darren can

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 4d

I don't even get the logic. Why can't ICE take care of themselves? Too much time spent on rappelling training, not enough self-defense? Who's coming next to protect the poor widdle Texas National Guard from antifa?