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Maarten J. Bijlsma

H-index: 14
Public Health 36%
Medicine 30%
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
Does he make bold statements for populist reasons (appearance of boldness), or is he actually bold and his words indicate what actions will soon follow?
edzitron.com
I'm so sorry I can't stop laughing. OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT. They're crying their eyes out. What a bunch of hypocritical little babies. Cry more, freaks.

www.ft.com/content/a0df...
OpenAI says it has evidence China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor
White House AI tsar David Sacks raises possibility of alleged intellectual property theft OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property.
The San-Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of ‘distillation’, a technique used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable models. This allows them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost.
OpenAI declined to comment further on details of its evidence. Its terms of service state users cannot “copy” any of its services or “use output to develop models that compete with OpenAI”.
shonferguson.bsky.social
Unsolicited advice to authors:
In your responses to reviewers, the best practice is to respond point by point, using the same numbering and even including the reviewers' comments verbatim directly before each response.
Do not remove the numbering, jumble the order, and paraphrase the comments!
j2bryson.bsky.social
EUROPE IS DOING FINE. Look at these trade figures from Hélène Rey (London Business School and CEPR) which she presented in her prize talk at the 3rd Kiel-CEPR Conference on Geoeconomics this past autumn. In an equalising world, CN = US < EU

Video of talk is here www.ifw-kiel.de/institute/ev...
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
Very nice view, but please be aware thay if anyone ever wanted to dox you this'll be quite helpful to them.
lakens.bsky.social
People, just stop doing Frontiers special issues. Find a nice diamond open access journal, and self-publish and collaboratively peer review the set of papers you all want to write. Do not give Frontiers money. They add no value. If anything, they hurt your reputation. MDPI is of course even worse.
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
Good to hear this is being pursued. If Europe wants strategic autonomy it needs to use its own infrastructure.
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
I wonder if people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos use AI themselves or if they know its dangers and steer clear, considering it only for their underlings.

Kind of like a drug dealer: you don't get high on your own supply.

Reposted by: Maarten J. Bijlsma

smith-brocca.bsky.social
My letter in today's Guardian. Just asking, like. But I think we know the answer.

Reposted by: Maarten J. Bijlsma

dianamonkey.bsky.social
I wish cars would just do what I expect and follow traffic patterns. No, I'm not going to turn left across the street in front of you while you are unexpectedly stopped and waving for me to bike across and I can see a line of cars building up behind you getting grumpier and grumpier.
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
Just saw Heretic. Was about 2/3rds of a movie in terms of storyline. Not much character development. The acting was great, though.
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
You shouldn't install glass windows in your house because someone can just break the glass.
o.simardcasanova.net
Meta is testing, or has started to ship, its AI generated profiles, here on Instagram

www.instagram.com/himamaliv

#SocialWeb
carlbergstrom.com
You all said I was being paranoid and it was just coincidence.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...
Sometimes Siri would be inadvertently activated, a whistleblower told The Guardian, when an Apple Watch was raised and speech was detected. The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri's alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters noted.
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
Een oud basisschool docent van me heette Dolf. Vlak na WOII geboren. Gegeven ook zijn didaktische stijl hadden wij als kinderen zo onze verdenkingen.
markgrabowski.bsky.social
Resignation of the Journal of Human Evolution Editorial Board: We are saddened to announce the resignations of The Joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor. Press release below.

Reposted by: Maarten J. Bijlsma

jamesheathers.bsky.social
“A donor wanted to give $2 million to my lab, but only wanted to allow a maximum 10 percent to go to indirect cost recovery. And the school declined to receive the $2 million because they wanted at minimum, I believe it was 20 percent.”

www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harv...
Harvard Professors Leaving for Private Sector Research | Harvard Magazine
Three distinguished scientists on leaving academia to advance biomedical research
www.harvardmagazine.com

Reposted by: Maarten J. Bijlsma

epidbydesign.bsky.social
Yes AND I personally would like those academics to also engage with the ways in which LLMs are "plagiarism machines" [1], and to reflect on their attitudes towards plagiarism in scholarly work, the classroom, and the academy generally.

[1] www.chronicle.com/article/chat...
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
Probably not helpful for this current paper though; if applied psychologists are like demographers, they generally don't see the point of formalizing counterfactuals and it'll just confuse things.
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
Ah, those type of papers are helpful / necessary. While I'm generally in favour of avoiding APC, I know you are an expert on causal inference. Perhaps you'll find this paper of interest since as far as I know it's the only paper describing APC with counterfactual notation doi.org/10.1007/s135...
An Assessment and Extension of the Mechanism-Based Approach to the Identification of Age-Period-Cohort Models | Demography | Duke University Press
doi.org

Reposted by: Maarten J. Bijlsma

jburnmurdoch.ft.com
*sighs*

Percentage change should *always* be expressed on a log scale, because it’s multiplicative.

A doubling and a halving should be given equal space.

I did a whole thread on this at the time x.com/jburnmurdoch...
x.com
x.com
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
What's the gist of your talk? A general caution or a substantive interest of some sort?
mjbijlsma.bsky.social
For anyone who reads this thread and was as confused as I was; this is a post about absence of evidence not being evidence of absence.

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