During the week, I often collect and share links I find interesting on Elder Research’s Slack. These are some links shared March 17–21, 2025.
My Thoughts on the Future of “AI”
I have very wide error bars on the potential future of large language models, and I think you should too.
I’m not a language-model or AI researcher in any meaningful way, so I can feel like I’m getting whiplash between the ‘AGI is imminent’ and ‘AI is worthless’ camps. A wide set of error bars is a mental model I find helpful. Will be reading more of Nicholas’s writing.
Defense Against Dishonest Charts
This is a guide to protect ourselves and to preserve what is good about turning data into visual things.
This is a good idea, and the interactivity provides clear demonstrations of the different principles.
State Space Models & Structural Time Series, with Jesse Grabowski
This episode was mentioned in a discussion of time-series and state-space models. The particular episode is fine, but I’ve gotten a lot from the Learning Bayesian Statistics podcast overall in the last few years. I remember particularly enjoying the episode on principled modeling with Michael Betancourt.
Stop using the elbow criterion for k-means and how to choose the number of clusters instead
I don’t do much in the way of clustering, and I figured the “elbow criterion” was the right one because it’s what everyone is doing. Here are some alternatives that don’t seem too difficult to implement.
fastplotlib: Next-gen fast plotting library
GPU-accelerated plotting that supports Metal!
How Fast the Days Are Getting Longer
A fun tour of the physics and mathematics of a simple question: “How much longer are the days getting?” Like many ‘elementary’ questions in physics, the zeroth-order answer might be pretty simple, but there are many, layers of complexity as precision becomes more important.
I’ve always had a particular fascination for the trigonometric functions that go to infinity and how, in physics, these map onto physically unrealizable states.
This post and others like it are kindly republished by Python-bloggers.