wisty (u/wisty) - Readit News

wisty commented on The Waymo World Model waymo.com/blog/2026/02/th... · Posted by u/xnx

vinkelhake · 2 days ago

Is there an equivalent to Godwin's law wrt threads about Google and Google Reader?

See also: any programming thread and Rust.

wisty · 2 days ago

It's far from the only example https://killedbygoogle.com/

wisty commented on A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times statmodeling.stat.columbi... · Posted by u/timr

wisty · 14 days ago

So 6000 people cited a paper, and either didn’t properly read it (IMO that's academic dishonesty) or weren't able to determine that the methdology was infeasible.

No real surprise. I'm pretty sure most academics spend little time critically reading sources and just scan to see if it broadly supports their point (like an undergrad would). Or just cite a source if another paper says it supports a point.

I've heard the most brutal thing an examiner can do in a viva vocce is to ask what a cited paper is about, lol.

wisty commented on The behavioral cost of personalized pricing digitalseams.com/blog/the... · Posted by u/bobbiechen

cortesoft · 14 days ago

There was an article about targeted advertising a number of years that really changed my perspective on it called, "Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful": https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

The basic idea is that the real value in advertising is as a signaling mechanism, and targeted advertising removes most of that signal.

I feel like personalized pricing has some of the same issues, in that it erodes consumer trust and makes it more and more difficult for consumers to confidently spend their money in the market. I am not sure how we fix the problem, though, because it is a collective action problem; any individual company will need to use personalized pricing to compete, but that behavior will hurt the economy as a whole.

I don't know the solution to this problem.

wisty · 14 days ago

There's bqsically IMO two types of ads - marketing and sales.

Marketing ads are signalling, brand recognition, etc. You want the cool earbuds that everyone knows. You want to buy them from a big, reputable company with good r&d.

Sales is simpler - click on the ad and buy the product. It tends to be a bit sleasier - sales doesn't care as long as it makes a sale.

There's often a bit of tension between sales and marketing. A 50% ooff exploding offer can be good for sales in the short term, but can make the brand look cheap.

wisty commented on KORG phase8 – Acoustic Synthesizer korg.com/us/products/dj/p... · Posted by u/bpierre

mrandish · 16 days ago

You nailed it. Cool idea. Nice design. Great demo. Fun toy.

I'm sure I'd have a good time playing with it for an afternoon and come up with some sounds I like. And, in principle, I'm all for more ways to create music existing - especially ones which are interactive and tactile. But the reality is, if I bought this device it would end up spending most of its time in the basement graveyard with all the other cool tools that are too narrow, too big, too hard to interface, store/recall patches, etc.

I decided several years ago to refocus on a stack that's purely microphone (or other a/d converted input) + MIDI controllers to a DAW driving infinite layers of internal real-time digital synthesis, analog modeling and effects plug-ins. There are fabulously expressive MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) controllers now which can capture every nuance of input my hands, feet and breath could ever provide. As you highlighted, the feeling that creating in a digital audio workstation is "too easy" or maybe somehow 'soulless' - is all in my head. That lurking suspicion analog circuitry or electro-mechanical waveforms are more authentic or pure is just magical thinking.

Always believing that the next new box's cool-looking tactile input, novel interaction model or unique set of opinionated constraints will unleash my creativity - is just getting in the way of actually sitting down and making myself create with all the insanely powerful, wildly creative, infinitely flexible, hyper-productive digital tools I already have. Being able to save and recall entire racks worth of patching at the press of a button isn't soulless or limiting - unless I let it be. Feeling like I need just-one-more new device to inspire me with its defaults or constrain me with its limits - is the limiting constraint I finally realized was holding me back.

wisty · 16 days ago

> Feeling like I need just-one-more new device to inspire me with its defaults or constrain me with its limits - is the limiting constraint I finally realized was holding me back.

That's true in so many fields.

wisty commented on Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance science.org/doi/abs/10.11... · Posted by u/colincooke

Aurornis · 17 days ago

It’s amazing how far the pop-culture definition of ADHD has strayed from the medical definition. “Hyperfocus … until world class performance” is in no way consistent with the medical definition of ADHD. I’m well aware that “hyperfocus” is a prominent part of the Reddit and TikTok-ification of ADHD diagnostics, but being able to focus intensely on your job until you perform it at world class levels is decisively not indicative of ADHD. Hyperfocus is not part of official ADHD diagnostic criteria and the only pseudo-studies that have examined it have taken place as self-reported questionnaires with small sample sizes in the era since it became a popular topic on social media, unfortunately.

ADHD is not correlated with high career performance, sadly, and represents a real obstacle for those struggling with it. The current social media trend of equating ADHD to a superpower which propels people to focus intensely and excel is really unfortunate.

wisty · 17 days ago

I suspect it's partly diagnostic creep. Either real actual professional creep, or self diagnosis.

Some mental illnessess are extreme versions of traits that are often useful. It's good have one person in the village who frets about dangerous stuff, for example. Anxiety is useful at times.

But as you start to diagnose the very functional people who just need a few points to get a top uni course (or people self diagnose) ... well ... maybe you're picking up far less extreme and maladaptive versions of the trait.

wisty commented on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant media.mit.edu/publication... · Posted by u/misswaterfairy

pixl97 · 17 days ago

>We are no longer critical thinking

Please provide evidence that masses of people ever were critically thinking across general fields they were not involved in.

Everyone seems to take for face value there was a golden age of critical thinking done by the masses is at some time in the indeterminate past, but regardless of when you ask this question, the answer is always "in the past".

I surmise your thesis is incorrect and supplant this one instead.

The average person can only apply critical thinking on a very limited amount of information, and typically on topics they deal with that have a quick feedback loop of consequences.

Deep critical thinkers across vast topics are rare, and have always been rare. There are likely far more of them than ever now, but this falls into the next point

Information and complexity are exploding, the amount of data required to navigate the world we now live in is far larger than just a few generations ago. Couple this with the amount of information being presented to individuals and you run into actual physics constraints on the amount of information the human brain can distil into a useful model.

By (monetary) necessity people have become deep specialists in limited topics, analogies and paradigms don't necessarily work across different topics. For example, understanding code very well has very little bearing on if I grok the reality of practiced political sociology, and my idea of what is critical thinking around it is very likely to have a very large prediction mismatch to what actually happens.

wisty · 17 days ago

Critical thining requires knowledge, which is why LLM appear OK at it, and I fear the next generation of humans will be worse.

wisty commented on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant media.mit.edu/publication... · Posted by u/misswaterfairy

nindalf · 18 days ago

> Homer Simpson

I can't stress this enough, Homer Simpson is a fictional character from a cartoon. I would not use him in an argument about economics any more than I would use the Roadrunner to argue for road safety.

wisty · 17 days ago

I also cited more serious analysis.

Yeah, Homer Simpson is fictional, a unionised blue-collar worker with specialised skills, and he lives in a small town.

wisty commented on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant media.mit.edu/publication... · Posted by u/misswaterfairy

throwup238 · 17 days ago

> They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.

> We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.

You're right about the first part, wrong about the second part.

Pre-Gutenberg people could memorize huge texts because they didn't have that many texts to begin with. Obtaining a single copy cost as much as supporting a single well-educated human for weeks or months while they copied the text by hand. That doesn't include the cost of all the vellum and paper which also translated to man-weeks of labor. Rereading the same thing over and over again or listening to the same bard tell the same old story was still more interesting than watching wheat grow or spinning fabric, so that's what they did.

We're offloading our brains onto technology because it has always allowed us to function better than before, despite an increasing amount of knowledge and information.

> Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).

I find that to be a crazy opinion. Relative to thirty years ago, quality of life has risen significantly thanks to all three of those technologies (although I'd have a harder time arguing for Wikipedia versus the internet and Google) in quantifiable ways from the lowliest subsistence farmers now receiving real time weather and market updates to all the developed world people with their noses perpetually stuck in their phones.

You'd need some weapons grade rose tinted glasses and nostalgia to not see that.

wisty · 17 days ago

Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

wisty commented on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant media.mit.edu/publication... · Posted by u/misswaterfairy

sdoering · 18 days ago

This reminds me of the recurring pattern with every new medium: Socrates worried writing would destroy memory, Gutenberg's critics feared for contemplation, novels were "brain softening," TV was the "idiot box." That said, I'm not sure "they've always been wrong before" proves they're wrong now.

Where I'm skeptical of this study:

- 54 participants, only 18 in the critical 4th session

- 4 months is barely enough time to adapt to a fundamentally new tool

- "Reduced brain connectivity" is framed as bad - but couldn't efficient resource allocation also be a feature, not a bug?

- Essay writing is one specific task; extrapolating to "cognition in general" seems like a stretch

Where the study might have a point:

Previous tools outsourced partial processes - calculators do arithmetic, Google stores facts. LLMs can potentially take over the entire cognitive process from thinking to formulating. That's qualitatively different.

So am I ideologically inclined to dismiss this? Maybe. But I also think the honest answer is: we don't know yet. The historical pattern suggests cognitive abilities shift rather than disappear. Whether this shift is net positive or negative - ask me again in 20 years.

[Edit]: Formatting

wisty · 18 days ago

Soapbox time.

They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.

We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.

And it's not even that machines are always better, they only have to be barely competent. People will risk their life in a horribly janky self driving car if it means they can swipe on social media instead of watching the road - acceptance doesn't mean it's good.

We have about 30 years of the internet being widely adopted, which I think is roughly similar to AI in many ways (both give you access to data very quickly). Economists suggest we are in many ways no more productive now than when Homer Simpson could buy a house and raise a family on a single income - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).

wisty commented on Private equity firms acquired more than 500 autism centers in past decade: study brown.edu/news/2026-01-07... · Posted by u/hhs

cogman10 · a month ago

> I’d be curious to compare US PE run facilities with government run facilities in Canada.

You don't have to do that, we have US government ran facilities. It's the VA.

And if you look at the costs associated with the VA, they are much much cheaper than almost any private care [1].

And if you know a few vets, you know they almost universally love the VA. It's one of the best perks of serving in the military.

[1] https://www.herc.research.va.gov/include/page.asp?ID=inpatie...

wisty · a month ago

Free market ideologues are too dumb to understand local minima.

An ideal free market is a global minima (in theory). It's the best.

A non-ideal free market (heavily subsidised and regulated) might be close (in parameter space) to a global minima, but might be highly suboptimal compared to a local minima.