Marion and I have an essay in Aeon today: What is happening here is more than an abstract flow of information. It is more than a means of surveillance. It is more than a price mechanism. Rather, it’s as if the air traffic control and insurance commission functions of the IBM 650 have been fused, shrunk, and wholly generalised. This is the real computing revolution. Much of what we do is immediately authenticated as we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and de...| kieranhealy.org
ChatGPT 5 was released today. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has unveiled the long-awaited latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, GPT-5, saying it can provide PhD-level expertise. Billed as “smarter, faster, and more useful,” OpenAI co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman lauded the company’s new model as ushering in a new era of ChatGPT. “I think having something like GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable at any previous time in human history,” he said ahead of Thurs...| kieranhealy.org
A GitHub Issue on OpenAI’s Whisper, which is a good speech-recognition and transcription model with support for a large number of languages. A lot of people use it. The issue: Complete silence is always hallucinated as “ترجمة نانسي قنقر” in Arabic which translates as “Translation by Nancy Qunqar” In the comments, people note that this class of error has been known for a while and there are equivalents or counterparts in other languages: I found a similar thing happens ...| kieranhealy.org
Here’s an emulated Macintosh SE running System 7.1, courtesy of Infinite Mac’s embedder, which you can learn more about at this blog post by Mihai Parparita. The emulator is fully functional once it boots up. You may get one or two error dialogs during the boot process but you can just OK past them and things will work. Getting the classic 68k Macintosh experience like this is certainly less trouble than other ways of doing it.| kieranhealy.org
In 1995, at the beginning of the last week of August, on the afternoon of an inhumanly hot and intolerably humid day, I arrived at Newark Airport to live in the United States. I was twenty two years old and about to start as a graduate student at Princeton. I have been here more or less the whole time since. I spent six years on an F-1 Visa while getting my PhD. After that, I lived and worked in Tucson for seven years. My conception of what counts as an inhumanly hot day changed. During that ...| kieranhealy.org
Sometimes we want to repeatedly do things with all but one row of a data frame, where we systematically drop each row in turn and do the thing. For example, jacknife cross-validation is a kind of very basic bootstrap technique. (It is computationally simpler than and predates the bootstrap.) Or in some areas “leave-one-out” summary statistics are often calculated as a quick robustness check. Sometimes we want to do this within groups, perhaps especially when the groups may be small. First...| kieranhealy.org
Another in an accidental series of “Basic facts about U.S. urban areas presently in the news”. This week, West Coast Edition: like other very large American cities, Los Angeles is very big. There are a lot of Angelenos. In fact this is just Los Angeles county, which is both larger than the City of Los Angeles proper, but smaller than the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim Metropolitan Statistical Area. L.A. County has about 9.66 million residents; the City of Los Angeles about 3.8 million res...| kieranhealy.org
Here’s a Figure of the Day. The MTA, and especially the Subway, moves a lot of people every day. They also make daily ridership data available. The lines here are weekly averages, either of daily ridership or traffic volume through toll booths. More rides are processed through the Subway every day on average than there were people living in the country I grew up in. Updates: I redrew this to use epiweeks rather than weeks, so as not to generate artificially large dips in the final week of t...| kieranhealy.org
This post summarizes an extended period of deep annoyance. I have tried to solve the problem it describes more than once before and not quite done it. This has, in fact, happened again. I have still not satisfactorily solved the problem. But this time I know why I can’t solve it in a civilized manner. My goal is simple, and reasonable. I want to produce more or less identical plots in both PNG and PDF formats. PNG is a raster format. PDF is a vector format and also the Devil Incarnate. Some...| kieranhealy.org
