Matt Alldian

Some of my projects - spanning tools, toys, and AI experiments.

Sam and Samuel sit down with our Art Director, Atalanta, a sculptor by training, and talk all things sculpture. They discuss how art education has become de-skilled, how sculpture has always been the best art form for mass production and the surprising places the tradition has been kept alive.

Works in Progress on why America lacks sculptors for mass statue revival.

“To choose Inuit wayfinding,” the ethnographers conclude, “becomes increasingly heroic in the face of wayfinding that depends on an advanced technological system.”

It may be a losing battle to demand that basic acts of competence require heroism. But I still think it’s worth noticing what assumptions that Silicon Valley steam engine metaphor is trying to force us to accept.

Tim Requarth's essay on AI as steam engine, instead of a bicycle.

Most people believe that their personal learning goals will be obvious and easily remembered. But in practice, people often fail to achieve learning goals not for lack of desire to achieve them, but because the goals themselves are underspecified.

Because of this, when we encounter real obstacles in our lives, we often lack concrete plans that cue us how to work toward our goals when things get hard. This pattern can undermine learning progress and sap our motivation.

Learning Goal Claude Code skill uses psychology-backed goal-setting to maintain learning while coding with AI - by Dr. Cat Hicks.

Andes virus is simply not that contagious and infection comes nearly entirely from those who are symptomatic.I built a probabilistic model decomposing this question into exposure pools — the widow’s KLM boarding, the Airlink flight from St Helena, the JNB hospital, household contacts of disembarked passengers — applying Andes-specific transmission and incubation parameters, then conditioning on the observation that zero non-passenger cases have surfaced as of today. Running this, I get a 4% chance that there will be more than 5 cases from people outside those on the Hondius cruise, with a 70% chance of at least one non-passenger case by August, and about a 17% chance of three or more.

Peter Wildeford's analysis on hantavirus - and why we don't need to worry about a COVID style pandemic.

The question this brings to my mind is: why is this a story at all? This is nothing more than the moderately unhinged opinion of a guy whose company owns a lot of real estate. Why is it in the newspaper? The answer is that there’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as “rich guy has an opinion.” It’s surprisingly common, and once you notice it you’ll see it everywhere: entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage. It’s taken for granted in many newsrooms that a person’s wealth imbues their opinions with newsworthiness.

On "Rich Guy Quote Journalism"  - see also: Nobel Disease.

The morning session focuses on emerging research and academic perspectives, offering a glimpse into the ideas and experiments that will define the next wave of design.

NYCxDESIGN AI Summit - Tuesday, May 19th.

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

Bob Spitz with Tyler Cowen on the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Julia Child and more. I will be picking up his new Stones bio this week!

The AI agent receives a research instrument and a unit assignment, then autonomously decides what to search for, which sources to consult, how to evaluate conflicting information, and how to code the result. The agent performs discovery, finding relevant sources alongside extraction and coding. The input is a research question. The output is an auditable research record with full citations.

NBER paper on using AI agents to construct economic datasets. Same methodology I used to develop the Breakouts dataset for On_Discourse.

My view of AI use (especially cheating) in Go originally manifested as disgust for its practitioners. I switched eventually to an attitude of compassion and pragmatism towards a habit that was clearly much more vulgar and weak than it was evil. Over time, I have progressed to feeling deep sadness for a group that surrenders much of what it claims to value. The thing I want to impress with this article is the consistency with which we as a species underestimate our own willingness to give up our culture, economy and autonomy to AI, even without monetary incentives. For this to happen, AI does not even need to be superhuman. Indeed, Go AI automates human players’ role in culture as shallow simulacra. All an AI needs to do is be passably good at a task and that may well be enough for people to volunteer their own replacement.

LessWrong post on how Go players limit themselves when utilizing AI for post-game review. Compare to a previous paper in 2023.

About 10% of AMC movie showings sell zero tickets. This site finds them. Go enjoy your private theater.

Empty Screenings finds AMC movie theaters with zero ticket sales for private viewing.

AI systems automating their own research by 2028.