West Coast Stat Views (on Observational Epidemiology and more)
Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
We've recommended Brown's videos before. They are nothing special from a presentation point of view -- you can pretty much just treat them as podcasts -- but he's an extremely sharp and articulate software veteran who has become one of my goto commentators when trying to make sense of the AI bubble. I first encountered Brown through Ed Zitron. The Truth About Software Development with Carl Brown…
This 404 report justly been getting considerable coverage. Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process. A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training…
This is a big story, certainly bigger than you might have guessed from the coverage. Smart commentators like Patrick Boyle and the Financial Times have been ringing the alarm bell on the state of debt, particularly involving the unregulated Wild West of private credit, for a while now. It is one of those stories where the implications can genuinely keep you up at night. Bond markets are getting…
Like we said before, LLMs are tools. They have some impressive functionality and can be highly useful if you understand them and know the job that needs to be done. Cory Doctorow has done a fine job over the years explaining this distinction, as well as the fundamental misalignment of incentives between what LLMs are good for and what the AI industry needs people to see them as in order to keep…
From Vaclav Smil’s book “ Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure. ” (We'll be coming back to this one.) These short pamphlets were not widely known, but in 1825 the British public could read about a much bolder proposal for using tubes, vacuum, and high speeds to cover the distance of just over 600 kilometers between London and Edinburgh in five minutes (yes, minutes, not…
I'm still finishing up a post on the obscure and convoluted history of the intellectual property behind the eagerly anticipated Coyote vs. Acme (really hoping that this one knocks it out of the park). A story that no one outside of a couple of particularly obscure fan sites has noticed. In the meantime, I thought I'd set the stage by revisiting one of my favorite cases of cartoon, or in this case…
Given the state of things in 2026 and the two "next big things" that preceded generative AI, this is by no means a trivial point. The metaverse was next to nothing. Web3 effectively was nothing. In both cases, an astounding and profoundly embarrassing level of hype was supported by nearly non-existent substance. Large language models are not like the other two. They are a powerful set of tools and…
Random Patrick Boyle quote:"If I left a million dollars on the table over a non-disparagement clause, I'd bang out a million dollars worth of disparagement that same afternoon" His Wedding Guests Were Arriving—Just as His $45 Billion Fund Was Falling Apart Berber Jin, Peter Rudegeair, Gregory Zuckerman, Anissa Gardizy July 31, 2026 12:41 pm ET When the week began, Leopold Aschenbrenner was…
First, let's get some important disclaimers out of the way. Neither Joseph nor I are any kind of experts on international energy markets, so anything we tell you is pretty much based on what we read in the papers. When it comes to military questions, Joseph is actually pretty good, but, unfortunately, he's not the one writing this post. Nothing I have to say on that subject is backed by anything…
By the standards of 2026, March is a long ways away, particularly with respect to this story. For starters, there is that ticking fee, a penalty which Paramount agreed to pay for every day after the end of September that the deal doesn't go through. One interesting aspect of that fee which probably hasn't gotten the attention it deserves is that Paramount/the Ellisons only have to pay it if the…
[Picking up from this and this ] I realize that my recommendations for Patrick Boyle videos tend to be a bit heavy-handed, but even by his standards, this one is essential for anyone trying to get a handle on the AI bubble and its increasingly likely ramifications. It is an extraordinarily pithy half hour, hitting a number of important topics. I really need to do at least one or two more posts on…
