I'm using the free model via chat from the beginning. This is the first time, I'm seriously considering moving away from Claude. Before last month, Claude's Sonnet model was consistent in quality. But, now the responses are all over the place. It's hard to replicate the issue as it happens once in a while. I rarely encountered hallucinations from Claude models with questions from my domain however since last month I have observed abundance of them.

It's a tricky situation for people who might want to work on hard problems like this. Is it worth spending time and money fiddling around the models?

In research, you can't show your progress by showing how many ways you have failed (which I don't like). The universities, grant agency etc. require you to work on solvable problems.

With humans, performance in one cognitive test correlates with another and so on, generally. So, intelligence across domains.

Researchers test the same with animals. The issue being animals' intelligence being tied to their ecology. The dilemma being what is it worth for an animal solving a task that has no significance in its life. The other argument being if the animals' intelligence is closer/similar to human intelligence, we will find similar results in both.

Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.

Yeah, it was pretty bad incorporating G+ account to everything. The way the G+ worked (at least in my friend circle), normal people had less business there. It was very hobby focused.

I guess it's different in somewhere like Europe. But in Canada, most of the PhD students are paid for doing TAships, not primarily through grant. Average salary is 25k/year. Take 6-10k out for tuition, that's 15-19k/year. You get a student doing so many things for less pay. I guess, if your job only requires research then you can do it.

I don't think PhD students are sitting around and solving one problem for a year. Also PhD students are way cheaper

Bayesian approaches take a long time thinking, making models, choosing priors, simulations etc. but they provide a better estimate and understanding the parameters. I hate point estimates and decision based arbitrary p-value. Whenever possible I use Bayesian methods.

Most people are in headphones and give weird looks if you try doing small talks. I find it's easier to talk with older people.

Looking back, the incentives have changed. Back then, there was some openness, rawness, and genuine curiosity about people and things. And of course, the signal-noise ratio was much higher.

Influencer culture ruined everything, consciously or subconsciously. I still use Insta for photography. But, it's a sinking ship. Insta could have made a different app for reels.