Coming to you a bit late as I've been sick for a couple of days.

Whereabouts: I'm in the US this month, please get in touch! DC 8-10 March, Chicago 10-14th, NYC 14-21st, DC after that for a week (?---no return plans yet).

Something big is happening, but nothing big is happening to me

I've spent so much of February working that I now don't feel like talking about any of it. I'll bore you with it next month. We wrote a nice commentary on Bayesian clinical trials for JAMA and I also moved several papers forward.

So, instead, a couple of you asked me about LLMs. 500 words on that.

Throughout my "career" as a "statistician", 13 years and counting now (but how much longer?), I've always been great at stopping myself from doing useful work. At first, I worried that I didn't know enough yet to tackle interesting problems---until I've started feeling that I forgot too much to do "real" statistics. With LLMs that barrier is now gone and I've been finding them very useful. I have just enough context and experience to pose good questions and understand the explanations.

(BTW, I am surprised by how little students and my peers seem to use them. I am usually, willingly, cast in the role of the nay-sayer. So what's happening? Are they using them surreptitiously? Or else, why do I get more utility than others?)

But my work also got more boring now. Difficulty dial acts on both the good-challenging and bad-challenging bits and in some situations I am reduced to being a fleshy interface for a vast inhuman entity---parse the signals, feed into the machine, see what it spews out, translate.

So, obviously I decided to make this situation even worse and dip my toes into THE AGENTS this month (starting with the OpenAI one). In case you haven't encountered them, these are the ~latest craze in the LLM world.

Yes, just like with chatbots, you just describe what you'd like, in words, and it gets coded. But it's not just coding programs. You can do (some parts of) academic research or you can just make small, fun ideas come to life. I recently met a girl who vibe coded a Chinese medicine app that took photo of your tongue and told you seven things that were fucked up about your bladder.

Ultimately, however, my problem---because obviously I wouldn't bother to write this to just conclude that they're alright, would I---is that these tools are designed for people who like manipulating mental symbols in a certain way, you know, the screen-starers. Obviously this is a ridiculous complaint, not least because I am one of them... but as I get older, screen-staring part of my brain feels like the one I want to be visiting least often. And I think it was no coincidence that I had most fun playing with these tools when my mood was lowest.

In fact, they are addictive as hell, like a video game can feel. Everyone keeps reporting this. They dial difficulty down so much, that things get a bit muddy. People who talk about these models the most often seem to me maniacal, but I think these agents can stop you from getting actual work done. When I tried using these agents for my work, I ended up solving a lot of problems, but none of these problems seemed very important in retrospect.

Clearly that is a skill issue. I have no doubt that I'll get better at it. And if your work is mediated through screens and you're good at defining what you do and don't like, these agents may be great for me.

But at the same time, it feels like a general manifestation of any sort of "life-improving" technology, which is often just about channeling of mental disturbances. So, no, I am not banking on it making me a Nietzschean ubermensch next month; nor helping me start a billion dollar company, or even on having a better time. Right now it still feels net zero: for every bit of busy work that it may rescue me from, it feels like it has potential to rob meaningful work or meaning---or maybe even my life of life itself. "Projects" that I really care about in my life are not app-shaped or list-shaped, and in doing things, technology is always an afterthought.

encounters with Kultur and atmospheric phenomena

Let's put it like that: this ugly February has been a perfect companion for all of the difficulties in my personal life. Simple creature that I am, I kept difficulties at bay doing three things I do well, or at least can do in large volumes: spoke to/at friends, walked, and worked.

And so we walked with Karen & co in Lake District and I got to perform my rain poncho ritual. We looked for the grave of Rev. Bayes with Gavin. With Ocean, we climbed a hill in the rain and came upon a large family dressed in binbags, happily flinging themselves into the mud, one after another, chest first, as if we conjured a family of mud-lemmings in a misty meadows.

At least when it gets really rainy, Hastings gets all foggy and misty. And when the skies are clear, you can go out at night, run to the beach, and watch stars.

I've seen the Tempest at the Globe (well, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse). I used to go a lot when I first came to London and I haven't been in... ten years maybe? Great production, reimagining the play within play element of it; this review spoils the fun a bit, but sums it up very well.

I'm now reading Magic Mountain and it's great. I loved Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. I may write a bit more on Herzog and his autobiography next month.

Thing of the month: Neanderthal high pitch ONE TWO THREE