New blog...
This is MeasuredThinking, my blog where I'll be posting about science, programming, books I've recently read, or other topics I find interesting.
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Is beekeeping good for bees?
I often hear from beekeepers that they are helping keep bee numbers healthy and are necessary for bee survival. This is often linked to their own honey sales, which they can now market as a sustainable product. However, I never carefully considered whether beekeepers were right that their honeybees help
LLM delusions and sycophancy
I found this interesting preprint from MIT (Chandra et al., 2026) about LLM chatbot sycophancy. They ask whether a perfectly rational person be talked into believing something false by a chatbot that never intends to deceive them? The answer the authors arrive at, through a Bayesian model and simulation, is
Why trees, neurons, and arteries look the same
Whenever I drive to work in winter, I cannot help but see comparisons between the branches of the trees and the neurons I look at under the microscope. They share some structural details:
The problem with "Ultra-processed food"
The concept of "ultra-processed food" has gone from one Brazilian commentary in 2009 to a global policy framework in fifteen years. The term shows up in national dietary guidelines in Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Belgium, Israel, Malaysia, and Maldives (Bartholmae et al. 2023), in France'