friedman
Pornhub Will Block New UK Users Starting Next Week to Protest 'Flawed' ID Law
Only users who have already registered and completed age verification will be able to access the world's largest porn site. Pornhub is blocking itself in the United Kingdom on February 2, arguing that the country's age verification laws are ineffective, the company announced on Tuesday. As of February 2, only users who have already registered with Pornhub and completed age verification will be able to access the site. New users will not be able to register. The move comes after a new set of provisions aimed at keeping minors from viewing porn kicked in last July, requiring adults to submit to age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more, in order to verify that they are not minors.
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Predictive economics: Rethinking economic methodology with machine learning
This article proposes predictive economics as a distinct analytical perspective within economics, grounded in machine learning and centred on predictive accuracy rather than causal identification. Drawing on the instrumentalist tradition (Friedman), the explanation-prediction divide (Shmueli), and the contrast between modelling cultures (Breiman), we formalise prediction as a valid epistemological and methodological objective. Reviewing recent applications across economic subfields, we show how predictive models contribute to empirical analysis, particularly in complex or data-rich contexts. This perspective complements existing approaches and supports a more pluralistic methodology - one that values out-of-sample performance alongside interpretability and theoretical structure. Keywords: Predictive economics, Machine learning, Forecasting, Causal inference, Economic methodology 1. Introduction The evolution of economics has long been shaped by advances in analytical tools.
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Simulating Student Success in the Age of GenAI: A Kantian-Axiomatic Perspective
This study reinterprets a Monte Carlo simulation of students' perceived success with generative AI (GenAI) through a Kantian-axiomatic lens. Building on prior work, theme-level survey statistics Ease of Use and Learnability, System Efficiency and Learning Burden, and Perceived Complexity and Integration from a representative dataset are used to generate 10,000 synthetic scores per theme on the [1,5] Likert scale. The simulated outputs are evaluated against the axioms of dense linear order without endpoints (DLO): irreflexivity, transitivity, total comparability (connectedness), no endpoints (no greatest and no least; A4-A5), and density (A6). At the data level, the basic ordering axioms (A1-A3) are satisfied, whereas no-endpoints (A4-A5) and density (A6) fail as expected. Likert clipping introduces minimum and maximum observed values, and a finite, discretized sample need not contain a value strictly between any two distinct scores. These patterns are read not as methodological defects but as markers of an epistemological boundary. Following Kant and Friedman, the findings suggest that what simulations capture finite, quantized observations cannot instantiate the ideal properties of an unbounded, dense continuum. Such properties belong to constructive intuition rather than to finite sampling alone. A complementary visualization contrasts the empirical histogram with a sine-curve proxy to clarify this divide. The contribution is interpretive rather than data-expansive: it reframes an existing simulation as a probe of the synthetic a priori structure underlying students' perceptions, showing how formal order-theoretic coherence coexists with principled failures of endpoint-freeness and density in finite empirical models.
Investigating the Effect of LED Signals and Emotional Displays in Human-Robot Shared Workspaces
Ibrahim, Maria, Kshirsagar, Alap, Koert, Dorothea, Peters, Jan
Effective communication is essential for safety and efficiency in human-robot collaboration, particularly in shared workspaces. This paper investigates the impact of nonverbal communication on human-robot interaction (HRI) by integrating reactive light signals and emotional displays into a robotic system. We equipped a Franka Emika Panda robot with an LED strip on its end effector and an animated facial display on a tablet to convey movement intent through colour-coded signals and facial expressions. We conducted a human-robot collaboration experiment with 18 participants, evaluating three conditions: LED signals alone, LED signals with reactive emotional displays, and LED signals with pre-emptive emotional displays. We collected data through questionnaires and position tracking to assess anticipation of potential collisions, perceived clarity of communication, and task performance. The results indicate that while emotional displays increased the perceived interactivity of the robot, they did not significantly improve collision anticipation, communication clarity, or task efficiency compared to LED signals alone. These findings suggest that while emotional cues can enhance user engagement, their impact on task performance in shared workspaces is limited.
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Here's What Mark Zuckerberg Is Offering Top AI Talent
As Mark Zuckerberg staffs up Meta's new superintelligence lab, he's offering top research talent pay packages of up to 300 million over four years, with more than 100 million in total compensation for the first year, WIRED has learned. Meta has made at least 10 of these staggeringly high offers to OpenAI staffers. One high-ranking researcher was pitched on the role of chief scientist but turned it down, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the negotiations. While the pay package includes equity, in the first year the stock vests immediately, sources say. "That's about how much it would take for me to go work at Meta," says one OpenAI staffer who spoke with WIRED on the condition of anonymity as they aren't authorized to speak publicly about the company.
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Here Is Everyone Mark Zuckerberg Has Hired So Far for Meta's 'Superintelligence' Team
Mark Zuckerberg notified Meta staff today to introduce them to the new superintelligence team. The memo, which WIRED obtained, lists names and bios for the recently hired employees, many of whom came from rival AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Over the past few months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a recruiting frenzy to poach some of the most sought after talent in AI. The social media giant has invested 14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its CEO, to run Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL). News of the memo was first reported by Bloomberg.
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Looking into the Future of Health-Care Services: Can Life-Like Agents Change the Future of Health-Care Services?
Torkestani, Mohammad Saleh, Davis, Robert, Sarrafzadeh, Abdolhossein
The increasing availability of computer-mediated knowledge and the advancement of information and communication technologies have altered the methods through which health care information is sought [3] [25] [30]. The Internet has had a significant impact on healthcare service and is a virtual medical library for an estimated 75-80% of users in developed countries [4] [5] [11]. On an average day, more than six million patients and their caregivers in the United States use the Internet to obtain health and medical information. This number exceeds the average daily number of 2.27 million Americans who make visits to physician offices [11] [18] [26]. Furthermore, not only patients but their caregivers want to get actively involved in the health-care management of their loved ones. In a research nearly 60% of people who identified themselves as caregivers use the Internet to find answers to their health-related questions [16]. This computer mediated environment has become, as Vargo and Lusch [32] argue, a fundamental hub where "people exchange to acquire the benefits of specialized competencies (knowledge and skills), or services."
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Understanding Gradient Boosting Classifier: Training, Prediction, and the Role of $\gamma_j$
The Gradient Boosting Classifier (GBC) is a widely used machine learning algorithm for binary classification, which builds decision trees iteratively to minimize prediction errors. This document explains the GBC's training and prediction processes, focusing on the computation of terminal node values $\gamma_j$, which are crucial to optimizing the logistic loss function. We derive $\gamma_j$ through a Taylor series approximation and provide a step-by-step pseudocode for the algorithm's implementation. The guide explains the theory of GBC and its practical application, demonstrating its effectiveness in binary classification tasks. We provide a step-by-step example in the appendix to help readers understand.