CURRENT EVENTS - May 1 - May 7

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My son does not use AI to write. He wants to learn and had a good teacher for most of his life. At college, he's taking a 300 level humanities course for his distribution requirement. Got an A+ with the professor saying his paper was the best in the class. Maybe everyone else is using chatGPT so that's why his is so good? Anyway, this will create an opening for people who are willing to work.

People say: why learn to write well, given that AI will be improving and maybe AI drafting is out future. I respond: we think in language. Learning how to write isn't only about the words you put on a page. It's how you organize them in your head. I always say, "if you can't explain it well, you don't understand it well."

When I set myself to be a better writer my last year of undergrad, I started understanding the world a lot better. I got smarter in virtually every way. Also, it can be surprising how little there is to remember when you understand the internal logic of what you're studying. I barely had to study contracts for the bar exam because mostly everything follows a tight internal logic. I had to study torts a lot more because either a) torts has no real internal logic; or b) I don't get it. Then I realized I could bomb the torts section if I aced the contracts one. OTOH, that choice was sort of forced upon me by my own procrastination. When one studies for the bar in basically three days, compromises need to be made.
nonetheless, the question remains...

" Is our children learning ? "
 


“… Since the Republican began his second term in January, seven migrants have died while in the custody of immigration police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Blaise and two other migrants died in Florida, while one died in Arizona, another in Missouri, one in Texas, and one more in Puerto Rico. The individuals ranged in age from 27 to 55, and came from different corners of the globe: Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Ukraine, and Ethiopia.

… Last year, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) investigation found that between 2017 and 2021, during the first Trump administration and part of the Biden administration, 95% of deaths at ICE-operated facilities could have been prevented “if appropriate medical care had been provided.” …”

——
The article does not address whether this rate of deaths in ICE Custody is consistent or a spike from prior years …
 
nonetheless, the question remains...

" Is our children learning ?
The funny thing about that quote is that W's aides played it as if he changed his mind mid-sentence, which does happen to people. But I've never seen able to figure out what he was trying to say that would have started with the verb IS. "Is our educational system working" is the best I came up with IIRC, but that's pretty far from Bush's quote to be what he was thinking.
 
"Trump again teases a "very big announcement.""It's not about trade, it's about something else--but it's going to be a truly earth-shattering and positive development for this country and for the people of this country," he said in Oval. "And that'll take place sometime within the next few days."

His replacement for Obamacare will finally be ready. And his long-promised tax returns will be released (but only those from 1992-98)
 
The funny thing about that quote is that W's aides played it as if he changed his mind mid-sentence, which does happen to people. But I've never seen able to figure out what he was trying to say that would have started with the verb IS. "Is our educational system working" is the best I came up with IIRC, but that's pretty far from Bush's quote to be what he was thinking.
If only Bush had you as his press secretary...well done sir (y)
 


“… Since the Republican began his second term in January, seven migrants have died while in the custody of immigration police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Blaise and two other migrants died in Florida, while one died in Arizona, another in Missouri, one in Texas, and one more in Puerto Rico. The individuals ranged in age from 27 to 55, and came from different corners of the globe: Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Ukraine, and Ethiopia.

… Last year, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) investigation found that between 2017 and 2021, during the first Trump administration and part of the Biden administration, 95% of deaths at ICE-operated facilities could have been prevented “if appropriate medical care had been provided.” …”

——
The article does not address whether this rate of deaths in ICE Custody is consistent or a spike from prior years …

Quick search, per the ACLU, 52 deaths occurred in ICE custody over five years (between 2017-2021), 70 from 2017-2024, including a COVID-related spike in 2020 — so 8 deaths in ICE custody in 100 days seems like a significant spike.



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If only Bush had you as his press secretary...well done sir (y)
Do you remember Tony Snow as press secretary. That dude lied so often we figured that he had to be the nadir. Oh, how innocent we were. At least he lied reasonably well and didn't express utter contempt for everyone asking him questions.
 
"Trump again teases a "very big announcement.""It's not about trade, it's about something else--but it's going to be a truly earth-shattering and positive development for this country and for the people of this country," he said in Oval. "And that'll take place sometime within the next few days."

His replacement for Obamacare will finally be ready. And his long-promised tax returns will be released (but only those from 1992-98)
Infrastructure week again?
 
"Trump again teases a "very big announcement.""It's not about trade, it's about something else--but it's going to be a truly earth-shattering and positive development for this country and for the people of this country," he said in Oval. "And that'll take place sometime within the next few days."

His replacement for Obamacare will finally be ready. And his long-promised tax returns will be released (but only those from 1992-98)
Scared Kermit The Frog GIF
 
Is this real life ?

and the beat goes on alienating one country after another...

 


I have been wondering lately what will happen as the large language models continue to train on an internet which is made up of an ever-increasing proportion of AI-generated content. Can only imagine the quality will get worse and further degrade the user experience of both the AI models and the internet as a whole- accelerating the enshittification of everything.
 
I have been wondering lately what will happen as the large language models continue to train on an internet which is made up of an ever-increasing proportion of AI-generated content. Can only imagine the quality will get worse and further degrade the user experience of both the AI models and the internet as a whole- accelerating the enshittification of everything.
There was a study I saw recently showing just that -- a degradation in performance for language models trained on the outputs of language models.

As the language models get bigger, though, I think this effect will fade out. My understanding (some of which is unreliable deduction or inference on my part) is that the problem comes from the necessity of approximation. The AI neural network is essentially trying to plot incomprehensibly many points on an unfathomably large manifold of semantic space, but I think the space is bigger than the points (assuming that the points have finite size to avoid a triviality). In other words, the representation of semantic space within the network will have holes, so to speak. If the AI trains primarily on AI-generated data, then it would have a tendency to replicate the holes in the training data and hence a degradation in performance.

But the plots will eventually catch up, I think. I thought I read OpenAI is now training a 1B parameter model -- or someone is, at least. Because the number of connections generally scales as a square, that would be a huge improvement in power. I think the architectures prevent it from being a full square, because they have many levels and levels do not connect except to the adjacent levels (among other reasons), so maybe it's more like 50% of the full square. That would still be an 8x increase in its information storage.

By the way, for readers not familiar with the terminology: a manifold is like a surface, except in many dimensions. In this case, millions of dimensions I would think, maybe a few hundred thousands. It's impossible to visualize -- you have to undo the metaphor, sort of. Also, I'm not using manifold in the technical sense of being locally Euclidean everywhere. I don't know a term that competes with manifold for a non-tech audience (and indeed manifold is pretty esoteric itself).
 
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Translation:

The nomination of sketchy supplement promoter Nesheiwat for this post apparently died in the Senate, but she will be offered an unspecified role at HHS anyway. Meanwhile a medical influencer focused on metabolism and “optimal cellular biology” as the secret to health is nominated instead. She seems sort of on California granola eat clean guru side of things — hopefully genuinely interested in promoting healthy behavior (though her website looks like a bajillion other diet sites).

Dr. Means’ website: Casey Means MD

Nesheiwat is a certified quack, so hopefully this is an upgrade to harmless wellness guru.
 
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