Oct
21
2024

Mary Katherine Ham For the Win!

But the "Rabbit Hole" comes in a pretty close second:

Your word for the day is testy. As in, "I get more than a little testy when I notice my 'diverse' news media diet is feeding me the exact same stuff."

Also of note:

  • None dare call it election meddling. John Fund notes that Democrats Have a New Electoral-Campaign Partner. And that partner is…

    The federal government under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is slipshod and dilatory, except in one area of activity — mobilizing federal resources to get more people to vote this November and keep Democrats in power.

    In March 2021 — only six weeks after taking office — President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14019, “Promoting Access to Voting,” which directed every one of the 400 or so federal agencies to register and mobilize voters — particularly “people of color” and others who, the White House says, face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further directed the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits, which in reality are a politicized stew of progressive, labor, and identity-focused groups.

    A recent report by a coalition of such groups concluded that if federal agencies “integrate a high-quality voter registration opportunity for the people they serve, . . . they could collectively generate an additional 3.5 million voter registration applications per year.”

    A gifted link, so (if your blood pressure is under control) check it out.

    If you think this effort will be carried out without partisan leaning, I have a very nice bridge to sell you.

    I am of the opinion that if people need to be cajoled to vote, maybe they shouldn't. We need more lazy, thoughtless, irresponsible voters? I don't think so.

    The go-to publications on this are Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter and Jason Brennan's Against Democracy

  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)
    The World Series is set! I can't cheer for the Yankees, obviously. I might have cheered for the Dodgers, if they had stayed in Brooklyn, where God and Betty Smith intended.

    Which brings me to Jay Nordlinger's plug for his podcast featuring George F. Will. Who drops the following fun fact:

    His classic book from 1990, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball , “has sold more copies than my other 15 books combined,” he tells me, “which is a great sign of national health.”

    I haven't read it. I should. Amazon link at your right.

  • Not there yet. I'm about to finish up Ray Kurzweil's very optimistic book on the future of AI. So I've been on the look out for naysayers, and this Ars Technica article casts some cold water on AI enthusiasts' claims: Apple study exposes deep cracks in LLMs’ “reasoning” capabilities.

    For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced "reasoning" capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical "reasoning" displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.

    The fragility highlighted in these new results helps support previous research suggesting that LLMs use of probabilistic pattern matching is missing the formal understanding of underlying concepts needed for truly reliable mathematical reasoning capabilities. "Current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning," the researchers hypothesize based on these results. "Instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

    One example given is this word problem:

    Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday. How many kiwis does Oliver have?

    The researchers added some words that drove the AIs into fallacy:

    Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?

    To be fair they should include a sample of actual human fifth-graders to see how they do.

  • Sounds like a good sitcom premise. In that same vein, TechDirt reports: Robot Vacuums That Collect Photos, Videos And Audio Of Users To Train AI Models Start Yelling Obscenities And Chasing Dogs. From an Australian news report of nasty doings in America:

    Multiple people, all based in the US, have reported similar hacking incidents within days of each other.

    On May 24, the same day that Mr Swenson's device was hacked, a Deebot X2 went rogue, and chased its owner's dog around their Los Angeles home.

    The robot was being steered from afar, with abusive comments coming through the speakers.

    Five days later, another device was infiltrated.

    Late at night, an Ecovacs robot in El Paso started spewing racial slurs at its owner until he unplugged it.

    It is unclear how many of the company's devices were hacked in total.

    At least they haven't hacked into self-driving Teslas.

    They haven't have they? Elon?

Recently on the book blog:

Safe Enough

And Other Stories

(paid link)

This is a Reacher-free collection of twenty short stories from Lee Child. I hardly ever read short stories, but seeing "Lee Child" on the cover is a pretty powerful draw. I won't try to summarize each one. A library book, I read one or two stories a day.

Many, but not all, involve crime or violence in some way. Some are first-person narratives, and the narrators are not all upstanding citizens. Sometimes justice is meted out, other times not. Many are done in a gritty, spare, cynical style familiar from the Reacher tales. But there's one story that's just a single eight-page paragraph.

And many of the stories provide O. Henry-style twists at the end, occasionally in the very last paragraph, or even the last sentence. (I hope I'm accurate about that; I haven't read any O. Henry since, I think, sixth grade.)

I found the stories to be interesting and … well, "enjoyable" would be a stretch for the ones where the bad guys win. And that's the thing about short stories: even if you're not captivated, they're short and will be over soon.