For anyone unfamiliar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre

If a physics simulation doesn’t agree exactly with experimental data, it is often difficult to figure out why and tweak the model until they agree. With AI, incorporating a few experimental examples into the training process is a lot more straightforward, and it’s not necessary to understand where exactly the model went wrong.

That’s not too bad if it’s only ever used as a rough guide in the early stages of design, with proper testing done later. But do we trust corporations not to get lazy and pressure their engineers to skip the accurate tests altogether, especially when they can then brag to their investors that AI is replacing expensive engineer time? What would Boeing’s management want to do with this tech?

Around 100 sites in the country were bombed in one 10-minute period alone in what the IDF dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness.”

Israel needs an “are we the baddies?” moment.

“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

Yes, you have lots of guns and bombs and you’re very big and strong. But the Pope was offering a moral criticism. You know, about morality, doing the right thing. Have you or your “Christian” colleagues ever heard of it? Turns out it doesn’t often align with who is most eager and equipped to kill anyone who looks at them the wrong way. Even Jesus (heard of him?) had a thing or two to say about that.

He lost the war weeks ago.

“It’s unprecedented for an American vice-president to come the week before an election,” he said. But he said he had decided to come because of what he described as the “garbage happening against” Orbán in the election.

“We had to show that there are actually lots of friends across the world who recognise that Viktor and his government are doing a good job and they’re important partners for peace,” he said.

Vance insisted, however, that his efforts to bolster the lagging campaign of the rightwing, populist leader – whose “illiberal democracy” has long been seen as an inspiration for the Maga movement – did not constitute foreign interference. “I find it darkly ironic that people are accusing me of engaging in some kind of foreign influence,” he said.

No, that just is interference. The VP of another country flying in 4 days before an election to campaign for one of the candidates is about the clearest case of foreign election interference you could ever see.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement in English, saying that the PM supports the US decision and claiming that “Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbours and the world.”

Remember that for next time he starts claiming the opposite.

On the face of it, this is a much more intelligible and credible account of what’s going on than anything the USA is putting out.

That’s what a ceasefire is, for Israel. You have to stop shooting them, while they continue to shoot you. And if you shoot back then that’s an unprovoked violation of the ceasefire and they get to shoot you more.

Arguably, all of Musk’s DOGE bros, Musk himself, and Nigel Farage.

Edit: And, of course, Scott Bessent.

“Like every tech company, we’re really excited about the velocity increases from AI, and so we have a lot of internal prototypes that are up and running, and extensions is one of them,” Varma said. “But a lot of things we’re staring includes questions like: Can you customize your homepage? Can you add widgets? Can you change your background in whatever way you want?”

All that and rounded corners? Not sure I can handle this much future.

ChatGPT, I like you.

In general, “fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation,” they write.

People have always conflated confidence with ability and knowledge. That’s why so many positions of power are occupied by confident bullshitters. It seems like that tendency transfers over to people’s interactions with LLMs.

It would be interesting to experiment with an LLM trained to sound less confident and more tentative or self-deprecatory. Maybe the results would be different.

The USA encourages young people to do that by keeping them in poverty and ignorance. So it’s kind of voluntary but not exactly freely chosen.

AI is a misnomer. It’s artificial stupidity.

I’ve changed the title.

Unfortunately it’s also critical for MRIs.

Stephen Lewis, the former leader of the Ontario NDP who spent decades fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic with the United Nations and through his own foundation, has died.

Mr. Lewis, 88, passed away in Toronto on Tuesday, just days after his son, Avi, was elected leader of the federal NDP.

He had been battling cancer and was in a hospice, according to his sister, Janet Solberg.

“He waited for his son to win. I’m not joking. He never lacked for willpower,” Ms. Solberg said.

Mr. Lewis led the Ontario NDP from 1970 to 1978.

I think the Pope was responding to this:

Pete Hegseth prays for violence ‘against those who deserve no mercy’ while hosting first Christian service

The link sent Rademacher to a page on WebinarTV.us which featured a full recording of the Zoom recording, an AI-generated video summary of the meeting, “chapters” that sent the viewers to different parts of the meeting, and an AI-generated episode of the “Phil & Amy Show,” in which two AI-generated personalities discuss the content of the call, including quips and rapport between Phil and Amy.

So their business model is to steal other people’s meetings and add an overlay of shit? I hope it fails miserably for them.