Sugoi & Yokunai

we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. 

You’re paying $0 for primary care visits and certain mental health visits, $0 for prenatal and postnatal care, and you don’t have to meet your deductible first.

Hickman says she’s watched homelessness explode, basic road maintenance go undone, and state funds dumped into nonprofits that don’t deliver. As a result, she is one of roughly 60% of likely voters who told OPB in a recent poll they have a negative impression of the governor.

But that won’t matter much when Hickman’s ballot arrives.

“I’m feeling defeated at the moment,” she said, “but I will only vote for Kotek.”

Hickman says her vote is “100%” based on opposing Trump

Robert Lindstrom, a nonaffiliated voter from Eugene who identifies as liberal, told OPB he’s been dismayed to see the governor put forward “radical left” policies that he feels are aimed at pleasing her political base and not the state as a whole.

Democratic tendencies he views as soft on crime are one reason the retired electrician refuses to visit Portland anymore. But it’s Trump’s impact on national politics that has so dismayed Lindstrom that he says he may move out of the country.

Before he goes, the 59-year-old plans to vote Kotek.

An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient.

Researchers at Yale University have now uncovered important clues. Their study reveals that cortisol strengthens emotional memories by changing how brain networks involved in emotion and memory function and communicate with one another. The findings offer a deeper understanding of why certain experiences leave such powerful impressions while others quickly fade.

The update rolls out Oct. 30 and covers any website “associated with” any of a commercial user’s products or services (another sweeping claim). Meta defines commercial users as accounts that advertise, market, sell or list products, develop apps, create or use product catalogs, manage a Page or business Group, or use any business product, such as the Meta Business Suite, which lets companies manage all of their accounts from one console. One can imagine this would give Meta scraping rights to an impressive swathe of the open web.

Even under general anesthesia, the human brain can analyze language, recognize different types of words, and predict what comes next in a story, according to a surprising discovery by Baylor researchers. 

Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence? I saw this article about the attention process, which is at the heart of the transformer model, which powers LLMs. Yes, Vaswani and colleagues published their famous attention paper about their latest refinement, which turned out to be the one that really worked. But lost to most are the contributions of those who came up with the original transformer idea: Dzymitry Bahdanau and Minh-Thang Luong. If not for these guys, we wouldn't have had transformers yet, and LLMs wouldn't be a thing, and there wouldn't be OpenAI or Anthropic, and a lot of the derivative AI tech we're seeing.