Sugoi & Yokunai

The problem is that “writing code” was never the point. The conversation most people are having right now is about AI writing code. The conversation we should be having is around what software engineering looks like when software engineers don’t have to write code. But behind that is another question, which both sides arguing about code are ignoring: the structural question. If AI handles the work that used to train engineers, where does the next generation of engineers come from?

We report three findings that challenge prevailing assumptions about how these systems process and integrate visual information. First, Frontier models readily generate detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided; we term this phenomenon mirage reasoning. Second, without any image input, models also attain strikingly high scores across general and medical multimodal benchmarks, bringing into question their utility and design. In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images. Third, when models were explicitly instructed to guess answers without image access, rather than being implicitly prompted to assume images were present, performance declined markedly. Explicit guessing appears to engage a more conservative response regime, in contrast to the mirage regime in which models behave as though images have been provided. These findings expose fundamental vulnerabilities in how visual-language models reason and are evaluated, pointing to an urgent need for private benchmarks that eliminate textual cues enabling non-visual inference, particularly in medical contexts where miscalibrated AI carries the greatest consequence. 

There is an equally big problem at the top of the Tualatin Water system.  Scoggins Dam is an earthen dam and is not safe.  Period.  If we have a major quake and it breaks, thousands of homes will be destroyed, and an untold number of people will die.  There are approximately 60 billion gallons of water behind that dam.