17 April 2023

In my 15 April 2023 post,  I highlighted a post the described how one could use prompt injection to poison the results that LLM-using search engines like Bing would retrieve.  Therefore one wonders if we've already reached Peak LLM, that is, whether the easy ability to poison search results and befuddle the search quality of future users already indicates that incorporating Chat/LLM into production applications already has hit a wall.  The success of Chat so far depends on the vast number of documents out on the Web being pristine, and free of hidden "white text" that mischievous writers leave.  But what if a sizeable number of documents had hidden surprises for ChatGPT/GPTx to discover.  Very soon, we will see pranks and jokes, or worse, malevolent instructions that the Chat agent would blindly follow.  What bad outcome might result?  Perhaps a brilliant prompt engineer will come up with a way to defeat these pranks, but then this becomes an onging war of hacker against hacker.  The unwary consumer, just wanting to use the search engine, may be an unwitting casualty.  Perhaps we do need to pause things, despite what some think.

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I was hoping this would be No.  Do looks matter when it comes to advancing a career in economics?  The answer, sadly, is yes. 
Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher ranked PhD institutions and are more likely to be placed at higher-ranking academic institutions not only for their first job, but also for jobs as many as 15 years after their graduation, even when we control for the ranking of PhD institution and first job. Appearance also predicts the success of research output: while it does not predict the number of papers an individual writes, it predicts the number of citations for a given number of papers, again even when we control for the ranking of the PhD institution and first job. All these effects are robust, statistically significant, and substantial in magnitude.
I suspect that this is not just economics, but in academics as a whole.  We ugly people have to struggle harder.  But someone else found the real secret to profession success - having wealthy parents.  That's right, coming from a rich family is a major factor in whether or not you will succeed professionally.  And if you are rich and good-looking, well, there is no excuse for failure, is there?

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Why do flying insects seek bright lights and fly around and around them?  The answer is that they think it's the sun, and they are adapting their flight to it.

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Another crazy California idea.  A bill is being considered that will charge Califorians for energy use depending on how wealthy they are.  The richer you are, the more you pay.  Who said "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." 
I don't think it was Milton Friedman.

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Nature is amazing.  Why don't bears get blood clots when they hibernate?  Downregulation of HSP47 is why.  Fascinating.

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REI is leaving the Pearl District.  Another casualty of Portland crime.  Having so much glass in the ground floor windows is clearly a temptation for thugs to break.  The store was designed for times that no longer exist - when law and order was observed and people respected property.  So sad to see the further decline of what was once a fun city.

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16 April 2023

Fighting back!  Concerned about your personal photo being sucked up by A.I. to be used against you later?  The Fawkes team has you covered.  Fawkes makes alterations to images that are nearly invisible to the eye, but make it much more difficult for deep learning models to "learn" your image, but making pixel-level alterations that "poison" the image.

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Psilocybin - is it the magic, wonder drug that some people say it is?  Roland Griffiths thinks so, and wants to convince you - before he dies.

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Feminism has changed over the years, since I was young.  Now it's "darker" and "seething with resentment".

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This is funny.  Although search using the LLM interface might work in some situations, algorithms based on "what should the next desired word be, based on the model" can fall flat if the underlying development set data is less than optimal.

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I've been seeing wind mills everywhere, and my first instinct to seeing these has always been negative.  But the technology has improved a lot since the 1980s and it is one of the cheapest sources of energy.

Which is why China and Europe have been pursuing it greatly, far faster than the U.S. 
There's a great three part series worth a read.  And there's an interesting design from a company called T-Omega.

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In my 7 April 2023 post, I pointed out that the Business Journals Downtown Vitality Index put Portland at the very bottom.  Now a report from the University of Toronto, looking at cellphone activity, created a ranking of downtown recovery rates for various U.S. cities.  Portland ranked second to last.  Even Chicago beat us.

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Apparently a lot of people want access to Lake Oswego, and can't understand why they not.  They blame "the rich" for keeping the lake to themselves.  Well, these rich people paid to have the lake created and developed, and want to keep it clean, tidy, and for users to respect the resource.  Being able to attain and retain wealth, you are more likely to observe propriety, follow social guidelines and not do anything stupid.  Given what we've seen in Portland, I can't blame them for wanting to keep it restricted.  L.O. understands that granting open access is not reversible.  Once you do so, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. 

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15 April 2023

The Cascadia fault is alive.  Gases and hot water are pouring out of cracks and holes on the ocean floor.


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I wish I was in Eugene today when a man threw out $200,000 from a car "to bless others".  It seems I'm never in the right place at the right time.

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New coronavirus variant is out - XBB.1.16.  More contagious but apart from coughs and sniffless, one can get conjunctivitis.  So far no increase in deaths or hospitalizations.  Good.  But in the infectious disease department, comes a report that Oregon's syphilis rate is the 9th highest in the nation.  Officials are somehow blaming the coronavirus pandemic for this.  Yeah, that makes sense. 🙄

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Minimum wage is increasing, starting July 1.  So, prices will increase accordingly, since employees cost more to the employer, and since people have more money now, why not?  Is everyone getting a pay raise?  No?

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Nature can be stranger than science fiction.  Worse than Oedipus?

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Why we can't have nice things.  So while most people just use Bing's new search engine, powered by A.I., other people find ways to exploit it.  Like leaving secret commands for Bing to follow, that can change someone else's profile.  Or tailoring chat prompts to make Bing talk like a pirate, or poison the search index, or to get Bing to extract data by injecting hidden commands.  These are early and crude attempts, but were successful.  What will others do?

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14 April 2023

A very bad law.  The Washington state legislature just passed SB5599 (D-6, R-0), which allows the state to take from parents, the children who want to have "gender-affirming care", the euphemism for genital mutilation or puberty-blocking hormones, because of their mental illness.  Parents have no say in this matter, and I can't say enough how awful that this got passed.  Matt Margolis calls this "state-sponsored kidnapping," which it is.  Time to leave the state.  But not to Oregon.  Nope, because the idiots in Oregon are working on the same kind of law.  Groomers in the schools must be beside themselves with glee.

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Portland city council is confused about their ranked-choice voting procedure rough draft.  Commissioners Mingus Mapps, Rene Gonzalez and Dab Ryan raised some concerns about how byzantine the process is, but Charter Implementation Transition Manager Shoshanah Oppenheim said to just trust the outside experts that the City consulted.  They know best.  Ranked-choice voting is flawed.  It's a way to keep the voters of losing loony candidates to stay in the game, and redistribute their votes to their second-choice less-loony candidates that remain.  Voters who voted for more sensible candidates can only watch in horror, as the 3rd, 4th and 5th place candidates end up getting more votes with each round, and overtake the candidate that won originally, but just not above the 50% cutoff.

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AI as administrative assistant.  Terry Tao is happy with using GPT4 as his admin assistant.  It's still not a user-friendly process, but will be soon.  People who are employed doing menial services should be very concerned.  The world will no longer need this to be done by a human.

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Don't have friends?  No problem. Just replace them with your custom chatbot. As you can see, setting this up is much like running Linux on your computer back in the 1990s.  But things will get easier eventually.  I had not heard of Modal before - offering up serverless GPU cloud space.  Great business model, which will grow, I'll bet.  But machine learning models degrade over time, and require retraining and "constant access to ground truth data" so you may still need to keep your real friends around.

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13 April 2023

Tinnitus frequencies are not quite random.  There are particular frequencies at which you hear that ringing in your ears.

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The genetics of aging.  I saw Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick recently, and besides the impressive air sequences, the most awesome part of the movie was how slowly Tom Cruise has aged.  Some of it's makeup and healthy living, no doubt, but genetics likely plays some role.  This image has been circulating on the Web, contrasting Tom with Kelly McGillis, who hasn't fared quite as well.

An article in Nature reports that RNA polymerase II works less accurately as organisms age, proceeding faster but more carelessly, making more errors as it goes.  In some organisms, just slowing the rate at which the enzyme works, giving it time to be more careful, was able to increase longevity by 10% to 20%. 

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When Donald Trump was running, some called attention to some of his entrepreneurial flops, such as Trump College, which was meant to provide real estate training.  People don't realize that the very rich often do this - start ventures, see how it goes, and shut it down if it's not making money and there is no realistic path to doing so.  Google has done this many times - buying small companies and their products, then killing them when there is no future to them.  Here's Google's 2023 Graveyard.

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12 April 2023

Poor Legacy.  First they had their Moody's rating decreased to "negative".  Now the OHA has forced them to re-open their Gresham birthing center, which was not penciling out.  I would hate to be their CFO now.

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Cookie protection.  Mozilla is rolling out Total cookie protection.  Seems like a small deal.  Most savvy users have an extension that destroys cookies on leaving the site, as well as local storage data and service workers.  In 2023, making a big deal out of just blocking third-party cookies seems lame.  You can already to that in the browser's preference settings or with an extension.

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Been wondering that myself.  Who's running Stanford?

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11 April 2023

The virus just knows.  Oregon OSHA issued a Workplace Advisory Memo, stating that it plans to rescind its rules governing COVID-19 Workplace Requirements for All Workplaces and Requirements for Employer-Provided Housing.  While Oregon OSHA has incrementally removed many requirements related to COVID-19 for general workplaces and employer-provided housing, until April 3, certain requirements were still in effect for exceptional risk workplaces such as healthcare settings.  While I can understand the fear, there was never anything like this for swine flu or other communicable diseases. 

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Oregon is dealt a blow.  People are leaving Oregon (especially Multnomah county) in droves.  Yes, homelessness and drug use are problems, but they are the effect, not the cause.  The cause is rampant lawlessness and unequal enforcement of the existing laws.  If you're a homeless bum, you can commit rape, murder, theft, vandalism, property trespass, assault, littering - basically whatever it is you want to do.  And you won't get prosecuted.  Whereas if you are conservative, you'd better obey the law, pay your taxes, register your guns and follow increasingly stricter gun control laws.  You'd better obey progressive manners and watch your pronoun usage and avoid microaggressing someone else.  Who can live in this world? 

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Coava Coffee is leaving Portland.   Miller Nash is leaving the Big Pink building downtown. 

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JetPens has their annual best pens review.  I can personally vouch for some of the recommendations, which seem to be largely the same as last year.

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We like to think of ancient voices as being the sources of timeless wisdom.  Sun Tzu's writings are venerated in the West that way.  But it was not always like that. 
Zhuge Liang wept bitterly when presented with Ma Su’s severed head. Since China’s famed strategist personally ordered the execution of Ma Su, one of his own subordinate commanders, this reaction puzzled some of Zhuge Liang’s advisors. “It is not for Ma Su that I weep,” he remonstrated. “I am thinking of the late Emperor, warning me not to use this man because his deeds would not match his boasts. The late king’s words have proved too true, leaving me now to rue my blindness. I weep to recall it."

What incongruous boast sealed the fate of the hapless Ma Su?
According to the Chinese historical novel, Three Kingdoms, his fatal mistake was slavish devotion to the military advice of Sun Tzu.
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I literally lost my biggest and best client to ChatGPT today. This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin.

I keep seeing people (myself included) saying things like, “it’s not a threat if you’re a GOOD writer.”

Yes, I am better than ChatGPT. But, and I will say this again and again, businesses/clients, beyond very high end brands, DO NOT CARE. They have to put profits first. Small businesses especially, but even corporations are always cutting corners.

Please do not think you are immune to this unless you are the top 1% of writers. I just signed up for Doordash as a driver. I really wish I was kidding.

Of course, some disagree.

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American's IQ scores are decreasing.  This jibes with what I'm seeing.  No, I don't think the explanation is that modern kids don't take tests as well.  The Flynn effect was still present as recently as 2008 - so it's not like we're comparing it to the early 1900s.  So it's not surprising that companies will turn to artificial intelligence if they can't get it in meatspace.

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Speaking of artificial intelligence, it looks like San Francisco's driverless cars need more of it.  What a mess.  I think driverless cars were a solution looking for a problem to solve.  Do we really need this now?

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Browsing the Web on a phone is different from browsing on the laptop/desktop. Smart Banners are an example of why that is, and why I limit what apps I place on my phone.  Everyone's after your identity.

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San Francisco is losing their flagship Whole Foods store.  Must be the racism and white supremacy. 🤨

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Legacy Health's credit rating is now "negative" according to Moody's.  Another casualty of Oregon's coronavirus mismanagement.  Don't get sick!

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10 April 2023

There's even a greater need to pick more complex passwords.  A.I. can crack passwords more quickly than before.  When hackers break into a system, they can download the file where passwords are stored.  This will allow them multiple tries at cracking the password, bypassing the usual limited number of tries before the system locks you out.  Cloud systems often state that your data is encrypted and that they have no access, or that third-parties would not be able to read your data.  But of others (such as employees) have access to the server and can easily decrypt the data, then your privacy is easily invaded.  Multi-factor authentication is more important than ever.

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The coronavirus jab (is it really a vaccine?) is so politicized now that the CDC is partnering with a private social media non-profit to provide surveillance for citizens who oppose it.  They want to turn American into East Germany.  It's 2023 now, and the major Omicron variants are mild.  Why the need to kill dissenting voices?  Even in Oregon, the state death rate is vanishingly low.  The problem is with mismanagement of the whole pandemic - from mask recommendations, to stickers on the floor, plexiglas shields, bribery to get the jab, and claims of benefit made without data to back it up and often proved to be flat out wrong.  One doesn't have to delve into ivermectin and other wacko claims that unfortunately degraded the anti-vaccine stance. 


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Holy crap!


When everyone is at risk, no one is at risk - probably. Essentially, all deposits are insured, else we'd see the mother of all bank runs. But if banks know this, then risky behavior will be encouraged, because Papa Fed will take care of any problems that may arise. Most people are completely unaware of how tenuous things are.

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Another news network documents Portland's decline.  How much more decline before voters decide that enough it enough?

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He probably has another emergency ready to declare.  Biden finally declares and end to the national COVID-19 emergency status.

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9 April 2023

Happy Easter.  An t-Aisírí is an old Irish Easter hymn.  Here it is sung by Nóirín Ní Riain and the monks of Glenstal Abbey.


'S é Íosa an Fíreán, a shaothraigh ár n-anam,
'S é rinnemuid a cheannacht ón ndaorise;
Is d'fhulaing sé páis, agus bás ar an gcroich,
Mar gheall ar na peacaí a dhéan'mid.

Curfá
Agus aililiú leá, is aililiú ló, aililiú ló
Má maslaíthear ár gcolainn
Ní baolach dár n-anam
Ach ná séanaigí m’ainmse choíche.

‘S é Íosa an Fíréan, Dia dílis don Athair
Ó, is é a rinne ár gceannacht ón daoirse;
Nuair a d’fhulaing sé an Pháis agus bás ar an gcroich
Ag tabhairt sásaimh sna peacaí seo a níonns muid.

Tá an t-arán seo déanta i d’fhianaise, a Pheadair,
A Pheadair, caithidh an t-arán seo;
[An] té chaithfeas an t-arán seo, caithfidh sé mise,
Idir fheoil, anam is diachta.

Tá an fíon seo déanta i d’fhianaise, a Pheadair,
A Pheadair, ólaidh an fíon seo;
[An] té ólfas an fíon seo, ólfaidh sé an fhuil
A bhí ag tíocht ‘na braonta as mo thaobhsa.

Siúlaigí amach sa ngairdín, a Pheadair,
Tá uaigneas mór ar mo chroí-se;
‘S é meáchan na bpeacaí is ciontach le m’uaigneas
Is fairigí uair liom an oíche seo.

Éirígí suas a tromluí a gcodladh
Ní fada uaim saighdiúir mo dhaoirse
Rinne sibh faillí fanacht ‘na maidin
‘S ní bhfuair [gur] chaith sibh an oíche seo.

Tá sé ráite i dtairgearacht Mhaitiú
Leis an magadh a fuair Íosa
Gur éirigh an coileach a bhí ag fiuchadh sa bpota,
Chuaigh ar an mbord is lig glao as.

Tháinig na trí Muire ar maidin Dé Domhnaigh
Go leigheasfaidís cneácha Íosa.
Chuartaíodar an tuamba thart timpeall go gasta,
Ní bhfuaireadar amharc ar Íosa.

Tháinig an t-aingeal anuas as na Flaithis
Is d’ardaigh an leac ina bhfianaise
Bhí leac ar an tuamba, ní thógfadh céad pearsa í,
Ach thóg an t-aingeal a bhí naofa í.

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The pendulum swings.  Seattle is facing a major downturn.  The article seems to blame the pandemic for this.  But remember, as they saying goes, the coronavirus didn't kill the economy.  It was the government response to the coronavirus that killed the economy.

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It's amazing how the Koreans got it just right, using earthenware onggi for making kimchi.  It works better than making it in plastic or glass containers.

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Ghosting.  Young Japanese seem to treat other people as plug-and-play units.  To use as needed until no longer useful, then discard without a thought.  That's not the Japan I remember.

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More than 50% of Americans think 4-year college is not worth the cost.  This was especially true in the younger age groups, and could mean that they don't believe that the money is worthwhile the gain in the quality of education they will receive.  Maybe the educational curriculum has been dumbed-down so much that a college degree doesn't qualify you for a good job.  Requiring the jab is also likely a discouraging factor.  But the skills required for America to advance will necessitate education in math and the sciences.  But getting ahead and learning complex topics requires some mentoring and one of the benefits of a collegiate education was networking with the brilliant people you met along the way.  This will be lost.

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8 April 2023

Why do I blog?  Danny Guo lays out his reasons.  For me, it is to document the salient items of what's interesting to me, and perhaps it might be of interesting to a passing visitor.  It is a journal of sorts.

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Survival of the fittest.  Stability AI, which took the world by storm with the Stable Diffusion AI image generator, now has been beaten by competitors who were lucky, or just ran faster with the ball, especially Midjourney.  Now, they are hard pressed to find investors and may have to wind down.  Harsh is the world of competitive geekdom.  But Midjourney does seem to be better.

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Blame Obamacare.  This is a great article on how government policies greatly changed the face of medicine for the worse.  What resulted from Obamacare was the eradication of the small doctor practice, and the rise of the employed physician.  Insurance companies ruled the land, and so entities were created to help them make profit, like pharmacy benefit managers.  A whole industry came into existence to help healthcare systems deal with insurance billing and other administrative overhead.  Hospitals also became dominant as they received generous largess from Washington D.C.  The glass and steel buildings on the Hill and the waterfront were obtained during Obama's tenure.  Big Medicine didn't help doctors, however.  During that time, doctors sold their practices and became employed physicians, and what care you received was no longer up to the doctor, but what the insurance company would cover.  Most physicians may struggle to pay off their debts now.  Medicine will become more like a government-run operation (which it kind of is), than a place for holistic healthcare. 

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COVID is over, right?  So why does there need to be a special ICD-10 code for COVID-19 jab status?  We have never had a special code for who didn't take a medication, or who didn't undergo a certain surgical procedure.  Although the Z28 codes for not being vaccinated was created in 2016, the code has been fine-tuned specifically for the COVID-19 vax, to document not only that a person did not get the jab, but the basis for this status (e.g. group pressure, refusal etc.)  The government says that it needs this to track vaccine efficacy and disease mortality, but they never were interested in this before with other diseases.  So why now?
Update (9 April 2023):  Here is the reason: it "will help health insurance providers identify emollees [sic] who may benefit from outreach and further education about vaccination.”  
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Red flag law update.  In late December 2022, a New York Supreme Court judge declared their "red flag" gun law unconstitutional.  Then recently, a person was able to use this decision to vacate and dismiss a red flag judgment, affirming the prior decision (R Monaco vs State of New York).  I never understood why it became illegal to defend yourself in the most effective way, in a state with high crime and violence.  

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Are you nuts, folks?  Seattlites are all for confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens, but reject an opportunity to address the real issue?

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A Harvard physician/computer science reported that he was able to get GPT-4 to diagnose a rare medical condition (congenital adrenal hyperplasia).  Of course, he was the prompt engineer, so his success might not be duplicated by someone else.  The article states:

GPT-4 isn't always reliable, and the book is filled with examples of its blunders. They range from simple clerical errors, like misstating a BMI that the bot had correctly calculated moments earlier, to math mistakes like inaccurately "solving" a Sudoku puzzle, or forgetting to square a term in an equation. The mistakes are often subtle, and the system has a tendency to assert it is right, even when challenged. It's not a stretch to imagine how a misplaced number or miscalculated weight could lead to serious errors in prescribing, or diagnosis. 

Like previous GPTs, GPT-4 can also "hallucinate" — the technical euphemism for when AI makes up answers, or disobeys requests.

So it's not yet time to ditch your physician for an A.I. model.  And see the first item from my 6 April 2023 posting.

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The first time [Priya] received her paycheck, it was the most money she’d ever seen in one place. Uttar Pradesh is infamous for having higher school dropout rate among girls compared to other parts of the country. Its not exactly the safest place for girls either. Her father had invested in her education and kept her in school. And it had paid off. Sending your first salary back home is one of the proudest moments in a young Indian’s life, and that was the case for Priya also.

I think you know where this is headed. The day I got off the GPT4 wait-list I asked it to do what Priya does on a daily basis. It got the answer wrong in the first try, but some chain-of-thought prompting and boom. GPT4 gave the correct answer in 1/10th the time it would take Priya and cost a lot less.

I don’t see a long-term career in software anymore. Any dreams I had of earning decent money as a software engineer are slowly fading. Lex Fridman in his podcast said “if you’re anxious about GPT4 its probably because you’re a shitty programmer”. I mean, I’m not the smartest in the room but I have generated value with the software I’ve made. And was convinced that I’ll make decent money as long as put in the work. I’m just not that sure anymore.

What is the economic impact of LLMs? Idk (openAI has published some lengthy paper about it). What I do know is that some rich bloke in the US will get a few million dollars richer and Priya will lose her job.

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So why are we wearing masks?  It's 2023, and only now we're learning that coronavirus present on hands and other surfaces can spread COVID-19.  Everyone touches their masks, and then touches everything else in the grocery store.

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