Sugoi & Yokunai

Could be a good thing, actually.  Two-thirds of Legislature's bills for 2023 have died.  Including the universal basic income proposal.  

The Legislature will focus more time on the state budget in the second half of the session. It's a fraught process since, unlike Congress, the Legislature has to craft a balanced budget - money spent has to be balanced by money coming in.

Reasons why you might not want to live near your friends.  Everything about being an adult seems to be complicated.

Is the Fed bankrupt?  Hard to imagine that they are, but they've made a lot of promises, and the money printing machines have overheating.  So maybe not exactly bankrupt, but not quite in the Old Helicopter Ben days.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.