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Thursday’s Forum
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33 responses to “Thursday’s Forum”
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Boy, did I stumble upon a doozie of an AI hallucination yesterday!
I asked Google for historical examples of when a sitting president has come out in third place in a state. I remembered one example: George H.W. Bush came out in third place in Maine in 1992, behind Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.
Google AI reminded me of another one:
During the 1976 presidential election, sitting President Gerald Ford finished in third place in Texas. In that election, the Texas Democratic party used a hybrid system where the primary popular vote directly awarded delegates. Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter won the state, while right-wing third-party candidate Mac Curtis (running under the American Party banner) managed to edge past the incumbent President Ford into second place in the state’s general election tallies.
The only thing remotely true in the above description is that Jimmy Carter won Texas in 1976, with 51% of the vote. Everything else in the paragraph is a bizarre lie. Ford, the sitting president, very much came out in 2nd place, at 48%. In very distant third-place was Eugene McCarthy running as an independent, at 0.49%. In yet more distant fourth place, at 0.28%, was American Party candidate Thomas Anderson.
Mac Curtis was a rockabilly singer. As far as I have been able to tell, neither he nor anyone else with that name ever ran for public office.
Did Google AI swallow some shrooms?
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Let’s remember that the way this works is that the LLM doesn’t know anything.
It merely predicts, based on what’s on the internet, what the most likely next word is.So, while the AI hasn’t consumed any psilocybin, many people who write on the internet have.
I think this is maybe a case of a training set that had not seen many of the specific sentences.
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In the past when I’ve run across AI misinformation, I’ve usually had some idea where it was coming from. Some years back, before 2024, I asked ChatGPT who was the first African American on a presidential ticket, and it said Kamala Harris. I think the reason for that answer is that the phrase “on a presidential ticket” is nearly always used when talking about the vp candidate, even though by definition it includes the presidential nominee (often called “top of the ticket”) as well.
And a while back Google AI claimed the following was an exchange in The Empire Strikes Back:
Yoda: This bucket of bolts is never gonna get us past that blockade.
Princess Leia: This baby’s got a few surprises left in her, sweetheart.
This is also kind of shroom-worthy, but I know where it came from. It’s listed as a quote from the film on the Internet Movie Database (which is notorious for not checking user submissions).
In any case, I had the idea in my head that AI was getting better at avoiding these kinds of mistakes.
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A data point in how AI fails:
We have a travel trailer, a Safari Condo Alto retractable and there is a Facebook group specifically for Safari Condo owners. Yesterday a fellow retractable owner was wondering about the difference in gas mileage there was between the retractable and non-retractable versions of the trailer and decided to “ask AI”. They were very pleased with the result and shared it. However, as I was reading through the well crafted and seemingly thorough analysis, I came across a section where it said something like, “the retractable version fits almost entirely within the profile of your Toyota Highlander and therefore…” This surprised me. We have a one car garage with an extra tall door where we store the unit (retracted) and it is a near thing to get it through. A Highlander would be significantly narrower side to side and at lest a foot lower. Where did AI get its “idea”? My theory is that it’s because when the trailer is retracted it is often described as having a teardrop shape. But there is also a type of trailer called a “teardrop trailer” which has the same shape but is dramatically smaller.So bottom line is that AI scrapes stuff and puts it together but doesn’t understand what it is doing. I’ve found it moderately useful when I’m looking for new products, specs, etc for things I already know about and so can analyze the results for BS, but nothing it returns can be trusted to any great degree.
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Ballot Rejections Soared in Rural Counties After USPS Reduced Mail Service
In early August, election workers north of Spokane, Washington, went across the street to the post office to check for late mail-in ballots. It was three days after the primary and they were expecting no more than a few dozen.
Instead, their mailbox was brimming with envelopes — more than 500 of them, each a vote that wouldn’t count. The sight was “jarring,” said Auditor Lori Larsen, a Republican who oversees voting in Stevens County.
Across the region, other election officials were getting similar jolts. In the 11 predominately rural counties in eastern Washington, nearly 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to about 600 in 2022, the previous midterm primary.
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Over the past three years, as mail volume continued to plummet and annual deficits ballooned, the Postal Service started consolidating the processing of first-class mail at larger regional plants instead of at smaller hubs closer to local post offices. Then, in a little-noted switch that mostly took effect after the 2024 election, the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from these processing plants, from twice daily to once.The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and, most importantly for ballots, pushed back postmarking, which doesn’t happen until mail reaches the regional centers.
In this year’s primary, the effects of the cuts were clearest in five states that make detailed data on mail-in ballots available: Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon. All have or recently had grace periods allowing ballots to count if they come in after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by the deadline.
In these states, the number of ballots rejected for arriving late soared in counties affected by the service changes compared to 2022, ProPublica’s analysis showed.
The answer, of course, is to hand manage mail in ballots. That takes money. And honest people.
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A great example of how Trump doesn’t care about anything except for whether A) it makes money for him or B) it makes him look good
The mail thing is all about B. He was cheated out of his win in 2020 because of mail in ballot fraud. Of course he was.
(I could put scare quotes on “cheated” but I hope I don’t need to.)
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Russian generated fake news from fake news sites is fooling people like J D Vance.
https://theins.press/en/inv/298359
https://bsky.app/profile/robertscotthorton.bsky.social/post/3myg2en3w222n
excerpt
Western journalists call them “Doppelgänger,” but the team of Russian propagandists spreading fake content under the banner of legitimate foreign news outlets describe themselves instead —as “ideological troops” and “social architects.” The team, set up in 2022 by the Presidential Administration under Sergei Kiriyenko and PR specialist Ilya Gambashidze, was tasked with “natively promoting Russian narratives in unfriendly countries” — in other words, running a fake-news factory. Its operatives work both online and offline. While use their network of bots to amplify photos of antisemitic graffiti on Parisian buildings (itself painted by Russian agents), others try to get their fake stories about Zelensky noticed and retweeted by Elon Musk and JD Vance. The Presidential Administration oversees a team of hundreds, including MGIMO alumni and Foreign Ministry staff who fabricate stories in multiple languages and pass them off as Western media reports. Designers create deepfakes, while political strategists and professional propagandists use AI to identify each country’s most sensitive issues and make their disinformation as politically effective as possible. So far, however, the team has had more failures than successes.
In December of 2023, Ohio Senator JD Vance went on Steve Bannon’s podcast, where he asked rhetorically: “Who are the people who will cut Americans’ Social Security benefits and plunge our grandparents into poverty? And for what? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”
Just a couple of weeks earlier, Russian propaganda outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda had published a story about “Zelensky’s yacht,” citing “documents from the Mediterranean Association of Yacht Brokers.” The story also appeared in English on DC Weekly, a fake-news website founded by former U.S. Marine John Mark Dougan, who lives in Russia.
Two weeks later, the story was already being cited by Republican senators Thom Tillis and Vance, as well as by Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
At the offices of Russia’s Agency for Social Design (ASP), the reposts about “Zelensky’s yacht” — along with the efforts to debunk the story — were gathered in a folder titled “Collection of publications on the work of the Doppelgänger group.” The intended audiece of the folder was the Russian Presidential Administration.
The folder also contained reports on the November 2023 graffiti campaign involving Stars of David painted on buildings in Paris, as well as a fake video threatening attacks by Turkish nationalists against visitors to the Paris Olympics.Amid real corruption scandals over food and equipment procurement for the Ukrainian army that led to the resignation of Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov’s, outlets linked to Doppelgänger spent 2023 spreading false claims that Reznikov and his family had bought property in Cannes, Dubai, and Madrid.
False claims about Olena Zelenska’s lavish shopping had circulated on social media before. In December 2022, for example, obscure anonymous accounts on X began posting that Zelenska had spent €40,000 in Parisian stores during a visit to the city, citing “information from social media
The claim was reposted by American journalist, RT contributor, and admirer of authoritarian regimes Max Blumenthal, who has 860,000 followers on X. Trump loyalist Candace Owens, who has 7.8 million followers on the platform, also cited the claim. Responding to a post by Volodymyr Zelensky, she wrote: “We want nothing to do with you. Stop stealing from our people while your wife splurges tens of thousands of dollars shopping in Paris. Disgusting.”
The documents reviewed show that Sergey Kiriyenko initiated the fake-news operation, while the Kremlin’s key overseers were Alexander Kharichev (head of the Presidential Administration’s Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes) and Sofia Zakharova (an aide in the Kremlin directorate responsible for ICT development and communications infrastructure). Kharichev oversees disinformation about Ukraine, while Zakharova is responsible for spreading it in Western countries.
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A Fox News poll shows that “corruption in government” is the #1 concern of voters.
Scroll down to the teal & amber graph.
That’s… impressive.
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Perhaps Trump is getting ideas like the following from his conversations with Putin:
https://bsky.app/profile/maks23.bsky.social/post/3myfnicgrz22r
The Atlantic: Trump believes Ukraine is deliberately attacking Russian oil refineries to drive up global energy prices and hurt Republicans in the November midterm elections.
He sees these strikes as an attempt to undermine Republican electoral prospects and, by extension, his presidency.
This belief has reportedly fueled his anger toward Kyiv, with his administration threatening to restrict US military and intelligence support unless Ukraine stops targeting Russian energy infrastructure.
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The destruction of Ukraine’s last operating oil refinery in 2022, as well as that of its mothballed refineries, by Russian strikes does not count to trump because that was before the Iran war caused oil and refined product prices to skyrocket.
It appears that putin did not foresee Ukraine’s ability to exploit Russia’s many military and industrial vulnerabilities — even as recently as last month, when Russia struck Ukrainian data centers that are fewer and smaller than similar targets in Russia.
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NYT reports a good news/bad news story. Well, they report the good news, that young voters, 18-29, have shifted blue by 15 points, from 55% to 70%. Way more than 30-44 who are +5 from 51 to 56, 45-64 no change at 44%, and geezers like me +2 from 47 to 49. (How can anyone on SS vote Republican? For which see my running snark about a box of rocks electorate.) The bad news, sort of mentioned in passing, is that the little spits don’t vote. Maybe they will in the hoped for Blue Tsunami. They also fail to note how many voters are in each age block. One would assume the 10 year youth block is small compared to the three age blocks containing everyone else.
On the other hand, it does seem people form their party affiliation young and tend to stick to it.
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The Boing 737 MAX 10, first announced in 2017, has been certified by the FAA. This is the largest MAX variant, with the lowest range and the best per seat operating cost. It intends to compete, more or less, with the A321neo.
There’s also some buzz about a new clean slate mainline narrowbody by both Airbus and Boeing. I’ve no doubt there are tons of designs and studies, including unducted fan engines and the wing truss Bowing was raving about last year. Some insiders call these paper airplanes, as in they exist only on paper.
The costs of a new design are enormous, and the development time is really long now. But the 737 is already way past any more redesign of its 1960s airframe, and the A320 family is pushing 40 (announced in 1984, first flew in 1987). A new design is needed for the 2040s.
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Anyone impacted by the PHP critical vulnerabilities announced yesterday? Visited a website that was offline? Operating a website using WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla?
I use Joomla to manage a family association website and have been applying security patches for the last 4 months to fight vulnerabilities detected by bad actors using AI. In response to the alerts yesterday, I and many throughout the world took their sites offline until web host applied two critical patches.
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I’m still reading this. On his substack today, Paul Krugman suggests the government should take over Xtarlink.
I don’t see it happening, until Adolf one fine day decides to limit the speed for US forces, say if a major loss of the failure of some legitimate military operation would hurt the democratic president in 2029.
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Is it necessary? By law, the US government is already supposed to have total control over Starshield, crudely described as the military/govt version of Starlink. The US should just invoke the law and remove Musk from Starshield’s chain of command + open up space defense contracts to competing satelitte companies.
There is an opening here for Mark Cuban or some other billionaire, to say Musk is not reliable and a security threat and then build a competing service with promises of non-interference.
The problem for Musk here is that other Putin antagonist governments recoil from his business, seeing how he backstabbed Ukraine.
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The other problem is that Xtarlink and related subsystems are an integrated system with Xsapces satellites, software, and launch cadence.
TL;DR: you’d have to take all of Xspaces from him in order to keep building the satellites, which have a lifespan of about 5 years, and launch them in number large enough to maintain coverage.
And on totally unrelated news, it may just be the unsustainable AI bubble has started to pop.
Ok, maybe not. but this is serious. And Coreweave’s troubles are really real, really. And really bad.
I think the main issue is that there are too many players, which nominally is a good thing, but they are investing waaaaaay too much money each, which may be sucking capital off the rest of the economy.
BTW, we received a request for a proposal from a new customer. It came in PDF, in a listing cooked up in the bad section of Hell, with photos. I’ve been going crazy trying to come up with some way to add prices, brands, and total amounts per product.
And today a coworker tells me he’ll run it through ChatGPT. And damn me if he didn’t come up with a usable Excel file. I think I may need to rethink some aspects of using LLMs…
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I’m not convinced that the Pentagon and/or the White House had no discussion or awareness of the change to Starshield’s operation in Ukraine. Hegseth’s mealy-mouthed denial,
“We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that,”
begs questions about the Pentagon’s management of the contract, and its communications with Starlink over the terms of service. An interruption of service over TOS issues without notifying the customer (DoD) would clearly be unacceptable.
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I was canceled and reviled for saying exactly this. But doing it a dozen years back.
The lived experience notion has certainly elicited pushback. This should continue, increase and ultimately render the whole idea an obsolete curiosity. This needlessly Balkanizing fashion, presented as enlightenment, is simply jejune. The literary world needs to get over it and get back to publishing writers for being the uniquely imaginative and empathetic humans they are.
Just because you’re on ‘our side’ doesn’t mean you can’t be fucking stupid. Or, sorry, jejune.
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I’ve had a problem with that stance since American Dirt. Dictating what people can and cannot write is on par with those who seek to ban books after they’re written.
Also: I’m part of an NPR book reading group on Facebook. One of the readers there has been working their way through the Gone series! (She’s on book 4 I think and nothing but raves…)
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Oh cool!
I actually picked the fight deliberately because I was big enough I couldn’t be ignored, but not so big I’d make the issue all about me. And no one backed me, except in secret DMs. ‘I’m secretly with you! But don’t tell anyone!’ It’s not just politicians who are craven.
And of course no one has said, ‘You know, Michael, you were right.’
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