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Tuesday’s Forum
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15 responses to “Tuesday’s Forum”
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Example of politics/ideology by Pentagon leadership that harms our troops and our readiness.
US military races to vaccinate new recruits before flu shots expire
The US military is racing to vaccinate new recruits after a two-month halt on mandatory flu shots – but it’s a temporary reprieve, as the shots will soon expire and new doses will not be available for months.
Officials will need to lean on other prevention measures to contain the growing flu outbreak at Lackland air force base in San Antonio, Texas, experts say.
The flu vaccines now being deployed across military basic training camps are set to expire on 30 June, and new doses will not arrive until August or later.
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I’m a map person. However, not have grown up here, I know I wouldn’t be able to get around Houston without Waze or Google Maps. And I’m pretty sure my wife and kids are utterly dependent on these tools and probably can’t read maps anymore.
No more “turn left at the corner with the restaurant that has the rooster out front”.
Is GPS reliance making troops less observant? Yearlong study aims to find out.
Military commanders love to warn troops that overreliance on GPS technology could spell disaster when signals are jammed or networks go down. But could handing navigation over to a computer be diminishing their powers of observation and decision-making skills as well?
That’s the question an upcoming study from the University of Texas at Arlington aims to find out. The yearlong, $200,000 study, funded through the Department of Defense via a sub-grant, will use virtual reality simulations to track aspects of observation and recall in subjects with and without navigation aids.
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First AI, now quantum computing.
Quantum computing is about to become a national security problem in orbit
Quantum computing is advancing fast, and nations are racing to field the first machines powerful enough to break modern encryption. This race has direct consequences for the commercial space industry, and for satellite operators in particular.
As low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes an increasingly contested domain, satellite operators could face a wide range of threats from quantum computing as nation-states harness the technology for gray-zone operations, hostile actions below the threshold of open conflict, that are exceptionally covert and hard to attribute.
The timeline is also shorter than many assume. Estimates for “Q-Day,” the point at which a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arrives, increasingly point to as early as 2029 according to Google, Cloudflare, IBM and others, and the billions being poured into quantum research by the United States, China, the UK, France, Japan and other countries could accelerate that timeline further.
Although this article focuses on protection for space assets, I’m guessing that quantum computing and crypto cracking will be pushed and utilized by the most innovative segment of our economy: organized crime.
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@Scott:
First AI, now quantum computing.
Quantum computing was The Next Big Thing for years, then it was dethroned by AI. Hell, it was even mentioned in an early season of The Big Bang Theory*.
I don’t understand it, so I won’t try to explain it. I do know it’s a very difficult engineering problem, as it requires very low temperatures and lasers. Quantum states are kind of fragile, apparently too fragile under more normal conditions. So it’s not likely we’ll have personal quantum PCs any time soon. Early prototypes opened for experimental use required a remote connection.
But maybe real quantum computers will achieve actual artificial intelligence.
*Concretely the Physics Bowl ep, where one of the questions is about quantum computing, and Leslie Winkle gives the answer Shor’s algorithm
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Rep. Tom Keane from NJ has reappeared after four months. He cites a bout with depression as the reason for his absence.
I’m sure the general public is waiting to learn about his plan to extend four months of recovery time to all Americans who need it, along with coverage for the medications to make their (eventual) return to work possible. /s
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Interesting. I wonder what is going on here? What’s the story behind the story? Maybe Nina Totenberg got ahead of herself.
Editor’s note: NPR retracts Justice Samuel Alito story
Editor’s note: Earlier today, we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. Neither Alito nor the court’s public information office has announced his retirement, and we have retracted the story.
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@Scott: Current speculation, which sounds correct to me, was that this was a pre-write (story written ahead of time so you can just add in the last-minute details and push GO) and someone mistakenly published.
For example, I used to write a whole bunch of blog posts for a client and then load them into wordpress. We’d push “publish” on a few each week, after adding any current info.
It’s likely this is a screw-up by someone at NPR, not named Nina.
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Continuing the AI discussion here. I tried @Kylopod’s suggestion and asked for an image of a shirtless man wearing a red shirt that is solid blue.
Gemini made an image of a shirtless man awkwardly holding a red shirt, and somehow either made his left hand a foot, or gave him a foot floating around mid thigh height. It also titled the image “Man holding red shirt outdoors.” but it also seems to still be processing the request (the three dots next to “creating your image” are still moving).
Copilot, meanwhile, began to generate something, then said “Sorry, I can’t generate that image as requested. Please try a different image description.”
The thing is, the ability to hold contradictory opinions is a default human setting. The fixer court demonstrated this just yesterday. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Now and then a boss can give contradictory orders. Believe it or not, some of them may clarify them or change them if this is pointed out. Others may just let you figure it out on your own. Some do it on purpose.
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@Kathy:
Copilot, meanwhile, began to generate something, then said “Sorry, I can’t generate that image as requested. Please try a different image description.”
That could be because the shirtless part triggers its filters against adult content.
How about the following: “An 80-year-old baby with a blond combover throws a tantrum because his blue toy is green.”
Sorry–not unrealistic enough.
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@Kylopod:
I tried a man wearing a blue shirt that is solid red. It pictured a man wearing a red T-shirt. I suppose the latter qualifies as a kind of shirt. I then tried a plain shirtless man, and it refused citing it was a sensitive image.
I tried moving away from images and asked what seat on a plane has people on each side and offers room to stretch one’s leg into the aisle? It answered an aisle seat, saying there are people on both sides, one on the window seat and one in the middle seat.
So, when an LLM is given contradictory orders, it hallucinates.
Seeing as that’s what it does often, I judge it does not go insane.
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A few days ago in the Atlantic, “Money once used for crucial national-park repairs is now financing Trump’s redecorating projects.”
From the non-paywalled part of the article, referring to the pathway that leads from the White House residence to the Oval Office:
As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.
But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232,…
And this:
This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from national parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from national parks elsewhere.
Going back at least 10 years, I’ve been saying (not here) that a journalist should ask him a question or two about our national parks, such as which ones he has visited, and which ones he likes the most. Maybe he’d show his appreciation for our natural lands and historical sites by answering the ones with golf courses.
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Meta, formerly Fakebook, wanted to acquire Kalshi. This was not possible, so instead Zucks is building his very own “prediction market”.
I don’t quite get it. These are money-mining companies, not data-mining ones. It’s en entirely different business.
Then the light dawns: “..users will wager “play money” on the outcome of happenings in the news and topics trending online.”
Ah, refined data-mining does fit.
It may not be all bad. If people learn how easy it is to lose and how hard to win using play money, they may learn not to squander their real money on Kalshi and Polymarket.
Or not. It’s likely an early huge win with play money may lead some to sign up for real money markets and lose a bundle in short order.
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@Kathy: I do not understand betting markets, online poker, and the like. In a casino you at least see the money on the table and some of the cards dealt. In this stuff with hidden algorithms, negligible visibility, and no regulation, what on earth would lead you to trust the house?
