Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, October 15, 2025
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18 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
Democrats flip ‘America First’ script on Republicans over Argentina bailout (Washington Examiner)
From HuffPo:
If only Sens. Grassley and Cramer had some role in the majority party, to make relevant demands.
@DK:
Interesting little quirk about this bailout, it will only happen if Milei’s party wins the upcoming legislative elections. In true mob boss fashion, the felon is trying to coerce the Argentinian people.
Cancer is on the rise in young people. Most commonly found along the digestive tract. Most likely contributors are highly processed foods and micro-plastics in our food and water supplies.
So the GOP answer to all that is kill all research funding and pollute or poison for profit to their black heart’s content. It really is.
We’re taking a course on the new federal acquisitions law. Yesterday we got to hear more about using AI to help in assembling proposals. I’m still skeptical, but did understand something about ChatGPT. Namely what a custom GPT can do.
The catch is that the feature for customizing your GPT isn’t available in the free version. therefore I wasn’t able to try it out myself. copilot doesn’t seem to have this capability.
Customizing looks easy, at least for certain purposes. The lesson showed you can upload files to the custom GPT, then indicate whether it can also search the web or not, and a few other things. this makes the files uploaded the entirety of its knowledge font, ergo it shouldn’t go hallucinating given careful prompting.
I looked at Gemini, and it did let me do my customized agent. However, it lacks some options GPT offers. For instance, I can’t keep it from searching the web. I tried it anyway, and it was a massive failure. Not only did it fail to do what I asked (list the technical requirements in the request for proposals), but it also hallucinated a very wrong answer.
I’m not paying $25-$50 a month just to try this feature. Even for work, the use case seems of little benefit at best. But if the company pays for it, I may try to find out more about it.
Surprised? I’m not. But even cynical as I am I thought it would take a little time to develop, but nope, Hamas is murdering Gazan civilians. I know! What are the odds? (100%)
There’s video. You don’t want to see it.
I read a comment on AI recently, I forget where, that there’s a common cycle, exemplified by chess. First researchers organize knowledge of chess so they can program it, but then someone does chess better with deep data they don’t organize and AI. The article said this repeats in other fields, it’s better to collect mountains of data and just let AI have at it.
I’m beginning to see why tech companies are so hot for AI. Circumstances have led me to make too many changes at more or less the same time. We had two WIN10 machines we couldn’t upgrade and tariffs were coming, so we bought new WIN11 machines. Our printer died so we bought a new HP Smart (sic) printer. And T-Fiber laid cable allowing us to opt out of the hated Comcast/Xfinity WIFI. (Also, we’re hurricane prone and the fiber is underground, while the Xfinity stuff is overhead, old, and sometimes out in good weather. After Ian we had the kids staying with us, trying to work remote jobs thru phone hot spots.) I’ve been spending days getting and keeping everything working to our satisfaction, yesterday two hours in chat with two Indian gentlemen getting the printer to accept the new WIFI. Once upon a time I could uninstall and reinstall. No longer possible. And with OneDrive fighting DropBox gawd knows where my files are. I have a punch list that gets longer with each new element.
The upshot is that I’ve spent a lot of time with tech documentation, paper and online. Much of it is problematic because the menus have changed. I can understand why the tech companies are spending billions on AI. It’s cheaper than organizing and documenting their products.
If anyone is ever introduced to me as being in marketing for Microsoft, they’re unlikely to survive the encounter. And I feel better post rant, thank you.
A story I’m working on begins with the protagonist listening to a history audiobook while she tries to make biscuits for next day’s breakfast. I had thought it would be a fun easter egg to have her listen to a portion of Duncan’s Martian Revolution.
The the other day while falling sleep I had a thought, related to a book I read last week about the last years of the USSR. It was half an idea, half the kind of dream imagery one gets at the edge of sleep. It came as a sentence: “While they were delighted to see Communism crash and burn, they were blind to the many shortcomings that would bring their own system down a few decades later in similar fashion.”
I think it’s evident who “they” are and the system that will crash and burn soon (it has been a few decades) is capitalism. I’ll extend it a bit and use it in the story (sorry, Mike!*)
IMO, it’s clear the current capitalist model is unsustainable. More on this later.
*I’ll just throw in some flex cells and Phos-5 here and there. BTW, there’s a Martian Revolutions Wiki out in the wild.
@Kathy:
You probably have a better memory than I do, but if you’re like me you should keep track of your Easter eggs. I put them in, have a chuckle, and forget about them until some reader ten years later asks me about something. And I have no idea.
@becca: There is evidence that some strains of E. coli, the common gut bacteria, produce a carcinogen called colibactin that is responsible for the rise in colon cancer in young people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colibactin
Dietary fiber is reported to counteract this. I recommend sauerkraut, raw on top of a hot dog or cooked in a kapusniak if you’re middle European; if you’re a sophisticated Frenchie choucrote garni works, too.
@Slugger:
Who knew that a hot dog could be health food?!
Sauerkraut was a go-to ingredient when I was younger and my funds were more limited. Inspired by the Reuben, but used in various improvised grilled sandwiches and spilled over into a side.
@Michael Reynolds:
Unlikely.
Most are simple references to other SF works. Like bringing up a Sinclair’s planet (B5). Or the Martian Revolution.
As to the latter, the issue would be to keep narrative continuity with Duncan’s work. So it needs to take place decades after the revolution, when Duncan is supposed to be presenting his work. there would need to be references to energy sources like Phos-5, or some mention of what surpassed these.
Or just ignore it and have the story take place two centuries before the Revolution, and maybe the protagonist was listening to a fiction podcast or book.
@Kathy:
My most elaborate Easter egg was so obscure literally no one got it. Possibly because in a book aimed at 14 year-olds I was doing wordplay on the names of various Nazi leaders. The character is named Lance, see, and the German word for lance is Speer, so. . . you get it? No? Another was a character who was self-parody which no one was ever going to get, why would they? But I amused myself.
@becca:
You don’t see the eightieth dementional chess being played? If young people die of cancer at higher rates, this eases the burden on Medicare later on.
@Slugger:
I recall hearing a lot about the benefits of fiber since the 80s, when it was promoted as necessary to control cholesterol or something. Lately I’ve been hearing more about it. So I eat several servings of oatmeal and other cereals per week. It’s also why I make beans often. In addition, I rarely ever peel potatoes any more, nor apples when I have any raw. Last, bananas are a decent source, it seems. I eat between 4 and 5 per week, mostly for the potassium.
If you increase fiber consumption, make sure to stay well hydrated as well. Fiber needs to enter in solution to be most effective nutritionally.
@Michael Reynolds:
What’s the German word for “Spear”? 😀 That might have been more obvious.
In Turtledove’s endlessly repetitive AH American Empire series, he has a brilliant US tank officer named Morrell. the name is supposed to be a misspelled anagram of Romel. this strikes me as a rather odd easter egg for a Jewish author.
This feels like an Onion headline:
Trump Administration Authorizes Covert C.I.A. Action in Venezuela
I’m not sure announcing this via a NYT headline qualifies as “covert.”
See, it isn’t just me imagining things…
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/could-lead-protein-powder-according-175606979.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
In the near future, remember AI was as bad as it is now, before it got enshitified.
@Jen:
There’s a line in there about the info coming from multiple sources within the intel and mil communities. Leakers. Letting the public know what our Dear Leader is up to is high treason.
I expect righteous outrage from Heggie and Tulsi. There will be lie detectors! Lotsa luck with those intel boys and gals though, they know all the tricks.