JOANNE JACOBS: ‘We took care of our kids’ — but they lost a year in reading, math. “I’ll be honest, academics was not at the forefront of what we were pushing our teachers to push to their students. It really wasn’t. It was, how do we build a sense of community?”
Archive for 2023
August 8, 2023
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Chicago Mayor Worries That We’re Being Too Mean To The Thugs Terrorizing His City.
Nice french cuffs, though.
BLACK PERFORMER PUSHES BACK AGAINST ATTEMPTED lynching by trans activists.
CHRIS QUEEN: Here’s the Feel-Good Story of the College Football Pre-Season. “It’s a tale of two hard-working players and a tremendous gesture of generosity that took place after a team meeting last week.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Men’s Slippers with Arch Support. #CommissionEarned
JEFF BEZOS, SPACE HOBBYIST: Amazon shifts launch of its first Internet satellites to Atlas V rocket.
Amazon has confirmed it now plans to launch the first two test satellites for the company’s Kuiper broadband network on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket as soon as next month, shifting the payloads off of the inaugural flight of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.
The shift has been rumored for several weeks after ULA delayed the first flight of its Vulcan rocket from the summer until the fourth quarter of the year. The delay will allow time for ULA to beef up the structure of the Vulcan upper stage’s liquid hydrogen tank, which sprang a leak that resulted in a destructive fireball on a test stand in March.
The first Vulcan rocket was slated to launch the first two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, a network of more than 3,200 broadband satellites that the retail and tech giant plans to deploy over the next few years. The Kuiper network is similar to SpaceX’s Starlink “mega-constellation,” which already has more than 4,000 satellites in orbit.
Amazon delivered the two Kuiper test satellites to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the Vulcan launch earlier this year, and the spacecraft have been sitting in storage since March, waiting for Vulcan to fly.
Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine was supposed to power the Vulcan rocket starting in 2019 but there have been a lot of delays — postponing the Vulcan and Bezos’ own New Glenn rocket.
SLOWLY … AND THEN GONE: Could that be what we are about to witness here in America? Daniel Oliver, my old friend from the Reagan days, offers this observation in his latest column:
“In his novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s character Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. ‘Two ways,’ he says. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ That seems to be true, mutatis mutandis, of revolutions too: some are measured, peaceful; some are not.”
Go here to read where Oliver, who served as Reagan’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman, sees things going, thanks to the distemper represented by Biden, Blinken, et. al. And while you’re at it, check out American Greatness.
A COVERUP SO BLATANT THAT IT’S ONLY REAL PURPOSE MUST BE TO DISPIRIT THE OPPOSITION: The Cover-up of Cocainegate Continues. “Not only are we supposed to believe that no cameras captured who brought the cocaine in, but we’re supposed to believe the plastic bag it was in had no fingerprints on it.”
EVEN IF IT WERE SCIENTIFICALLY POSSIBLE — IT’S NOT. NOW — THESE PEOPLE WOULDN’T KNOW A SUPER SPECIES IF IT BIT THEM ON THE BUTT: This is the wildest story you’ll read this week.
FROM ANTHROPIC: Frontier Threats Red Teaming for AI Safety.
“Red teaming,” or adversarial testing, is a recognized technique to measure and increase the safety and security of systems. While previous Anthropic research reported methods and results for red teaming using crowdworkers, for some time, AI researchers have noted that AI models could eventually obtain capabilities in areas relevant to national security. For example, researchers have called to measure and monitor these risks, and have written papers with evidence of risks. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also highlighted this topic in recent Senate testimony. With that context, we were pleased to advocate for and join in commitments announced at the White House on July 21 that included “internal and external security testing of [our] AI systems” to guard against “some of the most significant sources of AI risks, such as biosecurity and cybersecurity.” However, red teaming in these specialized areas requires intensive investments of time and subject matter expertise.
In this post, we share our approach to “frontier threats red teaming,” high level findings from a project we conducted on biological risks as a test project, lessons learned, and our future plans in this area.
Our goal in this work is to evaluate a baseline of risk, and to create a repeatable way to perform frontier threats red teaming across many topic areas. With respect to biology, while the details of our findings are highly sensitive, we believe it’s important to share our takeaways from this work. In summary, working with experts, we found that models might soon present risks to national security, if unmitigated. However, we also found that there are mitigations to substantially reduce these risks. . . .
We discovered a few key concerns. The first is that current frontier models can sometimes produce sophisticated, accurate, useful, and detailed knowledge at an expert level. In most areas we studied, this does not happen frequently. In other areas, it does. However, we found indications that the models are more capable as they get larger. We also think that models gaining access to tools could advance their capabilities in biology. Taken together, we think that unmitigated LLMs could accelerate a bad actor’s efforts to misuse biology relative to solely having internet access, and enable them to accomplish tasks they could not without an LLM. These two effects are likely small today, but growing relatively fast. If unmitigated, we worry that these kinds of risks are near-term, meaning that they may be actualized in the next two to three years, rather than five or more.
Well, two or three years takes us to 2025, when Vernor Vinge predicted that technology would put world-ending technologies within reach of anyone having a bad hair day.
IT’S DUSTY IN HERE: Little girl, 10, ‘marries’ boyfriend days before dying of leukemia.
THIS HARDLY SEEMS TESTIMONY TO HIS ABILITY TO MAKE GOOD DECISIONS: Bryan Johnson, tech guru who spends $2M a year to thwart aging, says he used to drink alcohol for breakfast.
HE IS RIGHT. IF IT WERE APOLITICAL THEY WOULDN’T FIGHT FOR IT SO MUCH. AS HE SAYS: People need to stop pretending Pride flag is apolitical.
THIS LOOKS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS EXPECTING: US Scientists Repeat Breakthrough in Fusion Ignition at National Laboratory.
SO WE GET TO KNOW WHAT’S IN THEM? Judge overseeing Trump classified documents case deals blows to special counsel Jack Smith.
SURE WHY NOT? CHARGE HIM FOR BREATHING. HOW DARE HE CHALLENGE FRAUD? BREAKING: Georgia DA expected to charge Trump under anti-mafia RICO law.
WHETHER THEY WOULD PAY OR NOT: Joe Biden’s Weather Report.
I RESPECT THE PROFESSOR, I DO, BUT I THINK HE MUST HAVE LED A VERY PROTECTED LIFE: The Remaking of America.
Most of these attacks on American culture have been going on my whole life. They are just more visible now. And they’re more visible now because we are, at long last, fighting back.
CAN WE KILL THIS BIZARRE TAKE, ALREADY? Jack Smith’s Sham Indictment Shows Biden Regime Wants To Face Trump.
I’m sorry does the writer have leftist friends? ANY? Does he still have access to any of their web pages? Has he ever talked to a leftist?
This inexplicable insanity is getting repeated all over the right side. It relies on two things: the idea the left never missteps and is always machievelic and flawlessly omniscient and the idea the left totally understands the right, so much they can manipulate us completely.
If this were true, the left would never lose, the second amendment would be a thing of the past, and we’d all be leftist robots.
The left is going after Trump because he must be punished for winning in 16. It’s never stopped. They also are aiming these indictments at “things that will get the right mad.” They can’t understand why we don’t get mad at “Trump’s immoral behavior” with women, or his “security risks” or his “disrespecting our elections.” Seriously. They can’t understand why it’s not working. As for the “Oh, and if he runs we’ll win” — they’ll say that about whoever is nominated. They might be right too. It might be impossible to beat the margin of infinitely adjustable fraud. But they want to destroy Trump because they want to destroy Trump. Not because they think he’s easy to beat. In fact, they’re sure if they keep pounding, we’ll turn on him.
For the love of Bob, these are the people who think if they prevent us talking, it will change our minds. Psychological masterminds, they ain’t.
STARTING? THEY’RE STARTING??? REALLY? Countries Are Starting to Regret Their CV-19 Responses.
IF ONLY OUR COUNTRY HAD A RULE OF LAW APPLYING EQUALLY TO ALL PARTIES: ‘An Omission Lie’: Jack Smith Can Be Indicted Under Terms of Trump Indictment, Says Dershowitz.