NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Risks from GPT-4 Byproduct of Recursively Optimizing AIs.
Archive for 2023
April 10, 2023
A FRIEND’S TRYING TO GET ME TO ENTER A SKEET COMPETITION WITH HIM, BUT I CAN’T DO THIS:
Insane aim at such high speeds pic.twitter.com/JugFFsNVLW
— Mr Bouf Bouf (@MrBoufBouf) March 20, 2023
DO YOU BELIEVE THEM? Good News: The IRS Promises it Won’t Use Any of the $80 Billion in New Funds it’s Getting for More Armed Agents.
Flashback:
Remember how they told you they were beefing up the IRS to go after the rich?
The truth is: The government often promises to go after the richest and most powerful as a pretense to enact policies that take from those who don’t have the resources to fight back. https://t.co/wV4dGquH9g
— Kat Timpf (@KatTimpf) February 11, 2023
ICYMI: Roger Kimball on the State of America. “Anyone who has read the Farewell Address will recall Washington’s stirring warnings against ‘the fury of party spirit,’ foreign entanglements, his cautions against excessive debt, his insistence on the place of religion as the foundation for civic order. The question is: what relevance do such injunctions have in present-day America?”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: The Louisville Shooter’s Inconvenient Social Media Being Conveniently Scrubbed
IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: The Mysterious Underground City Found in a Man’s Basement.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: What retirement? Millions of parents are raising grandchildren.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Dalai Lama Inundated With Requests From Public Libraries To Lead Story Hours.
THAT SOUNDS RIGHT: ChatGPT Causes White Collar Job Loss and Robots Cause Blue Collar Job Loss.
THE STASI NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD: Hundreds Of Former Feds Have Flocked To Jobs In Big Tech. “Google hired 130 former DOJ, DHS, CIA and FBI employees, the Daily Caller’s key term cursory search on LinkedIn found. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, employed 47 people for those three entities who were previously at the DOJ, FBI or DHS. TikTok, the Chinese-based app embattled with national security concerns, employed 25 former DOJ, FBI, DHS or CIA employees. Twitter had 46 executives who had previously spent time working for the three-letter agencies.”
I’M SURE THIS IS TRUE: Private-sector disrupters, not Beltway bureaucrats, offer best hope of making healthcare affordable and accessible.
But where do you find the best opportunities for graft and consolidation of political power?
I REMEMBER WHEN “ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC” WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BAD: Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band Guitarist Steven Van Zandt Deletes Call to ‘Exterminate’ GOP ‘Cockroaches.’
SLOW ROLL: Biden Reveals 2024 Plans — Sort of?
I DON’T KNOW, BUT THE WORD “TWEAKMENTS” IS: Am I toxic if I talk about wanting anti-ageing tweakments?
STRATEGERY: How Putin saved NATO.
When Finland cleared the last hurdle for NATO membership last week, major Western newspapers buried the story. Yet Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto justly celebrated ‘these historic days’—the end of 75 years of neutrality. As of this week, Finland is formally in, and Sweden, another eternal neutral, will soon follow, once Turkey stops blocking its membership.
Why would these two countries throng into an alliance that French President Emmanuel Macron diagnosed as being ‘brain dead’ only four years ago, and which former US President Donald Trump saw as ‘obsolete’ in 2017? The wisdom of the 18th-century British wit Samuel Johnson offers a broad answer here: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’
But there is an even pithier answer to this question: Vladimir Putin. The man who would be king of Europe has given NATO a new brain and a new lease on life.
What an irony! One of Putin’s many pretexts for subduing Ukraine was to stop NATO enlargement once and for all. Instead, by pushing two neutral Nordic countries into the alliance, he has achieved the opposite. NATO, now, has not been in better health for decades.
It isn’t just membership increasing. Poland is on track to have the largest (outside of Russia and Ukraine) and most modern military in Europe.
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Dalai Lama regrets asking boy to ‘suck my tongue.’
DEAL OF THE DAY: SOJOS Classic Aviator Sunglasses. #CommissionEarned
I LOVED THE OLD 9:30 CLUB. Mark Judge: Rock and Roll Ghost: the New Old 9:30 Club.
Among other things, I saw an amazing double-bill of Steve Earle and The Rainmakers there, for a measly five bucks.
One depressing sign of the political times is that partisans on the left and right are willing to trash political norms and institutions to get their way. The latest example comes from Democrats urging the Biden Administration to ignore last week’s federal court order concerning the abortion drug mifepristone.
In an editorial nearby, we explain our doubts about Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling. His national injunction is also excessive before the merits are even considered. But the judge delayed the enforcement of his order for a week to give the Biden Administration time to appeal. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will weigh in on the national injunction and the legal merits of the case.
But this regular legal process isn’t enough for many Democrats, who are demanding that a federal agency ignore a legal court order they don’t like.
You know, Congress could change the law by — hold on here, brace yourselves — passing a statute. All they’d need is a majority in both houses. I mean, for a party that talks a lot about “democracy” and the “rule of law,” they never seem to want to proceed that way.
THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: New Details on Intelligence Leak Show It Circulated for Weeks Before Raising Alarm.
Sometime in January, seemingly unnoticed by the outside world, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post files—many labeled as top secret—providing details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about U.S. allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics.
The documents, which appear to have numbered in the hundreds, stayed among the members of the tiny group on the Discord messaging platform until early March, when another user reposted several dozen of them to another group with a larger audience. From there, at least 10 files migrated to a much bigger community focused on the Minecraft computer game.
On Wednesday, with the U.S. government apparently still unaware, a Russian propaganda account on Telegram posted a crudely doctored version of one of the documents, alongside a few unedited ones.
It sure would be nice if we had an intelligence community more interested in gathering and protecting actual intelligence than in suppressing domestic “dissent.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Why Bud Light’s Woke Rebranding Will Probably Succeed.