Archive for 2024
October 14, 2024
FORGOTTEN FACTS ABOUT THE LEBANESE ‘CIVIL WAR:’ The most basic of those forgotten facts is that it was not a civil war, it was a classic genocide conducted by Hezbollah against Lebanon’s historic Christian population. Richard Pollock has the gruesome facts from eyewitnesses and victims.
EASING INTO THE 21ST CENTURY: Tesla Cybercab Robotaxi First Ride: Surviving a Trip in Tesla’s First Self-Driving Car. We didn’t ask what to do if the Cybercab started veering off-course. But we didn’t need to. “Yet myriad questions remain about the Tesla Cybercab’s viability. If its abilities are founded on software similar to the Full Self Driving system we frequently use on surface streets and highways, that’s overtly sketchy if there’s indeed no way for a human to intervene should the need arise. Our Model Y’s Full Self Driving constantly makes decisions that range from careless to dangerously moronic. It forces us to stay vigilant and remain ready to catch it out when it, for example, enters an intersection as the light turns red and creates gridlock, or misreads a speed limit sign and aggressively decelerates in the middle of flowing freeway traffic.”
A NICE PROOF OF WHAT MOST PEOPLE SEEM TO GET IN THEIR GUT: Apple’s study proves that LLM-based AI models are flawed because they cannot reason.
The group has proposed a new benchmark, GSM-Symbolic, to help others measure the reasoning capabilities of various large language models (LLMs). Their initial testing reveals that slight changes in the wording of queries can result in significantly different answers, undermining the reliability of the models.
The group investigated the “fragility” of mathematical reasoning by adding contextual information to their queries that a human could understand, but which should not affect the fundamental mathematics of the solution. This resulted in varying answers, which shouldn’t happen.
“Specifically, the performance of all models declines [even] when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark,” the group wrote in their report. “Furthermore, the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models [demonstrates] that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases.”
The study found that adding even a single sentence that appears to offer relevant information to a given math question can reduce the accuracy of the final answer by up to 65 percent. “There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer,” the study concluded.
An earlier example: “The faulty logic was supported by a previous study from 2019 which could reliably confuse AI models by asking a question about the age of two previous Super Bowl quarterbacks. By adding in background and related information about the games they played in, and a third person who was quarterback in another bowl game, the models produced incorrect answers.”
I had a similar experience last week, putting together Florida Man Friday. I asked ChatGPT to create an image that had to include the eye of a hurricane. On the second attempt, I left out the request to include the hurricane’s eye. Because on the first attempt, I got a hurricane full of eyes.
Cute — but not intelligent.
JIM TREACHER: Happy Anniversary to Hunter’s Laptop.
Four years ago today, my Twitter account was instantly suspended for posting the following picture:
That’s Hunter Biden. The photo came from the laptop he abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, less than five miles from his father’s house.
Vladimir Putin didn’t take that snapshot. He didn’t plant the laptop. It belonged to Hunter, who then abandoned it and lost legal custody of it because he’s a drug addict.
And yet when I posted that photo in October 2020, just weeks before the election, my Twitter account was instantly locked down.
I don’t mean within minutes, either. The instant I clicked the button to post that, I was locked out of my account.
Here’s the warning I received:
I had been censored. Lil’ ol’ me!
So I removed the tweet, under duress, to restore access to my account.
As it turned out, I was far from the only one. Anybody who shared any part of that news story — and it is a news story — got instantly locked down by Twitter. You couldn’t even share the URL of the original NY Post story. A complete blackout.
The Democrats wanted Trump out of the White House, and they thought this story would interfere with that. So they locked it down.
Exit quote: “Hunter’s laptop. COVID-19. ‘Climate change.’ Letting boys beat up girls in sports. No matter the issue, some very powerful Democrats want you to shut up about it. You can vote however you want, but you can’t make me complicit.”
THERE’S A HEADLINE I WASN’T EXPECTING: Boom! Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Silences Angry Leftists Over Trump’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Campaign Ad.
THE ATLANTIC’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JEFFREY GOLDBERG WARNS NEWSROOM DECAY IS HOW ‘DEMOCRACY DECOMPOSES:’
We work very hard to produce only highest-quality journalism. Sometimes, we don’t hit the mark, but not for lack of trying. Our operating theory is so simple. The only way to get people to pay for your product is to make a great product, something they can’t find elsewhere. To do this, we have to have the best journalists. Readers become our subscribers when they realize that they will find illuminating and delightful stories, written by journalists at the very top of their game, on a regular basis.
How worried are you about the decline we are seeing transpire in many legacy newsrooms? And what effect will that have on society?
It’s awful. To look at cities that used to be served by newsrooms of 300, or 500 journalists, now reduced to virtually nothing, is terrible. This is the way democracy decomposes. We’re sleepwalking into an absolute disaster. Jefferson had it right almost 250 years ago when he said he’d rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.
I wasn’t expecting Jeffrey Goldberg of all people to be advocating for a massive reduction in the size of government, but I’m happy to see him advocating for America to return to its libertarian roots. However, “newsroom decay” (a phrase written by CNN alum Oliver Darcy in his headline, not Goldberg) happens in a variety of ways, not just in shrinking the quantity of the manpower inside of the newsroom.
Another leading cause are weak editors who let their young uber-woke, and very emotionally brittle staffers wag the dog, and that’s something that Goldberg knows quite a bit about. Two years before the New York Times and other publications began their Marxist struggle sessions (leading to last week’s freakout at CBS News over Tony Dokoupil performing journalism), Goldberg hired and then almost immediately fired Kevin Williamson when his female employees dived for the fainting couches over the never-Trumper’s views on abortion. As Kurt Schlichter tweeted at the time:
And while the Atlantic appeared to have survived 2020 without a struggle session on par with it collective 2018 meltdown, that year saw the magazine infected with a massive case of Covid-driven paranoia (in addition to its already dangerous levels of TDS), as Christine Rosen wrote in Commentary two years ago: The Atlantic’s Nervous Breakdown.
The Atlantic launched the COVID Tracking Project to count the number of cases and deaths when they were not readily available, and published innumerable stories, articles, items, and memoirs on the subject. Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his COVID stories.
But with Trump out of the White House and pandemic fatigue becoming more fully entrenched among the public, subscription growth has slowed significantly. According to Byers, “even with last year’s substantial surge, the magazine had lost more than $20 million and was on track to lose another $10 million [in 2021].” The magazine laid off 68 employees in the spring of 2020, though they were mostly in the public-events area—understandable, given that there were no public events to be staged in a country in lockdown.
Twenty million is a drop in the bucket for Laurene Jobs, but nobody likes to lose that kind of money. Chris Hughes, the Facebook billionaire whose purchase of the New Republic was the original model for the Laurene Jobs play, found that magazine’s annual losses a quarter of that size intolerable and sold it off after only a couple of years.
Those numbers might help explain why the overwhelming experience of reading the Atlantic in 2021 and the first weeks of 2022 is like being a therapist whose severely anxious patient flops on the couch and delivers a monologue about the tortures of his daily life.
Or perhaps we should view the Atlantic community of editors, writers, and readers as a kind of daily group-therapy session. Consider that the “Most Popular” articles on the magazine’s website on a late-December day featured one potentially heartening story about COVID—“Omicron is the beginning of the end”—followed by several more that promised only horror: “How Long Does Omicron Take to Make you Sick?” “Is Omicron Milder?” A week earlier the magazine had warned, ominously, “America Is Not Ready for Omicron.”
And lest one think this tone infects only reporting on COVID, another popular recent piece promised to explain how “We’re Heading Toward a Very American Climate Tragedy.” An earlier one highlighted the looming menace of . . . rocks: “The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record.” Even our cars are threatening: “Big Cars Are Killing Americans” was another headline of late. The print magazine strikes a similar tone: A 2021 cover story about foreign autocrats warned that “The Bad Guys Are Winning.”
Fortunately for Goldberg, he’ll know in about a month if his subscription numbers will see a significant upturn next year.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Brief Guide To Pistol Compensators.
EVERYTHING FOR THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE: Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship.
UPGRADE YOUR WORKOUT: Doctor-Developed Gym Wrist Wraps/Lifting Wrist Straps for Weightlifting. #CommissionEarned
BATTLESWARM BLOG: Why Leftists Keep Lying About The Second Amendment. “What’s more, there are literally dozens of similar quotes from the men who debated and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Virtually all of them recognize that the Second Amendment conveyed an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
The Left wants the people disarmed presumably because they want to implement policies that would have the people up in arms.
I’M DONALD TRUMP AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE:
Bill Clinton: Laken Riley's death "probably wouldn't have happened" if the border had been secured by Kamala Harris.
He said this while campaigning FOR her. Lmfaopic.twitter.com/T5I65qpstm
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 14, 2024
A DELICIOUS REMEDY FOR BEACH EROSION: Can walls of oysters protect shores against hurricanes? Darpa wants to know. Oysters are making a comeback in many places, though we aren’t yet back to the ship-grounding oyster reefs of the old days.
VDH: The Strange, Mythological Campaign of Kamala Harris.
Central to Harris’s metamorphoses has also been her somewhat massaged biography. She often omits that she is the daughter of two PhDs, a Stanford professor, and a cancer researcher at UC Berkeley. Harris never really lived long in Oakland as claimed but grew up in upper-middle-class neighborhoods in university towns like Berkeley, Palo Alto, and an elite district of Montreal.
Harris, in the past manner of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, does not limit her fluidity to her bio but extends her makeover to the trivial, such as altering cadences and accents in efforts to sound somewhat more authentic to particular black, Caribbean, or Hispanic audiences.
For the first time in her life, Harris also seeks to cement her supposedly conservative middle-class bona fides by reinventing her past and present tastes and experiences. She claims she once worked at McDonald’s, but oddly cannot cite which franchise she worked at and when.
Harris insisted she owns a Glock handgun without specifying when and where she purchased it, to whom it is registered, or which model. Much less does she remind listeners that, as California Attorney General, she made it nearly impossible to purchase many Glock models. The once noted wine connoisseur now populist Harris now, of course, drinks beer on television.
During the recent slippage in Harris support, the campaign has issued a number of near-comical “working-class” commercials. Their aim is to regain support from blue-collar males, especially poor white men without college degrees. But such ads aimed at these constituencies are laughable, with actors caricaturing how elites imagine working males talk and look like when voicing support for Harris.
At times, Harris oddly thinks the best way to win back the male vote is to ridicule it. In a style reminiscent of Hilary Clinton’s disastrous lambasting of Trump supporters as “deplorables,” Barack Obama recently ventured out on her campaign trail to lecture supposedly naïve young black men not to be misled, fooled, or suffer from false consciousness into voting for a supposedly racist Trump rather than a progressive black female Kamala Harris.
Yet Obama, like Harris, is apparently completely unaware that wealthy coastal elites (the Obamas own three mansions in Hawaii, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard) convince few when they begin lecturing supposedly clueless working-class men, both black and white, on why they are being fooled into voting for Donald Trump.
All of those incongruities have led this week to “The Mid-October Democratic Presidential Campaign Panic Attack,” Jim Geraghty writes. “Again, does this mean Donald Trump is guaranteed to win? No. But seven swing states being neck-and-neck, three weeks before Election Day, is not where Democrats thought they would be. They’re sweating, and they have good reason to sweat.”
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Schools Leftists Outraged by Trump’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Ad.
SIGNS AND PORTENTS IN THE HEAVENS: NASA says comet expected to put on show in Earth fly-by.
I’M NOT A PHEASANT HUNTER OR EVEN A SHOTGUN ENTHUSIAST (EXCEPT FOR HOME DEFENSE), SO I FOUND THIS POST BOTH HELPFUL AND FASCINATING:
Tim Walz’s Hunting Gaffe Explained:🧵
I’ve done a lot of pheasant hunting. As a high schooler, I made extra $ assisting guides on pheasant hunts: getting the hunters in the field, flushing game for them to easily shoot, and making sure they are safe. And much more since those… pic.twitter.com/IlyEQ7zAAn
— Larry Alex Taunton (@LarryTaunton) October 13, 2024
Do read the whole thing.
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: It’s the 4th anniversary of the biggest lie the Biden-Harris administration ever told. It’s only gotten worse.
Three weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published its first article on the contents of Mr. Biden’s laptop. The report featured an email in which one of Mr. Biden’s business partners mentioned a meeting with President Biden. President Biden had denied meeting with Hunter Biden’s business associates while on the campaign trail.
Photographs later proved that President Biden had met with one of Hunter Biden’s business partners. In fact, everything on his laptop was authentic—and the FBI, members of the Biden-Harris campaign team and Hunter Biden himself knew it all along. Instead of squarely addressing the content of the laptop and telling the American people the truth, the Biden-Harris campaign developed an elaborate scheme to mislead voters just three weeks before the presidential election by pretending the laptop was Russian disinformation.
The American people understand it is not uncommon for political campaigns to spin negative stories, but this went far beyond spin. It was a lie.
Before the New York Post had even published its reporting, the FBI began to pressure Twitter and Facebook to suppress the story. Facebook restricted posts that linked to the story to ensure fewer people saw the content. Twitter completely banned links to the report and shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account entirely. The Post’s account remained censored for 16 days.
Flashbacks:
● Poll: Majority of Americans Say Big Tech Censorship of Hunter Laptop Story Interfered With Election.
● The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
● Finally, return with us to the crazy week that the Post’s laptop story broke and this banger of an exchange:
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: TRUMP 47: The Foreign Policy Preview.
The world is a more dangerous place than it was on Jan. 20, 2017 — and far more dangerous than it was when Donald Trump left office — thanks to four years of epic mismanagement by the Biden-Harris administration. But our national interests remain unchanged, and Donald Trump remains Donald Trump. So what might Trump 47’s foreign policy look like?
The question is important because, while we look to be in the opening phases of World War III, foreign policy has been conspicuously absent from the presidential campaign. You can blame a purposely incurious press that would rather not discuss President Joe Biden’s deadliest failures.
Let’s start our discussion close to home.
VIP members asked for more long-form pieces and I’ve been happy to oblige.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Breakdancers risk ‘headspin hole’ or lump on scalp, study warns.
ONCE IS HAPPENSTANCE, TWICE IS COINCIDENCE…: LPG Tankers Explode, One Linked to Iranian Gas Smuggling.
In a dramatic scene off the coast of Bangladesh, two liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carriers erupted in flames during a cargo transshipment operation on Sunday. Fortunately, injuries were averted thanks to quick intervention by the Bangladesh Navy and Coast Guard, but the incident has once again shined a spotlight on the murky safety and operational standards of vessels involved in transporting sanctioned oil and gas.
The vessels in question were identified as the 78,500-cbm Very Large Gas Carrier (VLGC) Captain Nikolas, built in 1992, and the 6,500-cbm fully pressurized gas carrier B-LPG Sophia, built in 1997. Both ships have changed hands multiple times in recent years, operating under various flags of convenience while flying under the radar of international scrutiny.
Reports from local Bangladeshi media indicate the fire broke out as the two vessels were separating after completing a lightering (discharging cargo) operation. Senior crew members on board both ships confirmed to authorities that the flames started during the disconnection process.
It at least looks like an accident…
READER FAVORITE: ecozy Nugget Ice Maker Countertop. #CommissionEarned
THANKS, BILL!
Bill Clinton says Laken Riley's death "probably wouldn't have happened" if Kamala did her job at the border, continues on to imply that we need illegal immigrants for cheap labor.
He was supposed to be campaigning FOR Kamala. YIKES. pic.twitter.com/k55Ee8rVH3
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 14, 2024
Clinton is one of the sharpest political operators of his (or any) generation. Either he’s losing his touch — possible, we’re all getting older — or there’s something sly going on.
Perhaps he’s laying a little groundwork for a post-Kamala, re-DLC Democrat party?