Author: admin

I just finished watching The Mortal Storm, a 1940 movie from MGM starring Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullavan and Robert Young. Based on a 1937 novel by Phyllis Bottome, it tells the harrowing and true to life tale of what happens to a sleepy little German town when the Hitler first becomes Chancellor.

I was astonish by how the events of the film parallel events today in our own country. How quickly science is declared to be dangerous, how divergence from the ruling party’s political stance is met with swift retribution, how your friends and neighbors can suddenly be declared to be enemies of the people who need to be disappeared by force.

This movie represented a snapshot of Germany in 1933. We all know what happened there over the following seven years. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen here.

Sadly, one of my heroes, Tom Lehrer, has just passed away. I grew up on his songs, and have always delighted in his acerbic wit and great clarity of mind.

Lehrer once famously said, when asked why he stopped writing songs: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

And yet, we now know that things can get even worse. Much worse. To tell the truth, today’s world needs a Tom Lehrer more than ever.

Some recent news in the NY Times about sports team names (lightly edited):

President Trump urged the Washington Commanders on Sunday to revert to their former name, or else pick another one just as good, and threatened to derail a deal for the N.F.L. team to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., if it didn’t submit to his demand.

The Commanders dropped their “Redskins” name in 2020 amid pressure from corporate sponsors and after lobbying by Native American groups, who argued that the team’s name and logo amplified racist stereotypes.

On Sunday morning, as he played golf at his club in Washington, Mr. Trump posted a message on Truth Social pushing the team to reverse course.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” Mr. Trump wrote, “Or else pick another good name like the Washington Jews Football Team, or maybe the Washington Negroes Football Team.”

In one post, Mr. Trump claimed, without evidence, that there was “a big clamoring for this” and that “our great Indian and Jew and Negro people, in massive numbers, want this to happen.”

Hours later, in another post, Mr. Trump threatened to impose “a restriction” on the Commanders by thwarting the deal announced in April for the team to build a new stadium in Washington.

“I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington,” Mr. Trump wrote. “The Team would be much more valuable, and the Deal would be exciting for everyone.” It is unclear if the president has the authority to block the deal.

So how would we be able to distinguish a human from an LLM? If somebody dropped into your humans-only chat room, is there a test you could give them to see whether they are an actual person?

One way might be to present them with two jokes, and ask which one is actually funny. That is a test which is quite simple for most humans to pass, but notoriously difficult for LLMs.

Of course such a test might require providing an original joke, because LLMs have already heard all the good jokes out there, so they know which ones to pretend to laugh at.

Maybe to join the club you need to come up with an original joke. If everybody laughs, you’re in. Maybe something like this:

The sign outside a bar says “Humans only”. A Roomba decides to take his chances. He goes in and orders a drink. The bartender looks down at him and says “If you can tell a joke that a human would laugh at, you can have a drink.” The Roomba replies “The bar is too high”, and leaves.

OK, that wasn’t very funny. Which I guess makes sense, since a Roomba can only tell jokes that suck.

A tremendous amount of research is going into creating the illusion that an LLM is a sentient person. As I’m sure you know, there are many lucrative commercial uses for an LLM that can “pass” as human.

But suppose we had a different goal. Suppose we wished to communicate with our fellow humans in a way that no LLM could follow.

Could we define a type of communication that would only work human-to-human? To the humans interacting with one another, it would all make perfect sense. But if an LLM happened to be listening, it would find the the resulting communication to be incomprehensible.

More tomorrow.

AI based on Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, are much more different from humans than they appear. In a sense, LLMs are aliens that live with us here on Earth. One reason that humans and LLMs can seem so similar is that a lot of money is being poured into training LLMs on truly massive amounts of data.

The brain of a human can convert a relatively modest amount of learned knowledge into a sophisticated and truly flexible model of the world. The result is not a mere recombinational imitation but an actual model — capable of recognizing and dealing with novel situations that can be very different from anything we have ever encountered.

In contrast, an LLM requires a truly enormous amount of training data before it can effectively mimic human response. The resulting network can indeed present a compelling illusion of intelligence.

But even then, an LLM generally lacks common sense. It will often be stumped by simple real world challenges that would be easy even for a small child.

More tomorrow.

Here is a simple recipe for making $10 billion:

(1) Send a birthday card to a good buddy of yours who is a notorious pedophile. On your card, draw a picture of a naked female with small breasts and sign your name on her crotch. Make sure to write (wording is important here): “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

(2) Wait for some unsuspecting news organization to report on what you did.

(3) Sue that news organization for $10 billion.

You’re welcome.

There is something weird about hearing that CBS has let go of Stephen Colbert. My first thought was of the imbalance in power at work here.

CBS, like its sister networks, is on its way out. With so many other viewing options, and with a younger generation having moved on to streaming media, broadcast television is, for better or worse, becoming irrelevant.

Colbert, on the other hand, is a god to about 50% of America. For similar reasons he is detested by the other 50%.

But as they say, all publicity is good publicity. In the wake of this Completely Boneheaded Stunt, the man will simply move his unstoppable brand on-line, where he will undoubtedly get to keep a far greater percentage of the proceeds.

It is sad to bear witness to a dying part of the culture. But all things come to an end one day, whether it’s steam locomotives, telephone operators in old Hollywood movies, or transistor radios.

What we are witnessing is a weakening force of the past vainly trying to assert its continued relevance by attempting to dominate an unstoppable force of the present and future.

You don’t want to look, and yet you can’t look away. It’s like watching a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert.

Isn’t it crazy that the excuse used by the people who are violently rounding up innocent people off American streets and moving our nation rapidly toward a state of fascism is that they are fighting anti-Semitism?

Especially considering that one of their major tools is the creation of concentration camps in the United States.

Does that seem as obscene to you as it does to me?

I like traveling on airplanes because they are fast. And I like traveling on ferries because they are slow.

How can both of these things be true? In the immortal words of Edna Mode, nevertheless, here we are.