Month: July 2025

That guy in the White House must be very confused by his recent encounters with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil. The general modus operandi of our current administration is to act like a child throwing a tantrum, as a way of getting everyone else to operate on that level as well.

But Lula insists on continuing to act like a grownup. He’s used to dealing with corrupt autocrats, after having dealt with them for many decades.

So the Brazilian president responds by behaving like an adult, speaking firmly but with respect, and not giving in to bullying and grandstanding. It all must be so confusing to his North American counterpart.

The 50% tariff imposed on Brazil is the political equivalent of a five year old sticking out their tongue and going “Nyah nyah”. It’s not much of a threat when the target of your threats has the option of simply shifting their business to more reasonable trading partners.

When this all shakes out, Brazil will be just fine. But I’m not sure I can say the same for the U.S.

Here’s a fun number game:

For any U.S. president, collect three numeric digits as follows:

— One digit is the number of letters in their first name.
— One digit is the lowest digit of their birth month.
— One digit is the lowest digit of their birth year.

For example, for Abraham Lincoln, the three digits would be 7, 2 and 9 (for Abraham, February and 1809, respectively).

Now try to form numbers by arranging those digits in different ways. For Lincoln, you get six numbers:

      279, 297, 729, 297, 927, 972

You can do this with any U.S. president. For George Washington, the digits would be 6, 2 and 2. So you only get three numbers:

      226, 262, 622

So some presidents produce six numbers, and others produce three. Yet among the 45 U.S. presidents, only one produces a single number.

But that number might say a lot about that president. Can you figure out what the number is?

One scene in The Mortal Storm stood out to me, because it made me curious. It occurse one evening as the Nazis gather around a large fire to burn books.

The two books that we see them incinerate are by Heinrich Heine and Albert Einstein. Each author was chosen for a specific reason.

I understood immediately why Einstein was chosen. Science, being an objective observer of truth, is the natural enemy of fascists.

For example, it is no coincidence that the current U.S. government is defunding science on a massive scale. Of course that is a direct attack on something that is truly great about America — and a key source of our economic power in the World.

But our current administration doesn’t care about any of that. It thinks more along the North Korean model: Keep your people poor and illiterate, and thereby maintain absolute control of the nation that you have ruined.

But what about Heine? I spent quite a bit of time today reading about him, and I highly recommend that you do the same. A good starting point might be his Wikipedia page.

Among his many other accomplishments, Heine coined the phrase “Where books burn, so do people.” Of course such a man would need to be silenced.

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.