Asking AI to adjudicate Supreme Court cases: Adam Unikowsky thinks Claude 3 Opus is better than the actual court. I mean, who do you trust to respect precedent, Claude 3 or Clarence Thomas?
But here's an argument that AI won't take our jobs. You might think that AI translation would be leading to a decline in jobs for translators, but so far the number of human translators still seems to be rising. "When creative destruction happens, it’s always easier to see the destruction than the creation." I suspect this is an intermediate stage and before very long AI will be as good as the average human translator, but I won't guess how long that will take.
Intelligent Scott Siskind essay, "Fake Tradition is Traditional."
New Zealand has a Tree of the Year contest, and this year's winner looks a lot like an ent.
Fascinating little Celtic fertility idol.
How much of life on earth is dormant? "We live on a dormant planet. Life is mainly about being asleep."
In January, the discovery of a major deposit of rare earth minerals was announced in Sweden; now a Norwegian company claims to have found an eve bigger deposit in Norway. We won't be crippled by running out of metals.
Audobon photography awards: top 100 here; nice selection here.
With no actual history to speak of, North Macedonia leans on its very tenuous ties to Alexander the Great, to the immense irritation of the Greeks. (NY Times) It's hard to have a nation without national heroes.
Japanse battery maker TDK claims that a new material can increase the energy storage density 100-fold over their current batteries.
Loose Thread Stitchery, the Tumblr of someone who does amazing embroidery.
The amazingly diverse salamanders of the southern Appalachians.
Hoard of medieval silver found in Hungary.
Today's reason to hate the rich: the folks who poisoned the trees blocking their view of Camden Harbor in Maine.
A claim that the camp of the Assyrian army during the siege of Jerusalem has been identified.
Update on the search for Planet 9.
An argument that fossils excavated from Native lands should be repatriated. This piece appeared in Nature with the statement, "According to Lakotan people, they have always lived in Paha Sapa, as they call the Black Hills." This is false both as to the actual history of the Lakotas, whose tradition records that they first saw the Black Hills in the 1750s and did not live there until the 1800s, and to the opinion of better informed Lakota, who know this. And, no, monster stories are not evidence that pre-modern peoples knew about dinosaurs.
Some cool Roman armor.
At The Chronicle, Colin Dickey writes that for the past 75 years, many Americans seem to have held that if students emerge from college agreeing with them, they have been educated; if they emerge with different views, they have been "indoctrinated." Many conservatives used to think that professors indoctrinated students into communism, but now the fear is that they indoctrinate them into wokeism. (How and why this changed remain obscure.) Meanwhile, many professors wonder how they are having such a profound impact on students who won't do the reading or show up for class.
Reason: "Numerous federal appeals courts have ruled that filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, but police around the country continue to illegally arrest people for it."
Photographs of Iceland over the past century, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its independence.
This week's music is Orff's Carmina Burana: the whole hour-long thing, the amazing 3:38 of O Fortuna in a live performance with fireworks.
Thread on Twitter/X about the ineffectiveness of KGB intelligence gathering: "Who can any longer doubt that Soviet leaders...would have been far better off throughout the cold war reading and believing Western newspapers, than believing what the KGB told them?"
The German army has placed an order for $9 billion worth of 155mm artillery shells, to supply Ukraine and restock their own arsenals. That's $9 billion for just one category of munitions out of dozens, dwarfing Germany's recent $2 billion order for 100 new tanks. This new era of war and international tension is already very expensive, and it's only going to get worse.
US defense figure Joseph S. Nye, Jr. on Eight Lessons from the War in Ukraine.
Excellent, informative thread on Twitter/X covering the impact of Russian electronic warfare on various NATO-supplied weapons. Longer article version here. From Colby Badhwar, one of the internet's top experts on anything to do with weapons procurement.
CSIS report on Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation. Involves many women and is especially strong in Crimea.
Autonomous mine-scanning drones have arrived.
4 comments:
Today's reason to hate the rich: the folks who poisoned the trees blocking their view of Camden Harbor in Maine.
Here's the REAL reason to hate the rich.
If a poor person did this, they would be in considerable financial trouble due to the associated fines. But when the rich do it, those same fines are a mere pittance they happily pay without a care in the world.
Fines for illegal acts need to be based on a percentage of the transgressor's wealth - ideally, progressive in nature.
While we're at it, maybe towns should have the legal power to banish people if an overwhelming majority of residents are in favor of it. If you've managed to piss off an entire population of people, they shouldn't have to tolerate your continued presence.
"Numerous federal appeals courts have ruled that filming the police is protected under the First Amendment, but police around the country continue to illegally arrest people for it."
The police know that the odds on their side in terms of getting away with it.
A) Most people aren't firmly aware of the legality, and so if a police officer tells them to stop filming because it's illegal, they'll tend to believe the officer (as they in an office of power and authority), or they'll err on the side of caution even if they doubt the officer.
B) Even when people are firmly aware of the legality, the mere threat of being arrested (legally or not) is a major deterrent. Most people have never been arrested and want to keep it that way.
C) Even for the people who are willing to risk the hassle of spending a night locked up due to false arrest, the prospect of then having to take the police to court afterward is yet another level of deterrence.
D) Even for the people who are willing to go to all the hassle of taking the police to court after being falsely arrested, the financial burden of doing so is A STILL FURTHER level of deterrence.
E) Even for the people who are both willing AND able to take the police to court, the odds of anything of value coming about because of it are very low. Winning the case is likely to not be all that difficult, but at best you're going to win financial compensation, and the guilty officers are going to get let off with a slap on the wrist, while the actual underlying practice of police intimidation and false arrest is simply going to continue unabated.
Most people aren't willing to go through such tremendous amounts of difficulty when no real change and nothing of any real significance can be achieved through our current legal system.
And the police know this, and play the odds intentionally - it's a calculated risk they are more than willing to take, because it lets them get away with so much more than it ever costs them.
The German army has placed an order for $9 billion worth of 155mm artillery shells, to supply Ukraine and restock their own arsenals. That's $9 billion for just one category of munitions out of dozens, dwarfing Germany's recent $2 billion order for 100 new tanks. This new era of war and international tension is already very expensive, and it's only going to get worse.
The GDP of Germany in 2022 was $4.082 trillion. An outlay of $9 billion is 0.22% of that.
Of course, the GDP is the entire economy. Perhaps it makes more sense to compare to total governmental spending - which in 2021 was $1.88 trillion, with $9 billion being 0.44% of that.
As a NATO member, Germany is ostensibly supposed to spend at least 2% of their entire GDP on military preparedness. But like the vast majority of NATO members, they have rarely if ever done so - in fact, they are only just going to meet this requirement for the first time since German Reunification this year.
As a percentage of that 2% of the GDP for military preparedness, spending 0.22% of the GDP on 155mm artillery shells alone is impressive.
But in comparison, $9 billion is a relatively middling amount of money to spend on civic infrastructure construction projects in major cities.
Sports stadiums dot the low end - Madrid is spending $1 billion to upgrade a soccer stadium; Los Angeles is spending $2 billion to build a new basketball stadium; Xi'an is spending just under $8 billion on an olympic stadium for soccer; etc.
Transportation systems cost more. New York is spending $7 billion to renovate Penn Station, and another $19 billion to renovate JFK airport; Italy is spending $12 billion to build a bridge across the Strait of Messina, and a further $16 billion on the Italian part of a rail tunnel being dug under the Alps to connect Lyon and Turin (the French are spending $10 billion of their own for their side of the connection); Sydney is spending $64 billion on overhauling their entire metropolitan rail system; etc.
But that's peanuts compared to things like corporate profits. Over the past 12 months, Amazon profited to the tune of $37 billion; Nvidia pulled in $42 billion; Facebook profited $45 billion; JP Morgan had $50 billion; Google's take was $82 billion; Microsoft took in $86 billion; Apple broke $100 billion.
Any one of those companies could foot the bill for this artillery shell order and still be making money hand over fist. (They just predictably prefer to line the pockets of their executives and investors even more deeply instead.)
This $9 billion order is nothing to sneeze at, but it's actually not all that much in the grand scheme of things. We routinely dedicate FAR more resources to frivolous things like advertising, election campaigns, and tax breaks for the ultra wealthy.
Autonomous mine-scanning drones have arrived.
The link states "Ukraine unveils ST-1, an autonomous mine-detecting drone that scans 1 hectare in 4 hours—4x faster than humans."
While this is definitely a good development, they seem to be overstating things a tad. A metal detector only detects metal - a human mind is required to identify what that metal actually is.
That's part of why human scanning is comparatively "slow" - every time a minesweeper detects a piece of metal, they have to stop and carefully assess it visually, and determine what the object actually is.
Sending a drone in first is useful in open fields where there hasn't been much combat, because most of that area is going to be empty, and any metal detections are highly likely to be concealed mines, which the minesweepers can then go and manually confirm and handle.
But in areas that have seen combat, or in areas retaken from the enemy, or in urban settings where bombing / shelling has taken place... there's typically a LOT of metallic garbage littered all over the place, and the vast majority of detections are of mundane objects, debris, etc. I don't know how useful it would be to send a drone into such an area when it's just going to populate a hectare-sized map with countless tiny dots marking detection sites, most of which will be false positives.
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