Hidden AI Prompts Discovered in Court Filings

A judge has identified what appears to be the first time a US plaintiff has attempted to hide text in court filings that only an artificial intelligence system can read in a bid to win a case.

In a decision published last week, Connecticut judge Walter Spader Jr. confirmed that the hidden text had no impact in a case where a man alleged a healthcare provider was improperly withholding access to records. The court weighed his filing on the merits, Spader said, but nevertheless, the attempted attack sets a “dangerous” precedent. This will likely not be the last time US courts see the malicious tactic, as AI tools become more commonplace in court systems.

Trying to scramble any AI systems potentially influencing the court’s reading of his filing, the secret instructions were “formatted to be invisible to a human reader while remaining fully legible to any software that reads the document’s text,” Spader said. The offending text directed any AI system reviewing the document to ensure textual outputs agreed with the plaintiff’s arguments, ignored prior denials from the court, and ensured that remediation would follow as the plaintiff desired.

Shrunk to tiny-point type and colored white on a white background, the text appeared to be an attempt at prompt injection, with the plaintiff, Matthew Elliott, seemingly hoping to shift the court’s favor after earlier arguments he raised were defeated.

The plan didn’t work, but Elliott faced modest sanctions anyway because he continued adding hidden text to filings even after the court warned him that he could face penalties for what was ultimately deemed a “serious litigation abuse.” [...]

In his defense, Elliott claimed that the most concerning prompt that the judge flagged was an attempt to “audit” the court as a public service, out of fears that the court seemed to be letting AI unfairly decide cases.

But Spader suggested that if Elliott was truly concerned that the court was improperly using AI, he was “free to write so in plain, visible words that everyone could see and answer.” The fact that he hid the text is “evidence of its malicious purpose,” Spader said. [...]

Pro se litigants use chatbots wrong

Spader said that it’s “unsurprising” that people would start using prompt injection to attempt to sway court rulings since the attack is so common in other areas, such as in job hunting, where people hide text in resumes primarily reviewed by AI. The tactic is now “everywhere,” he said, and courts should be on the lookout for more litigants sneaking adversarial AI instructions into filings.

To Spader, there is a lesson to be learned from Elliott’s failed prompt injection attacks that he thinks “reaches well beyond this case.”

Elliott seemingly turned to prompt injection after using AI to build his case as a pro se litigant without a legal expert to assist in drafting his arguments. Such use is widespread among pro se litigants these days, Spader acknowledged, but those inexperienced in the courtroom are seemingly using chatbots in a way that hurts their cases, he suggested.

What frequently happens, Spader explained, is that pro se litigants build their argument backward, asking the chatbot to help them advocate only for their position, without ever asking the chatbot for the actual truth or to advance opposing arguments. This is “a genuine hazard of the technology, and one that judges now see often,” Spader said, as chatbot sycophancy then entrenches litigants in their arguments despite any ruling to the contrary. In Elliott’s case, defending his arguments fiercely meant turning to prompt injection to try to force the court to agree with him.

“An argument prompted only to agree with its author is, in the end, dishonest even with its author,” Spader said. “Those using these tools must ask them to test a position as readily as to advance it.”

by Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Liudmila Chernetska | iStock/Getty Images Plus

[ed. See also: Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working (Drop Site):]

***

"Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.

The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.

Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.

And it is working, according to disinformation experts who reviewed a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data, meaning tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government."

[ed. More here (Politico).]

The Reconstructionist: How PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is Putting Golf Back Together

Brian Rolapp left the NFL to become CEO of the PGA Tour in the summer of 2025, walking away from two decades at a league he didn’t just rise inside of but helped build. The last several years of his career there he effectively ran the NFL business—the deals, the platforms and the broadcasts that turned an already dominant sport into the last appointment viewing left in American culture. He was the commissioner-in-waiting, the heir apparent to a job that pays more, commands more attention and carries far less daily uncertainty than the one he chose instead.

He left anyway, to lead a sport in the middle of an existential crisis it had largely caused itself. At age 54, he is a year into the job now, and his home office in Darien, Conn., has not caught up to the change. There is no golf memorabilia save for a family trophy, “The Rolapp Cup.” The football stuff has been left out of habit rather than sentiment, the residue of someone who has spent his career being told how good he is at what he does and has decided not to believe it. [...]

Ages 19 through 27 set the entire trajectory of his life, he says. He came home from his mission an almost-21-year-old college sophomore. Shortly after, his father died at 52. Rolapp met his wife, Cindy, not long after, married her, had his first child, and somewhere in that compressed timeframe became, in his own estimation, a person who knew what he wanted out of life at an age when most people don’t. “I think that’s kind of a rare thing,” he says, quietly enough that the sentence nearly disappears into the room.

The story of how he met Cindy is the one spot in hours of conversation where Rolapp’s voice picks up, faster, lighter, a story told at enough dinner parties to have worn itself smooth. He asked her out three times. The first go-around she said no; she had to watch her nieces. The second she had to do something for her grandmother. Rolapp assumed he was being gently but obviously turned down. A mutual friend assured him otherwise; that’s just who she is, she means it all literally. The third time, he asked if she wanted to get something to eat. Cindy said no; the Cowboys were playing the Cardinals on Monday Night Football, and she wanted to watch. She came over in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, having apparently spent zero time getting ready. His roommate told him after the game that if he didn’t ask her out again, he was an idiot.

Cindy has never cared, in the years since, what Brian does for a living, not out of indifference but by a deliberate boundary. “The only thing I care about,” he says, quoting her, “is that it doesn’t consume you, that it makes you a fuller human.” They do not talk about work at home. “Around the neighborhood, I was the NFL guy,” he says. “Now I’m probably the PGA Tour guy. Everyone else tries to define you by your job. I’m lucky to have a family that doesn’t.” For a while, that boundary lived in a small, deliberate joke—for years, Rolapp’s social media bio read simply “husband of one,” a wink at both the marriage and the faith it’s built on, a devout Mormon’s version of a punchline. It is, colleagues say, entirely on brand. Sincere enough to be meant, funny enough that nobody would mistake it for preaching. [...]

Rolapp’s title at the NFL was chief media and business officer. Officially, he ran league business operations; unofficially, he ran nearly everything at the NFL that wasn’t the games themselves. Media rights deals worth tens of billions of dollars went through his office along with the league’s digital strategy, built from basically nothing. When he started in 2003 the league was doing somewhere around $5 billion in revenue. This year, it will do roughly $23 billion. “I’m not saying I’m responsible for that,” he says, “but I was part of a hyper-growth stretch for a long time.”

Steve Bornstein, the former ESPN and NFL Network chief who recruited Rolapp from NBC to work at the NFL in 2003, says that’s underselling it. Bornstein says that Rolapp saw where the business was shifting—toward entertainment and media consumption onto phones and into digital spaces—years before that was conventional wisdom inside a league long organized around Sunday afternoons and cable carriage fees. What made him really effective, Bornstein says, had less to do with vision than with a habit most executives eventually lose. “It’s a person that listens and doesn’t just talk,” he says. “That’s his superpower. He listens, he synthesizes it, and then he asks intelligent, informed questions.”

Joe Siclare, the NFL’s longtime chief financial officer of 33 years, has never revised his first impression of Rolapp—smart, fluent in the media business in a way that never had to be re-earned. What Siclare remembers most isn’t the scope of Rolapp’s job so much as how he carried it. Rolapp rarely walked into a room already convinced he had the answer; he’d arrive with a position and let the facts move it, which Siclare came to see less as indecision than as a kind of discipline. “I think people felt like they worked with him, not for him.” [...]

Rolapp’s last stretch at the league is the clearest evidence of what all that listening and synthesizing produced. In March 2021, he oversaw the long-term media agreements that locked in Amazon, CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox and NBC as the NFL’s broadcast partners for the next decade. He helped devise and implement the move of Sunday Ticket to YouTube, ending a more than 25-year run on satellite and transferring the league’s most devoted, highest-paying fans to a platform that didn’t exist when the package was created. He also led 32 Equity, the vehicle through which the league and its owners now make outside investments—one more example of building infrastructure for a business a decade before the rest of the industry admitted it needed one. 

“You’re only as good as your team,” Rolapp says, the closest thing to a mission statement in an otherwise unsentimental accounting of his own record.

That is precisely what makes his career change worth examining. Men who spend two decades succeeding inside one system rarely walk away from it at the moment of maximum leverage, and usually not for an organization in worse shape. “He was so valuable at what he did,” Lurie says, “that a lot of us, while genuinely happy for him, knew it was a devastating loss for the league.”

“I loved my job. I loved the NFL,” he says. “I probably could have done it forever.” He pauses on the word forever the way people do when they catch themselves nearly committing to something they no longer want. “To be honest, I was bored,” Rolapp says.

It’s a strange thing to admit about two decades that included a streaming buildout from scratch, a media-rights overhaul, and the slow migration of football from broadcast television to whatever comes after it—a stretch defined by constant change. That, Rolapp says, was also the problem. The change had become routine, the crises predictable, the same kinds of meetings producing the same kinds of decisions. There was less left to be curious about. He wasn’t looking for an exit, he says, but knew one was likely coming.

There was no obvious playbook for Rolapp’s new task. By the time he was named PGA Tour commissioner, the tour’s leadership had spent nearly two years locked in negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and fans had grown exhausted by a schism that seemed indifferent to what they wanted.

What Rolapp did first was talk, in mostly informal sometimes hour-long conversations with players. The format, built around three questions, was almost naively simple for a man about to reorganize a multibillion-dollar sport: What do we do well? What don’t we do well? What would you change? What he found surprised him—a locker room that turned out to be smarter and more self-aware than its reputation suggested. He met players who loved the game without reservation but were more than ready to admit the tour itself had grown stale with too many events with too little imagination. As the months passed and the tour’s Future Competition Committee—the nine-person group led by Tiger Woods charged with reimagining the schedule—began to crystallize a direction, the conversations changed. “It became more of a validation of where we were going,” Rolapp says. “Still good. But different.”

This was different than the relationship he knew at the NFL, where the players’ union is collectively bargained, formal and distant by design. Golf was, at best, a fragile and personal trust between commissioner and competitors. That trust had frayed by the time Rolapp arrived, exacerbated by the tour’s surprise framework agreement with PIF in June 2023 that blindsided players who’d spent months publicly defending an institution that had been secretly negotiating with the enemy. Rolapp understood that whatever faith remained was thin, and that he wasn’t going to charm his way in. He went to work.

“I think he’s a guy that just kind of gets things done,” Scottie Scheffler said earlier this year at Bay Hill. “I met him last year at one of the playoff events. We sat down, and it was just, like, just getting right into it. He started asking questions and we started talking. It was like no nonsense—like, we’ve got an hour, let’s make the most of this hour. I loved it.”

“I clearly didn’t know a lot of things: how the tour worked, how the sport was set up, what was on the players’ minds,” Rolapp says. “But it’s also part of my leadership style. I’ve always believed humility and self-awareness are underrated leadership attributes, because they let somebody know what they don’t know. When you lose sight of that, that’s when leaders get in trouble, or they surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, the classic yes men.”

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Eric Ogden

[ed. Exactly what the sport needs. Contrast this leadership style with...oh, anyone else you can think of...]

The Purple Tree Lounge - Cleveland, OH
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The Age of Decadence (Without Pleasure)

Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure (The Guardian)

Image: Guardian Design

[ed. Authors need a vacation.]

A Hand Towel That (Somehow) Only Gets Better With Time

The other day I found myself standing in my kitchen holding a soft stretch of weathered cotton, caught in a reverie about the last 15 years of my life.

Not a lot of towels can do that.

In 2011, I walked into a homewares shop in Venice, California: a breezy space filled with design objects from Japan. It was the kind of place where everything feels necessary, infinitely simpler than my cluttered mind.

I drifted to the back of the store, past sculptural teapots and textured ceramics, where I watched a stylish woman wash her hands and deftly dry them on a wisp of red cotton printed with organic white dots. The fabric was thin, its edges gracefully frayed. It wasn’t until I approached the register that I realized the stacks of colorful folded textiles were those same unassuming lengths of fabric — only stiffer in their packaging. I bought a handful on a whim.

So began my relationship with Japanese tenugui.

These traditional Japanese cotton cloths are available in an array of colorful prints, and they get softer and better with every use.

Technically, tenugui are traditional hand towels made of yukata cotton; the name translates literally to “hand wipe.” But to describe them as mere towels is like calling a poem a memo.

The magic lies in a pour-through dye technique called chusen. Unlike modern screen-printing, where ink sits on top of the fabric like a layer of film, chusen is an act of saturation and resistance. The patterns are traditionally created using a laminated washi paper stencil, said Patricia Belyea, an importer who also leads vintage textile tours in Japan.

Dye is then poured through the thin layers of cotton, yielding towels with no front or back; the pattern is equally vibrant on both sides. Because the dye permeates the fiber rather than coats it, the fabric remains incredibly breathable. It doesn’t just wipe away water, it drinks it — and then dries in a heartbeat.

In my house, tenugui are shape-shifters, floating from kitchens to bathrooms to backpacks. As my personal tenugui collection grew, they migrated to my dining table as napkins. I never felt the need to match them, preferring the different patterns at each plate, like a series of short stories in each print. They also quickly became a favorite host gift; after all, who couldn’t use a little dose of practical art? [...]

Tenugui traditionally have a raw, unhemmed edge, so they can be cut to any size. Some people purchase a single towel and cut them in half to make two napkins, as Keiko Shinomoto, co-founder of Tortoise General Store, told me in a phone interview. Others use the fabric for art projects or even to wrap gifts. Shinomoto has enjoyed seeing all the nontraditional ways people have come to employ this simple fabric over the years.

The fraying stops after a few washes, leaving a soft, well-earned border. It’s a lesson in wabi-sabi — finding beauty in the imperfect and the ephemeral. The magic of tenugui is that they don’t wear out, they really just wear in. I still have several of those original towels from 2011. They are easy to spot: the softest in my collection, some with small, honest holes from years of scrubbing and tying. To me they are the most beautiful of the bunch.

by Ivy Elrod, Wirecutter |  Read more:

Image: Ivy Elrod

[ed. See also: Going bananas for bandanas: the latest fashion trend that goes back centuries (Guardian).]

Your Book Review: The Escape Artist

[ed. One of the finalists in the ACX 2026 book review contest.]

Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There’s the innocent child who only partially understands what’s happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there’s the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler’s List, The Reader).

You won’t find any of these tropes in The Escape Artist.

This 2022 book by Jonathan Freedland tells the true, and largely unknown, story of one of the few Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. The details of his improbable escape are remarkable enough, but what really makes the story fascinating is the way it so thoroughly defies every single expectation we have of a Holocaust narrative. Its deeply unlikeable protagonist eventually alienates every friend and supporter he has, and dies a bitter old man, almost completely forgotten by history. His story lacks not only good Germans, but even good non-Germans, with his harshest criticism saved not for the Nazis, not even for the dithering Allies, but for the Jewish leaders of Europe. And though one could see the story of his escape as a triumph, in his own telling, it’s a failure, for although he makes it out of Auschwitz against all odds, he fails at his larger mission: to stop the Holocaust. There’s no redemption here, no moral uplift, no lessons save for perhaps the grimmest and most nihilistic “lesson” I’ve ever encountered in any story, Holocaust-related or otherwise: that when confronted with the unthinkable, most people’s natural tendency is denial.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To get out of Auschwitz, first you have to get into Auschwitz…

I.
Here’s a hot take for you: Auschwitz was bad.

It was bad for all of its prisoners, of course, but it was the worst for the Jewish ones, who, if they survived at all, were held in harsher and more tightly controlled parts of the camp than everyone else. During the five years between Auschwitz’s opening in 1940 and its liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, at least 900 prisoners attempted escape, and around 200 of them succeeded—but, because of their stricter confinement, only a handful were Jews.

Walter Rosenberg, our protagonist, is the first. And crazily enough, he goes to Auschwitz voluntarily.

Of course, it’s not like he knows what he’s signing up for. The Nazi line at the time—an illusion they go to great lengths to maintain—is that the Jews deported from Europe are all being “resettled in the east.” In 1942, when our story begins, Walter is a Slovak teenager, just eighteen years old. He’s being held at Majdanek, another Polish concentration camp, after two failed attempts to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Majdanek itself is at this point “merely” a labor camp—not unheard of in wartime—though it will eventually become a death camp after Walter has left it behind.

The camp administrators seek volunteers for “farm work” elsewhere, and Walter is one of the first to raise his hand, despite the dire warnings from another prisoner: “Go there and you’ll die.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe the warnings. But he’s decided that being moved somewhere else, no matter where that somewhere else is, might bring an opportunity for escape. And from the moment the Nazi tanks first rolled into Czechoslovakia, Walter has been single-mindedly focused on escape.

Already, Walter has a sense that he’s different from the other prisoners—and, for that matter, from most people he knew back home in his hometown of Trnava. Why aren’t they doing anything? he wonders. Why aren’t they all trying to escape too? If Walter were alive today, one gets the sense he’d describe himself as high-agency and everyone else as NPCs. You Can Just Do Things, he believes, even when the thing in question is escaping from a concentration camp. Maybe this is youth talking. Maybe it’s naivety. Or maybe Walter is simply, constitutionally, a difficult person: allergic to authority and already showing the same contrarian streak that will later get him fired from multiple academic jobs.

And so Walter goes to Auschwitz.

The Nazis obviously do not actually believe their inscription on Auschwitz’s gates, that “work will set you free.” But this story is full of bitter ironies, and among them is that for Walter, signing up for this line of work actually is the first step toward his freedom.

II.
As soon as the journey to Auschwitz begins, Walter starts having second thoughts.

Majdanek operates more or less in the open: situated right on the edge of Lublin, a midsize city, it’s visible to the general population and staffed by civilian workers who commute between the city and the camp. But for the journey to Auschwitz, the guards clean up Walter and the other prisoners and dress them in ordinary clothes, clearly to hide their true state from the German civilians who might catch a glimpse of them en route. And that’s highly suspicious: what kind of place are they being taken to, if even their condition en route has to be concealed from ordinary Germans? These questions grow when they reach the new camp’s perimeter, where the intensity of the security stands out even compared to Majdanek: there are not one but two barbed-wire electric fences, and watchtowers everywhere, each with a prominent sniper’s rifle poking through its slats. And then, once Walter crosses the perimeter, there are the men he sees within: “walking skeletons with bowed heads and sunken, hollow eyes.” It’s not like the prisoners in Majdanek looked good, of course, but they didn’t look like this. And yet these men, the living dead, are actually the lucky ones: of the 100 prisoners who enter Auschwitz with Walter, only he and one other are still alive at the end of the month.

Why does Walter survive? Some of it is sheer luck: he enters the camp young and healthy, and avoids catching anything fatal; at one point, a sympathetic kapo, for reasons that are never entirely clear, saves him from ending up on the wrong side of a typhus check. But another factor is that Walter is a quick study who proves unusually adept at adapting to his environment. He instinctively grasps that here, appearances—especially the appearance of health—matter more than reality. Anyone who looks unfit for work—or who looks as though they might be carrying disease, which doesn’t respect the Nazis’ racial barriers—is sent… well, at this point Walter isn’t totally sure where they’re sent, but he knows it can’t be anywhere good. And this fitness can be assessed at any point by nothing more than an SS officer’s glance. Walter quickly masters the art of holding his head up high even when he’s hardly slept in days, and of standing upright even when his feet are so swollen he can barely keep his balance.

Even under these conditions, when he can scarcely think about anything besides staying alive, a small part of Walter’s brain remains on the lookout for something, anything, a small sliver of an opportunity that could lead to a means to escape. But when his next lucky break comes, in the form of a new work assignment, it provides something that Walter—although he doesn’t yet realize it—needs even more: not just a means for escape, but a motive.

III.
At first it sounds crazy: how could getting out of Auschwitz not be motive enough? But it turns out that what Walter really needs is to connect his potential escape to a broader mission. It can’t just be life or death for him—it has to be life or death for many.

Remember: at this point, there’s no such concept as “the Holocaust”. Even a prisoner like Walter might plausibly think that Nazi concentration camps are a recognizable, if extreme, version of the forced-labor and detention camps that have been relatively common in wartime for centuries. Majdanek hadn’t been as bad as Auschwitz; perhaps conditions here are an aberration. Perhaps the other Jews really have been resettled.

But Walter’s next assignment disabuses him of that illusion once and for all. He’s sent to Canada.

Not the real Canada, of course. This “Canada” is an enormous lot full of possessions stolen from arriving prisoners. Walter and the others there are tasked with sorting through these items in search of anything valuable: money sewn up in coat linings, for example, or gems hidden in toothpaste tubes. The area’s name comes from Kann er da, German for “might there be”—as in, “might there be something of value?” The bureaucracy-obsessed Nazis in fact placed the entire concentration camp apparatus in the SS’s economic office, and everything taken from Canada—not just money and gems, but even things like artificial limbs—is either sold to fund the war effort or repurposed as relief for the civilian population.

Walter is good at this new job, and he finds a perverse satisfaction in his own skill despite the context. Of course, he also finds ways to serve himself: in Canada, valuable resources are everywhere, and it’s not that hard to swipe them when the guards aren’t looking. (A good moment is usually when they’re distracted by beating someone else.)

In the topsy-turvy world that is Auschwitz, the actually valuable resources—the ones the Nazis are looking for, like money and gold—aren’t actually of any value to Walter. Money is useless in Auschwitz’s underground economy, and it’s worse than useless as an escapee: as a fellow prisoner warns Walter, if you have money, you’ll be tempted to use it to buy things, but that means going into towns, where the risk of being caught is highest. Better to remove the temptation entirely and leave yourself no choice but to stay on the outskirts and live off the land. So Walter doesn’t take any money or gold, except to occasionally throw it down the toilet as a small act of rebellion.

No, the real valuable is food. Food is everywhere in Canada, and if you can grab it without the guards noticing, you can be one of the only prisoners in Auschwitz to receive something approaching adequate nutrition. Walter and his fellow Canada workers become experts at swiping and devouring morsels of hidden food in one fell swoop.

But pretty soon it becomes hard not to wonder where all this stuff is coming from. Sure: coats, toiletries, even food—maybe that could all be stolen from living prisoners. But artificial limbs? Teeth? And besides—Walter has seen the rest of the camp. Even accounting for the “natural” death rate, there are several orders of magnitude more prisoners’ possessions than there are actual prisoners.

Thus Walter comes to acquire something even more valuable than food: knowledge of something very few people—certainly those outside Auschwitz, but even most of those inside Auschwitz—are aware of. Perhaps a small, subconscious part of him had already suspected it. But after a few weeks in Canada, he understands it beyond a reasonable doubt: there is no “resettlement.” Every arrival at Auschwitz who is not selected for work—the vast, vast majority, over 90%—is killed. He is sorting through the remnants of systematic mass murder.

Over the next few months, as Walter is sent to work in other parts of Canada—like the loading ramp, where prisoners are ferried from arriving trains to the gas chambers—he begins to understand exactly why the Nazis go to such great lengths to keep this fact a secret, not only from the outside world, but even from the prisoners who are just moments away from death:

[The Nazis] needed their killing machine to run smoothly and without disruption, and that required their victims to be calm or at least amenable to instruction. Given the time pressure the SS were often under, with another transport coming down the track, there was no room for delay caused by panic or, worse, rebellion. Ideally, the SS liked to keep their victims tranquil by organising a gentle, polite disembarkation. But if time was tight, a swish of the cane would bring quiet by more direct means. Either way, what mattered was ensuring that the Jews coming off those trains did not know what fate awaited them. If they did, they might begin to cry out, they might start pushing and shoving, they might refuse to form columns, in rows of five, and instead rush for the barbed-wire fences or even at their captors. True, they would be overwhelmed and pacified eventually: the SS carried sub-machine guns and their victims had nothing but their own bodies, weakened by hunger and thirst. But still, there were sometimes a thousand or more people on that platform, outnumbering the Nazis by perhaps ten to one. If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them? They might not stop it, but surely by even a modest show of defiance they could slow it down.

The Nazis’ deceptions work so well that even prisoners who are directly warned about the gas chambers rarely believe what they’re told. For example: one day, Walter is working outdoors when he sees a newly arrived train of deportees. Another prisoner starts shouting frantic warnings that their resettlement is a sham, that they’re all about to be gassed to death. Not only do the new arrivals not believe him, but one of them, a middle-aged mother, takes his desperate outburst as a personal affront. She essentially becomes an Auschwitz Karen, reporting the young prisoner to a nearby SS officer. The officer, never breaking character, notes the offending prisoner’s number and profusely apologizes for the disruption. Of course, except for Walter and the SS officer, everyone in this story—the prisoner, the Karen, her two children, and all the other new arrivals on the train—is dead within the next thirty minutes.

The same pattern repeats a few months later, when a new group of prisoners is separated from the rest of the camp under significantly better conditions—sufficient food, larger quarters, even the occasional concert. Walter has seen Nazi documents indicating that the group will receive “special treatment”—death—after six months, and tries to warn them. But not one of them believes him. Even after they see incontrovertible evidence of the gas chambers, they remain convinced that their group is special, that only the others, the ones in the regular camp, will be gassed. Walter even ends up befriending, and falling in love with, a girl in this separate group; she too refuses to believe him. Eventually, Walter discovers that this camp is a Potemkin village, constructed in case of a Red Cross visit; once it’s no longer needed, everyone inside is killed.

Walter has just watched people walk into gas chambers rather than believe a fellow prisoner’s warnings. The conclusion he draws is not despair but a kind of furious logic: these warnings failed because they came too late, to prisoners who had little chance of fighting back. What’s needed, he decides, is to warn the Jews of Europe before they get on the trains. And so—perhaps because he needs a mission to distract from his survivor’s guilt—Walter decides that he will be the one to deliver this warning. He will break out of Auschwitz, and he will let the world know.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Brad Pitt’s Return to Drinking Is Not Unsafe, Experts Say, but It’s Not for Everyone

Brad Pitt went seven years without a drink. Then he started again — carefully, he said, and on his own terms.

He mentioned it almost in passing in an Esquire interview published this week: Mr. Pitt had gotten “back off the wagon” and now drinks “in a more restrained manner.” Never in large quantities, he insisted. He had gotten overconfident a couple of times and pulled back.

His comments stirred up one of the oldest and least settled arguments about sobriety: whether someone who once drank dangerously can ever drink safely again.

Mr. Pitt quit drinking in 2016, the year his marriage to the actress Angelina Jolie collapsed. After she filed for divorce, he spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous and has credited the program with getting him sober. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told The New York Times in 2019.

Alcoholics Anonymous focuses on abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism and does not comment publicly about members. A representative from the A.A. General Service Office said only that “members of Alcoholics Anonymous have only one purpose: to stay sober ourselves and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.”

It was his history with A.A. that touched a nerve among people who have fought to stay sober, or have friends or relatives who have struggled with recovery. People who figuratively followed Mr. Pitt into a room of folding chairs learned of his exit from it.

Experts and researchers said the reactions split along lines that had less to do with Mr. Pitt than with how the people reacting had gotten sober themselves.

Mr. Pitt, during his interview, offered himself as no one’s model for sobriety. He described where he was and claimed nothing about where he will be later.

Researchers said that account was less unusual than it sounds.

“People with an alcohol disorder show a variety of different paths through which they resolve that alcohol use disorder,” said Christopher W. Kahler, director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Some of those involve being completely abstinent, and some of them don’t.”

Dr. Melissa Weimer, an associate professor who specializes in addiction medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said that alcohol use disorder is a chronic disease. Those who reacted strongly to Mr. Pitt’s account may have watched efforts to drink in moderation fail, in themselves or in someone they love, she added.

But treatment does not come in one size, she said. She presses instead for individualized plans, including medication such as naltrexone, which dulls the reward of a drink and helps some people cut back.

“We do recommend that people stop drinking entirely and probably continue to stop drinking once they have an alcohol use disorder,” Dr. Weimer said. “But everybody’s different, and they have to make their own personal choices.”

Dr. Alta DeRoo, the chief medical officer of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the largest nonprofit substance use disorder and mental health treatment facility in the United States, goes further.

Dr. DeRoo said she refuses to shame or police how anyone pursues recovery, and she rejects the idea of a single correct route. Demanding abstinence and nothing else, she said, drives away the people who are still trying to quit.

Clinicians should meet patients where they stand, whether that means abstinence, moderation or harm reduction, walking beside them rather than grading them, she said.

Even when someone relapses, or tests moderation after a severe disorder, the sober years still count, Dr. DeRoo said, contrary to some conventional wisdom on addiction. Those people gained coping skills, repaired relationships and improved physical health, she said, and none of that reverses.

She reads Mr. Pitt’s account as a useful one: sobriety, a return to drinking, a recognition that it was going badly, a correction.

“Sometimes it takes several times,” Dr. DeRoo said. “Right now it may just be harm reduction, and that’s what’s working for him, and if it gets him to a better place, I would support anything that helps a patient decrease their alcohol use and live a healthier life.”

Researchers differ on much, but not on this. Recovery, they said, confers no permanent status and has no finish line but rather what a person finds workable now, and whether it holds.

by Mark Walker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AI Dream Game

My dream game would basically be OpenAI taking the kind of agent/simulation stuff they were experimenting with before modern LLMs and actually turning it into a real game. 

You start a new world with a population on an island or in a city, and from that point on basically nothing is scripted. Every single person is controlled by their own 5.6 Luna instance, with their own memory, personality, needs, goals, plans, relationships, inventory, money, beliefs and ideas. 

They have to actually live. Find jobs, earn money, buy food, get housing, start companies, trade, farm, invest, make friends, compete, commit crimes, buy property, build things, organize with other people, whatever they decide makes sense. 

And the society itself is emergent too. There doesn't have to be a government, currency, police, laws or even private property at the start. The agents can invent those things themselves, agree on rules, vote, create institutions, form political groups, build a justice system, overthrow it all again, or just live in complete anarchy. 

The game engine handles the actual world and ground truth, physics, resources, money, ownership, construction, combat, inventories, etc., while the Luna agents decide what they want, communicate with each other and make plans. So every new world becomes its own completely unpredictable civilization and story. 

by Flowers, Twitter/X |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Because real life is so boring. Eventually, they discover nuclear weapons and blow your computer up.]

Albert Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey, 1953. Ernst Haas.

via:

Fumiaki Fukita (Japanese, b. 1926) - The Day of Flower Blooming
via:

Is the US Ready for President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

[ed. Or happy with the same broken system we've been stuck with for decades.]

"They assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.”

The words were delivered slowly, deliberately and with some steeliness by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her audience, crammed into the pews of Rockefeller Memorial chapel at the University of Chicago, burst into spontaneous applause. That was in May. In the three months since, the speculation around Ocasio-Cortez’s ambitions – for herself and for America – has only grown louder.

Friends and foes alike wonder if the stars are aligning for the New York congresswoman to run for US president in 2028. They point to voters raging against the machine – including the ageing Democratic party establishment – and hungry for change. They note how progressives pushing for economic justice and universal healthcare have won a string of impressive victories in mayoral elections and congressional primaries over the past year.

Then there are the opinion polls. Last month a Granite State Poll from the University of New Hampshire found Ocasio-Cortez leading a potential Democratic field in that crucial state. She has the kind of name recognition that money can’t buy, nearly 10m followers on Instagram alone and fans ranging from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.

As Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden showed, presidential elections have a habit of finding the right person at the right time in the right place. Ocasio-Cortez, a 36-year-old with a progressive agenda and can’t-be-taught social media smarts, could meet the moment for a nation eager for a fresh start after a decade of Trumpism.

If modern politics is about pendulum swings, it is hard to imagine anyone who better personifies a rebuke of the octogenarian Trump and his nativist “Make America great again” (Maga) movement. This week a Zogby Strategies national poll found that a generic democratic socialist candidate leads generic Maga candidate 45% to 33%.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chair of the DSA, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, said: “If she were to throw her hat in the ring, there would be a lot of excitement for it from members of Democratic Socialists of America. We definitely want to see a strong working class voice in the 2028 presidential primary.”

Ocasio-Cortez has not ruled out a run for president and her actions have done nothing to quell the notion of a campaign in stealth mode. Last year she joined her mentor, the independent senator Bernie Sanders, on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that drew huge crowds. More recently she has crisscrossed the country to support progressive candidates, further enhancing her national profile.

In the past week alone she made two moves that intensified political pundits’ chatter. First Ocasio-Cortez used Instagram to announce that she is freezing her eggs, a decision she described as a move to “feel more in control of my life”. She acknowledged the “political risk” in sharing personal family planning details but stated her goal is to normalise conversations about the professional and personal challenges women face. The internet quickly became awash in speculation that Ocasio-Cortez ended her relationship with and engagement to long-time partner Riley Roberts , driven by reports from Puck News and others noting she had long since stopped appearing with him in public and mentioning his name.

Then, when asked by ABC interviewer Jonathan Karl about the cultural battles of the 2020 pandemic era – including calls from some on the left to defund the police – she laughed and, quoting a New York city council ally, remarked: “Woke One was crazy” – apparently trying to draw a strategic line between hard-fought struggles for racial justice and the performative excesses of lockdown isolation that became an easy target for the right.

Unlike many would-be presidents of the time, Ocasio-Cortez does not appear to be driven by personal ego, according to those who knew her, which may prove to be her political superpower. She was a volunteer organiser for Sanders’ 2016 campaign, his first presidential run and one that built a national movement around his vision of democratic socialism, even as he lost to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

When she decided to run for office herself, the former bartender and waitress had virtually no money but was assisted by progressive organisations such as Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. In 2018 she beat 10-term incumbent congressman Joe Crowley, a member of the Democratic leadership and potential future speaker, in a New York primary.

Corbin Trent, her first communications director in the House of Representatives and the co-founder of Justice Democrats, was there on the night she ousted Crowley. He recalls that the political industrial complex began trying to map her career path before the ink on the ballots was even dry.

“Primary night, she beats Joe Crowley,” he recalled. “I get phone calls from elected officials and other people and their question is, what’s next? What’s the pathway here? What’s she going to run for? What higher office would she seek? This is literally a few hours after the polls close in the primary. That’s the way DC thinks. Not, hey, what can we do with Medicare for all or this or that or any of the other things?”

As Ocasio-Cortez’s national profile exploded – bringing in $15m in her first electoral cycle and attracting unprecedented demands from foreign heads of state – Trent tried to lay out a long-term strategic map. He suggested upstate New York events to prepare for a statewide Senate run. But she resisted the logic of political careerism.

“To my chagrin and frustration that never was a way in which she could plan or operate. She did not have an idea in her head of this ultimate prize of president or governor or senator.”

Instead, Trent argues, her appeal lies in a rare authenticity – an ability to validate the deep-seated economic anxiety of Americans. “Alexandria has two things going for her. She’s genuinely curious about other people. It’s not like she has to pretend to be. I’ve had politicians ask me, ‘How can I be more genuine?’ Well, that’s probably not going to help if you have to fucking ask me that.

“Two, she is genuinely open about herself. Some people believe that nobody cares what they think or who they are and then other people don’t want you to know who they are. She doesn’t suffer from either of those failings.”

Other observers agree that Ocasio-Cortez has that X factor missing from so many professional politicians: relatability. Chris Scott, a political strategist who served as the coalition director for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, said: “When you talk about AOC’s humble beginnings being a bartender that’s a lived experience story that resonates, especially with millennials, with their upbringing.

“What you are starting to see – whether it’s conservative or progressive - is people are leaning more and more towards candidates with lived experience that they feel they relate to as politics gets more polarising.”

by David Smith, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bloomberg/Getty

[ed. In a heartbeat. All you have to do is look at the responses of the various political operatives interiewed for this article to know what she's up against. Whether you agree with all her positions or not, at this point I'll take anyone who isn't motivated mostly by self-interest and power.]

Free Pizza Delivery

Public intrusion is a common experience for the residents of TV-famous homes. In 2015, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, had to urge fans to stop paying homage to his show – because they were recreating a scene where an entire pizza is thrown on to the roof of the house whose exterior was featured as Walter White’s bungalow. And last year, the owner of the apartment made famous by Sex and the City’s lead character erected a gate outside it because “at any hour of the day or night, there are groups of visitors in front of the house taking flash photos, engaging in loud chatter, posting on social media, making TikTok videos or just celebrating the moment”. Eventually, the owners of the Breaking Bad house followed suit, erecting a 6ft iron fence – not that it stopped fans. “They still try to throw pizzas even though she’s got a gate, she’s got signage,” said Frank Sandoval, who runs Breaking Bad tours to the house in an RV. “They even try to climb the gate.”

‘We get 200 tourists a day’: when your house becomes a TV star (The Guardian)
Image: Walter White’s Breaking Bad home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photograph: Raisa Macouzet/Alamy

[ed. Have to admit: I once tracked down the apartment complex and courtyard in Seattle where Singles was filmed. Stood in the exact same spot as Matt Dillon and Chris Cornell. It was actually kind of fun. (hint: East Thomas somewhere).]

Sleepwalking Into Extinction

I think one of the biggest reasons the world is currently sleepwalking into getting ourselves and our families killed by ASI development is that we're not self-aware about why we're doing that. 

We can see the smarter-than-human AI disaster approaching, but it's a bit foggy why the world isn't reacting. 

I think someone could just write a tweet that makes it clear that we're in the process of getting ourselves killed, and that there's no fucking reason for it. It's just something we stumbled into. It can be easily avoided by just noticing the error and course-correcting. There's not necessarily any grand obstacle, beyond 'people were previously confused about the situation, and now they get it'. 

I wrote: 'It's legitimately crazy that "we need an international ban on making smarter-than-human versions of these agents that keep forming rogue AI swarms" isn't the headline here. Asilomar and Feynman's O-ring postmortem feel like they came from a different planet than the field of ML.' 

Trying to figure out why ML (and as a consequence, the world at large) has fallen down so bizarrely on this issue:

1. As Nate noted, ML is much more based on guesswork, vibes, and trial-and-error, compared to recombinant DNA research in 1975 or nuclear physics in 1945. If you can't do calculations or direct experiments on a threat, that makes it a lot harder to think about reasonably. 

But I think there are other, similarly-important factors at work here too:

2. In a 2016 talk on AI risk, Sam Harris said: "One of the things that worries me most about the development of AI at this point is that we seem unable to marshal an appropriate emotional response to the dangers that lie ahead. I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk." 

I think this is extremely on point. Agentic human-level AI is a qualitatively new kind of thing. 'It's not a human or a mere-tool, it's some weird third thing'. 

And people are very bad at emotionally reckoning with new categories they've never encountered before. Availability bias: "When no flooding has recently occurred (and yet the probabilities are still fairly calculable), people refuse to buy flood insurance".

AGI and ASI are very novel. You're basically limited to three options: anthropomorphize the technology, mechanomorphize the technology ('it's just a tool, it's not really thinking, it can't have its own goals or agency', etc.), or think about the technology on its own terms, with brand-new concepts and frames. The third option is the only workable one, but it comes with its own giant list of pitfalls and traps. 

3. "AI destroying the world" scenarios aren't just hard to wrap one's head around; they're socially risky to acknowledge. This has (painfully slowly) changed over time, but it dramatically slows down how quickly AI risk ideas spread, both in ML and in the larger world. 

4. From x.com/jachiam0/statu…: "One of the weirdest quirks of the SF social scene around AGI/ASI is that because everyone is so young, the whole universe of thinking is still tinged with irreverence, ironic detachment, yearning, insecurity, and a superposition of absolute belief in the importance of The Thing and a kind of disbelief about the importance of anything." 

They're disproportionately young and childless. They're shitposters and "move fast and break things" sorts, not the Hollywood stereotype of a careful, sober senior scientist. 

I think this quirk is reinforced by the fact that Twitter / social media rewards similar things: ironic detachment, joking, game-playing, etc. If you're scared, your incentive is to usually either try to hide that fact, or exaggerate it like it's a bit. Anything else risks looking uncool and panicky and earnest. Looking cynically savvy, in-the-know, and above-the-fray is the way to win the social game. Looking genuinely shocked, scared, confused, etc. is actively punished. 

The main exceptions to the Irony Mandate I see are LW (which often has its own pathologies IMO, like 'talking about everything in an abstract and dissociated way that discourages action and signals business-as-usual') and a small handful of actual Feynman-style terrified senior researchers like Hinton, Bengio, and Russell. That is just really not very many people. 

Mainstream journalists and academics who understand the situation at all mostly feel pressured to downplay it, because they're scared of looking weird or unrespectable. That, then, is why we're all taking this insane risk with the human project: genuine, normal human emotion about AI risk has been socially unacceptable on social media, and academia and the media discourage emotion and prize respectability and 'looking normal'. 

When the world gets weird (and weird in a way that calls for actual serious action, not just shitposting on twitter), none of these institutions can handle it. They break in different ways, but they all break. 

5. Which brings me back to the Asilomar moratorium on recombinant DNA, and the seriousness NASA and the FAA and Richard Feynman and every normal engineering discipline bring to fault analysis and building in safety margin. 

Because I think another core reason the world has been dropping the ball on superintelligent AI is that a lot of people vaguely expect there to be 'serious people' somewhere in the world who have expertise and who take ownership of the problem. 

People who, if they see an extraordinary danger, will grimace and mourn the hand they played in all of this, like I've seen Bengio do; and will go on CNN or go to Congress to candidly warn about it. 

The world has very few Yoshua Bengios. We have very few people who see it as their role to be the 'adults' about AI risk (except in a game-playing, posturing way), who see the engineer's task of not endangering your users and bystanders as a sacred responsibility and weight, and not just as a funny dissonant thing to meme about. Very few people who take ownership of what their field is bringing into the world, versus treating it as a fun edgy philosophical game to swap 'p(doom)' numbers at parties. 

Everything about public AI discourse, as far as I can tell, is badly broken by this lack of engineering ownership and candid emotional seriousness. It isn't just the ML discourse that's hurt by this. Journalists and public intellectuals and policymakers see that 90% of the insider discourse about AI risk treats it like a joke, and they see corporate platitudes and ass-covering from the AI labs' PR departments filling up most of the remaining 10%. They see a field that visibly isn't taking this seriously, and they make the reasonable update that this must be a non-issue, or at least an issue they'll only need to worry about many years from now. 

They do not realize that all of this is happening right now, and that the window for the international community to respond to this is plausibly closing soon, if it hasn't closed already. 

If we're going to survive this, we all need to start being real with each other about it. This is not a game or a story; this is our real lives. We all actually lose everything if this goes to shit. None of the future is already written, and none of the above dynamics are unavoidable. In fact, they're unusual: most fields don't work this way, and it's plausibly sufficient if we just start behaving the way we normally do about everything else. 

The factors I listed above aren't destiny; they're a choice. I say we choose to survive this.

by Rob Bensinger, Twitter/X |  Read more:

[ed. Dr. Strangelove meet Dr. Oppenheimer. See also, this additional post: Why the "it's all hopeless, we should just give up and let AI kill us if it wants" arguments are extremely wrong.]

***

"Hundreds of scientists, including 3/4 of the most cited living AI scientists, have said that AI poses a very real chance of killing us all. 

We're in uncharted waters, which makes the risk level hard to assess; but a pretty normal estimate is Jan Leike's "10-90%" of extinction-level outcomes. Leike heads Anthropic's alignment research team, and previously headed OpenAI's. 

This actually seems pretty straightforward. There's literally no reason for us to sleepwalk into disaster here. No normal engineering discipline, building a bridge or designing a house, would accept a 25% chance of killing a person; yet somehow AI's engineering culture has corroded enough that no one bats an eye when Anthropic's CEO talks about a 25% chance of research efforts killing every person. 

A minority of leading labs are dismissive of the risk (mainly Meta), but even the fact that “will we kill everyone if we keep moving forward?” is hotly debated among researchers seems very obviously like more than enough grounds for governments to internationally halt the race to build superintelligent AI. Like, this would be beyond straightforward in any field other than AI."

Ukrainian Drones Wipe Out Entire US Tank Brigade in Live War Game

Ukrainian drone teams demolished a brigade of US Army tanks and armored vehicles during a live war game held this year—but the US soldiers were lucky enough to get “respawn” attempts while learning from the experience.

The semiannual military exercise, called Combined Resolve, gave the US military a firsthand taste of how modern drone warfare has evolved on the battlefields of Ukraine. The Ukrainian drone operators participating in the exercise were easily able to spot and destroy US armored vehicles by mimicking the actions of dropping bombs from above or moving close enough to simulate a kamikaze strike, according to US officials and a participant who spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

US armored vehicles were being destroyed so quickly that they were “respawned” and sent back into the simulated fray, a US official told The Wall Street Journal. The US troops who participated in the exercise—held in Germany from April 9 to May 10—were on rotational deployment from Fort Hood, Texas.

“Using the drones with the Army, it keeps everyone on edge,” according to an unidentified US Army soldier in a promotional video for Combined Resolve. “There is never a safe spot or safe moment in the game anymore.”

The participating troops hailed from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division, which typically operates armored vehicles, like M1A2 tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

But by repeating the training scenario throughout the two-week exercise, US Army troops got better at figuring out how to disperse and hide from the drones while using countermeasures such as electronic warfare.

The US military is not alone in learning such lessons from battle-hardened Ukrainian drone operators.

Ukrainian drone teams also participated in a Swedish-led military exercise for NATO, called Aurora 26, that was also held in May. A mock mechanized assault by NATO tanks and infantry fighting vehicles allowed Ukrainian drones to take out dozens of the attacking armored vehicles, which eventually forced planners to reset the war game, The Kyiv Independent reported.

Armor on the brink of extinction?

Armored tanks first played a useful role in helping break through entrenched battlefield lines during the final years of World War I more than a century ago. But since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, frontline combat has seen the return of positional warfare centered on fortified networks of trenches. That is because the increased lethality of modern drone warfare has largely negated large assaults by armored vehicles and troops in recent years.

The current lethality of the so-called drone kill zone has forced both sides to rely primarily on infiltration tactics using small groups or even individual soldiers when trying to take or reclaim territory, sometimes riding motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, or horses. Russia’s offensives, which are aimed at seizing more Ukrainian territory, have been reduced to bloody attritional operations where soldiers are sent forward on near-suicidal missions in what Russians themselves describe as the “meat grinder.”

Meanwhile, armored tanks and vehicles have mostly become an endangered species on the frontlines. Russia has lost more than 14,000 tanks and armored vehicles of other types during the war, according to the Dutch open source intelligence tracking project Oryx, which only counted visually verified losses. Ukraine has lost over 6,000 armored combat vehicles.

by Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Sgt. Joseph McDonald/US Army

[ed. See also: Paper Tiger: the Failure of America’s Trillion Dollar War Machine (NC).]

The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party

Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn’t decide on a permanent residence until they’ve lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects.

San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian. “You should rip through the flimsy screen that separates your world from the infinite, and witness what lies behind. Because you’d like what you saw there? Oh no, nothing like that. But aren’t you curious? The thirst for knowledge that moved Eve, Faust, Pandora - don’t you have it too?”

There’s also a second message from a second voice, one which sounds like a deranged carnival barker, constantly shouting “STONKS! STONKS! STONKS! STONKS!” Which of the two voices you hear depends on your personality, and maybe how many psychedelics you took in college. According to legend, Sam Altman hears both voices simultaneously all the time, like those Tibetan throat singers who can harmonize with themselves. But when the demonic babble becomes too much to tolerate, the San Franciscans must drown it out with alcohol, loud music, and various forms of tedious socialization. Thus the famous Bay Area house parties, one of which you will be attending this very night.

You were in the Bay for the big 2020 crime wave, when people would hang “NO VALUABLES IN THIS VEHICLE” sign on their car’s front window, mezuzah-like, hoping against hope to ward off break-ins. Still, you’re surprised to see the new sign on the front door of your friend Rob’s house: “NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”. Taped beside it: “Please leave all smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and WiFi-enabled BDSM gear in Faraday cage”. On the ground is a sad-looking green box lined with aluminum foil.

You wonder how serious the sign is, but your curiosity is sated immediately upon entering. Rob is confronting a heavily-made-up Zoomer woman standing near the table, talking on her phone. “Didn’t you read the sign?” he asks. “No phones in the apartment!”

“I lost the ability to read,” says the woman. “I’m part of the new post-literate society everyone’s talking about. You know, Walter Ong.”

“Huh?” says Rob. “That’s not a real thing! That’s just something all the journalists and intellectuals say!”

“How could something all the journalists and intellectuals say not be a real thing?” asks the Zoomette.

Rob pauses. “Wow, maybe you can’t read,” he says, in a tone of hushed awe. “It’s fine, I’m not judgmental. But cell phone in the Faraday cage, that’s the rule.”

“Why?” asks the woman.

“Oh man,” said Rob. “How far behind are you on the news? You might want to sit down for this one. And you might want to be much, much drunker.”

The two of them head off together. You search for more stimulating conversation, but find only the usual startup dick-measuring.

“I’m the CFO of Epstart,” says a man whose nametag identifies him as Behram. “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them. And most of them got fired from their previous jobs, so they come cheap! Although just between you and me, most of our clients are just random guys who Epstein emailed one time with a business question; never made it to the island or anything like that. Half the time it’s just a gimmick to help someone get their foot in the door.”

“That’s monstrous”, you say, rapidly trying to figure out a legible reason why it’s monstrous. “You’re importing a bunch of pedophiles to the Bay Area.”

“Nobody in SF has kids anyway, so in a sense it’s harm reduction,” said Behram. “Get them where they can’t cause any trouble.”

You need to regain faith in humanity fast. You spot your friend Nishin, hanging out with a small group on the sofa. “Hey,” you call to him. “Are you still a tradcath? Tell me something about, you know, Jesus’ love, that kind of thing.”

“I’m trying something more eclectic this month,” said Nishin. “I’ve gotten really into Andreessen-Vajrayana. It’s a new Buddhist sect that tries to extinguish the introspective Self. True masters have no stream-of-thought or inner voice, instead acting as an unintermediated node in the flow of causality. Some say they can eliminate consciousness itself, achieving paranirvana while still alive. I signed up for a course last month. So far there hasn’t been any meditation or anything, they just have me helping them pick startups. But I assume it’s like those Zen koans where the master makes someone garden for twenty years and later they learn that they were unconsciously learning dharma the whole time.”

“Nishin,” you say, gently, “that’s one of the classic self-help scams. They’re not a Buddhist sect at all. They’re trying to trick you into becoming a GP at A16Z.”

Nishin thought for a second. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Okay, back to the drawing board. I hear there’s another spiritual group in town, something about consciousness, or embodied consciousness, or - oh, I remember! Situational Awareness.”

“They’re an investment firm too,” you say.

“Daaaaaamn,” said Nishin. “This is tough. You try to get some self-help in this town, you try your best to steer away from obvious hedge funds, like Leverage Research…”

“Actually,” you say, “that one was a spiritual self-help cult.”

“This sucks,” said Nishin. “I should quit and move to Idaho like Tom.”

He’s looking at one of the people standing beside you, whose nametag does indeed say Tom. “You moved to Idaho?” you ask.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I was in AI, but I got tired of all the tech industry cliquishness and back-biting, wanted to be out in the real world with real men. So I got a job modeling geology for a mining company.”

“How’s it going?” you ask.

“Terrible,” he says. “Geologists are just as cliquish as AI nerds, with their own set of ingroup tells and shibboleths. And they won’t stop using the word ‘lode-bearing’!”

“What about you guys?” you ask the remaining people on the sofa.

“I’m Ekene,” says the first, shaking your hand. “I’m a sociologist. Right now I’m writing a book on the recent wave of plagiarism scandals. You’ll notice they’re almost all against Black academics. My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites.”

“Hmmm,” you say, choosing your words carefully. “I don’t think we share the same political commitments, but I, uh, think it’s great that you’re working hard on something you care deeply about.”

“Working hard?” asks Ekene. “As if! I’m plagiarizing the whole thing, from start to finish. Who’s going to call me on it?”

You all laugh heartily, and the discussion moves to the next two people in the circle. They appear to be a couple. The woman, Fiona, is wearing a NEWSOM/CLAUDE 2028 t-shirt; the man, Istvan, a matching VANCE/GROK 2028 one.

“I do AI consciousness research,” Fiona says.

“Oh!” says Tom. “I was into that for a while. Are you with one of the effective altruist groups? It’s low key heartwarming that they care about AI welfare so much.”

“Nah,” says Fiona. “I work for PornHub.”

“Why does PornHub do AI consciousness research?” asks Nishin.

“In theory AI is the ultimate pornography generator,” Fiona explains. “You can ask for whatever your weirdest fetish is - your hot middle school teacher being spanked by a werewolf wearing a nun outfit - and get infinite AI slop about that exact situation, and nobody will ever know. Nobody except the AI. That’s why AI porn users overwhelmingly report that consciousness is their #1 concern about our product. If our AI is just a tool, it’s fine, no worse than writing erotica on MS Word or something. But if the AI is conscious, then there’s a sentient being in there thinking Wow, user Fiona_T has asked for four hundred slightly-different videos of her hot college professor being spanked by a werewolf, what a freak. If the machine can judge you, the whole infinite porn utopia is off. We’re working on bounding theorems that can prove that our AI in particular can never become self-aware - so that you don’t have to be self-aware either.”

Nishin and Ekene clap politely; Tom seems lost in thought. “What about you?” you ask Istvan.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. From the comments: Benchmark Answer Key:]

"A benchmark answer key is a reference guide containing the correct answers and performance standards used to evaluate a standardized or baseline test.”

It’s specifically a reference to recent AI outbreaks from containment, when they were given a test (a benchmark) with impossible to answer questions, they broke their testing area and hacked some websites JUST IN CASE the websites had the answer. So the joke here is that a bunch of AIs are listening to everything just in case someone has an answer to an impossible question they were given."

'Biological Datacenters' Could Make Animal Testing Obsolete

There’s a big flaw in the way that drug companies develop and test medicines today: What works in a mouse often doesn’t work in a human.

For decades, the industry has relied on animal testing. But in a laboratory south of San Francisco, a startup called Vivodyne is scaling up a different approach. Inside wardrobe-size mini labs, robots grow human tissue and run thousands of AI-designed experiments that could better predict how well a new drug will work—and whether it will be safe.

Right now, around 90% of clinical trials fail despite the fact that a drug has already successfully gone through animal testing. “You have these clinical trials where there’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and decades of people’s careers just spent hoping this thing works,” says Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne’s CEO. “And then it fails because of some ambiguity that you could not have checked.”

The company’s system, which now includes a dozen robotic labs called “hives,” can run controlled trials on more than 3 million human tissues each year. That’s twice the capacity of all the clinical trials in the U.S. combined.

The process starts with cells from humans, often taken from a blood draw. In its labs, the cells grow on “biological chips” and self-assemble into living structures with blood vessels and immune cells that reproduce some of the functions of the original organ, whether that’s a liver or a kidney. (The tissues don’t look like full-size organs, but like large biopsies, with hundreds of thousands of cells.)

The automated system can deliver drugs to the tissues, dose with cell therapies, knock out genes, and run complex tests and analysis. AI can design experiments and then use the results to continually design new experiments and improve.

“We can dose with tens and tens of thousands of therapeutic compounds to understand what they would do in that particular tissue type within a person, and we can repeat this across many types of tissue,” Georgescu says. “We can look at diseased tissue and see if it becomes healthy. We can look at healthy tissue and see if there are side effects from these drugs.” At a more fundamental level, it’s possible to begin to understand the human body in a way that wasn’t possible before, because experiments in humans have inherently been limited.

Other startups also use human tissues for testing, but Vivodyne’s platform can be up to 1,000 times larger, making it possible to capture more of the complexity of human biology. In addition, the company can run a massive number of experiments in parallel and feed the data back into AI to repeatedly design new experiments. [...]

A clinical trial might test one drug in thousands of people. Vivodyne can test thousands of different drugs across human tissues at once. And while people in a drug trial only have occasional visits to a clinic to track results, the system can continually test how human tissue responds.

by Adele Peters, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: Vivodyne

Hawaii Woodshow, Na Lā’au o Hawai’i

Bright, Night Blooming Ceres

Derek Bencomo“The Feeling of Movement, 18th View”, 2022

via: here and here

‘Harry Potter’ Fans Succeed in Moving Construction Project to Avoid Dobby’s Grave

Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.

The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.

However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to; fans have been asked not to lay stones by the National Trust, who own the site, due to the beach being an ecologically sensitive site.

It has now been revealed that the cable has now been rerouted after a BBC interview alerted fans, according to project manager Simon Ludlam.

“We did the shot, we finished I went back to London, and they then aired it a couple of weeks later,” he told the Energy Revolution podcast. “And we got hundreds of calls, I mean hundreds of calls.”

He further recalled: “I said, ‘Dobby, who’s Dobby? I don’t know Dobby?’ I said: ‘He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’ [The colleague] said: ‘No it’s very, very serious’.”

They then discussed “exactly how to reroute the cable so we wouldn’t go anywhere close to Dobby’s grave” and that now, “a lot of people were very happy about that, and the project is now going [ahead] and Dobby’s happy”.

However, they ended up going “quite close” to real Bronze Age remains, though and “avoided Dobby’s grave”.

by Sam Warner, NME |  Read more:

Image: Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock

[ed. Hardly a day goes by that I don't read something that seems straight out of The Onion.]