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From Nautilus: “It’s impossible to know exactly when each of the five mutations happened. When, deep in my marrow, one thing after another went awry, and divided my life. Like all people who have been ill, my life is split into Before and After. Did a mutation occur the summer Before, when my gallbladder inexplicably started to act up, when I got a surprisingly terrible case of hand-foot-mouth virus for an adult? Perhaps one occurred in college, silently changing my future while I took my first organic chemistry lab, being careless with a solvent. Maybe the first mutation occurred when I was 2 years old, wearing footie pajamas soaked in flame retardant. Is it possible, even, that the mutation happened generations before I was even born, perhaps when my grandmother worked in her family’s dry-cleaning shop, the chemicals triggering a change deep in one of her cells that eventually lead to her death, my father’s, and nearly mine?”

Astronomers say they have detected a sign of life on a distant planet

From the New York Times: “A team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae. “It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life. “This is a revolutionary moment,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.” The study was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

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Continue reading “A chemist investigates the potential causes of her leukemia”

From The Guardian: “Nobody can recall who first phoned the police on the morning of 4 September 1990, but everyone remembers the girl. Her body, hanging from a pine tree on a steep slope above the Spanish frontier town of Portbou, was visible to anyone looking up from the beach or across from the opposite hillside. She was barefoot, with grey-blue eyes and thick chestnut-brown hair. She wore blue dungarees over a turquoise green shirt. In these years before the Schengen agreement, guards were stationed on the French border but these officers were experts in immigration and smuggling, not violent deaths. Instead, Enrique Gómez, a 35-year-old investigator from the Guardia Civil police force was called in from the nearby city of Figueres to investigate. Carles Cereijo, an 18-year-old reporter who had just begun working with the local El Punt Avui newspaper, got to the scene before him. Cereijo had been woken by a call from a waiter friend working the breakfast shift at a cafe.

This philosopher didn’t think unluckiness existed until he met his wife

From New York: “Holly Davis didn’t believe in luck until she realized just how unlucky she was. Often, it was the little things. Reservations she made disappeared. Rides she booked never came. Someone else would fill out an annoying but vital online form without a hitch; the site would crash as soon as she tried. Her neighbors’ plants glowed a lustrous green while hers — same soil, same rain — shriveled with disease. Was this just adulthood, she wondered, to be waging an endless war against the everyday? The man who would eventually become her second husband didn’t think so, and he knew a thing or two about luck. He’d written a master’s thesis about it. His name was Lee John Whittington, and he didn’t believe in the salt-throwing, new-engagement-ring-buying sort of luck, either. At least in most cases he didn’t. Though he too laughed about it, hedged about it, he came to see his wife as the exception.”

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Continue reading “Her mysterious death in Spain is still unsolved 35 years later”

Writing about the government’s antitrust case against Meta is a little like putting on an old sweater — it’s comfortable and worn, but also has kind of a funky smell (maybe it’s best for everyone if I don’t continue with this metaphor). In any case, I have been writing about this topic off and on for more than half a decade now. I wrote about it for the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was the chief digital writer from 2017 to 2024) when the case was first launched in 2020, at the tail end of the first Trump administration. After a bunch of presentations from the Federal Trade Commission and a variety of opinions from Meta watchers and antitrust experts, the case was thrown out because Judge Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said the government failed to provide compelling evidence that Meta had a monopoly on the market for any kind of distinct market for something known as “social networking.”

I wrote about the case again in 2020 when it was revived by the Biden administration, based in part on arguments from antitrust theorist Lina Khan, who took over as the chairman of the FTC. At that point, Boasberg ruled that the government had met his test for showing that Meta had a monopoly on a distinct enough market for him to let the case proceed. At the time, he said that “while there are certainly bones one could pick with the FTC’s market-definition allegations, the Court does not find them fatally devoid of meat.” Meta tried to get the court to dismiss the case in 2022 for a variety of reasons, none of which had much substance, and then both sides basically said they needed more time to get their arguments in order and marshall all of the evidence, and that’s how it took three years before the case actually showed up in court.

During that time, of course, the US switched presidents, and Trump returned for a second term. That’s when all hell broke loose on a host of different fronts: massive tariffs against China and dozens of other nations, threats to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal, threats to make Canada the 51st state, mass deportations of alleged criminals — including some US citizens and green-card holders — to a for-profit prison in El Salvador, without a trial or any evidence being provided (Boasberg is also hearing a case about that, by a strange coincidence). Homeland Security and ICE are using artificial intelligence and surveillance software to track down “undesirables,” including anyone who has said anything even remotely positive about Palestine, or remotely negative about either Trump or his bizarre and likely also illegal policies (I wrote about this for last week’s edition of The Torment Nexus, in case you missed it).

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Continue reading “Meta may be bad but the FTC’s antitrust case is still weak”

From The Standard: “She fell in love with the book, originally written by Erich Maria Remarque in 1928, in high school. Taking the German point of view, it follows soldier Paul Baumer through the trenches during the last years of the First World War. It had twice been adapted for the screen before, but not since 1979. It stayed at the back of Paterson’s mind as she pursued a career as a triathlete, winning numerous races around the world before coming across the book again, by chance, in a charity shop. When she and her husband, Simon Marshall, enquired about the rights, they were stunned to find them relatively affordable. The pair went for it and Paterson spent the next decade trying to get the film optioned, working on drafts of the script with writing partner Ian Stokell and funding the licence fee renewals by winning triathlons.”

The strange tale of how a sea lion in California came to be called Alice

From Strange Company: “Alice and her husband of many years, Lee, were both from Mississippi, but since 1917, they lived in California and the Pacific Northwest, where Lee worked as a salesman and saw sharpener.  In September of 1965, Alice died at their home in Santa Cruz, and Lee arranged to send her body to her home town of Terry, Mississippi, for burial.  At the same time, the Boyd Science Museum in San Rafael, California, was awaiting the arrival of a sea lion that was also being shipped from Santa Cruz.  This was when Fate arranged that the young sea lion and the elderly housewife would be forever entwined. During the shipping process, the bill of lading that was meant to accompany Alice’s corpse somehow wound up in the crate containing the sea lion.  When the animal arrived at the museum, the employees were both intrigued and extremely confused.  Who was Alice Parsons, and why was a sea lion named in her honor?  They shrugged and decided to roll with it.  From then on, the creature was known as “Alice.”

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Continue reading “She ran triathlons for 16 years to finance this Netflix movie”

From Amusing Planet: “Sometime in the summer of 1791 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fell ill. By late November, his condition worsened dramatically. He became bedridden, suffering from swelling, pain, and persistent vomiting. Around two weeks later, on 5 December, he died at his home in Vienna. Mozart himself was deeply troubled by his deteriorating health and feared he was being poisoned. He believed the poison was Aqua Tofana, a colourless, tasteless, and odourless liquid that could be mixed with the victim’s food without detection. When administered gradually, it mimicked symptoms of common illnesses such as cholera or influenza. This poison is believed to have been invented by an Italian woman named Thofania d’Adamo in the 17th century. It quickly gained notoriety in southern Italy, particularly among women seeking to rid themselves of their husbands and claim their inheritances.”

Google is developing an LLM that could help us communicate with dolphins

From Scientific American: “Dolphins are renowned for their intelligence and social skills. These large-brained marine mammals communicate using individualized signature clicks and whistles and even seem to recognize their own “names.” Now a few researchers think a form of two-way communication with dolphins could be on the horizon. In collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the nonprofit Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), Google has announced progress on what the team has as the first large language model (LLM) for dolphin vocalizations, called DolphinGemma. WDP provided acoustic data from the species to train the LLM. Teams at Georgia Tech and Google then asked the model to generate “dolphinlike” sequences of sounds. “Half of it was background noise stuff that you expect from the ocean,” says computer scientist Thad Starner. But the rest had authentic-sounding clicks, whistles and burst pulses—rapid sequences of clicks that dolphins often utter during fighting and other behavior.”

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Continue reading “Aqua Tofana was the 17th-century husband killer”

From the ICIJ: “Although his own empire’s resources were depleted, Churchill wanted the United States to control the Soviets in Europe through the use of nuclear weapons. The Soviets still appeared far away from developing their own atomic weapons, and would respect American dominance if exerted. Dropping the bomb—or at least “a showdown” with the implied threat of doing so—must be a vital tool in curbing Soviet communism, Churchill argued. Privately, Churchill suggested that America strike first, before it was too late. According to FBI records, he urged Sen. Styles Bridges, a conservative Republican from New Hampshire active in foreign affairs, to back a preemptory and devastating attack on Moscow. “He [Churchill] pointed out that if an atomic bomb could be dropped on the Kremlin wiping it out, it would be a very easy problem to handle the balance of Russia, which would be without direction,” Bridges told the FBI.

This medieval manuscript features a Yoda lookalike, killer snails and savage rabbits

From Open Culture: “As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century. Indeed, even many specialists in the field would hesitate to take on the challenge of such a manuscript in full. But what if we told you it comes with illustrations of demons running amok, knights battling snails, killer rabbits and other animals taking their revenge on humanity, a dead ringer for Yoda, and the penitent harlot Thäis? These are just a few of the characters that grace the pages of the Smithfield Decretals. When it was originally published as an already-illuminated manuscript in the 1230s, the margins of the text were deliberately left blank by the original French scribes so that future owners of the text could add their own notes and annotations. And they did.”

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Continue reading “Churchill urged the US to hit Moscow with an atomic bomb”

From The Guardian: “Rudi Herrmann took a deep breath and asked his son Peter to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years, running over the words in his mind. He was about to tell his 16-year-old son that everything Peter thought he knew about their family was a lie. Rudi explained to Peter that what he was about to tell him had to stay secret. He could not discuss it with his friends, and certainly not with Michael, his younger brother. Peter nodded, and Rudi began: “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.” Rudi came to the most important part of the conversation. “Would you be willing to become an intelligence officer like me?” he asked. Peter’s head was spinning, and he didn’t know what to think or say. But he nodded his assent.”

Breakthrough Prize winning physicist says quantum physics is nonsense

From Scientific American: “In the pantheon of modern physics, few figures can match the quiet authority of Gerard ’t Hooft. The Dutch theoretical physicist, now a professor emeritus at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has spent much of the past half-century reshaping our understanding of the fundamental forces that knit together reality. But ’t Hooft’s unassuming, soft-spoken manner belies his towering scientific stature, which is better revealed by the prodigious numbers of prestigious prizes he has accrued, which include a Nobel Prize, a Wolf Prize, a Franklin Medal, and many more.His latest accolade, announced on April 5, is the most lucrative in all of science: a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth $3 million, in recognition of ’t Hooft’s myriad contributions to physics across his long career. In a conversation with Scientific American, ’t Hooft spoke about his Breakthrough Prize, his optimism for the future of particle physics and his dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics.”

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Continue reading “His father recruited him to be a deep-cover KGB spy in the US”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus that was titled “Be careful what you say on social media, they are listening,” which was triggered in part by the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia University who took part in pro-Palestine demonstrations on the campus. Khalil was taken by agents of ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security — and told that his visa was revoked. When they were told that Khalil had a green card, making him a legal resident of the US, the agents said that this was being revoked as well, something that typically requires a ruling from an immigration court judge. Since I wrote that, Khalil has been in a detention facility in Louisiana. His attorney said this week that his case will be heard by Friday, and a judge will determine whether he can legally be deported or must be released. The judge ordered the government to provide all the evidence against Khalil by end of day Wednesday. To quote my previous post:

The notice given to Khalil after he was detained said that he could be deported because “the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” What is this based on? No evidence was provided at the time. Did he throw any bombs? No. Did he shoot someone? No. Did he advocate violence against Jews? Not as far as we know. But isn’t participating in a peaceful protest protected by the First Amendment? It certainly used to be. But Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has said that Khalil’s detention is “not about free speech,” and that “no one has a right to a green card.” The President said on X that ICE “detained a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas student,” and that this would be what he called “the first arrest of many to come.”

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Continue reading “Be careful what you say on social media, part 2”

From Now I Know: “LaChappa is 41 years old right now. His three-year pro career topped out in the low minors more than two decades ago. But if prior history is any indicator, sometime in the next few weeks, the San Diego Padres will sign LaChappa to a minor league contract — just like they have every year since 1996. When the Padres drafted LaChappa in 1993, they had high hopes for the local-born left-handed pitching prospect. He was taking some practice throws off on the side when something went wrong; he clutched his chest and fell to the ground. He was having a heart attack, caused by an undiagnosed virus around his heart. LaChappa survived but would never be the same. At age 20, his career was over. It was unlikely that LaChappa would ever be able to work again, in any capacity. So, the Padres brought him back the next year, and have continued to do so every year, not only providing him with some much-needed cash but, more important, allowing him to maintain his medical insurance.”

Authorities in Boston have busted a high-end brothel charging $600 an hour

From the Wall Street Journal: “Eager to gain access to an exclusive establishment near Harvard University, biotech executives, doctors, lawyers and politicians filled out applications and handed over IDs, work badges and personal references. This elite club was a high-end brothel charging up to $600 an hour for sexual encounters in luxury apartments in Cambridge, Mass. Now, that unusual trove of personal information is serving as evidence in a series of criminal hearings that have pulled back the curtain on upscale sex work. Dozens of prominent Boston-area men, who lost a legal battle for anonymity, are facing misdemeanor charges that have caused major public fallout. Cambridge City Councilor Paul Toner, among the alleged sex buyers, is confronting calls for his resignation and has been stripped of committee assignments. Others have left high-profile posts in business and medicine without explanation. Most have avoided the closely watched proceedings, dubbed “The Cambridge Brothel Hearings” by local media, where names—more than 30 so far—have emerged in batches.”

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Continue reading “The Padres signed him but he hasn’t played in 20 years”

From the Tribune: “A researcher claims to have solved the 136-year-old mystery of Jack the Ripper, revealing a 100 per cent DNA match linking the infamous serial killer to a long-standing suspect. Russell Edwards, who has spent years investigating the case, says DNA extracted from a bloodstained shawl found at the crime scene of one of the Ripper’s victims, Catherine Eddowes, matches that of Polish-born barber Aaron Kosminski. Kosminski has long been a prime suspect in the brutal murders of five women in London’s Whitechapel district between August and November 1888. Edwards, working alongside genealogists, traced a living relative of Kosminski, who agreed to provide a DNA sample. When tested against the genetic material found on the shawl, it reportedly yielded a match. Now, the descendants of Eddowes and Kosminski are calling for an official inquest to legally confirm the killer’s identity.”

A private equity analyst quit to devote his life to the welfare of shrimp

From Asterisk: “I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I’ve lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless. Shrimp may not be high up on the list of animals that most people think about when they consider the harms done by industrial agriculture, but we do know that if shrimp can suffer, they are doing so in the hundreds of billions.”

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Continue reading “Expert says Jack the Ripper has been 100% identified by DNA”

From the CBC: “Joshua Haldeman was just one of thousands of Saskatchewan farmers who lost their land in the drought of the Dirty ’30s. While that trauma shaped the lives of everyone who went through it, the crisis affected Haldeman so much that he never stopped raging at what he perceived were the causes of the Great Depression. Haldeman came to believe that an international communist conspiracy controlled the banks, the media and the universities and was aiming to run the world. “An ‘Invisible Government,’ working to carry out the objectives of the International Conspiracy, is operating in every country,” he wrote. He also said the conspiracy was pushing for the fluoridation of water supplies, mandatory milk pasteurization and mass vaccination programs. Haldeman embraced the solution proposed by a movement called Technocracy: that government should be run by scientists and engineers rather than politicians.” 

In the 1700s and 1800s pink was the color of princes and kings

From Literary Hub: “He was a prince whom all of Europe nicknamed “the pink prince”: Charles Joseph de Ligne (1735–1814), marshal of the army of the Holy Roman Empire, diplomat, thinker, writer, scholar, and a great ladies’ man. His courtly manner, wit, elegance, and gaiety charmed all the European courts. His nickname came from the traditional livery of his house along with his personal taste for pink, notably in clothing and furnishings, but also from his optimism and good humor. Hence we have proof that in the late seventeenth century, the color pink, symbolically, already evoked joie de vivre, pleasure, and lightheartedness, a pink that was not pale and delicate, but strong and saturated, closer to a light, vivid red. It would be anachronistic to see a sign of homosexuality or effeminate behavior in the wearing of pink by men. The prince of Ligne, who happily wore this color for many decades, had sixteen children by his wife and multiple affairs with women throughout Europe. All women found him charming.” 

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Continue reading “Elon Musk’s grandfather was a technocrat and apartheid fan”

From Wikipedia: “Alessandro Zanardi is an Italian former professional racing driver who won the CART championship in 1997 and 1998, and took 15 wins in the series. He also raced in Formula One from 1991 to 1994 and again in 1999; his best result was a sixth-place finish in the 1993 Brazilian Grand Prix. He returned to CART in 2001, but a major crash in the 2001 American Memorial resulted in the amputation of his legs. He returned to racing less than two years after the accident, competing in the European Touring Car Championship in 2003–2004 and then in the World Touring Car Championship between 2005 and 2009; he scored four wins. In addition to continuing to race cars, Zanardi took up competition in handcycling, a form of paralympic cycling. In September 2012 he won gold medals at the London Paralympics and in September 2016 he won a gold and a silver medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics.”

While in exile on Elba Island the former emperor Napoleon decided to take English lessons

From Public Domain Review: “Napoleon had had a rollercoaster eighteen months. First he had been forced to abdicate as Emperor of France and exiled to the island of Elba. Then he had managed to escape, march on Paris, and retake the throne. Finally a crushing loss at Waterloo had led to exile once again, this time to a far more remote island called Saint Helena. The watery walls of his new South Atlantic prison were at least a thousand miles thick in every direction. The British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments, but he could not have what he most craved — family, power, Europe. To make matters worse, he had virtually nothing to read. Newspapers were banned, and those he did manage to get his hands on were nearly all in English. That was the main reason why, on January 16, 1816, three months after landing on the island, he decided to learn the language of his captors.”

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Continue reading “Racecar driver lost both his legs and became an Olympic athlete”

From The Hustle: “Just after 11 PM on February 15, 1992, a janky ball machine at the Virginia State Lottery HQ spit out 6 winning numbers on live television: 8… 11… 13… 15… 19… 20. In the coming days, officials would find out that one “person” had secured not only the $27,036,142 jackpot, but 6 second prizes, 132 third prizes, and 135k minor prizes collectively worth another $900k. What unfolded next was the strangest, most improbable lottery tale in history — one involving thousands of international investors, dozens of complex computer systems, and a mathematical savant. This is the story of the man who “gamed” the lottery by buying every possible combination. In the late 1960s, a young Romanian economist named Stefan Mandel was struggling to get by. Many Romanians might have turned to a life of crime. But Mandel, a self-described “philosopher-mathematician,” saw another way out: The lottery.”

Researchers have brought prehistoric algae back to life after 7,000 years in Baltic Sea mud

From Phys.org: “A research team led by the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) was able to revive dormant stages of algae that sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea almost 7,000 years ago. Despite thousands of years of inactivity in the sediment without light and oxygen, the investigated diatom species regained full viability. Many organisms, from bacteria to mammals, can go into a kind of “sleep mode,” known as dormancy, in order to survive periods of unfavorable environmental conditions. They switch to a state of reduced metabolic activity and often form special dormancy stages with robust protective structures and internally stored energy reserves. This also applies to phytoplankton, microscopically small plants that live in the water and photosynthesize. Their dormant stages sink to the bottom of water bodies, where they are covered by sediment over time and preserved under anoxic conditions.”

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Continue reading “A rogue Romanian economist won the lottery 14 times”

Before anyone gets upset about my headline, I am using the term “thought process” in the loosest possible way. I realize that many people (perhaps even most people) would not describe what an AI model does as “thinking.” After all, aren’t LLMs just a kind of super-autocomplete, as Noam Chomsky put it, with the whole internet to choose from? Aren’t they mostly just giant guessing machines, with no real intelligence behind them, or “stochastic parrots,” as AI scientists Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru described them? These are all fair questions, and I wish I had answers. But when it gets right down to it, we simply don’t know how LLMs do what they do — and when I say “we,” I’m not just referring to myself, or others like me who aren’t experts in artificial intelligence. Even the people who are building these AI engines and chatbots fundamentally don’t know exactly how they arrive at the outputs they produce (although some of them might pretend otherwise for marketing and/or fundraising purposes).

I know this probably sounds terrible, as though AI scientists are playing with explosives while not understanding how combustion works, but a surprising amount of science (the really interesting part anyway) is like this. Which is why I was so excited to see the recent reports from Anthropic, in which the company — founded by former OpenAI scientist Dario Amodei in 2021 — described at length its efforts to understand on a deeper level how its AI (nicknamed Claude) “thinks,” or why it arrives at the conclusions that it does. You might think that this should be fairly straightforward — couldn’t Anthropic just ask Claude a question, and then ask it to describe how it arrived at its answer? The short version is yes, Anthropic has done this with simple math problems, and Claude has gone into some detail about how it arrived at the answers it gave; but when the company tried looking under the hood at how it actually arrived at the answer, the real process it used was not even close to what it said it was doing.

Again, this is going to sound either ridiculous or disturbing to many people, or possibly a combination of the two. Doesn’t this mean that AI engines are making things up? How can we trust them? After all, companies are using artificial intelligence to perform all kinds of services, and government agents like Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s DOGE are even relying on it for more crucial functions, like figuring out who is a terrorist, and re-engineering the entire infrastructure of the government. Does any of this make sense if LLMs are just making shit up all the time? These are also fair questions. I for one think we should hold off on entrusting government services — like the decision on whether to deport someone to a prison in El Salvador — to an AI engine until we can understand how they arrive at their conclusions, and why they sometimes “hallucinate” (which AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton prefers to call “confabulate”).

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Continue reading “What can we learn from an AI’s thought process?”