Nicole Mehringer lost her job after she was caught drunk in an unmarked police car with a male subordinate.

She won a lawsuit against the city alleging that her conduct — while against department policy — was no different from male command staff who routinely flouted rules.

The verdict was the latest in a series of legal losses for the city in lawsuits brought by female police command staff members.

Interesting blog post by a mathematician about the potential for LLMs to do math research. He goes beyond simple reports of "ChatGPT solved X problem" to try to understand what LLMs are doing and whether they're consistent enough to be useful. He concludes that what the models do well is access and generalize from existing knowledge that a single researcher might not be aware of, but a lot of human labor is still involved weeding through the garbage to find the gems, because models are not capable of consistent self-critique. He also notes that they're unable to invent new concepts or terms, just apply existing ones.

He concludes with speculation that eventually models will be able to solve a lot of problems autonomously, but they won't be able to determine which ones are most interesting to humans, and that that curiosity is both a strength (because humans can determine what to do with new knowledge) and a limitation (because focus is a limited resource).

The word "juggernaut" originated from racist descriptions of celebrants of the festival if Jagannath throwing themselves under the wheels of the large temple cars.

In this case, no one who's in the path of destruction asked to be there; and I know this current war is symptomatic of the US's fragility and may very well be the thing that breaks its grip on the world's throat. So the metaphor isn't particularly apt, but I feel like I'm stuck, forced to watch gravity take its course. The car is out of control and it's eventually going to shatter itself on something, but there'll be considerable destruction and loss along the way.

May all those in this country's path be spared, and may there be peace, hope, and a chance to rebuild in the aftermath. Your hopes for the future shine the brightest.

Anthropic must be really hard up for cash because its native advertising is looking increasingly desperate. Today: become Claudepilled by charging your clients for AI slop and fixing your Google ad trackers to make it easier to figure out where leads for your bullshit products are coming from.

This is long but worth the read:

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley.

Somehow, this ended up turning into an invitation for Friday night dinner at Valinor, Alexander’s former group home in Oakland, named for a realm in the Lord of the Rings books. (Rationalists, like termites, live in eusocial mounds.)

Anyway, Eric isn’t involved with the underwriting firm or the venture-capital fund anymore. His new company is called Sperm Racing.

Donald was practically vibrating when we left Cluely. “Dude, he’s just a scared little boy,” he said. “He’s scared he’s not doing the right thing, and because of the fucked-up world we live in, people who should be in The Hague are giving him twenty million dollars. Something bad is gonna happen here, something really fucking bad is gonna happen.” He sighed. “I just want Zohran’s nonbinary praetorians to march across the country and put all these guys in cuffs.”