This article set my teeth on edge in a way that I cannot fully articulate.

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.