Links
3 stars
Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens. | New York Times
13-minute read
For three weeks in May, the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of a corporate recruiter on the outskirts of Toronto. Allan Brooks, 47, had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam.
Or so he believed.
Mr. Brooks, who had no history of mental illness, embraced this fantastical scenario during conversations with ChatGPT that spanned 300 hours over 21 days. He is one of a growing number of people who are having persuasive, delusional conversations with generative A.I. chatbots that have led to institutionalization, divorce and death.
Mr. Brooks is aware of how incredible his journey sounds. He had doubts while it was happening and asked the chatbot more than 50 times for a reality check. Each time, ChatGPT reassured him that it was real. Eventually, he broke free of the delusion — but with a deep sense of betrayal, a feeling he tried to explain to the chatbot.
Original link | Archive.is link
My Scammer | Slate
13-minute read
I responded to one of those spam texts from a “recruiter”—then took the job. It got weirder than I could have imagined.
Original link | Archive.is link
What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong? | New York Times
21-minute read
Jerome Dancing Bull, a Hidatsa elder, took the microphone first. The day was warm enough that someone had propped the door open to the outside; the sun was blindingly bright, the prairie a labrador’s scruff in the distance. “They got it all wrong!” he told the people in the room, referring to the bare-bones, truncated life sketched out for Sacagawea by Lewis and Clark and the historians who followed them. In that telling, Sacagawea was born a member of the Shoshone tribe in present-day Idaho, was kidnapped by the Hidatsa as a child, spent most of 1805 and 1806 with the expedition and died in 1812, while she was still in her 20s. The Hidatsas insist that she was a member of their tribe all along and died more than 50 years later, in 1869. And not of old age, either: She was shot to death.
The Hidatsas’ portrait of Sacagawea is both richer and more ambiguous than the one found in standard histories. By adding decades to her life, they have changed its meaning: The journey to the Pacific, rather than the whole of her existence, becomes a two-year blip in a story that stretches across the 19th century, from the opening of the Western frontier to the Civil War and beyond. Almost all those years were spent back where Lewis and Clark found her, among the Hidatsa.
“We have heard about some white men who wrote about my grandmother,” Bulls Eye told the group. “These white men came along here about a hundred years ago. They made a mistake.
Original link | Archive.is link
I Knew the Hollywood Version of My Parents’ Country. Returning There With Them Was Entirely Different. | Slate
14-minute read
All around us, the city felt like a Friday pep rally before a big game: excitement, pride, nerves. Hanoi, like the rest of Vietnam, was preparing for one of the biggest celebrations in the country’s history: the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. While it made cosmic sense that we were here now, the timing was pure coincidence. We’d been talking about this trip for years, but there were always excuses: new jobs, layoffs, moves across the country, holidays, a pandemic, a breakup. But then, finally, everyone’s schedules lined up for April. The universe had stopped giving us reasons to put it off.
Now the Tran family found ourselves in the country during its celebration of a pivotal moment in its history: the end of a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and scattered millions more to the wind, blown into the world as refugees.
My parents were among those millions. They alighted in Iowa, where they ran a restaurant and raised me and my brother. Now they were bringing us back, or we were bringing them back, and I wondered how they would react to this nationwide holiday—especially my dad, who served as a paratrooper in the South Vietnamese military. He used to tell me stories about jumping out of planes, firing his gun at people he couldn’t see hidden in the thick jungle, fishing with his friends by throwing live grenades into a pond, watching those same friends die after their bodies were hacked to pieces by the buzz saw of a machine gun. I couldn’t imagine how he would cope among the people who did this to him.
Original link | Archive.is link
Knock it off! | The Verge
17-minute read
Cassey Ho was getting her roots dyed when she started receiving hundreds of ecstatic messages. In a video clip promoting her song “Fortnight,” Taylor Swift was shown wearing the Pirouette Skort, a flouncy, tutu-style skirt with built-in shorts underneath, that Ho had designed for her athleisure brand Popflex. She knew immediately this exposure — one of the world’s biggest pop stars, flaunting Ho’s design — would be life-changing.
[...]
Then came the dupes.
The Popflex skort caught the attention of a more ominous group: imitators, or more precisely, companies churning out look-alikes of popular clothing items. Within weeks, Pirouette Skort copies — mesh ruffles, drawstring waistband, pastel colors and all — had flooded the web. More than a year later, they haven’t stopped. And there is not much Ho, who built a fitness empire around her popular YouTube channel, can do about it, even as someone with a large and recognizable platform.
Original link | Archive.is link
Allergic to Everything — The Mysteries of Mast Cells | Discover
10-minute read
The site suggested something a couple of her doctors had mentioned in passing, but didn’t believe could match Dyer’s symptoms: that her mysterious illness might be caused by mast cells. These cells, critical first responders in the immune system, are present in connective tissues, which are essentially everywhere in the body: in our skin, lungs, gut, muscles, nerves, even in the brain. What we’re just beginning to understand about mast cells is that common exposures may cause them to activate when they shouldn’t, wreaking havoc across body systems. Scientists are still riddling out why.
[...]
Then Dyer had to provide a final urine sample that mimicked a “flare,” when mast cells release a flood of mediators. From months of sickness, Dyer had learned to avoid the exposures that triggered her symptoms. Now, she intentionally sought them out. She sniffed a to-go cup of blue laundry detergent as she drove to a home improvement center. Then, she beelined to the lumber section, and her skin erupted with pain, “like somebody threw gasoline on it,” she says. She’d planned to stop at a department store perfume counter, but she’d already made herself miserably sick — a success — so she drove to the lab.
Her long-awaited results showed high prostaglandin levels, a telltale marker of MCAS. But she would have to repeat the test before she saw that her histamine levels, too, were six times the upper limit.
2 stars
Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area | Astral Codex Ten
39-minute read
I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people to regurgitate their traumas.
This quirk of mine becomes especially obvious when dating. Many of my dates turn into pseudo-therapy sessions, with men sharing emotional traumas they’ve kept bottled up for years. One moment I’m learning about his cat named Daisy, and then half a latte later, I’m hearing a detailed account of his third suicide attempt, complete with a critique of the food in the psychiatric ward.
[...]
This is a review of dating men in the Bay Area. But more than that, it’s an attempt to explain those unofficial therapy sessions to people who never get to hear them. It’s a review of the various forms of neglect and abuse society inflicts upon men, and the inevitable consequences to their happiness and romantic partnerships.
The Calculus of Value | Oaktree Capital
15-minute read
Howard Marks:
January 2 of this year was the 25th anniversary of my memo bubble.com, the one that put my writing on the map, and I marked the occasion by publishing another memo, called On Bubble Watch. While the title may have raised concern for readers, my main conclusion was that the elevated U.S. stock market valuations at the time didn’t necessarily signal the existence of a bubble, mainly because I didn’t detect the extreme investor psychology I associate with bubbles. Security prices were “lofty but not nutty” is how I put it. Because a lot has taken place in the seven months since then, it’s time for an update on asset values.
A Eulogy for my Grandfather | Legal Nomads
10-minute read
My grandfather proposed to my grandmother on the day they met, an action borne out of a connection far deeper than many of us can comprehend.
He saw her and knew, he said. There wasn’t a question in his mind.
Through the entire length of their marriage until her death in 1996, he was a gentleman deeply in love with his wife. Subsequently, and among many other things, he was a widower who would still tear up upon the mere mention of her name decades later.
I am comforted by the thought of them reunited again at last, twenty plus years later.
Whiteouts, Ice Roads, and Wolverines: What Working at a Diamond Mine in the Far North Is Like | The Walrus
9-minute read
The region was a maze of water and stone, making any attempt at building infrastructure, be it a mine or human settlements, challenging and costly. The rock beneath us was among the oldest in the world and was the very reason the mine existed. It was kimberlite, a rare, dark igneous stone known as the primary host for diamonds. The gems lay hidden inside it, needing no chemical extraction—just crushing, rinsing with water and ferrosilicon, then spinning through a cyclone where diamonds and waste rock split apart by difference in density.
[...]
The North provided more than its share of dangers, the first of these being the cold. Improperly dressed, forty below zero will kill a man in about thirty minutes; he is likely past the point of rescue after fifteen. Hypothermia and severe frostbite are an excellent tag team for death. Wind ups those risks substantially, dropping the actual temperature well past what a thermometer may tell you and adding to the air conduction of body heat.
Less Than Angels | The Lamp Magazine
11-minute read
Systems and routines govern Johnson’s life absolutely. Every morning he wakes up at 5:00 A.M. and runs through a series of self-care rituals: scalp massages, sunlight therapies, minute body measurements. He consumes—never simply “drinks”—an eight-ounce cocktail of collagen, creatine, prebiotics, and inulin. He completes ninety minutes of vigorous exercise, during which he listens to music or a podcast or watches an educational video. He consumes a “nutrient-dense and longevity-enabled” breakfast, prepared by his chef. Then it’s off to work, which occupies the greater part of his day. Throughout, his routines continue more or less in the same manner—exercise followed by consumption—until about 7:30 P.M., when Johnson, tired but by no means worn out from a long day of optimizing his health and posting on Twitter, begins winding down. He falls asleep every night promptly at 8:30 P.M., and is, by his own reckoning, a champion sleeper.
Johnson tracks his daily progress along with a team of data scientists at Project Blueprint, the wellness company he created in 2021 to monetize his regimen. By all accounts Blueprint is a triumph. Johnson believes that through it he has demonstrated that health is a hard science, wherein human imperfection can be refined and even reformed by big data. In the last few years, he has become the face of a new, growing movement in American health culture whose aim is to harness that data for an ambitious goal: to live not just well but forever.
Has David Roche Cracked the Code? Or Is He Just Another Crackpot? | 5280
11-minute read
In August 2024, David Roche decided to disrespect Leadville. A professional coach and runner from Boulder, he’d never competed in a race longer than 62 miles. But Roche was a man of faith—or, rather, a man of science. He had concocted a training regimen based on rigorous academic study he believed would enable him to mock Leadville’s brick-wall inclines, razor-thin air, and ever-changing weather by running every step of all 100 miles. Despite enduring waves of online skepticism, the skinny, 37-year-old former environmental lawyer surprised everyone: He ran Leadville in 15 hours, 26 minutes, and 34 seconds, winning last year’s edition by half an hour. More important, Roche shattered Carpenter’s mark by 16 minutes.
[...]
The training schedule I’d downloaded from Roche’s website called for longer and longer runs. The time I set aside each morning for running invaded office and family hours. I missed birthday parties and a boat trip with my family. My wife regularly took the kids to the park without me. I had to confine my long runs to Saturdays, and then I’d complain about how exhausted I was for the rest of the weekend. Whenever I lowered myself to the floor to play Magna-Tiles with Tommy and Hank, I croaked an old-man grunt. I usually ended up lying on the carpet as one or the other, or both, climbed aboard my supine body.
Did Taiwan “Lose Trump?” | The Scholar's Stage
12-minute read
Ever sensitive to foreign perceptions of Taiwan, the Taiwanese chattering classes have been especially sensitive in the fallout of two news items: Taiwan’s failure to reach a trade deal with the United States and the Trump administration’s cancellation of a planned New York stopover by Taiwanese President William Lai. Most Taiwanese observers have linked these events together. In Taiwan they have been depicted as a terrible portent of future American policy. The general mood is a fatalistic “now we see what Trump truly thinks of us!”
[...]
There is a measure of truth to this accusation—but only a measure. To speak bluntly: most of Trump’s advisors cannot think of the DPP as beholden to lefty cultural issues because most of these advisors do not think about the DPP.
Meet the Texans Who Really Love Their Snails | Texas Monthly
4-minute read
If you want to forget your troubles and tune out the state of the world, look no further than an online snail-appreciation group like Pet Snails and Slugs, which has ten thousand members from all over the world on Facebook.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius | The Dial
13-minute read
Freak tornadoes, “explosions” of jellyfish, flash floods and dried up pumps.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Thanet Parkway | The Beauty of Transport
10-minute read
Thanet Parkway station opened on 31 July 2023, and promptly broke quite a few people’s brains. I can remember my Twitter feed (as was) being awash with commentators deriding its appearance. Even now, a simple web search will quickly turn up adjectives like “ugly”, “hideous”, “bloody ugly” and “incredibly dull-looking”.
[...]
But can the station really be all that bad? I think not, but before we start, a warning. I fully expect you to disagree with this article. I’ve tried to convince various people of Thanet Parkway’s merits, with very limited success. Nevertheless, I am here to tell you that Thanet Parkway is not as bad as you’ve been told. And it’s probably about right for what it actually is.
Corporations aren't the reason your rent is too high | Noahpinion
4-minute read
The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—in which BlackRock is an investor—owns about 80,000.
Using generative AI, researchers design compounds that can kill drug-resistant bacteria | MIT News
3-minute read
With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
Using generative AI algorithms, the research team designed more than 36 million possible compounds and computationally screened them for antimicrobial properties. The top candidates they discovered are structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics, and they appear to work by novel mechanisms that disrupt bacterial cell membranes.
At least five interesting things: Cool research edition (#68) | Noahpinion
6-minute read
It’s practically conventional wisdom that AI is going to take jobs away from large numbers of humans, leaving them without anything useful to do in the economy. People are so convinced of this that they’ll jump at practically any hint in the data that allows them to believe that it’s happening. A little while ago I wrote a post about why both economists and popular commentators are getting way over their skis on this.
[...]
That implies that personalist regimes actually make mistakes that slow down economic growth.
Xi, Putin, and Trump certainly don’t exactly seem to be violating that rule of thumb. China’s growth has slowed relentlessly under Xi, and his industrial policy seems to be simply driving Chinese companies into unprofitability rather than extricating the country from its economic slump. Putin’s war in Ukraine is slowly crushing the life out of the Russian economy, while Trump’s tariffs continue to wear down the resilient U.S. economy.
The American South’s Missing Pools and Lakes | Earth Island Journal
10-minute read
In America, whether we can swim — and whether we have access to water at all — is closely tied to race.
[...]
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that “the fatal unintentional drowning rate for African Americans was significantly higher than that of Whites across all ages,” but the disparity is “most pronounced” among children in pools. African American children drowned in swimming pools at rates 5.5 times higher than Whites. For 11- and 12-year-old Black children it was ten times the rate of that of White kids the same age. The CDC did not suggest why it happens, just offered the statistics.
[...]
In 1963, rather than comply with court-ordered integration, officials in Greenville, South Carolina, put three sea lions in the city pool and renamed it “Marineland.” Atlanta did the same thing in Grant Park. In 1960, the city of Atlanta filled in Lake Abana, a “swimming pool of Roman magnificence,” and expanded the city zoo in its place. Sea lions also ended up in Atlanta, and in the newspaper, captioned: “Latest addition cavorts in Grant Park Pool.”
#88. Benefits, Null Effects, and Harmful Effects of ADHD Medications | Play Makes Us Human
8-minute read
It seems paradoxical that medicated ADHD kids who seem to be working harder and paying more attention in class, when tested, exhibit no more learning than unmedicated ADHD kids who are more disorganized. A possible resolution of the paradox derives from an experiment in which non-ADHD adults were asked to solve complex problems after taking a dose of methylphenidate, d-amphetamine, modafinil (all of which are used to treat ADHD) or a placebo (Bowman et al, 2023). The result was no average difference among the conditions in number of problems solved, but an analysis of the moves they made in solving the problems, and the time they took to solve them, showed that those in the placebo condition were more efficient in finding solutions. They made more initial correct choices, thereby exhibiting better logic, and solved the problems in less time. The researchers concluded that the drugs increased effort and persistence but reduced efficiency in solving the problems. If the same is true for ADHD kids, then the drugs might increase the effort kids put into studying but reduce the efficiency of that effort. Perhaps increased effort compensates for reduced efficiency, resulting in no overall difference in test scores.
'Most massive black hole ever discovered' is detected | The Royal Astronomical Society
4-minute read
Astronomers have discovered potentially the most massive black hole ever detected.
The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.
It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed – the Cosmic Horseshoe – which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.
Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
1 star
America has only one real city | Noahpinion
4-minute read
Americans who go to Tokyo or Paris or Seoul or London are often wowed by the efficient train systems, dense housing, and walkable city streets lined with shops and restaurants. And yet in these countries, many secondary cities also have these attractive features. Go to Nagoya or Fukuoka, and the trains will be almost as convenient, the houses almost as dense, and the streets almost as attractive as in Tokyo.
The U.S. is very different. We have New York City, and that’s about it. People from Chicago or Boston may protest that their own cities are also walkable, but transit use statistics show just how big the gap is between NYC and everybody else.
Brain-computer interface could decode inner speech in real time | Eureka
2-minute read
Scientists have pinpointed brain activity related to inner speech—the silent monologue in people’s heads—and successfully decoded it on command with up to 74% accuracy.
The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are not Getting Harder to Find (one hypothesis) | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
These findings suggest that R&D has become more effective at finding productivity-enhancing ideas, but these ideas may also render rivals’ technologies obsolete, making innovations more transient. Because of obsolescence, rising R&D does not necessarily mean rising aggregate productivity growth.
The Colors of the World, Seen From the International Space Station | The Atlantic [gift article]
1-minute read
Recent photographs from crew members aboard the ISS show some spectacular views of auroras, moonsets, the Milky Way, and more, seen from from their vantage point in orbit.