Saturday, May 31, 2025
White House issues report with fake citations
Dani Blum and Maggie Astor, White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, NYTimes, May 31, 2025.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
Administration response: "Eh":
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
There's more at the link.
Deep Learning doesn't Learn Deeply
The transformer expressiveness results are often a bit of a red herring as there tends to be a huge gap between what can be expressed in transformers, and what can be learned with gradient descent. Mind the Gap, a new paper lead by @SaldytLucas dives deeper into this issue 👇👇 https://t.co/Q3BTFR5v7T
— Subbarao Kambhampati (కంభంపాటి సుబ్బారావు) (@rao2z) May 30, 2025
Friday, May 30, 2025
Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point
Karen Hao, Silicon Valley Is at an Inflection Point, NYTimes, May 30, 2025.
The 4th paragraph in:
When I took my first job in Silicon Valley 10 years ago, the industry’s wealth and influence were already expanding. The tech giants had grandiose missions — take Google’s, to “organize the world’s information” — which they used to attract young workers and capital investment. But with the promise of developing artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., those grandiose missions have turned into civilizing ones. Companies claim they will bring humanity into a new, enlightened age — that they alone have the scientific and moral clarity to control a technology that, in their telling, will usher us to hell if China develops it first. “A.I. companies in the U.S. and other democracies must have better models than those in China if we want to prevail,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, an A.I. start-up.
This language is as far-fetched as it sounds, and Silicon Valley has a long history of making promises that never materialize. Yet the narrative that A.G.I. is just around the corner and will usher in “massive prosperity,” as Mr. Altman has written, is already leading companies to accrue large amounts of capital, lay claim to data and electricity and build enormous data centers that are accelerating the climate crisis. These gains will fortify tech companies’ power and erode human rights long after the shine of the industry’s promises wears off.
The industry is monopolizing AI talent in a dangerous way:
Meanwhile, there are fewer independent A.I. experts to hold Silicon Valley to account. In 2004, only 21 percent of people graduating from Ph.D. programs in artificial intelligence joined the private sector. In 2020, nearly 70 percent did, one study found. They’ve been won over by the promise of compensation packages that can easily rise above $1 million. This means that companies like OpenAI can lock down the researchers who might otherwise be asking tough questions about their products and publishing their findings publicly for all to read. Based on my conversations with professors and scientists, ChatGPT’s release has exacerbated that trend — with even more researchers joining companies like OpenAI.
This talent monopoly has reoriented the kind of research that’s done in this field. Imagine what would happen if most climate science were done by researchers who worked in fossil fuel companies. That’s what’s happening with artificial intelligence. Already, A.I. companies could be censoring critical research into the flaws and risks of their tools. Four years ago, the leaders of Google’s Ethical A.I. team said they were ousted after they wrote a paper raising questions about the industry’s growing focus on large language models, the technology that underpins ChatGPT and other generative A.I. products.
An inflection point:
These companies are at an inflection point. With Mr. Trump’s election, Silicon Valley’s power will reach new heights. [...]
Their influence now extends well beyond the realm of business. We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence. That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold.
Technological progress does not require businesses to operate like empires. Some of the most impactful A.I. advancements came not from tech behemoths racing to recreate human levels of intelligence, but from the development of relatively inexpensive, energy-efficient models to tackle specific tasks such as weather forecasting. [...] A.I. tools that help everyone cannot arise from a vision of development that demands the capitulation of a majority to the self-serving agenda of the few.
I agree. The AI industry is dominated by adolescents pretending to be adults. That's not good.
There's more at the link.
About Musk and his destructive rampage – a long time coming?
First I excerpt three articles from The New York Times. I conclude with some rather different remarks I made about Musk in 2018.
Michelle Goldberg, Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death, May 30, 2025.
There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. DOGE claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel — its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity — could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.
Now, Musk’s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he’s leaving government behind. “It sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,” he told The Washington Post.
There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.
There's more at the link.
* * * * *
Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey, On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama, May 30, 2025.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
There's much more at the link, going into the history of his drug use and his problematic treatment of X, his child with Grimes, and of Ashley St. Clair, mother of his 14th child.
There's more at the link.
* * * * *
Matthew Purdy, The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania, May 29, 2025.
Over the past couple of decades, Musk has devoted himself to three grand engineering projects, all with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. The goal of his rocket company SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars. Tesla is accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Neuralink aims to eventually wire artificial intelligence into human brains so people can keep pace with machines.
“The guy is our Einstein,” Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, said two days after President Trump’s inauguration.
Musk's longtermist beliefs:
In 2022, Musk reposted a link to a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who was then at Oxford, with the line, “Likely the most important paper ever written.”
In the paper, titled “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,” Bostrom took a stab at calculating the potential lives lost by delaying the development of technology needed to survive “in the accessible region of the universe” for millions of years. “The potential for over 10 trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster,” he wrote. [...]
For longtermists, the most pressing threats are often existential, and technology is almost always the cure.
This is Musk’s sweet spot. The focus of so much of his technology — rocketry, humanoid robotics, even his tunneling company — is intended to converge on making “human consciousness” multiplanetary, an urgent mission he complains is frustrated by rules and regulators. He calls colonizing Mars “life insurance of life collectively.” Like an insurance salesman, he has his pitch down.
“For the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.
There's more at the link.
* * * * *
I was thinking rather differently about Musk when I published this article in 3 Quarks Daily back in 2018, just after the time Space X had successfully landed the boosters from a Falcon Heavy rocket: Three Children of the Space Age: Elon Musk, Freeman Dyson, and Me.
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, after Apollo 11, but before Apollo 17. He would have been a year and a half old during Apollo 17, much too young to have experienced it in any meaningful way. For Musk, and for anyone born after the middle-to-late 1960s, human space-travel was something to be experienced only in science fiction. As something people actually do it existed only in historical retrospect.
Musk, among others, is determined to change that, profoundly.
After going into a bit more of the history behind Musk-in-space I invoke Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, which I had just read, about what life might be like in 2150, after the deluge:
And yet the book is optimistic, if not exactly sunny and cheerful – 600 pages worth of detail. Things are certainly different. But the super rich are, if anything, even richer. Their aeries even higher. National governments are weaker, skyscrapers have food gardens on multiple floors, people are more self-reliant. Gray zones, if you will, are larger; boondocks abound. And living quarters for almost all are smaller. Life goes on.
But there’s nothing in the book about colonies on the moon, among the asteroids, or on Mars. Nothing. Robinson’s attention was elsewhere. But if Musk has his way, those colonies will exist. Their total population? I don’t know, 10,000, 100,000? Who knows? Will they be a net drain on earth resources? Maybe, but most likely not. They simply won’t happen if they cannot at least sustain themselves. If Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and who knows who else, if they have their way, they’ll have to return a profit.
I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet against it. I just don’t know.
I still don't know, but Elon Musk has certainly taken a huge turn to the Dark Side.
* * * * *
Let me offer one final observation. Musk has clearly given a lot of thought to the nature of the universe, in its entirety. I believe that all of the longtermists and the AI Doomers have.
I realized long ago that trying to thing about IT ALL, ALL OF IT, is between very difficult and crazy. I can trace my own thoughts about it all back to my childhood. I’m wondering whether, in thinking such thoughts, one has to make a choice, and choice that is logically prior to one’s thinking: Is there order inherent in the universe, or is it inherently without order? I believe that longtermists and Doomers, the so-called rationalists, have opted for the second. I seem to have opted for the first.
Historically, I believe, the first has led to religious belief. Is it possible to choose that way without (conventional) religious belief?
The state of Texas approves $50M for ibogaine trials
Texas Ibogaine Initiative, Texas Launches Largest Publicly-Funded Psychedelic Research Initiative in History with $50 Million Investment in Ibogaine, CISION PRWeb, May 22, 2025.
AUSTIN, Texas, May 22, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- In a historic and bipartisan move, the State of Texas has approved $50 million in state funding for drug development trials for ibogaine, a powerful, naturally occurring medicine showing extraordinary promise as a breakthrough treatment for substance use disorder, trauma-related conditions, and traumatic brain injury.
With the passage of House Bill 3717, authored by State Representative Cody Harris (R–Palestine), and Senate Bill 2308, sponsored by State Senator Tan Parker (R–Flower Mound), Texas now leads the country—and the world—in psychedelic research investment. This is the largest publicly funded psychedelic research initiative ever launched by any government worldwide.
"Ibogaine is the Manhattan Project of our time," Bryan Hubbard, Executive Director of the American Ibogaine Initiative and architect of the legislation, said. "We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the fabric of this country. And mighty Texas, in all its strength and independence, is the first state to stand up and lead a revolution in the treatment of trauma and addiction."
Ibogaine is a psychoactive alkaloid derived from West African botanical sources. Studies have shown that a single treatment can significantly interrupt substance dependence, reduce trauma symptoms, and promote neurological repair. Yet in the U.S., ibogaine remains a Schedule I drug, blocking formal research for decades. Thousands of Americans, particularly Veterans and first responders, have been forced to seek treatment abroad or go without.
After we're given the history of the initiative, financial arrangements:
The $50 million appropriation will help fund FDA-approved clinical trials of ibogaine in partnership with a drug developer, who will assume all financial risk and regulatory responsibility for advancing the treatment through the clinical trial process. Texas retains a financial stake in any future dividends from successful drug development, which could be used to help fund access to ibogaine treatment for Texans in need.
There's more at the link.
H/t Tyler Cowen.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
A Night in Tunisia, one of the more interesting versions I've heard
A Night in Tunisia by Havana Noche live @ 23rd Paradise Jazz Festival
5,389 views Dec 12, 2023
Composition by Dizzy Gillespie
Recorded live during the 23rd Paradise Jazz Festival, on Friday 25th of August, at Val`s Place in Gialia village, Cyprus.
The well-known Lain Jazz Band is hitting the Paradise Jazz Festival`s stage for an unforgettable set, transmitting Latin music's energy, enthusiasm, and passion. The band was formed in Cyprus by percussionist and drummer Constantinos Paouros and participating musicians from Cuba, Colombia, and Cyprus. Their music is based on Latin jazz genres such as son cubano, salsa, timba, and cha-cha.
Constantinos Paouros – Drums, Director
Alexander Rodriguez – Piano
Mike Michael – Trumpet
Nicolas Tryphonos – Acoustic Bass
Giorgos Koulas – Congas
Sound Recording: Andreas Rodosthenous
Video Recording: Giannis Avraamides & The Orange Train
Edit: The Orange Train
Elon's disillusioned and is going home
Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer, Jonathan Swan and Ryan Mac, A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington, NYTimes, May 28, 2025.
Elon Musk took a swipe at President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, saying it would add to the national deficit. He complained to administration officials about a lucrative deal that went to a rival company to build an artificial-intelligence data center in the Middle East. And he has yet to make good on a $100 million pledge to Trump’s political operation.
Mr. Musk, who once called himself the president’s “first buddy,” is now operating with some distance from Mr. Trump as he says he is ending his government work to spend more time on his companies. Mr. Musk remains on good terms with Mr. Trump, according to White House officials. But he has also made it clear that he is disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, raising questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.
Mr. Musk was the biggest known political spender in the 2024 election, and he told Mr. Trump’s advisers this year that he would give $100 million to groups controlled by the president’s team before the 2026 midterms. As of this week, the money hasn’t come in yet, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the behind-the-scenes dynamic.
Too much time on politics:
But Mr. Musk has said in recent days that he spent too much time focused on politics and has lamented the reputational damage he and his companies have suffered because of his work in the Trump administration.
“I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics,” Mr. Musk said in an interview this week with Ars Technica, a tech news outlet.
He added: “It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”
He also took a swipe at Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress, telling CBS News that he was “disappointed” by the domestic policy bill that the president championed and the House passed last week.
Middle East rivalry:
He also took a swipe at Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress, telling CBS News that he was “disappointed” by the domestic policy bill that the president championed and the House passed last week.
Mr. Musk complained to David Sacks, the president’s A.I. adviser, and other White House officials about the Abu Dhabi project involving OpenAI, an organization he founded with Sam Altman, with whom he has since had a falling out, according to the official. He also expressed concerns about fairness more broadly for other A.I. companies, and sought to have his own company, xAI, be included in the deal, though it ultimately was not.
Troubles for Elon:
Mr. Musk’s own disillusionment with national politics can be traced back to two recent events, according to people close to him: his frustrations with the president’s tariff regime and the roughly $25 million he spent backing a candidate who ended up losing a judicial bid in Wisconsin.
Back to space:
On Tuesday, SpaceX held a test flight of Starship, the rocket that Mr. Musk hopes will someday take humans to Mars. The vehicle had a successful launch, but sprang a leak halfway through its journey and eventually exploded. On X Mr. Musk called the launch a “big improvement,” but postponed a planned talk he was set to give on “SpaceX’s plan to make life multiplanetary.”
There's more at the link.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
EMOTION and MAGIC in MUSICAL PERFORMANCE: On the Phenomenology of Musical Experience
I uploaded the first edition of the document over a decade ago. This is now the 14th edition, which I've spruced up a bit. You can download it from Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_14.
I've added a new preface, which I've reproduced below the asterisks.
* * * * *
Prefatory Note: On the Phenomenology of Musical Experience
I’ve been a musician for most of my life. Early on I read Jean-Baptist Arban say, of music, “There are other things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them” (see p. 34 below). I sure liked the sound of that. But what did it mean? Somewhat later I read musicians talking about how, on this or that occasion, the music “played itself.” What could that possibly mean? At some point I came to experience the second, that is to say, I experienced something to which that phrase could reasonably be applied. And I think I know what Arban had in mind. That is to say, I have heard playing to which that phrase could reasonably be applied. I may even have done some myself.
And so, back in the mid-1990s, I started assembling accounts about, well, musical experiences that caught my attention. I wrote brief descriptions of some of my own experiences and collected anecdotes about the experiences of others from various sources, magazine stories, interviews, books, and, more recently, online articles. I put the first edition of this document online about ten years ago and have then updated it when I came across more anecdotes.
I’ve never established explicit criteria for these anecdotes, for that would contradict my fundamental reason for creating this collection in the first place. I am simply on the lookout for interesting things that happen to musicians – also listeners, but mostly musicians themselves – while performing. The idea is to get a large and diverse set of accounts in one place so that we can look at it and ask: What’s going on?
That is to say, there is a sense in which I do not know what these musicians are talking about. The experiences are often hard to describe, we don’t talk about them, and there so there is no standard vocabulary. And yet I feel that these phenomena are the life of music. And so I’ve gathered these anecdotes together into a single document and offer it to anyone who is curious. One day, I assume, or at any rate I hope, one day someone will begin to make sense out of it all. My job is simply to provide something to make sense of.
What happened? And by that I do not mean a deep question about underlying causes and significance. No, I’m asking a simple question about phenomenology: What kinds of experiences are there? Under what circumstances did they occur? How common are they? How do we classify them?
Finally I note that I have never undertaken a systematic search for such anecdotes. The ones I have gathered here are simply ones that I’ve come across in the ordinary business of thinking and investigating. I have no idea what a systematic search of either the web of the archives would turn up, much less systematic interviews of a wide range of people, musicians and non-musicians alike. Needless to say, we desperately need an extensive and systematic effort to collect such stories.
* * * * *
This document is in five parts. The first contains various experiences I’ve had as a musician. These are my windows into how emotion & magic arise in musical performance. Many of these experiences are of a kind sometimes known as altered states of consciousness (ASCs). I list these first, not because I think they are somehow special. How could I possibly know that? I list them first simply because I am able to describe them more completely than the anecdotes I have collected from others. With these, I know what I’m talking about. They span my musical life from my middle school years into the current millennium.
The second part contains a few statements by listeners. The third part collects a few anecdotes from musicians I know. The fourth part is a list of passages by various performers that I’ve collected from various sources over the years. I’ve come across these anecdotes in the normal course of my reading. There has never been a period when I specifically looked for such anecdotes, but I’ve read about music and musicians all my life. These stories do not represent a systematric effort to collect such stories.
Finally, I offer a typology of sexual experiences that, Leola, a sex educator and healer, has developed. The typology applies to musical experiences as well. The stories in this collection are mostly about restorative and transformational music, to use her terms.
What’s new with the 14th Edition
That third part, anecdotes from musicians I know, that’s what’s new to the collection, and they’re what prompted me to expand my original preface. At some point I may go through the whole collection and classify them according to the typology in the fourth part. That would be a good way to begin making sense of these various anecdotes. I’m sure various issues would turn up in that process: Some experiences won’t fit one of the categories; others may fit in two or even three; it may be impossible to tell in some other cases. But that’s more than I want to undertake at this time.
About the mandala on the cover
I uploaded the 13th edition to ChatGPT and asked it to create an image suitable for use on the cover. I put that through several iterations before I decided that perhaps a mandala would be more suitable. The final image is based on the fourth mandala ChatGPT created. I uploaded it to Photoshop, played with the color a bit, and added the lens flare effect.
I’m a ding dong daddy from Dumas! [Satchmo wails]
YouTube:
I'm A Ding Dong Daddy · Louis Armstrong & His Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man 1923-1934
℗ Originally Released 1930 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
Released on: 1994-09-27
Trumpet, Vocal: Louis Armstrong
Composer, Lyricist: Phil Baxter
Banjo, Steel Guitar: Ceele Burke
Drums: Lionel Hampton
Piano: L.Z. Cooper
Piano: Harvey Brooks
Alto Saxophone: Leon Herriford
Alto Saxophone: Willie Stark
Tenor Saxophone: William Franz
Trumpet: Leon Elkins
Trombone: Lawerence Brown
Executive Producer: Bruce Talbot
Mastering Engineer: Mark Wilder
Mastering Engineer: Tom Ruff
* * * * *
The song was written by Phil Harris and originally performed by Phil Baxter singing with the Phil Harris Orchestra back in 1928. The full lyrics are rather more elaborate than the truncated ones that Armstrong sings. He starts singing about a minute in and skips over the opening verse entirely, the one that introduces our rural Romero. He starts right in with the first of the "Ding Dong Daddy's." He gets about half-way in and switches to scat – to cover over just what? – before returning on a ding dong. He then scats a bit up to 1:39, when we have a sax solo. Armstrong picks up his trumpet at 1:55, taking a nice unaccompanied break at 2:05. Now listen to him wail over the band, draping himself all over the time, at 2:14, another break at 2:23, and repeat. Listen to what he does at 2:46. Damn!
I reckon you all don't know me at all
I just got here today
My home is way down in a little town
It's not so far away
Everybody for miles around
Calls me by my name
Now that I am in your fair town
You must do the same
For I'm a
Ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a clean cut fellow from Horner's Corner
Your ought to see me strut
I'm a caper cuttin' cutie
Got a gal called Katie
She's a little heavy laden but I call her "Baby"
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a ping pong papa from Pitch Fork Prairie
You ought to see me strut
I'm a ding dong daddy
Got a whiz bang momma
She's a Bear Creek baby and a wampus kitty
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a popcorn popper and a big apple knocker
You ought to see me strut
I'm a mamma makin' man
And I just made Mary
She's a big blonde baby from Peanut Prairie
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a peach-pie papa from Jackson's Hollow
You ought to see me strut
I'm a honey dippin' daddy
Got a hard hearted baby
She's a sheik shakin' Sheba but she can't shake me
'Cause I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a jug jugglin' Jasper
From Flat Fork Flats, and
You ought to see me strut
I'm a corn-huskin' huskie
Got a gal called Cleta
She's a flip flop flapper
But her brains are in her fee
Oh, I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
I'm a cider sipper
From Corn Cob Center
You ought to see me strut
I'm a high powered papa
Got a gal called Susie
She's a fast movin' mamma
But she can't love me, 'cause
I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas
You ought to see me do my stuff
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
What happens to programming jobs when AI writes more and more code?
Noam Scheiber, At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work, NYTimes, May 25, 2025.
As A.I. spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers have expressed concern that it would lead to mass unemployment. But while joblessness has ticked up and widespread layoffs might eventually come, the more immediate downside for software engineers appears to be a change in the quality of their work. Some say it is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster paced.
Companies seem to be persuaded that, like assembly lines of old, A.I. can increase productivity. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent.
At Amazon, which is making big investments in generative A.I., the culture of coding is changing rapidly. In his recent letter to shareholders, Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.”
Those changing norms have not always been eagerly embraced. Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year. The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new A.I. productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
Sheiber goes on to give two other examples, Shopify and Google:
The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that A.I. can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Mr. Jassy wrote last year that the company had saved “the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years” by using A.I. to do the thankless work of upgrading old software.
Eliminating such tedious work may benefit a subset of accomplished programmers, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University who has tracked research on the subject closely.
But for inexperienced programmers, the result of introducing A.I. can resemble the shift from artisanal work to factory work in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Things look like a speed-up for knowledge workers,” Dr. Katz said, describing preliminary evidence from ongoing research. “There is a sense that the employer can pile on more stuff.”
Sheiber then returns to Amazon noting that this seems like what had happened in the warehouses where robotic warehouses were adopted:
But the robots have increased the number of items each worker can pick to hundreds from dozens an hour. Some workers complain that the robots have also made the job hyper-repetitive and physically taxing. Amazon says it provides regular breaks and cites positive feedback from workers about its cutting edge robots.
The Amazon engineers said this transition was on their minds as the company urged them to rely more on A.I. They said that, while doing so was technically optional, they had little choice if they wanted to keep up with their output goals, which affect their performance reviews.
More about Amazon, then on to Microsoft where AI tools are writing large chunks of code:
“It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs.
There's more at the link.
Monday, May 26, 2025
The Tech Right gets skewered with the MacBird!* treatment
Michelle Goldberg, From the Creator of ‘Succession,’ a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right, NYTimes, May 26, 2026.
In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premiers on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. [...]
He’s succeeded. Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. [...] In “Mountainhead,” three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hanger-on they call Souper, short for “soup kitchen,” because he’s a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic, juvenile Venis — the richest man in the world — has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deepfakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes or desecrating sacred sites, and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internecine violence turns into apocalyptic global instability.
It’s not a far-fetched premise. Facebook posts accusing Muslims of rape have already helped fuel a genocide in Myanmar, and tools like those that Venis unleashes seem more likely to be months than years away.
Venis’s foil is Jeff, who has built an A.I. that can filter truth from falsehood and whose flashes of conscience put him at odds with the others. Rounding out the quartet is Randall, a venture capitalist — played by a terrific Steve Carrell — who pontificates like the bastard offspring of the investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
As the planet melts down, they start fantasizing about taking over “a couple of failing nations” and running them like start-ups.
After a bit of this and that Goldberg returns to the main line. Speaking of the mega-rich techbros:
“I think they think that their philosophical approach can solve any problem,” Armstrong said of the tech barons. “And I find that amusing and scary.”
It’s an open question, in “Mountainhead,” how seriously we should take the men’s scheming. The characters are titanically arrogant, but outside their domains, they are not particularly effectual. “There’s a lot of society and government which is not amenable to a tech approach,” said Armstrong. “DOGE may have discovered that, and so may anyone who tries to engage with systems with a lot of real human beings in them.”
Still, America’s tech plutocrats have expansive plans, fortunes that make Gilded Age robber barons look like paupers and an ungodly amount of political power, even now that Musk has stepped back from the White House. The “big, beautiful bill” that the House just passed contains a 10-year moratorium on state A.I. regulation. Musk’s company SpaceX is a front-runner for the contract to build Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense shield. When the president went to Saudi Arabia this month, he brought a passel of tech executives with him.
There's more at the link.
* * * * *
is a 1966 satire by Barbara Garson. It was self-published ('Grassy Knoll Press') as a pamphlet, and the full text appeared in the December 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine. It was staged in February 1967.
The play superimposes the John F. Kennedy assassination onto the plot of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Sarah Silverman: Postmortem [Media Notes 161]
Jason Zinoman, in the NYTimes (May 25, 2025):
“Death is really hard for me,” Sarah Silverman says with the kind of impeccably performed earnestness that makes you believe her banal statement for just long enough to be sideswiped by the punchline. “And that’s what makes me unique.” What actually makes Silverman different is that few others would handle the death of a father and stepmother in the same month by joking merrily about merch. “I really feel like my parents would want me to monetize this,” she says.
No amount of tragedy is going to turn Silverman into a maudlin solo artist. Her funniest jokes employ sarcasm, not sincerity.
That’s a reasonable characterization of the special. It’s worth watching. I enjoyed it. And of course I thought of the deaths of my own parents.
Very different.
Silverman’s parents died nine days apart. My father died several years before my mother. He died of complications (sepsis) following surgery to remove his bladder (cancer). His surgeon thought he could save his life by removing his colon, but my father did not want the reduced quality of life. He’d signed a DNR (do not resuscitate), but my sister and I had to make the final authorization as my mother had Alzheimer’s. I’ve said more about his death in this post.
That was 1998 when he was 86. My mother died in 2001 at the age of 85.
Since she could no longer take care of herself after my father died, my sister and I had to make various arrangements for her. At first we arranged for a companion to stay with her in her home, where, my sister observed, she now slept on her husband’s side of the bed. But it was too exhausting for the companion – my sister and I were unable to make arrangements to relieve her often enough – and so we had to put her in some kind of home. My sister eventually found the Mary Drexel Home outside of Philadelphia, which was excellent.* One day she fell into a coma and didn’t wake up. My sister and I stayed with her until the end. Or at least, I assume, my sister did. I was tired and went down the hall to sleep, not very comfortably, on a small not-quite-sofa in a waiting room.
* * * * *
*This post is about one Thanksgiving day at the Mary Drexel Home.
Pardoning Corporations
Stras, Brandon, Pardoning Corporations (April 02, 2025). Forthcoming, University of Chicago Law Review, Volume 92, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5202339 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5202339
Abstract: Though the Pardon Clause could be interpreted to include or exclude corporate offenses, overlooked history suggests the broader interpretation is the more plausible one. The Clause codified a power that had existed for centuries in England. And corporations were often pardoned at common law—including the Massachusetts Bay Company. This tradition lasted for hundreds of years, and it is the backdrop against which the Framers drafted the Pardon Clause. Even following the Founding, people continued to understand that the pardon power stretched to corporations. Since that time, however, institutional memory has faded.
The President could condition forgiveness on corporate compliance programs or on donations to his political campaign. He could offer pardons to foreign companies to sweeten relations with other countries. He could effectively abolish corporate criminal liability during his terms, at least at the federal level, even for prosecutions initiated by independent agencies. He could pardon his own companies to protect them from prosecution. Or he might even pardon companies that bribed him. Given the sweeping pardon power in Article II, all these decisions fall within the President’s discretion. He does not even need to wait for a company to apply.
Some of these consequences are startling, but Congress can limit the pardon power’s effects in two ways. First, Congress can refuse to appropriate refunds of pardoned fines. At the time of writing, Congress has not appropriated such refunds for individuals or companies. That decision denies people reprieve from the most common, and often most consequential, punishments imposed on companies. Second, Congress can repeal statutes that impose corporate criminal liability and replace them with unpardonable civil infractions, depriving the President of offenses to pardon.
Some state constitutions might also include a power to pardon companies. Though this account is more tentative, some attorneys could be more effective advocates if they encouraged their corporate clients to apply for pardons. Federal juries convict around 100 companies per year; states impose the rest of the corporate criminal liability. In most states, there is little authority one way or the other, which creates opportunities for good lawyering. This is important because, even if the President never pardons a company again, some state governments might consider doing so. Alaska’s Governor already did, and that pardon is unlikely to be alone forever.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
White Bird [It's a Beautiful Day]
YouTube:
℗ 2024 Davlin Music
Released on: 1969-03-03
Violin: David LaFlamme
Keyboards: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Organ: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Piano: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Tambourine: Patti Santos
Bells: Patti Santos
Percussion: Patti Santos
Drums: Val Fuentes
Bass Guitar: Mitchell Holman
Guitar: Hal Wagenet
Guitar: Bruce Steinberg
Music Publisher: Copyright Control
Lyricist: David LaFlamme
Composer: David LaFlamme
Lyricist: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Composer: Linda Baker LaFlamme
Why are Silicon Valley tech leaders obsessed with Tolkien and misread him so badly?
Michiko Kakutani, Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits, NYTimes, May 23, 2025.
There's an obvious answer to that: They're man-children.
Here's how Kakutani opens the article:
For generations of fans, J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings” remains their first experience of the immersive magic of fiction. The trilogy recounts how a motley group of friends set out on a journey to destroy the great Ring of Power and defeat the dark Lord Sauron, who intends to use its dreadful magic to rule all of Middle-earth through “force and fear.” The Ring corrupts all who use it, and its story endures as a potent allegory about the corrupting effects of greed and pride and what Tolkien called the evil “lust for domination.”
Given the trilogy’s idealistic overtones, it’s easy to understand why the books gained a cult following in the 1970s among hippies and Vietnam War protesters, who embraced its love of nature and rejection of consumer culture, and what they saw as its passionate denunciation of militarism and power politics. It’s more difficult to understand why the trilogy’s most prominent fans today are Silicon Valley tech lords like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and a rising group of far-right politicians in both Europe and the United States.
How did a trilogy of novels about wizards and elves and furry-footed hobbits become a touchstone for right-wing power brokers? How did books that evince nostalgia for a pastoral, preindustrial past win an ardent following among the people who are shaping our digital future? Why do so many of today’s high-profile fans of “The Lord of the Rings” and other fantasy and sci-fi classics insist on turning these cautionary tales into aspirational road maps for mastering the universe?
Some of the answers lie in the sheer popularity of the trilogy, which has sold more than 150 million copies across the world and permeated the public imagination, as genre fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream.
And then there's Traditionalism:
According to the scholar Benjamin Teitelbaum, Traditionalism posits that we are currently living in a dark age brought on by modernity and globalization; if today’s corrupt status quo is toppled, we might return to a golden age of order — much the way that Tolkien’s trilogy ends with the rightful king of Arnor and Gondor assuming the throne and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.
A similar taste for kingly power has taken hold in Silicon Valley. In a guest essay in The Times last year, the former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott pointed to “a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech.” This management style known as “founder mode,” she explained, “embraces the notion that a company’s founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees.”
The new mood of autocratic certainty in Silicon Valley is summed up in a 2023 manifesto written by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who describes himself and his fellow travelers as “Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community.”
Andreessen, along with Musk and Thiel, helped muster support for Trump in Silicon Valley, and he depicts the tech entrepreneur as a conqueror who achieves “virtuous things” through brazen aggression, and villainizes anything that might slow growth and innovation — like government regulation and demoralizing concepts like “tech ethics” and “risk management.”
Love of Tolkien goes deep in Silicon Valley. Kakutani traces it back to the early days in the 1970s and then tells us:
Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, a lifelong Tolkien fan, oversaw the company’s purchase of the rights to the “Lord of the Rings” back story for $250 million. Multiple seasons of its streaming series “The Rings of Power,” Vanity Fair reports, will most likely cost over $1 billion, making it the most expensive series ever made.
Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and mega donor to right-wing causes, says he’s read the trilogy at least 10 times. He has named several companies after magical objects in “Lord of the Rings.” Vice President JD Vance, whose careers in business and politics were nurtured by Thiel, followed in his steps. Vance has said that a lot of his “conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up,” and he named his venture firm Narya Capital after Gandalf’s magic ring of fire.
Classic fantasy and science fiction stories have informed how many fans think about the world, giving them a Manichaean vocabulary of good vs. evil, and a propensity for asserting that the future of civilization is constantly at stake. The stories also acted as an exhortation to think big and to pursue huge, improbable dreams.
And then there's Asimov's Foundation novels, which
trace a narrative arc that has resonated with right-wing politicians intent on remaking the world. It’s a story line in which a hero or a group of heroes takes on the challenge of a civilization in crisis. They wage war against a dangerous or moribund establishment and aspire to build a brave new world out of the ashes of the old. Similar plot dynamics are at work in Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which depicts a colony of freedom-loving settlers on the moon and their successful revolt against the oppressive rule of bureaucrats on planet Earth.
This does not look good. Kakutani notes:
Tolkien himself regarded “machine worshipers” with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England’s landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home.
Of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics — or, for that matter, any technological innovation — need not be used for war. “They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.”
Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties.
She goes on to note:
The growing embrace in Silicon Valley of “transhumanism” — including research into life extension, machine enhancements and even finding a solution to death — underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? [...] In the case of “The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien argued that mortality is part of “the given nature of Men,” and the Elves called it “the Gift of God (to Men),” allowing them “release from the weariness of Time.” Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, which turned them into his servants.
Many prominent readers of “Lord of the Rings” no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).
Man-children, the lot of them. There's more at the link.
Note: Tolkien was a philologist and medievalist. He did an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my very favorite texts. As far as I can tell, there is more wisdom in that one medieval romance than there is in the Silicon Valley elite.
Saturday, May 24, 2025
Damage Patrol: The Economy, Harvard, AI Hallucination
It’s the economy, so stupid
Tony Romm and Colby Smith, Pivoting From Tax Cuts to Tariffs, Trump Ignores Economic Warning Signs, NYTimes, May 24, 2025.
One day after House Republicans approved an expensive package of tax cuts that rattled financial markets, President Trump pivoted back to his other signature policy priority, unveiling a battery of tariff threats that further spooked investors and raised the prospects of higher prices on American consumers.
For a president who has fashioned himself as a shrewd steward of the economy, the decision to escalate his global trade war on Friday appeared curious and costly. It capped off a week that saw Mr. Trump ignore repeated warnings that his agenda could worsen the nation’s debt, harm many of his own voters, hurt the finances of low-income families and contribute far less in growth than the White House contends.
The tepid market response to the president’s economic policy approach did little to sway Mr. Trump, who chose on Friday to revive the uncertainty that has kept businesses and consumers on edge. The president threatened 50 percent tariffs on the European Union, and a 25 percent tariff on Apple. Other tech companies, he said, could face the same rate.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has raced to enact his economic vision, aiming to pair generous tax cuts with sweeping deregulation that he says will expand America’s economy. He has fashioned his steep, worldwide tariffs as a political cudgel that will raise money, encourage more domestic manufacturing and improve U.S. trade relationships.
Concluding paragraphs, businesses are stalled because they can’t plan for the future:
Mr. Goolsbee recalled a recent exchange with the chief executive of a construction business, who said: “We’re now in a put-your-pencils-down moment.” Businesses, Mr. Goolsbee said, now “have to wait if every week or every month or every day there’s going to be a new major announcement.”
“They just can’t take action until some of those things are resolved,” he added.
“Let’s Destroy Harvard”
Jess Bidgood and Michael S. Schmidt, Why Harvard Has No Way Out, NYTimes, May 23, 2025.
Jess Bidgood: I’d imagine that for international students, this makes the prospect of attending Harvard feel deeply uncertain — even unappealing. Where would the university find itself, even if it wins?
Michael S. Schmidt: Even if Harvard runs the table in court, it’s still persona non grata with the Trump administration, and that means that it’s going to continue to face investigations, including from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. [...]
Harvard finds itself in this impossible position. If it continues to fight the administration, it will continue to get hit with these extraordinary uses of federal power to punish the university.
Jess Bidgood: What’s happening at Harvard behind the scenes?
Michael S. Schmidt: Harvard officials have privately determined they are in a major, major, major crisis with very few, if any, good off ramps.
If you’re a law firm and you get hit with an executive order, you can go to court and get a restraining order. You can go back to work and things are semi-normal. Harvard is much more complicated than that.
Is there anything happening behind the scenes to de-escalate this?
Harvard’s board, as far as we know, won’t let the university go back to the table. The board members don’t trust that you can negotiate with Trump. And the things that Trump keeps hitting Harvard with are so destructive. How could you go back to the table?
Reading List of Fake Books
Talya Minsberg, A.I.-Generated Reading List in Chicago Sun-Times Recommends Nonexistent Books, NYTimes, May 21, 2025
The summer reading list tucked into a special section of The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer seemed innocuous enough.
There were books by beloved authors such as Isabel Allende and Min Jin Lee; novels by best sellers including Delia Owens, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Brit Bennett; and a novel by Percival Everett, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner.
There was just one issue: None of the book titles attributed to those authors were real. They had been created by generative artificial intelligence.
It’s the latest case of bad A.I. making its way into the news. While generative A.I. has improved, there is still no way to ensure the systems produce accurate information. A.I. chatbots cannot distinguish between what is true and what is false, and they often make things up.
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