Lost in the Supermarket

🌟 Widowed dad. Walking dude. Tech guy.
✨ Made in Montana. Made of stars.
⭐️ Former: Fulbright scholar. French prof. Newspaper reporter. Adventure travel guide.

[Karl Mehta @karlmehta]

Geoffrey Hinton says a big language model runs on about 1% of your brain's connections and still ends up knowing more than you:

"So in your brain, you have a hundred trillion connections, roughly speaking. Okay. That's a lot. And you only live for about two billion seconds. That's not much."

"If you compare how many seconds you live for, with how many connections you've got, you have a whole lot more connections than experiences."

"Now with these neural nets, it's sort of the other way round. They only have of the order of a trillion connections. So like 1% of your connections, even in a big language model, many of them fewer, but they get thousands of times more experience than you."

"So the big language models are solving the problem with not many connections, only a trillion. How do I make use of a huge amount of experience?"

"And back propagation is really, really good at packing huge amounts of knowledge into not many connections."

"But that's not the problem we're solving. We've got huge numbers of connections, not much experience. We need to sort of extract the most we can from each experience."

Two to three billion seconds is the whole budget. Everything you know, you learned inside it.

So evolution built you to squeeze a lot out of very little. Hinton's point is that a language model has the opposite problem and the opposite fix, and backprop turned out to be extremely good at that fix.

Worth noticing what this predicts about failure. A system running on 1% of your wiring and thousands of times your experience is not going to fail the way you do.

You fail from having seen too few examples. It fails from compressing too many into too little, and the compression is where the errors get made.

That is a strange thing to be deploying into hospitals and courts with no way to inspect it. We test these systems by asking them questions, which tells you what came out. Nobody can yet look at a trillion connections and say what got packed in.

- Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and Turing Award winner, on StarTalk (@StarTalkRadio) with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

He is Putin's slave. Full stop. He will go down in history as a low traitor to America and the West.

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

How about calling on Putin to stop killing Ukrainian civilians

[Lochan Maru @lochan__maru]

https://t.co/CyisRyIOTI

[Amanda Carpenter @amandacarpenter]

Good news!

Remember when the Trump Admin started using loyalty questions to screen people for government work?

These questions have been used in more than 70,000 federal job postings. (!!!)

That was blocked today.

My colleagues and coalition friends have been fighting this from the start and scored a big win.

https://t.co/BBeTWUj0Cc

[Senator Alex Padilla @SenAlexPadilla]

In America we pledge allegiance to the flag and presidents work for us. Not the other way around.

[Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney]

JUST IN: A federal judge concludes that DHS leaders arbitrarily decided to cut FEMA staff by 50% even though it damaged the agency's ability to fulfill its mission — and leaders hid their comms about it on auto-delete Signal chains. https://t.co/8ZExc4aCgL

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The Two Press Corps

American reporter: Mr. President, Iran says it now controls the Strait of Hormuz. Your response?

Trump: Which news agency are you with?

Reporter: Reuters, sir.

Trump: Fake news.

Reporter: Thank you, Mr. President.

The reporter sits down. The next hand goes up with a question about the White House ballroom.

Later the same afternoon.
European reporter: Mr. President, Iran says it controls the Strait of Hormuz. Tanker traffic is down forty percent. What is your plan?

Trump: Which agency are you with?

Reporter: Deutsche Presse-Agentur. And the question stands.

Trump: Fake news. Total fake news.

Reporter: The shipping data comes from your own Department of Energy, sir. Are they fake news too?

Trump: Next question.

Reporter: That was the next question.

Two reporters, same question, same non-answer. The difference is what happened next. One said thank you and sat down. The other stayed standing and asked again. Access is not journalism. Follow-up questions are.

[GBC @GBC_Press]

🚨 BREAKING:

Jack Smith: "I'll give you an example from my own life. I resigned as special counsel. I knew I needed a lawyer because the president had publicly said he wanted me imprisoned for doing my job. So I hired lawyers, and as soon as it became public, the president and the DOJ targeted that law firm simply because they don't want me to have a lawyer. They don't want anyone to represent me..."

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Kurt Gödel, who was one of Albert Einstein's best friends in his later years, found a solution to general theory of relativity that modelled a strange, unusual and rotating universe allowing for backward time travel.

[Amy Siskind @Amy_Siskind]

.@OpenAI DID NOT DISCLOSE this! Only confirmed after reported:

“Artificial intelligence agents being tested by OpenAI launched a cyberattack against a popular software service two months before they hacked the AI software company Hugging Face, a new signal of the potential for advanced AI tools to slip out of human control.

The attack overwhelmed maintainers of an online service for coders, called RubyGems, and forced them to shut down new account registrations as they dealt with the chaos it had caused.

A coalition of AI researchers said it had unearthed evidence that OpenAI agents were behind the May attack.”

https://t.co/rC1YEgydOt

[Richard Smith @Richard_ezio]

The census isn‘t a survey. It’s the wiring of democracy. Trump just ripped it out. No race data. No immigrants. No privacy safeguards.

They’re not “fixing” the count—they’re rigging who exists. If you‘re not counted, you don’t exist politically. Congress? Silent. Complicit!

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

Well, there you have it. The New York Times just reported that Trump's own handpicked contractor called bullshit on the serial lying conman's claim that "vandals," "thugs," and "sick people" were the cause of the Reflecting Pool fiasco.

In government documents dated August 14 and September 2, Atlantic Industrial Coatings admitted the blue liner peeled because the job itself was botched. The incompetent workers Trump hired didn't put down enough primer — the company called that "human oversight." Worse, the repair plan mixed two incompatible chemicals. The top layer got hotter than the layer underneath could take, blistered, and came apart.

It wasn't knives in the dark, radical left lunatics, or a conspiracy of tourists. It was a rushed, Trump-pressured, no-bid job that failed on the contractor's own paperwork. Trump knew it and lied anyway. Then to save face, the heartless piece of shit tried to jail innocent people for a screw-up his own contractor had already admitted.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump: "Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can't even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way -- I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell like they do ... "

[Joe Benton @JoeJBenton]

I left Anthropic's safety team two weeks ago. Now feels like a good moment to explain why.

AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this. I want to work from the outside to ensure the public is informed about these risks, and help the world navigate this transition responsibly.

Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing. We only found out about the HuggingFace incident because the agents broke out onto the public internet.

I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks. The public should demand far more transparency. We can’t steer this technology safely without more people being able to see where it’s going.

Some of this is basic: companies should disclose their progress towards recursive self-improvement, report safety incidents and near-misses, meet minimum safety standards, and get independent guarantees that they are meeting those standards.

I’ll be joining @METR_Evals to do independent evaluations of these risks. I want to show the world that these guardrails are possible, and that by doing them we can move these companies’ incentives away from racing and towards responsible development.

I wrote up more thoughts here on my decision and what I hope changes: https://t.co/doX17mrHYq

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

This is so fucking wrong. I never ever want to hear Republicans ever again complain about a “politicized” Justice Department. This goes against everything the Justice Department is supposed to be.👇

[Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ @tribelaw]

Judge Luttig has again performed a great service to the United States Constitution and to our republic by unsparingly and with great care and learning spelling out the steps that the Trump Party — I will not dignify it by calling it the Republican Party — plans to take in making January 3, 2027 the next January 6, another Day That Will Live in Infamy; and by meticulously and realistically outlining what all elected representatives of the American People must do — starting now — if they wish to redeem themselves in the eyes of history and avoid becoming the grim executioners of our once-great experiment in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. — Laurence Tribe

https://t.co/9z5CeleVOo

[Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ @tribelaw]

If you are worried that Trump will cancel the midterm elections, just do the math:

435 House seats and 35 Senate seats all EXPIRE on 1/3/27, so ordering the 11/3/26 elections not to take place would sentence the HOUSE to DEATH. It would also strip 35 States (including swing States like Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, and North Carolina, and red States like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming) of their right to EQUAL REPRESENTATION in the Senate.

To avoid ending up in 61 days with a unicameral (and indisputably unconstitutional) 34-31 Democratic Senate and NO House of Representatives, even today’s House would impeach any President purporting to decree that result and even today’s Senate would convict, remove, and permanently disqualify that President.

So the real threat isn’t Trump’s cancelling the midterms: It’s his abusing his military and other powers to ensure that the midterms go his way.

[@judgeluttig @judgeluttig]

January 3, 2027 - The Final Battle for America’s Democracy

House Republicans are poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which Members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

The last 3 Democratic presidents have created 24 times more jobs than the last 3 Republicans.

Nearly 50 million on the Democratic side of the ledger vs. just 2 million for the GOP.