no insight

This contains hundreds of different AI use cases across the federal government. For example:

ID: DOJ-0001-2023
Agency: Federal Bureau of Investigation
Title: Complaint Lead Value Probability
Description: Threat Intake Processing System (TIPS) database uses artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to accurately identify, prioritize, and process actionable tips in a timely manner. The AI used in this case helps to triage immediate threats in order to help FBI field offices and law enforcement respond to the most serious threats first. Based on the algorithm score, highest priority tips are first in the queue for human review.
In production: more than 1 year
Dept: Department of Justice

Fascinating this data exists. The government really catalogues everything.

The Wrecking Crew, also known as the Clique and the First Call Gang, was a loose collective of American session musicians based in Los Angeles who played on many studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s, including hundreds of top 40 hits. The musicians, most of whom had formal backgrounds in jazz or classical music, were not publicly recognized at the time, but were viewed with reverence by industry insiders. They are now considered one of the most successful and prolific session recording units in history.

How many times have you heard this crew without realizing?

I really enjoyed visiting the Dream House, though I think I listen to enough weird music that it wasn't the case that "all the sensory information [was] unusual and outside [my] normal frame of reference."

The scene behind Dream House is fascinating. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela were at the center of the 60s downtown art scene. John Cale (of the Velvet Underground) played viola in Young's Theatre of Eternal Music before forming the band. They also at one point had $150,000 in unpaid rent. A fascinating rabbit hole if you're into minimalism and atonal music (and other similar pretensions).

Pharoah Sanders playing 'Kazuko' in a tunnel in Marin County, 1982. Absolutely gorgeous.

The mines north of the town are the largest deposits of rare-earth elements yet found and, as of 2005, responsible for 45% of global rare-earth element production.

It's remarkable how much of the global rare-earth supply chain originates in this single mining district. That 45% figure really puts into perspective how geographically concentrated the production of these essential elements is.

Of course, this comes at a huge cost to the local environment and population.

In NYC since 1993! Originally conceived in the sixties. Worth a visit if you're in NYC.

Reminds me of R|W by Yoshinao Satoh.

As a former write-in mayoral candidate…

The whole track is great, but that intro just slams into you!

If your YouTube recommendations are anything like mine, you may have already seen PAPERS. But have you seen desktop?

Or POWER?

I really like Satoh's style. Every frame is kind of a jump cut, but somehow his work doesn't feel frenetic. Here's a short interview with Satoh on PAPERS:

The animation is constructed entirely from newspapers, which Satoh cut piece by piece, rearranged, and animated frame by frame. Without following a specific narrative structure, its focus lies in the animation principle of giving movement to objects that are normally static, emphasizing the visual impact of motion itself.

...

What I wanted to convey to the audience through 'PAPERS' was simply "the surprise of seeing movement in still objects that we see every day."

I love it. Check out his YouTube channel.

Everybody else continues to reject the premises, but they do so at their own peril. Over and over again, the crazy people have insisted that they are building AIs that can do everything humans can do. They have been slightly too aggressive in their expectations for AI development, but while you're busy dunking on them, did you even notice that AIs have improved far faster than anyone else predicted?

I think "assume things will proceed a little slower than the most aggressive estimates show — but only a little slower" was a better strategy for predicting 2025 than any other. It's certainly vastly, vastly better than "assume all this AI nonsense is about as good as it's going to get."

I also hope things slow down. But the stochastic parrot crowd is just plain wrong. For example, Luciano Floridi and Massimo Chiriatti wrote in 2020 that:

GPT-3 does not do what it is not supposed to do, and that any interpretation of GPT-3 as the beginning of the emergence of a general form of artificial intelligence is merely uninformed science fiction.

This piece reflects a kind of confidence that I hope we will see less of.

Anyone who makes confident predictions about the future of AI progress is, in my opinion, overextended. But "exponential growth continues" is not an outcome you can rule out, and "AI systems are useless and economically irrelevant" is now empirically wrong (and suggests the speaker doesn't know the state of capabilities).

Of course, the jury is still out on whether "AI is evil"; that can certainly still turn out to be true. But as Piper writes, "I don't blame anyone for hating AI, but I will say this: It makes you really bad at predicting it."

Mr. Sims, the anti-trafficking expert, estimates that the revenue generated from these operations in Cambodia could exceed $12 billion a year, representing about a third of the country's gross domestic product.

The United States and rights groups have criticized the Cambodian government for complicity in the industry. But the international community, including Washington, has said little about the Thai airstrikes. This, the Thai military has suggested, was tacit approval from governments struggling with an industry that has looted many of its citizens.

Airstrikes against scam centers (which are themselves staffed largely by forced labor). It seems disproportionate, though apparently scam operations make up more than a third of Cambodia's GDP. So perhaps these scam operations are a sort of critical infrastructure…

She and the others work at Tyson Foods' beef plant and are among the 3,200 people who will lose their jobs when Lexington's biggest employer closes the plant next month after more than two decades of operation.

Hundreds of families may be forced to pack up and leave the town of 11,000, heading east to Omaha or Iowa, or south to the meatpacking towns of Kansas or beyond, causing spinoff layoffs in Lexington's restaurants, barbershops, grocers, convenience stores and taco trucks.

…

Near the plant, at the Dawson County Fairgrounds, Tyson workers recently filled a long hall as state agencies — responding with the urgency of a natural disaster — offered information on retraining, writing a resume, filing for unemployment and avoiding scammers when selling homes.

Attendees' faces were subdued, like listening to a doctor's prognosis. "Your financial health is going to change," they were told. "Don't ignore the bank, they will not go away."

Many of the older workers don't speak English, haven't graduated high school and aren't computer savvy. The last application some filled out was decades ago.

"We know only working in meat for Tyson, we don't have any other experience," said Adan, the Kenyan immigrant.

Tragic story about a Tyson plant closing in Nebraska. Who will they sell their homes to? (I'm curious if the anchor employer risk factored into the mortgage pricing.) What is Tyson's moral responsibility to its workers, and to the local economy its workers sustain?

This is a bit of a stretch, but this story makes me more sympathetic to the idea that some firms are too big to fail—not Tyson, but other firms in the American economy that are much more deeply integrated. Perhaps sometimes the government does have a moral imperative to step in and prevent closures, though in those cases shareholders and management should be wiped out. That logic doesn't apply here because the plant is no longer economically relevant (beef is declining), but it's a good reminder of how anchor business failures ripple outward.

I have a tenured job at a state university, and I am not personally worried about my future—not at age 63. But I do ask myself every day how I will stay relevant, and how I will avoid being someone who is riding off the slow decay of a system that cannot last. … It amazes me how many people do not much ponder these questions. "Oh, it hallucinates!" is the fool's trap of 2025, I am sorry to say.

I don't know what comes next either. But I'm also struck by how many people are currently either unaware of the coming tidal wave of AI progress (both realized and unrealized), or, if they're aware, respond to it with denial rather than fear/cautious optimism.

In "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik" from The White Album, Joan Didion wrote about Dallas Beardsley, an actress who placed a desperate trade ad in Variety declaring "I'm going to be a movie star" and signed it "please come, Dallas."

Beardsley didn't make it—her only credit appears to be as a dancer in Blood Orgy of the She Devils and an anti-drug educational film. But you have to admire her ambition and confidence...and her attitude:

When they hurt you, it's because they've been hurt themselves, and maybe God means for you to be hurt, so some beautiful thing can happen later.

Didion observed: "Her dedication to the future is undiluted."

I wonder what happened to her.

From a conversation about Joan Didion's California Republic—particularly her essays on the Getty Museum and the state's water projects:

It's a particularly Californian phenomenon, in which wealth constructs its own reality and finds a willing audience.

They also unanimously agreed that tedious polling methodology dilemmas do not make for compelling blog posts — and were a bit concerned that writing about how we grapple with questions like this could open us up to some bad-faith attacks. But we'll always be transparent with you about how we conduct our polls so that you can continue to trust our polling and trust that we're giving you the most accurate read on how Americans really feel.

For those of you interested in this, all of our previous surveys have been reweighted to align with this new weighting scheme. We're attaching the full, updated surveys below for paying subscribers. Nothing much has really changed, outside the Hispanic partisanship of our respondents — but we wanted to make sure you had access to the most up-to-date version of our work.

Thank you Lakshya for the inside view on how you do polling! I particularly appreciate re-releasing all the old polls with the new methodology. It takes courage to publicly correct your work, especially when you didn't actually make any mistake to begin with (but the correction creates the appearance that you did).

A heartwarming and hilarious documentary of two brothers who take on a "Big Year" in birdwatching. Punches way above its weight. Strongly recommended.

Latin jazz from Marku Ribas.

Also on Spotify and Apple Music.

She walks through the corn leading down to the river
Her hair shone like gold in the hot morning sun
She took all the love that a poor boy could give her
And left me to die like a fox on the run
Like a fox, like a fox, like a fox, like a fox, on the run

Bluegrass, in Tokyo, by a band called REDBULL.

Fascinating look at the city from below and inside.

Illuminating. Don't underestimate the role of stupidity in conflict! I think many important problems do boil down to power and competing interests, but applying that lens by default is noxious. We're all often wrong!

See also: In Defence of Conflict Theory

My uncle!

When I turn 50 I should get a "no code" tattoo. Actually, why wait?

"There are no new ideas." What a fun hunt!

I want to believe that everyone's interests are aligned and mistake theory is the best lens for this evolution.