Month: February 2024

Today I learned that the San Francisco Fed performs daily tracking of economic news sentiment. Here it is since the end of the Great Recession:

The index is currently at 0.17, roughly equal to the peaks between 2014 and 2020. However, it only rose above zero about three months ago. It took a long time for objectively good economic conditions to finally filter into the press.

The SF Fed's index covers only newspapers. On the one hand, this is bad because it doesn't count TV news shouters that lots of people listen to. On the other hand, it's good because it doesn't count TV news shouters, who are mostly out of their minds. Call it a wash.

As long as we're talking about Gaza, here's an updated set of fatality figures:

The cumulative death toll as of today is just over 29,000, about 1.3% of the total population of Gaza. Dead and injured come to just under 100,000, or 4.3% of the total population. On a population basis, that's six times the number of American casualties in all of World War II.¹

¹During World War II the US suffered roughly 1 million dead and wounded out of a population of 136 million, for a casualty rate of 0.7 percent.

Why oh why does the US keep vetoing UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza? Are we really that brutal and heartless?

Oh come on. This isn't complicated. It's because these immediate ceasefire resolutions never demand that Hamas immediately release its hostages. That's a loud tell that the resolution backers aren't really serious about any kind of fairminded solution.

For my money, the resolution that would make the most sense is a purely humanitarian one with no gotchas. Someone on the Security Council should offer a resolution demanding that Israel and Egypt allow some minimum amount of food, water, power, and medical aid into Gaza. That would be hard to veto.

This is the piece that keeps me gobsmacked. I understand both sides of this conflict, and I empathize with both sides. But for all the "pressure" that Joe Biden is supposedly putting on Israel over its mass destruction of Gaza, the one thing that (apparently) hasn't happened is pressure to allow in far more humanitarian aid. The US has limited leverage over Israel, but on this one subject it sure seems like Biden could pretty much lay down the law if he wanted to. Why doesn't he?

This is Joe Biden's schedule today after landing at LAX:

A street performer in Laguna Beach.

Unless someone gets run over by a bus, the two candidates for president this year are Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That's it, like it or not. So can everyone please start dealing with reality on this? The endless pissing and moaning about Earth-2 scenarios is really starting to grate on me.

OpenAI recently released an AI video creator, and its ouput, though amazing, isn't perfect. Atrios comments:

Not an expert on video/image editing, but I suspect editing out the 6th finger is a lot more work than it's worth. And, sure, these things will always get better, but some things need to be better than pretty good to be useful.

I'm not picking on Atrios here. Lots of people feel exactly this way. But I just don't get it. OpenAI and others have been working on LLM models for a while, but ChatGPT was the first really good one to be released publicly and that was in November 2022. That's only 15 months ago!

I sort of get the skepticism over driverless cars. It really does seem as if they've been "almost there" for the better part of a decade. But LLM models? Their capabilities have skyrocketed beyond belief in just a year or two. Their rate of improvement could be cut in half and they'd still be on track to take over the world by the end of the decade.

And even that presumes that LLMs are the ultimate in AI tech. But they surely aren't. We've had neural nets, which eventually topped out. Then we had deep learning models based on neural nets, but they topped out too. Now we have LLMs based on deep learning, and they'll probably top out too someday. But by then compute power will have increased another thousand-fold, making possible an even better model based on LLMs.

Even if you count from mid-2017, when the seminal Google paper about attention-based LLM models was first published, it's taken less than seven years to get where we are today. That's beyond miraculous. This train is barreling down the track at breakneck speed and there's nothing likely to stop it.

It's sad to see what's happened to the Hugo Awards, but I don't think this is right:

The Hugos are a victim not of social media, but of highly motivated bad actors. Their problem is that they're just too small.

The Hugos are an entirely amateur affair. A few thousand science fiction fans vote each year for best novel, best film, and so forth, and then show up at the World Science Fiction Convention where the winners are announced. A famous author is corralled into hosting, and when it's over everyone heads back to their rooms for a night of riotous filking. Just a bunch of nerds having some nerdy fun every year.

Decades ago these fans made a deliberate decision to stay small and cozy (unlike the San Diego Comic Con), and recently that's come back to bite. The problem with being small is that you can be easily attacked by a fanatic with a beef. So Vox Day and his crew of sad puppies were able to mount an effective sabotage of the awards several years ago with only a few hundred committed followers. Then, in 2021, a group in Chengdu, China, was able to land the 2023 convention site because it doesn't really take many votes to win the competition. It's not like becoming the host city for the Olympics.

It's still not 100% clear what happened at the Chengdu convention, but some combination of inexperience, cowardice, and fear of Chinese government pressure caused the organizers to rig the voting to prevent any politically disfavored writers from appearing on the ballot. In the end, it was clear that the entire vote was fraudulent, and knowingly so.

It would be remarkable if the Chinese government really cared enough about a tiny fan convention to pressure the organizers, but that's not really at the heart of what happened. Too many people have discovered that the Hugos are small enough to be easily manipulated and (just barely) large enough and prestigious enough to be worth it.

It's a damn shame. For chrissake, people, it's a few thousand nerds who get together each year for a little fun. Just leave them alone and peddle your deranged political bullshit elsewhere. It's not like there's a lack of outlets for this stuff.

Moonset over the Sheephole Mountains.

By chance, I happened to mention exactly this to a friend of mine last night:

Are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?

....Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith.... The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot.... Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family.... In 2021, Reuters published a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers.

It's telling that this comes from David French, who is sensitive to it—and willing to talk about it—because he and his family have been persistently under threat thanks to his anti-MAGA stand.

So far, these threats have been generally hollow. They come from angry Trump supporters who want to intimidate their opponents, not kill them. But that's how it's started in other times and places too, and there's not much question that it's inspired by Donald Trump himself. He approves the violence of January 6. He constantly threatens to throw Joe Biden in jail when he becomes president. He's going to sweep up and deport every illegal immigrant in the country. His top generals deserve to be killed for opposing him. The language of anger and violence is not even below the surface of everything Trump says. It's right out in the open.