Fluid ImaginationFrom Stephen Wolfram:
We can say: “Look, this particular [neural] net [works]”—and immediately that gives us some sense of “how hard a problem” it is (and, for example, how many neurons or layers might be needed). But at least as of now we don’t have a way to “give a narrative description” of what the network is doing.
From A newborn was found alive in the rubble after the earthquake in Syria:
Residents digging through a collapsed building in a northwest Syrian town discovered a crying infant whose mother appears to have given birth to her while buried underneath the rubble from this week’s devastating earthquake, relatives and a doctor said Tuesday.
The newborn girl’s umbilical cord was still connected to her mother, who was dead.
From Trump’s Killing Spree:
After it was clear Trump would be leaving office in January, [Attorney General Barr] scheduled a string of back-to-back executions, to squeeze in as many as possible before Biden moved into the White House.
From AI Needs To Be Regulated Now:
What we need is a dedicated [Federal] agency to regulate A.I. … There is precedent for establishing a necessary agency to protect people from harm. How molecules interact with millions of unique human beings is a complicated subject and not well understood. Yet we created an agency — the Food and Drug Administration — to regulate pharmaceutical drugs.
This critical and necessary endeavor needs to proceed in steps. That’s why I will be introducing legislation to create a nonpartisan A.I. Commission to provide recommendations on how to structure a federal agency to regulate A.I., what types of A.I. should be regulated and what standards should apply.
From Where Do Alien Languages Like Na’vi Come From?:
Commissioning an entirely new language, which felt special for the first Avatar, is becoming a staple for immersive science-fiction and fantasy worlds. We’ve seen the invention of Dothraki and High Valyrian for HBO’s Game of Thrones, spoken and sign languages for the recent Dune remake, and bloodsucker-speak for Vampire Academy, to name only a handful. These languages are as functional as English, with internally consistent rules. In turn, neuroscientists have been able to harness them to better understand how the human brain processes constructed and natural languages, giving us new clues into what, exactly, constitutes a language to begin with.
From The Education of X González:
That evening, [the March for Our Lives activists] were invited to a reception overlooking the Capitol in D.C., all lit up… A white-haired man who had clearly had a few drinks came up to me. With all the positivity in the world, he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Well, it’s on you kids now; we fucked it all up, and now it’s your job to fix it.” How nice that must have felt for him, or for the countless people who would, in the coming years, say exactly the same thing to me, offloading the capacity to make change to us as a way of absolving themselves of their own role in America’s problems.
From If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way: A Journalist’s Manifesto:
As Trump prepares to run again in 2024, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the lessons we’ve learned — and committing to the principle that, when covering politicians who are essentially running against democracy, old-style journalism will no longer suffice.