Jonathan

Google’s latest version of Gemini 2.5 Pro is freakily smart. I was going to send an email pointing out where I thought someone was incorrect about the ability of moral facts to affect our brains backed up with research. I fed the email through Gemini 2.5 Pro to review it and after several back and forths became convinced that I was actually incorrect and completely misunderstanding the core of the argument.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/05/13/seemingly-nonexistent-citation-in-anthropic-experts-declaration/ Even Anthropic’s experts who work on their AI models are filing AI generated court documents with hallucinations in their own court case. This happens all the time but normally it’s done by lawyers who don’t really understand the technology and don’t even know it can hallucinate. Here it’s inexcusable because this guy makes these models and should really know better.

Random thought, why do we have a sex offender registry for only sex related crimes? I suppose I would want to know if I guy who molested kids moved in next door but I would also want to know if a guy who broke into multiple homes moved in next door. I don’t see what distinguishes sex related crimes from other crimes that warrants only sex crimes getting a registry. We should pick a standard and apply it equally, either every criminal goes on a public registry or no one does.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/smolagents/computer-agent/discussions/6 New favorite bug report. Welcome to the brave new world of debugging your AI agent responding to programming requests by showing you porn.

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research Trump recently re-instituted the ban on gain of function research which was previously lifted by none other than… Trump. One global pandemic later and he appears to have learned why we had that ban in the first place.

So after everyone (rightfully) freaking out about Kamala Harris imposing price controls on drugs now Trump has done the exact same thing and instituted drug price controls? I’m giving up. Nothing in the timeline we’ve fallen into makes sense anymore. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/supply-is-elastic-installment-6437.html

https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/ ChatGPT edged out X as the #5 most visited website in the world.

https://enterprisevalue.substack.com/p/burrito-now-pay-later With the new DoorDash updates that let users finance a burrito, is the next 2008 style financial crash going to come from financial institutions bundling together risky food financing loans to sell to institutions?

https://www.home.cern/news/news/physics/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc Looks like we owe all the alchemists a big apology. We can actually turn lead into gold. Unfortunately the economics are wildly infeasible, but it’s still fun we can do it.

ChatGPT taking every opportunity to trip over itself complimenting how right and intelligent you are does have its upsides. Model refusal rates seem to be significantly lower.

https://micahflee.com/despite-misleading-marketing-israeli-company-telemessage-used-by-trump-officials-can-access-plaintext-chat-logs/ Wow this is really really bad. How did this even pass the giggle test? Of course backing up encrypted messages to a plaintext file is stupid. What’s even the point of encrypting them at all at that point?

I’m sitting next to an old man in a wheelchair who’s spent the last half hour watching the most mindless TikTok slop with the volume at full blast. There are so many things I don’t understand. I would be embarrassed to play anything out loud on my phone in a public place and would be mortified if it was brain rot. Apparently he just doesn’t care.

https://polymarket.com/event/nuclear-weapon-detonation-in-2025 Not the kind of Number Go Up you want to see. Currently at 17% chance that there will be nuclear weapons used this year buoyed by India-Pakistan conflict.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/05/07/kanye-west-is-not-merely-a-creator-he-is-art-say-his-lawyers/ This is a heck of a motion. The paralegals had to have been dying laughing typing this up, especially the super duper serious legal arguments about “big titty women”.

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-data-missing-096cac9a China might be in trouble. There’s no way they would hide their economic data if it painted a rosy picture of the Chinese economy.

I used an LLM to brainstorm some deviously persuasive rhetorical tactics for an email and was pleased until I realized that they'll probably be used on me soon. The average human is not ready for intelligence equivalent to a top performing human to be unleashed on them to tailor every message and request to their precise idiosyncrasies.

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/accelerating-access-research-results-new-implementation-date-2024-nih-public-access-policy Finally just some solid policy decisions. This should have been done a long time ago. The next big step should be enforcing data uploads in common formats that has to be hosted alongside the paper to make everything transparent and reproducible.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/welcome-to-the-future We've ended up in a world not of early sci-fi space adventurers but a cyberpunk reality of AI and robotics. If even a tenth of the innovations actually become profitable companies the next ten years are going to look dramatically different.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/pam-bondi-says-trump-just-saved-258-million-american-lives.html Wow I had no idea Trump saved 75% of America in his first few months. Apparently he saved 139 million people in the last week alone. /s

Google's LLMs are cracking me up today. I fed some text into Gemini 2.5 Pro that contained a misspelling. Gemini guessed that what the writer meant by "veriority" was probably "verisimilitude". Gemini has so much faith in human intelligence. Yes Gemini, the person who can't spell "variety" definitely actually meant "verisimilitude" and also definitely knows what that means. Gemma 3 seems a little too fine-tuned to be agentic, and kept hallucinating that it was checking web results even when it had no tools available. The amount of grovelling that Google RL'd it on is really quite impressive. It was hitting every part of an apology: acknowledging its precise mistake, self-flagellating, and promising to do better in the future.