We Learn From Books and Movies

Likely you've read The Ox-Bow Incident; either in junior high or high school. It was a movie in 1942, and TCM just ran it, and I caught the end of it. The wiki has the details on the book and the film if you're interested. The point of the story is that vigilantes get it wrong. Kind of like today's leaders.

The last full scene of the film has Henry Fonda reading a letter from one of the hanged men to his wife. His pal, Henry Morgan tells Fonda he can't read the letter; he can't read at all. So Fonda takes advantage and reads it aloud. Loud enough for the rest of the mob/vigilantes in the bar can hear, too. This is most, it sounds like all of it.

Man just naturally can't take the law into his own
hands and hang people without hurting everybody in
the world, because then he's just not breaking one
law, but all laws.
   Law's a lot more than words you put in a book,
or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it
out. It's everything people ever have found out about
justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very con-
science of humanity.
   There can't be any such thing as civilization
unless people have a conscience, because if people
touch God anywhere, where is it except through their
conscience? And what is anyone's conscience except a
little piece of the conscience of all men who ever
lived?

I surely don't know how the programmers at TCM came to choose the film for today. The channel runs various "theme" days, and this month is Lone Good Guys in Westerns, or thereabouts. Alicia Malone was the presenter, and didn't draw the obvious analogy with the likes of shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw. May be TCM is chary, too.

Thought For The Day - 12 May 2025

With all of Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell}'s bloviating, it's worth recalling that the GOP has always opposed drug imports. Always. Can't trust that they're all OK, and the like. But, of course, upwards of 80% of API is foreign anyway. And that's based on 2019 data. Could be much worser now.

Barnum

The site Seeking Alpha has been around for some years, and when I found it, it ran on adverts and so the only thing one had to do was create an e-mail associated account. For that, one could read any number of these anonymous aliased articles by other retail plungers. Not so much in the last few years. One now has to pay a subscription to read this junk. Without ponying up the subscription fee, one can see the list of titles and anonymous authors. Sometimes you might be able to see news articles and other flotsom. I've kept the site on my bookmarks, just for the pleasure of finding (rarely) a title which looks interesting. And truthful. Most often, not so much, to wit:

Novo Nordisk: It's Not Been This Cheap For Many Years

Well... really? Pick your poison for share price charts and you'll find that it's current price is ~$66. What about "Many Years"? How about the 5 year window? What does that reveal? Well... it last was at that price in December, 2022. Not sure that's "Many Years". More like a couple+. And, in that 5 year window (May, 2020), it was ~$32. That's a bit closer to "Many Years", but not really Distant. Caveat Emptor.

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid you can't do that

Finally, the lamestream press has caught up with AI; at least the myriad vectors that I see. The nutshell bit

These systems use mathematical probabilities to guess the best response, not a strict set of rules defined by human engineers.

As offered up in these essays more than once: not until the AI community really, really, truly comes to grips with this shit will AI be trustworthy. And the way to do that is marry AI with RDBMS - that's the "strict set of rules defined by human engineers" side of the process. You heard it here first, and quite a while ago. At least, so far as I know.

And it gets worser. Some other notes in the report

Last month, an A.I. bot that handles tech support for Cursor, an up-and-coming tool for computer programmers, alerted several customers about a change in company policy. It said they were no longer allowed to use Cursor on more than just one computer.

In angry posts to internet message boards, the customers complained. Some canceled their Cursor accounts. And some got even angrier when they realized what had happened: The A.I. bot had announced a policy change that did not exist.

"We have no such policy. You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines," the company's chief executive and co-founder, Michael Truell, wrote in a Reddit post. "Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line A.I. support bot."

Now you know where the title came from. Cue the Twilight Zone theme.

[S]o called reasoning ystems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why.

Really?? The innterTubes is rife with shit. Shit in, shit out. Once again, with feeling: AI without ground facts as its basis will continue to shift shit.

When running another test called SimpleQA, which asks more general questions, the hallucination rates for o3 and o4-mini were 51 percent and 79 percent. The previous system, o1, hallucinated 44 percent of the time.

QED, kinda.

We still don't know how these models work exactly.
-- Hannaneh Hajishirzi

What was that parable about Pandora and her box?

The Greatest Threat - part the eleventh

Well... the Office of Data Integrity is up to its finest shenanigans. If there's no data, then all disagreements devolve into, "that's just your opinion!!! smart ass!"

Since Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} cares nothing for anything but himself, today's report that he's following through on his threat to kill anything even faintly related to climate change

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it would stop tracking the cost of the country's most expensive disasters, those which cause at least $1 billion in damage.

Some dissent

"It defies logic," [Jesse M. Keenan] said. Without the database, "the U.S. government's flying blind as to the cost of extreme weather and climate change."

As anyone with homeowner's insurance just about anywhere will know: the damn insurance industry knows full well that climate change (for the worser) is quite real.

So-called billion-dollar disasters — those with costs that balloon to 10 figures or more — have been increasing over time. In the 1980s, when the record begins, there were just over three per year, on average, when adjusted for inflation. For the period from 2020 to 2024, the average was 23 per year.

I'll just add a Yikes!!

Any rational insurance company will err to the high-side of some estimate range when calculating the cost of future weather disasters. Insurance, after all, is a for-profit endeavor. With little, or no, reliable data, those estimates come with evermore wide ranges. Do the arithmetic.

Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} and his elves can stamp their little feet and scream, "it ain't true!!" all they want. Private enterprise will always seek more profit.

The Blind Dictator. Such a sweet guy.

The Chicken or the Egg?

So, let's begin with the base fact: Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} is as dumb as a sack of hair. He's, once again, reneging on his 'promise' to get new country-by-country deals done real soon now. We don't sign deals with them, they sign deals with us. I guess he means that each of the targeted countries, and the total is nearly earth's total of them, will sign a deal with themself. I guess?

The other salient stupidity is the notion that the USofA just has to return to the glory of early post-WWII manufacturing. Those were the glory days. Just forget that you ever knew (Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} clearly has no idea) that Europe and Asia were laid waste by the Axis and Allies bombing the living shit out of there. Coincidentally, the USofA, modulo Hawaii (not yet a member of the Union), was untouched. Where else were manufactured goods to come from, anyway?? Mars? Of course not. The Marshall Plan set Europe on a re-building exercise; one which Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} surely would never have approved. Of course not. Now, according to Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell}, the EU is out to get us. Paranoia runs deep...

The reality was, if you were White and dumb as a sack of hair and lucky enough to work for Big Bidnezz with a Big Union, yeah, you got to be in the Blue Collar Middle Class. It wasn't manufacture that made the Blue Collar Middle Class, but unions and the simple fact that Uncle Sam allowed unions to flourish. Not in the South, of course. And, after Big Bidnezz got tired of over paying knuckledraggers to be assembly line flesh robots, they sent the jobs off to impoverished second and third world (over populated, too) countries; often run by dictators. No unions, or OSHA, or low cost healthcare, or pensions, or ... China, et al, didn't kidnap the wives and kids of the Big Bidnezz CxO class members and hold them for ransom: ship us your jobs or we'll rape and kill your families. No, none of that, just offered up their populations as flesh robots at very good rates.

Sure, all those Big Bidnezz CxOs will be happy to do their manufacturing here in the Red, White, and Blue. Just so long as they pay these American flesh robots the same as they do in China, or Vietnam, or Thailand, or Mexico, or ... Killing unions has been the main focus of Bidnezz since the invention of the union. Nothing personal, you know. Just Bidnezz.

A Stop on the Revenge Tour

The usual gang of pundits are all agog over Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} going after all these rich Ivy League schools. After all, didn't he graduate from one of them? Isn't the Ivy League his Tribe? Well... not really.

You see, he tried to get into Penn/Wharton as a freshman, but got rejected!! Another basis for retribution.

Both friends planned to enroll at Penn [or in Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell}'s case, USC as well], but only Nolan got accepted. Ten years later, Nolan was working in Penn's admissions department - he would later become director of undergraduate admissions - when Fred called in a favor.

So, Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} has had decades to seethe and squirm over that rejection. He had to spend two years at some commuter school in the Bronx, before sneaking in the back door. Ivy League said, NO!! Gotti make them pay.