Scared Out of Your Mind - part the third

The lede to this recent Derek Lowe post was going to be added to the trove of Thoughts. But it deserves some discussion, if only because he's 'repeating' much of what I've offered about AI. It sure is Artificial, but it ain't Intelligent.

As regular readers well know, I get very frustrated when people use the verb "to reason" in describing the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Sometimes that's just verbal shorthand, but both in print and in person I keep running into examples of people who really, truly, believe that these things are going through a reasoning process. They are not. None of them.

Damn straight. As he says later on, AI as currently implemented is just processing a gazillion cell correlation matrix. It does take some code to do the 'next word' walk through, but that's been a solved problem for many decades. What's also annoying: the coder cabal has managed to take the credit for this execrable scam, while the true credit belongs to Nvidia and AML, IOW, AI is a figment of hardware density. We could have had AI as currently implemented with the ENIAC back in the '40s, just would have taken a bit longer to generate.

[T]he accuracy of the answers across all 68 questions dropped notably in every single LLM system when presented with a "None of the above" option. DeepSeek-R1 was the most resilient, but still degraded. The underlying problem is clear: no reasoning is going on, despite some of these systems being billed as having reasoning ability. Instead, this is all pattern matching, which presents the illusion of thought and the illusion of competence.

This is the same phenomenon which leads so many to say Ken Jennings is So Smart because he won so many games on Jeopardy!. No, just large and fast memory. Just like today's AI machines.

LLMs are text generators, working on probabilities of what their next word choice should be based on what has been seem in their training sets, then dispensing answer-shaped nuggets in smooth, confident, grammatical form. This is not reasoning and it is not understanding - at its best, it is an illusion that can pass for them. And that's what it is at its worst, too.

Ken Jennings in silicon.

Polly Want a Cracker?

Anyone who thinks that Pami et al will release The Whole Epstein files is at least two steps beyond Pollyanna. Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don is a thug. That he would decline the opportunity to have at an underage piece of tail is absurd.

Remember:

Later, referring to Arianne Zucker (whom they were waiting to meet), Trump says:

I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.

He'd say to NO to Jeff??? Are you nuts? After all:

He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.

Flyers.
If it looks like, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck; it's a duck.
Birds of a feather flock together.

Me? I still think it's the case that Vlad has the pee tape. Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don is a thug. Of course, he'd do such a thing.

And, of course, lest we forget his Miss Teen USA adventures

"He just came strolling right in," Dixon said. "There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Others girls were naked. Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half-naked changing into our bikinis."

Say no to Jeff? Not a bit of it.

Thought For The Day - 12 November 2025

So, let me get this strait: in 2011 Jeff and his playmates conjured an email saga that would implicate Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don in child sex trafficking years after Jeff went belly up? Killed himself, or whatever. That's a Democrat hoax? I suppose Bubba Bill is behind it?

Only the most braindead MAGAthug would buy that.

Finally, the Real Question

Was walking by the teeVee, MSNBC was on during a break in coverage of the Supremes' hearing on the tariff issue, and some professor from Brown finally said the unsaid out loud:

it's likely not Constitutional for the Congress to cede any of its explicit duties under said Constitution to the Executive.

Damn straight. Now, how to get that undone is something of a question.

Rinse, Repeat

Sarepta has been a perpetual pinata for both skeptics and shorts from the beginning of its attempts to make an effective duchenne muscular dystrophy medicine. So far, it's not yet shown a clinical trial win in either PIII or post-approval confirmatory trials. But, if you bought up some AVII (what it started out as) when they started down this path, you'd have netted quite a bundle. Not today, though. Here's some from the latest confirmatory trial

Topline results found that numerical trends favored treatment versus placebo; however, the observed difference of 0.05 steps/second in least square means (LSM), did not reach statistical significance (P=0.309) on the primary endpoint, the 4-step ascend velocity at 96 weeks.

In case you're unfamiliar, that p-value bites pig's feet.

Games - part the second

So, let me get this straight. The team from a Crime Ridden Illegal Hispanic Hellhole city (according to Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don) wins the World Series on the backs of a bunch of Japanese pitchers? Why are furriners even allowed to play American Baseball? It's our pure game. Oh, yeah. That's right. American Capitalists don't care about the American Way, just Uncle Sugar's Bongo Bucks. Billy Joe Bob ain't happy about this. Sorta. I mean the alternative would be the Torontos win, and prove that they're better at our Pure Game.

Were it not for the Torontos tossing a couple of batting practice pitches that even I could hit out of the park, the Torontos would have won. One might wonder whether Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don would have hated that even more?

Were I a Dodger, no way in hell do I go to the torn down White House to shake hands with Duterte Don. We'll see. Even Carney collapsed.

Gambit

Withall the is he or isn't he surrounding Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don's efforts to be King for a Lifetime (aided and abetted Big Steve), I've not yet heard or read a Lamestream Lunatic Left pundit address the only issue: what does the 22^nd actually prohibit? Kinda an important question, one might think? Mightn't one?

So, here's the text

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
[bold by me]

Note: to be always effective in stopping the likes of Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don, the bold word has to be "serve". As has been hinted at by Big Steve and others: the simple way around the 22^nd is to simply run Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don as Veep to Deputy Dawg, who then abdicates on 20 January, 2029 in favor of Don. It's absolutely Constitutional. Now, of course, it only works if enough Idiots want the ruse and vote for Deputy Dawg. If Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don and his merry band of Fascists can restrict the vote to just MAGAnauts, it's a slam dunk. And that's what they've been up to. And will continue as such until election day 2028.