‘…a shift in the national experiment with online menus, an invention that not long ago seemed like the way of the future. Today, even though many restaurants still have “scan the code” cards tucked into napkin holders or pasted onto the corners of tables, customers seem to be ignoring them. And many restaurants have returned to using only paper menus….’ (The New York Times)

‘In a keynote speech at the European Association for Computational Linguistics in Dubrovnik earlier this month, I proposed a novel and tractable first step in responding to LLMs: we should ban them from referring to themselves in the first person. They should not call themselves “I” and they should not refer to themselves and humans as “we.”…’ (Crooked Timber)

‘The body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, who died at age 95 in 2019, was exhumed “roughly four years later” so it can be moved to its final resting place inside a monastery chapel, the Catholic News Agency reported.

When the coffin was unearthed, Lancaster’s body was apparently “incorrupt,” which in Catholic tradition refers to the preservation of the body from normal decay. The remains were intact even though the body had not been embalmed and was in a wooden coffin, according to the news outlet.

The discovery has captured the attention of some members of the church, and prompted an investigation….’  (CNN)

‘“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said. He was joking. Probably. Mostly. It’s a little hard to tell.

Altman’s company, OpenAI, is fundraising unfathomable amounts of money in order to build powerful groundbreaking AI systems. “The risks could be extraordinary,” he wrote in a February blog post. “A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world; an autocratic regime with a decisive superintelligence lead could do that too.” His overall conclusion, nonetheless: OpenAI should press forward.

There’s a fundamental oddity on display whenever Altman talks about existential risks from AI, and it was particularly notable in his most recent blog post, “Governance of superintelligence”, which also lists OpenAI president Greg Brockman and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever as co-authors….’  (Vox)

‘A hacking expert was hired by 60 Minutes as an experiment to try to pull off a scam, and how they did it was remarkable.

Once they got cell phone numbers of the reporter and their assistant from online sources, they “spoofed” the reporter’s phone number, so that a call to the assistant came up as coming from the reporter. Then they used AI to mimic the reporter’s voice and asked the assistant for a passport number. The assistant of course instantly and without any suspicion complied.

The report is mostly about how scammers are targeting senior citizens, but the expert emphasized, “Everybody would get tricked with that.” Scammers apparently just need phone numbers, some personal information, and a voice sample….’ (Boing Boing)

‘Scientists think a traumatized orca initiated the assault on boats after a “critical moment of agony” and that the behavior is spreading among the population through social learning….’ (Live Science)

Related: Video: Orcas bite hole in boat off the Iberian coast

‘A group of orcas slammed into a sailing boat off the Iberian Coast, tearing a hole in the bottom of the ship. Orcas sank three boats earlier this year, among other attacks. CNN’s Christina Macfarlane reports….’  (CNN)

‘The polling industry whiffed every year trump has been on the ballot. In 2016, trump upset Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. And after spending four years trying to fix what went wrong, the polls were even worse in 2020. trump ran far more competitively with now-President Joe Biden than the preelection surveys suggested.

Pollsters are breathing a sigh of relief after largely nailing last year’s midterm elections. But presidential years have been a different story in the trump era.
And now, with trump expanding his lead over his GOP primary rivals, pollsters are fretting about a bloc of the electorate that has made his support nearly impossible to measure accurately….’ (POLITICO)

CNN’s town hall showed why a second trump term would be worse

‘The CNN town hall was a wake-up call: If trump wins, he’ll be even more dangerous than he was last time….’ (Vox)

‘Researchers found compelling molecular evidence suggesting that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, traditionally viewed as distinct conditions, may have more similarities than previously thought.

By examining thousands of proteins present at synapses in the brains of patients with each disorder, they found changes that were remarkably alike. The team also discovered similar biochemical alterations in mice with a mutated gene linked to both conditions….’ (Neuroscience News)

‘Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, the real-life Men in Black are mysterious figures who threaten people who have reported paranormal experiences….’ (All That Is Interesting)

‘Republican political consultant Matthew Bartlett says CNN’s town hall with trump was rigged to make it look like everyone in the audience was in agreement with trump, even though many in attendance were “disgusted” and “bewildered,” reports Mediaite.

“The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud,” Bartlett told Puck News senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri….’ (Boing Boing)

‘A case on the Court’s “shadow docket” could strike down state and local bans on AR-15s and similar weapons….’ (Vox)

‘The murder case against Richard Glossip is so weak that even Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general says he should not be executed….’ (Vox)

‘…the most disturbing possibility is that this is a Russian government put-up job from start to finish. There are several reasons this makes more sense than other explanations.

First, an attack on the Kremlin would give Putin the rationalization he’s been seeking for some kind of dramatic and murderous action that might not make much military sense, but that would destabilize Ukraine and unsettle the world on the eve of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Russians, I believe, are dreading this coming operation, and want to change the narrative at home and abroad. I have no idea what Putin has up his sleeve, but even on his better days, he is prone to strategically idiotic moves. He might try to drag Belarus into the war, he could make more nuclear threats, or he could even order redoubled efforts to kill Zelensky.

In any case, faking a drone attack would fit into the long-standing Russian affinity for “false flag” operations. Though conspiracy theorists in the United States often trumpet unfounded claims of false flags, professional intelligence services do conduct such operations, and Moscow has been particularly fond of them all the way back to the Soviet period. The series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, for example, that became the pretext for escalation in Chechnya, were almost certainly orchestrated by the secret services (a possibility so disturbing that I and other Russia experts were loath to accept it—but which is now, in my view, undeniable). And in the past year, the Russians warned that the Ukrainians were going to unleash a “dirty bomb,” a ludicrous claim that even led China to give the Kremlin some stink eye for playing around with nuclear threats.

This drone strike looks like the same play, only without nuclear materials. A terrorist attack in the capital would be a pretext for the Russians to warn the world that this time, they’re really going to take the gloves off. Ukrainian officials are worried that this is exactly the Russian plan. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, told the BBC that the incident indicated Russia could be “preparing a large-scale terrorist provocation” in Ukraine. That’s a pretty chilling possibility, considering that the Russian campaign plan at this point already consists of indiscriminate war crimes….’ (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)

I remember fondly inviting him back to my dorm room after he gave a concert at my college. A dozen of us sat around in a circle on the floor with the man at times called ‘Canada’s greatest songwriter’ as he humbly sang the night away. I got a command performance of ‘Early Morning Rain.’ 

‘In a recent experiment, researchers used large language models to translate brain activity into words.

…Scientists recorded M.R.I. data from three participants as they listened to 16 hours of narrative stories to train the model to map between brain activity and semantic features that captured the meanings of certain phrases and the associated brain response…’ (The New York Times)