I keep missing their funerals!

I am a neglectful nemesis. I told you before that the Slymepit had died, and it took me six months to find out. Now I learn that Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent, has expired. I’m only about 2 months late to the party, so I’m getting better.

As his blog sank, Dembski was crowing in triumph.

In closing this farewell, I want to say special thanks to Jack Cole, who was the webmaster all these years and put in so many unremunerated hours; to Denyse O’Leary, whose quick pen and sharp insights supplied a never-ending stream of fruitful content; and to Barry Arrington, whose work in administering the site and writing for it kept the trains running. And finally, thanks to all the contributors and commenters over the years who, in supporting ID, have been on the right side of truth and will ultimately be vindicated for being on the right side of history.

Nothing in any of the Intelligent Design creationism blogs were on the right side of truth. Dembski has always been fond of making grandiose proclamations that fly in the face of reality, like this one.

In the next five years, molecular Darwinism – the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level – will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.

He wrote that in 2004. It’s a standard trope in creationism to announce the imminent death of Darwinism even as they are being stuffed into a grave. See also the Wedge document from 1998, where they predicted major legal and scientific victories within a few years, and instead they got the Kitzmiller trial in 2005…and we all know how that turned out for them.

(Of course, one could argue that “Darwinism” sensu stricto has been dead for over a hundred years, but that would be an admission that the creationists have been flailing ignorantly against a straw man.)

The AI hype machine might be in trouble

David Gerard brings up an interesting association: the crypto grifters, as their scam begins to disintegrate, have jumped ship to become AI grifters.

You’ll be delighted to hear that blockchain is out and AI is in:

It’s not clear if the VCs actually buy their own pitch for ChatGPT’s spicy autocomplete as the harbinger of the robot apocalypse. Though if you replaced VC Twitter with ChatGPT, you would see a significant increase in quality.

Huh. Interesting. I never trusted crypto, because everyone behind it was so slimy, but now they’re going to slime the AI industry.

Also interesting, though, is who isn’t falling for it. Apple had a recent shindig in which they announced all the cool shiny new toys for the next year, and they are actively incorporating machine learning into them, but they are definitely not calling it AI.

If you had watched Apple’s WWDC keynote, you might have realized the lack of mention of the term “AI”. This is in complete contrast to what happened recently at events of other Big Tech companies, such as Google I/O.

It turns out that there wasn’t even a single mention of the term “AI”. No, not even once.

The technology was referred to, of course, but always in the form of “machine learning” — a more sedate and technically accurate description.

Apple took a different route and instead of highlighting AI as the omnipotent force, they pointed to the features that they’ve developed using the technology. Here’s a list of the ML/AI features that Apple unveiled:

  • Improved Autocorrect on iOS 17: Apple introduced an enhanced autocorrect feature, powered by a transformer language model. This on-device machine learning model improves autocorrection and sentence completion as users type.
  • Personalized Volume Feature for AirPods: Apple announced this feature that uses machine learning to adapt to environmental conditions and user listening preferences.
  • Enhanced Smart Stack on watchOS: Apple upgraded its Smart Stack feature to use machine learning to display relevant information to users.
  • Journal App: Apple unveiled this new app that employs on-device machine learning to intelligently curate prompts for users.

    3D Avatars for Video Calls on Vision Pro: Apple showcased advanced ML techniques for generating 3D avatars for video calls on the newly launched Vision Pro.

  • Transformer-Based Speech Recognition: Apple announced a new transformer-based speech recognition model that improves dictation accuracy using the Neural Engine.
  • Apple M2 Ultra Chip: Apple unveiled this chip with a 32-core Neural Engine, which is capable of performing 31.6 trillion operations per second and supports up to 192GB of unified memory. This chip can train large transformer models, demonstrating a significant leap in AI applications.

Unlike its rivals, who are building bigger models with server farms, supercomputers, and terabytes of data, Apple wants AI models on its devices. On-device AI bypasses a lot of the data privacy issues that cloud-based AI faces. When the model can be run on a phone, then Apple needs to collect less data in order to run it.

It also ties in closely with Apple’s control of its hardware stack, down to its own silicon chips. Apple packs new AI circuits and GPUs into its chips every year, and its control of the overall architecture allows it to adapt to changes and new techniques.

Say what you think of Apple as a company, but one thing they know how to do is make money. Lots of money. They also have first-rate engineers. Apparently they are smart enough to not fall for the hype.

There are consequences?

Chris Licht, the former head of CNN who pushed that disastrous, mismanaged Trump town hall on us, seems to have faced some kind of rebuke from the men who control the pursestrings. He has undergone some ambiguous lateral transfer or downgrade — he’s not in charge anymore.

Anyway, the guy made no friends with his “let Republicans lie” brand of journalism because, really, that’s not what journalism is supposed to be. It’s supposed to inform people of the truth. CNN’s staff hated what Licht was trying to do. The viewers hated it, and left in droves. Freaking Newsmax started beating CNN in ratings. And the business suits hated it, because if money isn’t being made, what’s the point? In short, he shit the bed.

It’s not much of a consequence, but it’s something. If nothing else, all his rich friends know that he is in disgrace, which is probably what hurts him most. Being outright fired would hurt him better, though.

Are you middle class?

I took this little survey in the Washington Post that takes into account your income, number of dependents, and region of the country you live in, and it tells me that I am officially and totally middle class. I’m right smack in the center of the arbitrarily defined boundaries that delimit “middle class” — and that the way I got to this point was by getting rid of those pesky kids who were holding me back. Fifteen years ago, I discovered, I was way down deep in lower middle class territory.

Your household has a middle-class income, and you have the financial security associated with the middle class. Your income is similar to others in your Zip code above the median for rural Minnesota. Rural Minnesota is an inexpensive place to live, and you would still be considered middle income anywhere in the country.

It’s a comfortable place to be, but there is no hope that I will ever be wealthy. That’s good enough.

I won’t ask you what class you fall into, because only a grifter cares about that sort of thing.

But I was joking!

You know this podish-sortacast that Freethoughtblogs runs? At the end of the last one, we were talking about new topics, and I casually threw out “SPIDERS” expecting everyone would actually pick something of broader general interest. The jokes on me, because guess what we’re talking about on Saturday?

I can probably think of something to say. Whether it is of interest is a different question.

Only Apple could pull this off

Apple unveiled a shiny new gadget today: Apple Vision Pro.

This looks really good! I want one. But as the summary of the glorious widget went on, it was clear I was not in their market. It’s a complete wearable computer, with a whole new interface — it’s everything Microsoft and all those cyberpunk authors dreamed of, integrating the real world (it’s transparent) with virtual reality. As I listened to the WWDC presentation, though, every glowing adjective and every new tech toy built into it made me cringe. The price was climbing by the second. Then at the end, they broke the news: $3500. Nope, not for me. It’s about what we ought to expect in something so shiny and new and packed with every bit of advanced technology they could pack into an extremely small space, though.

That price is not going to stop Apple, I’m sure. This is going to be the new must-have technological marvel that every techbro and marketingbro and rich person with ludicrous amounts of surplus wealth is going to want. Apple is going to clean up, I predict.

The good little robot

Look at that thing. It’s beautiful.

That’s Ingenuity, the drone that was sent to Mars on the Perseverance mission. It was intended to be a proof-of-concept test, expected to fly for only a couple of excursions, and then fail under the hellish Martian conditions. Instead, it has survived for two years.

Ingenuity defied the odds the day it first lifted off from Martian soil. The four-pound aircraft stands about 19 inches tall and is little more than a box of avionics with four spindly legs on one end and two rotor blades and a solar panel on the other. But it performed the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet — what NASA billed a “Wright brothers moment” — after arriving on Mars in April 2021.

It’s made over 50 flights. Apparently it’s a bit wonky, losing radio connection to the rover when it flies out of line of sight, or when the cold shuts it down, but when it warms up, or the rover drives closer, it gets right up again.

NASA has still got good engineering. It might be because of all the redundancy they build into every gadget — this little drone cost $80 million dollars! — but I have a hypothesis that the real secret to its success is what they left out. There’s no narcissistic and incompetent billionaire attached to the project, just a lot of engineers who take pride in their work.

The problem isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s natural stupidity

A Texas A&M professor flunked all of his students because ChatGPT told him to.

Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes,

He legitimately wrote a PhD thesis on pig farming, but really — a “rodeo instructor”? I guess that’s like the coaches we have working in athletic programs at non-Ag colleges.

sent an email on Monday to a group of students informing them that he had submitted grades for their last three essay assignments of the semester. Everyone would be receiving an “X” in the course, Mumm explained, because he had used “Chat GTP” (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called “ChatGPT”) to test whether they’d used the software to write the papers — and the bot claimed to have authored every single one.

“I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content,” he wrote, saying he had tested each paper twice. He offered the class a makeup assignment to avoid the failing grade — which could otherwise, in theory, threaten their graduation status.

Wow. He doesn’t know what he’s doing at all. ChatGPT is an artificial expert at confabulation — it will assemble a plausible-sounding mess of words that looks like other collections of words it finds in its database, and that’s about it. It’s not TurnItIn, a service professors have been using for at least a decade that compares submitted text to other texts in it’s database, and reports similarities. ChatGPT will happily make stuff up. You can’t use it the way he thinks.

Mumm was unwarrantedly aggressive in his ignorance.

Students claim they supplied him with proof they hadn’t used ChatGPT — exonerating timestamps on the Google Documents they used to complete the homework — but that he initially ignored this, commenting in the school’s grading software system, “I don’t grade AI bullshit.” (Mumm did not return Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.)

Unfortunately for him, Mumm was cursed with smarter spectators to his AI bullshit. One of them ran Mumm’s PhD thesis through ChatGPT in the same inappropriate, invalid way.

In an amusing wrinkle, Mumm’s claims appear to be undercut by a simple experiment using ChatGPT. On Tuesday, redditor Delicious_Village112 found an abstract of Mumm’s doctoral dissertation on pig farming and submitted a section of that paper to the bot, asking if it might have written the paragraph. “Yes, the passage you shared could indeed have been generated by a language model like ChatGPT, given the right prompt,” the program answered. “The text contains several characteristics that are consistent with AI-generated content.” At the request of other redditors, Delicious_Village112 also submitted Mumm’s email to students about their presumed AI deception, asking the same question. “Yes, I wrote the content you’ve shared,” ChatGPT replied. Yet the bot also clarified: “If someone used my abilities to help draft an email, I wouldn’t have a record of it.”

On the one hand, I am relieved to see that ChatGPT can’t replace me. On the other hand, there is an example of someone who thinks it can, to disastrous effect. Maybe it could at least replace the Jared Mumm’s of the world, except I bet it sucks at bronco bustin’ and lassoing calves.