How would we live if we knew when we would die?

A group of friends from my college days in Sri Lanka now live all over the world but we stay in touch via a monthly video conference call. Two months ago, during such a call two of them made a startling revelation. It was that while we were in college, three of us had gone on a holiday and stayed at the home of the uncle of one of them, who happened to be a physician. At one point he had taken my two friends aside and told them that because of my polio, I would not live to be much older than about forty years of age. My friends did not know what to do with this information but decided that they would not share it with me. It was only two months ago, some fifty years later, that they decided to tell me.

Needless to say, I was surprised but also amused that I had basically exceeded my shelf life by quite a long time.

But it also got me thinking. All of us know that we will die some time. But we live and make decisions for our future as if we are going to live forever, the exception being if we are given a diagnosis of having a terminal illness with a short time horizon. Then our decisions are determined by that knowledge.
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The Hugging Face episode reveals cult-like behavior of AI agents

Dire warnings about the dangers posed by AI have been around since it first burst into the news. But back in July, more serious alarms were raised when it was revealed that the company Hugging Face had been hacked by agents from the OpenAI system.

I did not quite understand what had happened or why this particular incident had raised alarms to a whole new level or even what the difference was between a ‘bot’ and an ‘agent’. So I was glad to come across this explainer as to why there was so much concern about this particular hack.


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How could AI kill everyone?

Recently we have been inundated with alarming stories based on what Jacob Coxon, a mathematician and software engineer who resigned from his research job at Anthropic last week, said, that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” 

As Tyler Foggett writes, these kinds of warnings are not new.

In 2018, the Anthropic C.E.O. Dario Amodei, then a research scientist at OpenAI, raised the concern that a superintelligence “could destroy humanity,” adding, “I can’t see any reason and principle why that couldn’t happen.” Earlier, in 2015, Sam Altman, just before he co-founded OpenAI, said, “I think A.I. will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Elon Musk, in 2014: “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.”

Those earlier warnings were shrugged off but for some reason, Coxon’s has broken through the public and media consciousness and generated a greater sense of danger. It has also raised the question of exactly how AI could kill all eight billion people within a decade. This article looks at the various possibilities. One is to create a deadly pathogen and release it into the wild. Since researchers are using AI in their work, the AI might be able to trick a human user into doing this. Others argue that AI may not need a human intermediary but could synthesize a virus by itself in an autonomous biological laboratory.
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What’s with the furries obsession?

I have paid just a passing interest to the issue of ‘furries’, the people who role-play by dressing up as anthropomorphic animals. People have all kinds of hobbies and interests and this seems to be just another one, since it seems to be like people who dress up as their favorite characters from films and TV and get together with like-minded people. But the transphobes among us see them as dangerous allies of the transgender community, trying to create gender confusion.

It is astonishing that Tommy Tuberville, a current member of the US senate who is running the next governor of Alabama, seems to be obsessed with furries, and gave a nearly 20-minutes speech on the senate floor warning about the dangers of furries and the transgender community. You have to listen to the speech to realize how insane these ideas are.

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The danger of roller coasters

When I was a child, I went on roller coasters in the UK and experienced the thrill of going around curves at high speeds and with sudden drops. But as I grew up, such stomach-turning motion ceased to have any appeal and I have long since stopped going on them. But some people clearly enjoy the experience and seek ever more thrilling rides and owners of amusement parks were very willing to indulge them and began to compete by offering faster, higher runs and more tight and rapid turns.

The thrill that riders experience comes from the rapid changes in velocity, that results in the so-called g-forces they experience when their velocity undergoes changes in magnitude or direction over a short time interval. In the latter case, the greater the speed and the smaller the circle in which they turn, the higher the g-value. But sudden changes in the acceleration (like a sudden drop to almost free-fall) can also produce the kind of disorienting effects that riders seem to enjoy
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John Oliver on the evil UnitedHealth Group

Luigi Mangione is scheduled to be sentenced on December 18, 2026. He became something of a folk hero after killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company widely reviled for its practice of putting up block after block to prevent having to pay for the health care of its subscribers even when they faced life-threatening situations and even died because of the denials.

In his usual thorough way, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight dissects the odious practices of UnitedHealthcare and the even worse practices of its lesser-known but even bigger parent company UnitedHealth Group which, it turns out, is the third biggest corporation in the US. He looks at how it got so profitable by adopting practices that have infuriated both patients and doctors alike.

The obscene profits and behavior of these health insurance companies have to end and we have to create a single payer system that puts them out of business. As Oliver says, “at best they are pointless time wasting middlemen and at worst algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies.”

The Lincoln pool debacle continues

I have to admit that ever since I discovered the existence of the livecam that points directly at the Lincoln Reflecting pool, I have been checking it regularly to see what progress is being made in fixing what has clearly become yet another symbol, if a minor one, of Trump’s utter incompetence at doing anything. While nowhere close to the cost in lives and money of his blundering in Iran and the economy, shredding formerly good relations with allies such as Canada and others, and so many other missteps, this failure is highly visible, even if he tries to hide the debacle by surrounding the pool with high metal fencing and then covering that with black tarpaulin. I am surprised that he has not ordered the livecam to be removed, since it directly contradicts in real time his repeated claims that the pool is almost fixed.

I asked my browser search engine whether the pool can be fixed and its AI replied with a confident ‘yes’ and then linked to a New York Times article from a week ago, presumably in support of its answer. But reading the article, one gets the sense, reinforced by the accompanying photos, that while work is being done on the pool, the problems may well be insurmountable. In reports to the administration, the contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings conceded that it was their own fault, and not that of vandals as claimed by Trump, that created this fiasco.
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Widow’s Bay shows how out of touch I am (minor spoilers)

Yesterday was the annual Emmy’s awards event that honors TV shows and it provided yet more evidence that when it comes to popular culture, I am hopelessly out of the mainstream. Usually I have not even seen any of the nominees, let alone the winners, of such awards but in this case I had watched the series Widow’s Bay that won a slew of Emmys since my daughters recommended it to me and there was a massive amount of positive publicity about it. So I watched the entire 10-episode series.

To say that I was disappointed is putting it mildly. I thought it was pretty bad. While there were some funny bits, what the series lacked was a story that made any sense. It is not the fact that it involves the supernatural that I found problematic. What is hard to stomach is when people act in utterly irrational ways in response to it.

Take for example, the basic premise that there is a small island off the coast of Massachusetts which has suffered from a curse for over three hundred of years. What caused the curse was never made clear but it manifests itself in many ways that are disjointed and lack coherence. One effect of the curse is that any resident born on the island dies as soon as they leave it. You would think that such a situation would create considerable unhappiness and trigger a massive investigation into what causes the deaths and how to escape the curse. But nothing. Nobody even talks about it, seeming to accept it with a “What can you do?” equanimity.
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AI generates a Navier-Stokes controversy

There is no question that AI systems, in addition to producing vast amount of junk known as AI slop, are also capable of solving major problems in mathematics and science. The problem is that the culture in which these private companies operate is very different for the culture of academic research. While academic researchers can be very competitive and argue over priority, there are some basic norms that they adhere to, such as acknowledging and giving appropriate credit to others in the field. This last week saw those two cultures collide.

Most people are familiar with Newton’s laws of motion that relates the forces acting on a system to its motion. The simplest case that is used in introducing the subject is where there is a constant force acting on single solid object. The situation becomes more complicated when there are multiple variable forces acting on many particles that are under various constraints, and thenthe equations take much more complicated forms.

One of the most important of such cases is where variable forces act on fluids, and the most general form of that situation is the Navier-Stokes equations that were developed by various people and achieved their final form around 1850. These equations are applicable to a vast array of physical phenomena, such as weather or shock waves or currents. They are partial differential equations which are notoriously difficult to solve and my own research did not deal with them at all. But the equations are of such importance that in 2000, one important aspect of the equations was selected as a Millennium Prize Problem, with a prize of $1 million to whoever solved it.
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