Been reading about who Biden/Mayor Pete want to hire for the FAA. Unbelievable. But then it is this Admin.
Was -2 this morning, now down to -4. Suppose to get down to something like -15 tonight. And it is snowing lightly. It warmed up enough yesterday to get my Mini Split working, but not today. No shoveling, it can melt.
WSJ had an article about ‘The Sound of Music’ and its continuing large fanbase…reminded me, the real Captain von Trapp wrote an interesting memoir of his service in the First World War, which I reviewed here:
Diversity Equity Inclusion is the race hustler dogma official version. DEI kills; start DEI and your society or organization will die, become a Norweigan Blue, a bird of color, an ex-parrot. DIE flips the script.
Amazon is having some bizarre problems with their search results due to generative AI being used by scammers. Essentially what is going on is scammers are using ChatGPT to generate product discriptions for fradualent products to be listed on Amazon Marketplace. But since ChatGPT has all these restrictions preventing it from using certain trademarked names and terms as well as restrictions around promoting religious institutions, you end up with products that are named things like “I’m sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy.”
On the leopard and the bird, my springer spaniel has caught three possums. She brings them to us, we bring her in and reward her, and in a little while the possums get up and walk away.
Yes. Cats play all with they’re food
There are a lot of jobs at the FAA in addition to actual air traffic controllers. I don’t think we’re in any danger of vision-impaired people working as tower controllers.
There’s been a lot of justified concern about recent near-collision and airline maintenance incidents; still, air travel has reached amazing levels of safety by any historical standards. See data here:
Note especially the five-year moving average of fatal accidents per million departures, which has fallen from about 1.4 in 1970 to something like .1 in 2022.
Rumor has it that Trump will pick Haley for VP when she endorses him near the NH primary. She will drop out in exchange for the endorsement. And Cruz will endorse Trump this week. Heard this all on X (fair warning).
This tells me that Trump is after the GOP donor cash which leave him obligated to at least parts of their agenda. Trump may be turning into a creature of the swamp.
Say it ain’t so!!
Too true, David.
People panic for no good reason—those planes are so well made you can land ’em safely even when the emergency doors blow out.
(And that episode in Japan, wow! Everyone got out even though all that was left of the plane were the wings and some melted metal stuff… Good thing Japanese don’t, as a matter of course, wear stilettos…)
is that the minimum standard we are going here, well if the doors blow out,
I am considering DRIVING to California…
From NC right? I think it’s a great idea. Wonderful way to see the country. If you can work Highway 12 across southern Utah into the route you’ll love it. My favorite drive in the U.S.
This morning ERCOT , which controls the Texas power grid was asking for people to conserve electricity till 10 AM. Notice in this news article below, it is talking about how solar does not do well in the early morning hours and the wind was unusually low. ( Probably sustained winds are low) . Doesn’t mention that there is ice/ sleet / snow on top of some of those solar panels, most likely. We have a good dusting near Tyler, Texas right now.
Yes, I know about the air safety statistics. The problem is that recent near-misses feed my longstanding fears of heights and enclosed spaces. The problem with phobias is that they are irrational.
Mike Plaiss, southern Utah is gorgeous. I’d love to see it again.
I saw predictions from some Texas energy experts. Several thought a complete grid collapse like a couple of years ago was unlikely, but that temporary shutdowns were quite likely. Smart Texans learned from the disaster and have coping mechanisms in place.
(Or will they blame it all on the Cowboys?)
only the mail and the post, actually look into the FAA, most other papers have cantwell, interrogating the FAA, as if either party has a clue,
The Fed said it lost roughly $114.3 billion in 2023, its largest-ever annual loss.
The losses occurred because the money the Fed pays banks for reserves held at the central bank exceeded the interest earned on the mortgage and Treasury bonds it holds. The Fed has been raising the interest rate paid on reserves alongside the hikes on the benchmark federal funds rate to stem the worst inflation in forty years.
Well, the Fed chooses how much interest to pay on the bank’s reserves, so it could choose to pay less. However, I believe the higher interest payments are integral to its inflation fighting, as the article hints.
I hope this is not what a national debt bomb beginning to detonate looks like.
My cousin and niece have recently had severe cases of cold/flu/covid. Likewise other people I know. No one panicked; they just had tough times. This past fall a new Covid variant emerged in China and now is all over the world:
______________________________________________
What to know about JN.1, newly dominant COVID-19 variant in US: Symptoms and more
A heavily mutated, highly transmissible new COVID-19 variant called JN.1 now accounts for the majority of cases in the United States. As the country faces a post-holiday winter wave of coronavirus and other respiratory illnesses, JN.1 continues to sweep the country.
JN.1, which is a subvariant of omicron and an offshoot of BA.2.86, aka “Pirola,” has an additional mutation that affects its ability to evade immunity. In recent weeks, JN.1 rapidly overtook other variants — including HV.1 and EG.5 or Eris — to become the dominant strain in the U.S. and globally.
The JN.1 variant is now causing an estimated two-thirds of cases in the U.S., and may be “intensifying the spread of COVID-19 this winter,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an update on Jan. 5.
According to some experts and data models, the country is facing its second-largest COVID wave, smaller than only the omicron surge in late 2021 and early 2022.
JN.1 is now considered the fastest-growing variant in the U.S., per the CDC. The share of cases caused by JN.1 nearly tripled in the past month.
During a two-week period ending on Jan. 6, JN.1 accounted for about 62% of cases in the U.S., per the CDC’s latest data. This was a steep increase from 44% during the previous two-week period ending on Dec. 23 and 21% during the two-week period ending on Dec. 9.
I will be stunned if Trump picks Haley. The last thing her backers want is Trump in the White House. My impression is Haley is being pushed by folks who hate Trump and don’t want Biden back in. They need her to be running and unattached until Trump is successfully prosecuted for a federal crime. I’m not saying he will be successfully prosecuted, but I’m saying that I think the people pushing her candidacy believe Trump will be found guilty of one or more of the myriad crimes he’s accused of and the GOP will go to Haley as plan B*.
*Or maybe Plan A, depending on just how cynical** you are.
**I am very cynical.
huxley, my house is now Covid house. None of us got even a whiff of coronavirus when it first happened. My eldest daughter got it at her chiropractor, then I got it and ended up in the hospital for two days, during which my wife and youngest daughter got it. This variant just slammed us. And we all can’t taste anything.
JFM,
Sorry to hear you and your family have been ill. Glad you are out of the hospital!
Additional Footage claimed to show the Impact of at least 4 Ballistic Missiles launched by the Iranian-Backed Groups towards the U.S. Consulate and International Airport within the City of Erbil in Northern Iraq.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran has claimed Responsibility for the Ballistic Missile Attack which has Targeted the City of Erbil in Northern Iraq.
It is an act of war that cannot, should not, be overlooked, ignored, or brushed aside. We should retaliate hard and massively. And if that requires a declaration of war, so be it.
Re: New Covid
JFM:
Best of luck!
From what I read the New Covid is miserable, but not particularly lethal.
Except in China. The crematoria are burning nonstop again.
It seems the medical authorities wacked the Chinese people hard with antibiotics in recent years — weakening their immune systems.
Re: AI
I’m learning the cool way to say ChatGPT is geh-peh-dee, GPT, for them’s what’s cares.
Scientific American has a recent fun article claiming that ChatGPT 4 has a verbal IQ of 155. 155. Think about it. That’s a lot smarter than you or me.
We are looking at something serious here. There are legitimate arguments whether the curve is leveling off, increasing linearly or exponentially. But it’s going up for a while longer.
And AI is smarter than most of us already.
Paul Graham (founder of the venture firm Y-Combinator) referred to ChatGPT as an ‘artificial pseudo-intellectual’. Indeed, it reminds me of those people who are trying too hard to impress people as to how smart they are, as opposed to being truly intelligent. This doesn’t mean it and its descendents aren’t or won’t be useful, but certainly don’t think it’s as smart as, say, the commenters on this site, not to mention the hostess/
I asked ChatGPT to analyze Goethe’s ‘Faust’, specifically the theme of Ambition as portrayed in that work, with the idea of comparing its essay with the one that I earlier wrote on the same topic.
I went to high school with a friend who had an IQ of 170. It was a disaster for him. He was bored and couldn’t relate to his peers. He was miserable, and never did realize his potential. He should have been in college, but it was a small town, the 1940s, and people didn’t know how to help him.
AI is the same. If it isn’t handled correctly, it will not reach its potential and it also has the potential to be very destructive.
I ask you if you think the tech world has helped humanity with social media? Has the internet been as successful as it might have been if better guard rails were put in place a longtime ago?
I don’t trust the tech community to get this right. I’m with Elon Musk in calling for a pause in the development of AI.
You, as a programmer, are enthralled by the progress that ChatGPT has made. I get that. However, consider how chaotic and dangerous the world of autos would be without speed limits, lane markers, stop signs, and all the other guard rails. I thinly AI needs to have guard rails put in place before the development proceeds much further. Yep, I’m an old curmudgeon. 🙂
Huxley….”for some of us, Paul Graham was a god. Perhaps a god that failed, but nevertheless….”
Why past tense? Is it because of his views on Israel and the Palestinians?
J.J.:
High IQ folks have their problems. I have been fascinated by W.J. Sidis:
____________________________________
He entered Harvard University at age 11 and, as an adult, was said to have an IQ between 250 and 300, and to be conversant in about 25 languages and dialects. Some of these statements have not been verified, but many of his contemporaries, including Norbert Wiener, Daniel Frost Comstock, and William James, agreed that he was extremely intelligent.
Please be sure that while I love tech, I am frightened by social media and the meteoric rise of AI.
Why past tense? Is it because of [Paul Graham’s ]views on Israel and the Palestinians?
David Foster:
No. I’m not tracking that.
Graham preached the pure Lisp gospel for fast agile programming. Many of us were enthralled. In 2001 Graham announced an ultimate form of Lisp called Arc. It was released in 2008 and was a nothingburger.
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Been reading about who Biden/Mayor Pete want to hire for the FAA. Unbelievable. But then it is this Admin.
Was -2 this morning, now down to -4. Suppose to get down to something like -15 tonight. And it is snowing lightly. It warmed up enough yesterday to get my Mini Split working, but not today. No shoveling, it can melt.
WSJ had an article about ‘The Sound of Music’ and its continuing large fanbase…reminded me, the real Captain von Trapp wrote an interesting memoir of his service in the First World War, which I reviewed here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70506.html
Mike and Gadi chat up the news from Tel Aviv, starting with their reaction to the Ynet writeup of the Oct 7 timeline of IDF activities ( https://w.ynet.co.il/yediot/7-days/time-of-darkness ), moving on the pathetic US “actions” against the Houthis (it’s not about the Houthis), with some consideraion of the “Lebanon” problem: https://rumble.com/v46ziz9-why-did-the-idf-fail-on-oct.-7.html
DIE demands that the Mentally Nonnormative be hired as Air Tragic Controllers by the FAA. The Gods of The Copybook Headings are not surprised.
I am considering DRIVING to California to see my siblings. It would take me five fairly comfortable driving days.
Who or what is DIE and will someone please post a link to the piece that Shirehome referred to–is it in the US News or somewhere else? Thank you.
The Sound of Music certainly retains its appeal. Much better on a second viewing than I remembered.
A real revelation
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czZxe5d7kGE
The same might be said of Mary Poppins.
Diversity Equity Inclusion is the race hustler dogma official version. DEI kills; start DEI and your society or organization will die, become a Norweigan Blue, a bird of color, an ex-parrot. DIE flips the script.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/faas-diversity-push-includes-focus-hiring-people-severe-intellectual-psychiatric-disabilities
Amazon is having some bizarre problems with their search results due to generative AI being used by scammers. Essentially what is going on is scammers are using ChatGPT to generate product discriptions for fradualent products to be listed on Amazon Marketplace. But since ChatGPT has all these restrictions preventing it from using certain trademarked names and terms as well as restrictions around promoting religious institutions, you end up with products that are named things like “I’m sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy.”
On the leopard and the bird, my springer spaniel has caught three possums. She brings them to us, we bring her in and reward her, and in a little while the possums get up and walk away.
Yes. Cats play all with they’re food
There are a lot of jobs at the FAA in addition to actual air traffic controllers. I don’t think we’re in any danger of vision-impaired people working as tower controllers.
There’s been a lot of justified concern about recent near-collision and airline maintenance incidents; still, air travel has reached amazing levels of safety by any historical standards. See data here:
https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/plane-safety-airlines-boeing-never-been-safer-adbe2453?page=1
Note especially the five-year moving average of fatal accidents per million departures, which has fallen from about 1.4 in 1970 to something like .1 in 2022.
Rumor has it that Trump will pick Haley for VP when she endorses him near the NH primary. She will drop out in exchange for the endorsement. And Cruz will endorse Trump this week. Heard this all on X (fair warning).
This tells me that Trump is after the GOP donor cash which leave him obligated to at least parts of their agenda. Trump may be turning into a creature of the swamp.
Say it ain’t so!!
Too true, David.
People panic for no good reason—those planes are so well made you can land ’em safely even when the emergency doors blow out.
(And that episode in Japan, wow! Everyone got out even though all that was left of the plane were the wings and some melted metal stuff… Good thing Japanese don’t, as a matter of course, wear stilettos…)
is that the minimum standard we are going here, well if the doors blow out,
I am considering DRIVING to California…
From NC right? I think it’s a great idea. Wonderful way to see the country. If you can work Highway 12 across southern Utah into the route you’ll love it. My favorite drive in the U.S.
This morning ERCOT , which controls the Texas power grid was asking for people to conserve electricity till 10 AM. Notice in this news article below, it is talking about how solar does not do well in the early morning hours and the wind was unusually low. ( Probably sustained winds are low) . Doesn’t mention that there is ice/ sleet / snow on top of some of those solar panels, most likely. We have a good dusting near Tyler, Texas right now.
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2024/01/14/ercot-asks-texans-to-conserve-electricity-expects-tight-grid-conditions-due-to-freezing-temperatures/
Yes, I know about the air safety statistics. The problem is that recent near-misses feed my longstanding fears of heights and enclosed spaces. The problem with phobias is that they are irrational.
Mike Plaiss, southern Utah is gorgeous. I’d love to see it again.
I saw predictions from some Texas energy experts. Several thought a complete grid collapse like a couple of years ago was unlikely, but that temporary shutdowns were quite likely. Smart Texans learned from the disaster and have coping mechanisms in place.
(Or will they blame it all on the Cowboys?)
only the mail and the post, actually look into the FAA, most other papers have cantwell, interrogating the FAA, as if either party has a clue,
Federal Reserve Payments to Banks Trigger Largest Ever Operating Loss
Well, the Fed chooses how much interest to pay on the bank’s reserves, so it could choose to pay less. However, I believe the higher interest payments are integral to its inflation fighting, as the article hints.
I hope this is not what a national debt bomb beginning to detonate looks like.
My cousin and niece have recently had severe cases of cold/flu/covid. Likewise other people I know. No one panicked; they just had tough times. This past fall a new Covid variant emerged in China and now is all over the world:
______________________________________________
What to know about JN.1, newly dominant COVID-19 variant in US: Symptoms and more
A heavily mutated, highly transmissible new COVID-19 variant called JN.1 now accounts for the majority of cases in the United States. As the country faces a post-holiday winter wave of coronavirus and other respiratory illnesses, JN.1 continues to sweep the country.
JN.1, which is a subvariant of omicron and an offshoot of BA.2.86, aka “Pirola,” has an additional mutation that affects its ability to evade immunity. In recent weeks, JN.1 rapidly overtook other variants — including HV.1 and EG.5 or Eris — to become the dominant strain in the U.S. and globally.
The JN.1 variant is now causing an estimated two-thirds of cases in the U.S., and may be “intensifying the spread of COVID-19 this winter,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an update on Jan. 5.
According to some experts and data models, the country is facing its second-largest COVID wave, smaller than only the omicron surge in late 2021 and early 2022.
JN.1 is now considered the fastest-growing variant in the U.S., per the CDC. The share of cases caused by JN.1 nearly tripled in the past month.
During a two-week period ending on Jan. 6, JN.1 accounted for about 62% of cases in the U.S., per the CDC’s latest data. This was a steep increase from 44% during the previous two-week period ending on Dec. 23 and 21% during the two-week period ending on Dec. 9.
https://www.today.com/health/coronavirus/jn-1-covid-variant-symptoms-rcna129344
Yawrate,
I will be stunned if Trump picks Haley. The last thing her backers want is Trump in the White House. My impression is Haley is being pushed by folks who hate Trump and don’t want Biden back in. They need her to be running and unattached until Trump is successfully prosecuted for a federal crime. I’m not saying he will be successfully prosecuted, but I’m saying that I think the people pushing her candidacy believe Trump will be found guilty of one or more of the myriad crimes he’s accused of and the GOP will go to Haley as plan B*.
*Or maybe Plan A, depending on just how cynical** you are.
**I am very cynical.
she’s turrble as barkley would say
https://www.megynkelly.com/2024/01/15/nikki-haley-can-a-man-become-a-woman-iowa/
huxley, my house is now Covid house. None of us got even a whiff of coronavirus when it first happened. My eldest daughter got it at her chiropractor, then I got it and ended up in the hospital for two days, during which my wife and youngest daughter got it. This variant just slammed us. And we all can’t taste anything.
JFM,
Sorry to hear you and your family have been ill. Glad you are out of the hospital!
https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1747003036877164883?t=twyNw2Z1U7tQK3s8tXSlpg&s=19
https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1747004541545963748?t=wvdMlX8Sm-k2ik8Y4u_Hjw&s=19
An attack on a consulate is an internationally recognized act of war.
America should be literally up in arms about this.
My Assyrian boss/spook/friend has been in communication with our contacts in Iraq. He tells me that they are very stirred up.
We should be stirred up too.
Ah, but then there are so many “lids” in the way!: https://twitter.com/omriceren/status/1747004028507054171?t=rJt2TC57ut0-1rmTMEXLLw&s=19
It is an act of war that cannot, should not, be overlooked, ignored, or brushed aside. We should retaliate hard and massively. And if that requires a declaration of war, so be it.
Re: New Covid
JFM:
Best of luck!
From what I read the New Covid is miserable, but not particularly lethal.
Except in China. The crematoria are burning nonstop again.
It seems the medical authorities wacked the Chinese people hard with antibiotics in recent years — weakening their immune systems.
Re: AI
I’m learning the cool way to say ChatGPT is geh-peh-dee, GPT, for them’s what’s cares.
Scientific American has a recent fun article claiming that ChatGPT 4 has a verbal IQ of 155. 155. Think about it. That’s a lot smarter than you or me.
https://bgr.com/tech/chatgpt-took-an-iq-test-and-its-score-was-sky-high/
We are looking at something serious here. There are legitimate arguments whether the curve is leveling off, increasing linearly or exponentially. But it’s going up for a while longer.
And AI is smarter than most of us already.
Paul Graham (founder of the venture firm Y-Combinator) referred to ChatGPT as an ‘artificial pseudo-intellectual’. Indeed, it reminds me of those people who are trying too hard to impress people as to how smart they are, as opposed to being truly intelligent. This doesn’t mean it and its descendents aren’t or won’t be useful, but certainly don’t think it’s as smart as, say, the commenters on this site, not to mention the hostess/
I asked ChatGPT to analyze Goethe’s ‘Faust’, specifically the theme of Ambition as portrayed in that work, with the idea of comparing its essay with the one that I earlier wrote on the same topic.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/69654.html
“… it reminds me of those people who are trying too hard to impress people as to how smart they are, as opposed to being truly intelligent.”
Yeesh, David Foster, you could at least have the decency to wait until I’m not reading the blog to call me out like that. 😉
Paul Graham (founder of the venture firm Y-Combinator)
David Foster:
Not to contradict you, but for some of us, Paul Graham was a god. Perhaps a god that failed, but nevertheless….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
“155. Think about it. – huxley
I went to high school with a friend who had an IQ of 170. It was a disaster for him. He was bored and couldn’t relate to his peers. He was miserable, and never did realize his potential. He should have been in college, but it was a small town, the 1940s, and people didn’t know how to help him.
AI is the same. If it isn’t handled correctly, it will not reach its potential and it also has the potential to be very destructive.
I ask you if you think the tech world has helped humanity with social media? Has the internet been as successful as it might have been if better guard rails were put in place a longtime ago?
I don’t trust the tech community to get this right. I’m with Elon Musk in calling for a pause in the development of AI.
You, as a programmer, are enthralled by the progress that ChatGPT has made. I get that. However, consider how chaotic and dangerous the world of autos would be without speed limits, lane markers, stop signs, and all the other guard rails. I thinly AI needs to have guard rails put in place before the development proceeds much further. Yep, I’m an old curmudgeon. 🙂
Huxley….”for some of us, Paul Graham was a god. Perhaps a god that failed, but nevertheless….”
Why past tense? Is it because of his views on Israel and the Palestinians?
J.J.:
High IQ folks have their problems. I have been fascinated by W.J. Sidis:
____________________________________
He entered Harvard University at age 11 and, as an adult, was said to have an IQ between 250 and 300, and to be conversant in about 25 languages and dialects. Some of these statements have not been verified, but many of his contemporaries, including Norbert Wiener, Daniel Frost Comstock, and William James, agreed that he was extremely intelligent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis
____________________________________
Sidis did not have a happy, productive life.
J.J.:
Please be sure that while I love tech, I am frightened by social media and the meteoric rise of AI.
Why past tense? Is it because of [Paul Graham’s ]views on Israel and the Palestinians?
David Foster:
No. I’m not tracking that.
Graham preached the pure Lisp gospel for fast agile programming. Many of us were enthralled. In 2001 Graham announced an ultimate form of Lisp called Arc. It was released in 2008 and was a nothingburger.