AI Going Rogue! Which Way Gasoline? Saving Democracy!! Educating Hoosier?

 Exclusive-OpenAI works to understand full scope of agent activity as user data leak emerges

Two months after OpenAI disclosed the accidental hacking of Hugging Face, the ChatGPT maker is still working to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The latest example came on Friday when OpenAI said its agents had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users. OpenAI declined to say if the images were AI-generated or identified real people. It also declined to say when the ‌images were posted.

The intelligence war is turning against the Houthis (Al Jazeera), but this does what to oil prices?

The Saudi-led JFC’s broader transformation in C6ISR – the systems connecting command, communications, intelligence and combat capabilities – target development and faster sensor-to-shooter integration has changed the military equation since 2015. At the same time, sustained Houthi escalation has exhausted the restraint that governed Saudi policy for years. The major Saudi-led campaign now taking shape will therefore begin against an adversary whose external command support is already under sustained attack.

That is the decisive difference. The Russian-Iranian system sustaining and amplifying Houthi military power is being degraded before major Saudi-led air, land and naval operations are fully under way, while the tactical failures exposed at Mokha are being corrected within the Saudi-led JFC. The Houthis exploited a compromised command system once; they are now being forced to fight while the external system that magnified their own effectiveness is systematically dismantled.

The wrong prescription for liberal democracy's ills (Engelsberg ideas)

That’s a comment worth pondering as the political class around the world tries to figure out what happened to moderation. Leaders who do not hide their disrespect for democratic institutions are in power from Turkey to India to Argentina, while parties towards the middle of the ideological spectrum seem mired in trouble almost everywhere. Two thirds of German voters support none of the three parties that have framed political debate in Germany for nearly 80 years, even as Israel is torn by a debate about whether its government is becoming authoritarian. An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that elected officials don’t care what they think. As Daron Acemoglu asserts: ‘What we are witnessing isn’t a failure just of democracy but of liberal democracy.’

Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is well known for his work on political economy. His 2012 book Why Nations Fail, written with economist James A. Robinson, then at Harvard University, became a best-seller, and he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics with Robinson and Simon Johnson, also of MIT, for their research on how social institutions affect prosperity. Acemoglu’s new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, goes further, laying out the shortcomings of modern liberalism and offering ideas about how to avoid a slide into authoritarian rule. ‘Liberalism is worth saving and remaking,’ he insists.

***

Against that background, Acemoglu calls for a ‘working-class liberalism’ that pays less attention to ‘thought policing’ and more to building community, using narratives that bring people together rather than polarising them. ‘Shared moral principles are more likely to emerge when people see themselves as having agency in choosing such principles and when they feel that they are part of both local communities and a broader shared identity,’ he asserts.

Acemoglu is far from alone in his critique. Many trees have fallen victim to ruminations about the shortcomings of liberal democracy. As befits a book by an economist, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? draws more heavily on the economics literature than most books of this genre, but its conclusions are far from unique.

Here’s What California Is Learning From Solar Panels Built Over Irrigation Canals (KQED ) and what I got out of it was they are using marginal space for solar panels. Why not here?

The future of Indiana depends on educating its future, so what have we got? Education is being underfunded. 

Indiana superintendents say they're cutting jobs because of property tax reforms (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

The survey went out to 290 superintendents throughout the state in August; 144 responded.

Other solutions raised in the report are creative: one superintendent said they planted prairie grass instead of mowing to save money on fuel, removed televisions to save on electricity and launched a student-run business to generate new income.

Nearly all of the respondents said they anticipate negative financial impacts from SEA 1, while a clear majority expressed similar concerns about universal school choice and the level of funding the General Assembly will allocate to public schools next year.

Schools would need anywhere from 1% to 25% in one-time funding increases to maintain the level of services expected by the community, plus an average of 6% in ongoing increases thereafter, the report found.

 ***

Others are considering delayed maintenance, reduced staff raises, cuts to transportation services, electives and field trips or consolidation. One raised the possibility their district won’t be able to sustain student internships, career pathways or dual-credit offerings.

In rural districts, superintendents say they worry lawmakers are pressuring them to consolidate or close schools.

“I feel like funding is bleeding the small schools dry,” one superintendent wrote. “I am skeptical that this is simply a push to consolidate.”

The people running Indiana: About - CEOs of Indiana Corporate Partnership.

Snow Globe Palimpsest (Los Angeles Review of Books) shows the history of Zionism is not simple and that anti-Zionism has its Jewish roots.

 

Even the Irish think Putin pulls Trump's chain: Donald Trump acts as Putin’s puppet for reasons shrouded in secrecy (The Irish Times ).

Something for me, us, to think about: How Weimar Germany’s Proportional Democracy Put Hitler in Power. I favor proportional representation. Frankly, I assume the proportions being divided between our same-old main parties. One silver lining from the essay:

As the divided Weimar government continued to prove itself incapable of dealing with the myriad economic problems facing the country, more Germans began to search for radical solutions. By 1923 the Nazi Party had attracted more than fifty thousand members, among them the widely admired World War I general Erich Ludendorff. Hitler and Ludendorff believed the party was powerful enough to stage a revolution. 

“Divided.” Nationally, here, a multitude of parties seems unlikely. Maybe in the states, but even then not so many. Still, a reminder not to trust in one solution to a complicated problem. 

So, allow me to point you to STAR voting (Wikipedia).  We cannot change the type of representation without changing how we vote. This seems a better choice than instant run-offs, which interested me for over a decade.

Get moving:

sch 9/28

  

 

 

 

climate realism

 Engelsberg Ideas generally offers sensible articles, so I have to give serious attention The case for climate realism in an age of soaring energy demand.

In the conventional narrative about decarbonisation, net zero is going to be achieved by building lots of wind farms and installing lots of solar; batteries are going to fix the intermittency problems when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow; and it is all going to be cheap and can be delivered at sufficient scale to keep to the 2015 Paris Agreement target of well below 2°C of global warming. There would need to be a bit of gas, little or no coal, and, more recently, a good dose of nuclear, now added even by the greenest environmentalists. It would all be win-win-win – cheaper, more secure – and it would deal with climate change.

In reality, it will be none of these things. Countries such as the UK and Germany, which have pushed hardest for wind and solar, have some of the highest electricity costs in the developed world. Security of supply cannot be sufficiently guaranteed with short-term batteries, and the results have been more about deindustrialisation and territorial carbon production than about what really matters: carbon consumption. Made in China (primarily with coal) replaces Made in the UK or Made in Germany. The renewables supply chain dependency is now all about China, too, which produces around 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels and 80 per cent of the batteries and has a stranglehold on the refined critical minerals.

***

It was not supposed to be like this. Energy efficiency was supposed to enable energy intensity per unit of output to fall. Energy efficiency was supposed to reduce the demand for energy and, as we approached the 2050 targets, new technologies would allow all those cheap renewables to overcome their intermittency. 

This part of the narrative turns out to be wrong – and for two reasons, one theoretical and one about the changing economic composition of future economies. The theoretical reason is easy to state and devastating in puncturing the demand-side conventional narrative. If energy use is more efficient, it means less energy is needed per unit of output. This is equivalent to a fall in the price of energy. If price falls, demand goes up, not down. We can all consume more energy for the same budget. This is the Jevons paradox and it is rock solid. Energy efficiency improved massively in the 20th century and into this century, and it spurred a massive increase in the demand for energy.

To this is added a further blow: what we are now witnessing more generally across economies is a technology shift towards new energy-intensive industries not seen since the coming of steel in the late 19th century. These new technologies require lots of energy and they require it on a firm, not intermittent, basis. The energy they need is overwhelmingly electricity, and so electrification is rapidly advancing in those countries grasping the new economic opportunities and economic growth they may bring. That electricity is still generated overwhelmingly by fossil fuels (and fossil fuels still make up about 85 per cent of global energy supplies). Electric does not necessarily mean renewables, and intermittent generators like wind and solar do not meet the new AI industries’ demand for the five nines – electricity that is 99.999 per cent reliable.

***

Recognising the awesome nature of the challenge in front of us may be frightening. People may want to close their ears. But ignoring the facts does not make it go away. Climate realism is the first step in rebasing climate policies, and facing up to what is likely to be coming. It is much more helpful than chanting mantras about ‘1.5°C’, ‘2°C’ and ‘net zero 2050’. It also tells us that adaptation is a very urgent need. Perhaps if the global population starts to fall at the end of the century and new technologies come along, it may all turn out well – eventually. But in the meantime, we face a doubling of energy demand by 2050, and that is much more likely to happen than limiting climate change to 2°C by then. 

 Realism here feels too much like fatalism, and, with me, fatalism underlies my depression. I have been doing my best not to return to that kind of thinking so I am not inclined to follow here.

The first thing is to curtail AI data centers. That seems most likely considering current politics. 

Second is an old idea of mine that we must not only get from fossil fuels but also from their monoculture of energy supply. The future cannot be only wind or solar or nuclear or any other alternative to fossil fuel, but a combination of them. And, yes, there may need to add some oil and natural gas. Promoting just one method of energy production seems more conducive to business than anything useful for the species. Utility regulators are long accustomed to dealing with companies that generate power from one source.

Third, expanding wind and solar may be held up by state legislatures acting on behalf of power companies. It is my understanding that Indiana gives excess power generated by the solar panels of private citizens to utility companies. I think that has to blunt the development of solar power in Indiana. Consider this: that every house in a city generated most of its own energy, that any excess was retained within the city. Would that not then lower the carbon useage of the city?

I keep thinking climate change needs to be fitted into “Chases Ashes”. The number of heat advisories this year brought it home to me.

sch 9/23 

 

Obsessing Under an Autumnal Blue Sky

I finished the research project yesterday after losing myself to obsessive behavior these past 2 days. 

But I got the whole text down to the 30 pages the law review has as its limit. I cut and cut and then I screwed sentences until they screamed. Or maybe that was me. I did not go to church yesterday or Saturday, Which is not good. The church has kept my depression very much under control. I do not like this obsessive behavior that this article has been for me. It has swallowed most of my time since April, certainly since May. 

I am tired of Indiana's racist history. Finding bad scholarship that has steered Indiana constitutional law for about half of my life surprised me and all I can feel is appalled. A lawyer is supposed to disclose any precedent that contradicts their position. What I found in Indiana Supreme Court decisions were statements supported by cases that do not say anything like the statements for which they were supposed to be authority. And not once but several times in the same opinion. A law review journal from the Fifties by a man who became a respected legal scholar contained false statements - comments on text that are not what the ext says. If I had done the same when I was a lawyer and done the same, I would have been punished for unethical behavior. I would not be a government official with a good salary. 

No one keeps track of what is going on within the Indiana Supreme Court's opinions. The Indiana Lawyer barely tracks the news about the court: Indiana Supreme Court. Google Scholar does not show any criticism of particular opinions: "indiana supreme court". We stats, the early review of what has been decided, laudatory reminisces  of retiring justices, but no critical readings. Well, I have one on my computer.

Speaking of news from the Indiana Supreme Court:  High court weighs help for involuntarily committed. 

Burnt out and unable to shut off my brain, insomnia came to visit last night and early into the morning. I think I fell asleep around 3 AM. I missed Liturgy this morning.

I have been going for about 2 hours now. Without breakfast. I probably should do more about eating regularly. And finish the dishes and the laundry. I think I will go to a movie. All the things I have been neglecting. Get out of this apartment.

Anyway, I am done writing any time this week. Blog posts and email, nothing more. 

 The Roots of the Novel Are Parody, Pastiche, and Play - Lincoln Michel (Countercraft)

I’m not surprised that Don Quixote is hilarious and deranged. I’ve often found that the dusty classics that are supposed to be dreary chores to read are, in fact, far funnier and stranger than their reputations would suggest. However, I was surprised by how modern the novel feels. It is filled with metafictional conceits and techniques I associate with the postmodernists2 of the mid-to-late 20th century and various post-postmodernist works of today. Cervantes makes up fake ballads, interjects to complain about his protagonist, and has characters (in the second volume) who have read the book they’re inside. Even the premise of the book—an insane man goes on failed adventures while imagining he is a knight—feels like an extended bit novel I associate with postmodernists, Oulipians, and other more contemporary literary trends.

Yep, Don Quixote is a hoot. Anyone who doesn't laugh once while reading it has to be a literature professor. 

Decolonizing the Dead ( Los Angeles Review of Books ) is a review of the new China Miéville novel. He is in my mind as someone I should read. That is the other thing I need to do is get away from the computer and read some of these books piling up here.

The Rouse is decidedly weird fiction: it is, after all, about raising the dead, and whatever it is that haunts the dead themselves. It has a classic Lovecraftian sense of wanting to evoke the cosmic dread of that august project, which pushes at the limits of language and form. Throughout the book, there are linguistic breakdowns, gaps, absences, broken sentences, poetic glitchings, all to hint at the sublime collapse of language, meaning, consciousness, and even “life” itself when confronted with what lies beyond human limits. It’s at times a challenging, experimental read. But it is also propelled forward by a sense of apocalyptic dread, that something bad is coming, something worse than death—a kind of pulpy end-of-worldism that shares quite a bit with that Game of Thrones shorthand tag for an undead apocalypse: Winter is coming. The Rouse constantly quotes M. R. James’s eerie, haunting question from his classic weird tale “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”—“Who is this who is coming?”—and tries to answer it. Pulp horror and a dose of avant-garde aesthetics: that is quintessential weirdness.

At the same time, The Rouse is also fused with the Cold War spy novel. The book is about a top secret security agency called the “R Unit” in the British secret services, which is there to contain and explore the possible exploitation of supernatural energies. The R Unit explores REs—revenance events—and engages, we might say, with the roused dead. One of the book’s alternating narrative timelines focuses on a grieving mother trying to understand the early death of her military son Ewan in the 1990s, as she bumps up against the edges of a vast conspiracy, while a second thread follows one of the principal assets of the R Unit, a soldier called Allardyce, who joins the group just as Britain is starting to lose its empire in the 1950s. It is a book full of clandestine military networks, strange laboratories, black ops in far-flung places, and exhausted agents, crossed, double-crossed and triple-crossed in the field. It has the global reach of the Jason Bourne franchise, protagonists shedding identities and moving off-grid in ceaseless motion, popping up in unlikely locales. There are a lot of clandestine meetings at exotic dead drops where characters mutter enigmatic clues at each other.

 I have no real experience of the COVID lockdown. I was in prison and what you experienced during the pandemic is very much what I experienced starting in 2010. So, pandemic stories interest me. Such as The Impression of Living in a Ruin (Los Angeles Review of Books).

For many of these characters, the repetition and solitude of work have formed a kind of hopeless prison. The protagonist of “The Nightwatchman” patrols the halls of another unfinished space, in this case an apartment complex still under construction on the outskirts of the city, where he has been forced to move because his fiancée left him. The surrounding area is desolate, roads are deteriorating, and garbage dumps are overflowing due to the influx of new residents; it’s a soulless area where “nobody would ever walk” due to the lack of commercial properties. The emptiness in every aspect of the night watchman’s life leads to increasing dread:

So many late nights spent walking along dark passageways with his flashlight, attempting to catch any danger in the beam, had convinced him of the need for some kind of weapon as protection, even though nothing had ever happened. That word again: NOTHING. Nothingness was an existential concept.

In “The Animal Collector,” a street sweeper tries to fill the void he perceives in his life by adopting a menagerie of injured wildlife and household pets. His treatment of these animals quickly takes precedence over the wishes of those few people in his life who genuinely care about him, such as his partner of seven years, who tries to point out the selfishness of what he is doing. But, as the story’s narrator notes, “people tended to believe their motives to be quite different from what they really were.”

Another review of a writer I think I should be reading: Exit Party by Emily St John Mandel review – alternate visions of post-crisis America (The Guardian ).

Is the price of stability necessarily the loss of freedom? The question plays out daily in our political reality, its fictional possibilities providing inspiration for writers from Plato’s time onwards. The “upbeat-downbeat” ending Mandel chooses for her novel is not new in science fiction; indeed, it bears comparison to her own earlier take on the post-catastrophe novel, the 2014 blockbuster Station Eleven. What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel’s imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. 

 A bit of fun: George Bush, murder and nautical infidelity: the Chicks’ 20 greatest songs – ranked! (The Guardian)

On “Derek,” Captain Ahab’s Evil Half Brother  by John Hay is actually enjoyable and educational and may make you wonder how much tinkering Hollywood does on with classics.

Remembering Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian Nobel Prize-Winner We Should All Be Reading (Literary Hub) may not explain why most people should be reading this writer as much as being another example of a renowned writer gone missing. However, for someone from a fly-over place, it does seem pertinent to those who think there are from a place not worthy of a literature.

In writing about the life of Deledda in Nuoro, Sardinian literary critic and author Giulio Angioni referred to the conjoined role of history and memoir in her stories, her “sort of sardography.” That “sardography,” Sardinia seen through the stories of Sardinians, was the splendor awaiting discovery by outsiders like ourselves, in so many forms. 

“To discover a prolific, but forgotten novelist is like stumbling upon a new species,” social critic Todd Gitlin wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1998. After his wife discovered a novel by Grazia Deledda on a lonely pile in the corner of a bookstore in New England, he searched for the rest of her works, only finding them in small and university presses. He declared it was long overdue for a “literary resurrection” of the once famous writer with the “emotional power” of her novels. In the end, he only found five of her thirty-three novels.

Five Classic SF Stories First Published in Playboy (Reactor) is a reminder of Plyaboy as more than a skin mag.

Trying out a new widget from Blogger: 

 

I think it is the first new item in ages for Blogger.

Time and my stomach say enough of clearing out my tabs.

sch
 

The vagaries of literary fame

 This Novelist’s Censored Masterpiece Was Impossible to Find. Now It’s Back.

The book was roundly panned in Texas: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote that Phillips’s “ ‘tell all’ ” suffered from “an overextension of candor,” penned by a “somewhat immature and confused young man.” But the national press was encouraging, commending the book’s critical look at the debaucherous, wealthy elite, comparing it to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and its fresh and inventive prose to Hemingway’s, James M. Cain’s, and John O’Hara’s. Excerpts from The Inheritors were included in a 1943 anthology alongside pieces of works by John Steinbeck and Oliver La Farge; it was later considered by some critics a more mature forebear of Catcher in the Rye. In 1981 it was listed in this magazine, by critic A.C. Greene, as among the fifty best books on Texas.

sch 9/22 

 

 

Music. Comic Book Fanboys Put In Their Place.

 Just a few things I want to share from the past few days. A bit of fun. Enjoy.

 Albert Lee on Ritchie Blackmore, Eddie Van Halen and Eric Clapton (GuitarPlayer). Lee is a forgotten guitar hero.

Lanterns EP James Gunn Shuts Down Storyline, Hal Jordan Complaints 

Gunn on Hal Jordan Being Disrespected by Apparently Being Killed Off: "Hal's the star of TV series & he's in all the episodes so far. It's more live action screen time than all the live action screen time he's had combined throughout history. Kyle is amazing in the role. We more than respect him. We love him, despite his imperfections. Us knowing the time of his death, if that's exactly what that is, is absolutely not the same thing as killing him off right away. Hal is a big reason why the show is so popular with fans & non fans alike; sorry if you don't like it." 

Amen. Thanks for putting the fanboys in their place.  This class has made comic book movies disreputable and dismayingly dull. Comics are not movies. They need not operate under the restrictions of the comic code authority. They are as dull and as unimaginative and sterile as they are noisy. No wonder the culture is so screwed up.

sch 9/22 

 

News; Indianapols Mall Rehab, Iowa Diesel, Ball State Innovation, Sharia Law

 Indianapolis councilor hopes to redevelop Washington Square Mall

I was there in May and I was shocked. You can see my photos of the place here.

There is something creepy about the decrepitude of the malls. Strangest may be that I was never one for malls - too many people milling around like cattle awaiting for the cute to open at the stockyard. Still, there is a loss of energy, jobs, companies that they seem to memorialize.

I would turn the Anderson Mall into a park for solar panels. Maybe Indianapolis will have a better idea.

High fuel costs strain Iowa's agricultural economy. The people of Iowa did go for Trump and he always does right by his friends.

Ball State University - Profile, Rankings and Data | US News Best Colleges 

Center for Innovation and Collaboration ( Ball State University )

 The Center for Innovation and Collaboration connects Ball State University’s people, expertise, and resources with community and industry partners to solve real-world challenges through innovation. Serving as a hub at the intersection of education, community, and industry, the Center fosters collaboration, experimentation, entrepreneurship, and learning grounded in media, technology, design, and art. Through applied research, workforce development, entrepreneurship, and hands-on training, the Center will support regional economic growth and talent development across East Central Indiana.

What was a teacher's college is now a business school. 

America Needs No Sharia Law but American Muslims Deserve Liberty (Mustafa Akyol - The Dispatch), and no idea how it will ever affect us.

The good news is that the United States already has a brilliant solution to this tension. It is called the First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, so long as it is not imposed on anyone. So, Islam, too, should be freely practiced, as long as it is not imposed on anyone.

The bad news, however, is that there are voices on the American right today who explicitly argue that while their own religion is, of course, protected by the First Amendment, Islam is not—because, they say, it is not merely a religion but a “political system” that will always seek to subvert, conquer, and subjugate everything else. 

My Congresswoman must be getting worried: VERIFY: What those political attack ads in the Spartz-Hale congressional race are NOT telling you (wthr.com ). Good.

 sch 9/22

New WWI History

My opinion is that the world we have been living in for almost a century was born out of WWI. This includes the Middle East problems since 1948, it is in the current affairs of Turkey, and it played out in Serbia and Bosnia thirty years ago. You can disagree. It explains my interest in A New Intellectual History of The First World War: My Interview with Duncan Kelly regarding his new book, “Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics” 

When this failed to materialize, the obvious corollary kicked in. That despite Du Bois’s pessimism around his perceived failures (about which Chad Williams has so piercingly written in recent years), and at first glance counter-intuitively, the First World War didn’t in fact end at all, and hasn’t ended yet. The continuity between a sense of time and place where with ‘no justice’ there would be ‘no peace’, connects past and present in this way in a depressingly obvious way. That there is also a sense in which wartime over environmental and ecological resources and capacities remains, seems to me another lasting lesson of the global intellectual history of wartime, alongside the resurgence of contemporary debates about data and information management, economic planning and the limits of libertarian approaches to markets and politics, and that one thing a serious and credible political theory and intellectual history should try to show, is how the liminal qualities of our present were shaped in ways that we ourselves are often not completely certain about. 

sch 9/22