AI failures in healthcare

Oh my word:

On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a "confabulation" or "hallucination" in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached "human level robustness" in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

Of course, they use it because it's cheaper than paying a human transcriber.  So riddle me this, Healthcare Administrator: what do you call yet another AI that lies all the time?  A day that ends in "-day".

And people have started noticing:

While the vast majority of people over 50 look for health information on the internet, a new poll shows 74% would have very little or no trust in such information if it were generated by artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, 20% of older adults have little or no confidence that they could spot misinformation about a health topic if they came across it.

That percentage was even higher among older adults who say their mental health, physical health or memory is fair or poor, and among those who report having a disability that limits their activities. In other words, those who might need trustworthy health information the most were more likely to say they had little or no confidence they could spot false information.

People are smart enough to catch a whiff of marketing Bravo Sierra.

From now on I will start asking all of my healthcare providers if they do transcription, and if so whether they use AI for the transcription.  If they do I will demand to review the transcript.  If they won't, I'll get a different provider.

Is there an Extinction Level Event coming for the Deep State?

An Extinction Level Event is when something - we typically don't really understand what - causes a mass die-off, with 60% or more of species disappearing. The most famous of these was the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs (if you believe that; I'm skeptical that the answer to their demise is so neat and tidy).

Well Donald Trump said he's going to appoint Elon Musk to lead a "Government Efficiency Commission":

Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”

There's no need to look at Tesla's 50% Electric Vehicle market share, or compare SpaceX's launch rate to, well, the rest of the world combined.  Most relevant to this discussion is how Elon cut 80% of Twitter's headcount, turning the company around.

Even though reports have Government employees cutting back expenditures in anticipation of potential cuts, lots of folks are skeptical that this can be done at all.

I'm not one of the skeptics, because I've seen this my very own self, in my career at Three Letter Intelligence Agency.  It was the mid-1980s and I was a wet-behind-the-ears Electronics Engineer in the COMSEC R&D organization.  Their recent triumph was the introduction of the STU-III secure telephone.

The STU-III was a technological marvel, providing high level (Type 1) encryption in a telephony device that, well, worked like a telephone.  And it was delivered 2 years early because of a manager who might be described as the 1980s COMSEC version of Elon Musk.

Walt Deeley was a very senior Intelligence Manager.  He is listed on the NSA's web site:

As Deputy Director of Communications Security in the early 1980s, Mr. Deeley pushed the development and deployment of the STU-III secure telephone, which has been called the most significant improvement to the security of government voice communications in fifty years. He perceived the need for a new approach, and deployed an affordable and effective telephone security system within two years.

...


Walter Deeley was known as a strong-willed manager who pushed his subordinates hard to get results. While a tough taskmaster, the technical advances and mission achievements he led made the United States more secure.

Bold added by me.  Let me give some additional color around that.  He was a legend in the COMSEC R&D organization.  His reputation was equal parts admiration and fear - it was almost like he who must not be named.  People remembered the careers he derailed in his quest for an encrypting telephone.

One story told to me by an old hand was how Deeley had come into the office one Saturday to see how the program was working.  He called down to the program office, and the phone rang and rang and rang.  Finally one guy who happened to be in the office on the weekend answered.  Deeley asked for the Program Manager.  When told that the PM wasn't in because it was a Saturday, Deeley told the guy who was there that he was the new PM and to see him first thing on Monday.  It was very Elon-Must-at-Twitter.

True story - at least I believed it was.  And I for sure wasn't the only one there who did.

So to those who say you can't change how the Government works, color me skeptical.  I'm skeptical because I've actually seen it change (well, heard from people who did).

The interesting question here is how you scale this throughout all the Federal Agencies.  I think the answer is to use business-as-usual: different offices play office politics against each other to get budget and headcount.  That's how the game is played.  So set up an incentive structure for Office A to rat our Office B's inefficiencies and duplications to save their own skins.  I expect that this would pay big dividends.

It's sort of like setting one type of dinosaur against another, in a battle to the death.

UPDATE 28 OCTOBER 2024 14:51: Elon says they can reduce the Federal budget by $2 Trillion.

Satellites are revolutionizing Mayan archaeology

I'm starting to tread on The Silicon Graybeard's turf, but this is really cool:

Satellites are helping scientists spot more ancient Mayan ruins than ever before, which is no small feat considering how thick the forest is in the indigenous group's ancestral lands.

"Archeologists have mapped more Mayan sites, buildings and features in the past 10 years than we had in the past — preceding — 150 years," Brett Houk, an archaeology professor at Texas Tech University, told attendees at a NASA-led space archaeology conference Sept. 18 to which Space.com received an exclusive invite.

Archaeologists are finding these ruins faster due to better satellite technology. Using a pulsed laser technique called lidar, or light detection and ranging, satellites can peer through the dense canopy surrounding typical Mayan sites, Houk explained at the two-day livestreamed NASA and Archaeology From Space symposium.

I found the arguments in Charles Mann's 1491 to be pretty convincing that American populations were much larger than previously thought prior to Columbus' voyage.  This seems to be evidence in favor of that thesis.

Other places this technique should be easily applicable are the Amazon basin (which Mann claims hosted a very large population) and likely Cambodia/Angkor Wat.

 

So what I'd like to know is ...

How did the would-be assassin know where and when to find Donald Trump?  Was he just lucky like Gavrilo Princip?  Or was he "lucky" like Thomas Matthew Crooks?

How the Working Man got stabbed in the back

It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer".  It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular.  Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.

It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club.  Man is that different now.  I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.

Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics.  You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark.  An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:

Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.

Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.

I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.

The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.

Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.

Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen?  No?  Better to kill 10 million of them?  Oooooh kaaay.

Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.

And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.

During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.

Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists!  Don't look at the wall decorations!  I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!

Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.

So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys.  What to do, what to do?

Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs.  Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right?  Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.

Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense.  These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats.  Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.

I wrote about that at length here.

And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland.  And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago?  How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century?  Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?

Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:

This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.

To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.

Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.

Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?

Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants?  Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty.  Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.

This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime.  I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street.  Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg.  Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).

It's all upside down.  And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason.  On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really.  They sure must have had some powerful motivation.

I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.

Just how bad is the illegal immigration problem?

Libertarians have ditched their support for "free markets and free people":

I would prefer not to lose my Libertarian purity certificate. I want a political philosophy that is simple and has universal application. That way I don’t have to think too hard. For the last 30 years libertarianism has been that philosophy. Name an issue of the day and I can give you the answer. Sluggish growth? Privatise, lower taxes and de-regulate. Busy roads? Privatise. Inflation? Abolish the Bank of England or re-introduce the Gold Standard, or, er… privatise the Bank of England. OK, some issues are not quite that easy but usually they are. Until we get to immigration. Because if libertarianism means open borders then libertarianism is wrong because open borders are a disaster.

Read the whole thing, and the comments.  And remember that this is Libertarian Central.  If the Open Borders crowd has lost Samizdata, they've lost everybody.

Why the Democrats can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together

Well, they can't in time for the election, anyway.  There's an old saying in politics that "personnel is policy" which refers to a lot more than just having someone competent in the job.  It's a reflection that politics is about coalitions - building them and maintaining them.  The coalition members get their cut of the government largess, and pay for it with loyalty to the guy at the top.  If they're not loyal, he gives them their pick slip and they lose the largess.

This was actually Trump's biggest mistake when he was president, not filling the Federal Government with his coalition.  In his defense, he was in the middle of a Republican civil war, where there were multiple factions and multiple coalitions.

That's exactly what the Democrats face now, and why they can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together.  Because there are multiple coalitions, whoever emerges on top won't know if he (she?) can trust these coalitions because they aren't his coalitions.  They might be able to be integrated into his coalition, given time, but time is exactly what the Democrats do not have right now.

It takes time to forge a governing coalition - just look at any parliamentary system: when the government is stable it is because the governing coalition is solid.  Ministers can issue policy with a reasonable expectation that it will be supported and carried out by the coalition members.  When the governing coalition is unstable, chaos results.  Orders get ignored or slow walked or subverted because the Minister no longer has the loyalty of the coalition members.

Eventually a leader emerges who can attract key talent from outside coalitions and integrate it into his.  This will involve rewards like positions in the bureaucracy or some such - featherbedding is the name of this game.  But until this all gets sorted out and the new coalition is filled with people who think they're better off with the new leader than without, nothing is going anywhere.

Even worse, there will always be serious back stabbing between different coalitions.  Trust is not a virtue most politicians hew to, and quite frankly until they are in a position to remove perks as well as give them, they would be a fool to trust just about anybody.

Some day a leader will emerge to stitch together the various coalitions that make up the Democratic party.  It won't happen in the next 100 days, sure as God made little green apples.

The biggest implication of this is that it will be much more difficult for the Democrats to "fortify" the upcoming election via 2020-style shenanigans.  Sure, the party bosses will want to, but how much do they trust the other coalitions to support them?  Would other coalitions even go so far as to rat them out (with plausible deniability, of course) - leading to various party elders behind bars.  That certainly would make it easier for other party elders to construct a winning coalition once they've taken out some of the competition.

Like I said, these people would have to be fools to trust very many people, and an election cheating scheme requires a lot of people to pull off.  When everyone is on-side you get the 2020 election.  When lots of people are very much not on-side you get, well, the Italian government which has had something like 60 Prime Ministers in 80 years.

The best analogy I can think of is the scene from The Godfather where all the families get together to divide things up.  Nobody trusts anybody.  That's where the Democrats are right now.

I repeat: you can't put a coalition together overnight - heck, it's taken almost a decade for Donald Trump to put together a serious coalition and a lot of his party still hates him.  I think that the Democrats will come more apart before they start to come together as the various factions start putting out mob hit style rumor whispers about their Democratic competitors.  We will hear a lot about this in the next few weeks.

And this is why the only choice at all for them to to fall in behind Kamala and hope for the best in the down ticket races.  But remember, while Kamala might have inherited Slow Joe's campaign cash, she was never really part of this coalition.  It's not loyal to her at all.  It may be that she's been so ineffective in office because Joe's coalition kept sabotaging her.  She has to build a coalition, and right quick.  The cash will help her there but coalition building takes time.

She doesn't have that.  What she does have is a whole boatload of enemies in the Democratic party.  Some of these think that their best bet to get to the top of the greasy pole is for her not to get there.  They'd rather have Trump in the Oval Office because they will have 4 years to build a coalition.  If Kamala is there, things are a lot trickier for them.

I almost feel sorry for the Democrats in general and Kamala in particular.  Almost.  It's ironic that all their short term tactical maneuvering has led them to this very spot.  Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of Mob Bosses.

Illegal food

It seems that there are some types of food that are illegal in the United States - for example, you can't sell horse meat for human consumption.

Enter Illegal Chips, which allows you to taste these forbidden fruits in potato chip form.

I had not known any of that.  Of course, my tastes are more mainstream, such as Walkers Roast Chicken crisps.

Sweet Sixteen

This blog is sixteen years old today.  Dang, in a couple of years it will be able to vote.

Lots of changes in the last sixteen years.  I started blogging because of the Heller decision.  The gun control wars continue, but it's an entirely different landscape today than it was then.  Good.

I do miss a bunch of the old regular blogs I used to link to - Gormogons, Aretae, Fosetti, a bunch of others.  Miguel has now joined them.  I can understand the feeling as I came within a whisker of giving up myself 9 or 10 years ago.

It's weird that the blog has been around long enough that it saw Wolfgang's entire life, from when I first got him to that last awful day.  I still go back through the "Wolfgang" tag once in a while.  He's a dog that is taking some getting over.

The blog saw me move from Massachusetts to Atlanta to Maryland to Florida.  That's a lot of moving around in not a lot of time.

And it let me introduce The Queen Of The World to you.  She kind of scratched her head at the whole blogging thing at first, but she's the one who suggested I post about film scores and Dad Jokes.  I need to do more of both of those.

Because the old passionate topics - gun control, global warming, politics - have gone stale for me.  I've said pretty much all I have to say on them, and have come to realize that the world has gone mad and shouting into the wind is just adding hot air to cold.  I actually feel better doing Dad Jokes, not getting myself all wound up.  

The Queen Of The World has helped here as well.

I emailed Miguel when he hung up his blogging spurs to tell him that I was sorry to see him stop but understood his motivation.  He was very gracious in his reply, complimenting my stuff - but I am convinced that my best blogging days were long ago, 2009-2012 or so.  That's a decade in the rear view mirror.

So apologies if this place isn't what it used to be.  I'm not what I used to be, and that is probably a good thing.

In any case, when I put up my first post, what I did not expect at all was:

16 years
Almost 14,000 posts
Over 50,000 comments (!!!)
Over 14 Million page views (!)

I guess that predicting the future is hard, especially about things that haven't happened yet ...

Anyway, thank you to everyone who stops by here.  It's the readers - and especially the commenters - that make this place what it is, and keeps me coming back.

LOLOL

Well played, Chris.

The Queen Of The World and I are huge fans of that movie.

Forgotten Weapons on "Assault Rifles"

Lawrence has a good post up where Ian McCollum from Forgotten Weapons delves into the topic of just what an "Assault Rifle" is.   Everyone thinks they know all this (I sure did), but they - and I - don't.  For example: Assault Shotguns and Assault Pistols?  Defined by statute.  I did not know that.

Recommended.

Recommended reading (and listening)

Isegoria (he is a daily read, right posts a review of an article about the science fiction classic Dune.  The excerpt is pretty interesting but also includes a link to an episode of historian Tom Holland's podcast The Rest Is History, in which Holland talks about just how much of both science fiction and Hollywood is about Rome.

Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Dune, and all sorts of less likely films explicitly (or sneakily) include all sorts of Roman motifs.  It's a fascinating listen.  Highly recommended.

Can you call it a "dry stack stone wall" ...

... when it is under the ocean?

A prehistoric stone wall more than half a mile long has been discovered on the floor of the Baltic Sea in the Bay of Mecklenburg off the coast of Germany. Around 11,000 years old, it is the oldest human-made structure in the Baltic Sea and one of the documented human-made hunting structures in the world. More than a half mile long, it is also one the largest known Stone Age structure in Europe.

...

It was built by hunter-gatherers who inhabited the area and was likely a drive lane (a means to control the movement of animals to force them into a restricted space or, in this case, the lake itself) used to hunt migrating Eurasian reindeer. Prehistoric stone walls like these have been found elsewhere in the world (Jordan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Greenland, the United States) but are all but unknown in Europe. The closest comparable example was found at the bottom of Lake Huron in Michigan where a stone wall was used to hunt migrating caribou 9,000 years ago. It is much shorter a wall than the Mecklenburg megastructure — 98 feet versus 3186 feet. 

That took a lot of work to build.  Maybe it was built over the course of decades, little by little?

The earliest born person ever photographed

This is just plain interesting.  The first photographs date to the 1820s and 1830s, but there were some very old people alive then, who lived through some really interesting events.  This video covers who some of these people were, and who was born the earliest.

Christopher Lee speaks in 5 languages

I've said for some time that Sir Christopher Lee was the real "Most Interesting Man In The World".  What I hadn't known was that he was also multi-lingual.

10 War movie actors who served in combat

This is pretty cool:

Lots that's predictable, but a lot that's new.  Christopher Lee makes the list, but as we all know he was a badass.  I hadn't known that Clark Gable flew combat missions.  Oh, and Jimmy Stewart wasn't on the list but should have been.

But interesting.

Why, oh why?

People like to (as The Queen Of The World likes to say) complicate a cornflake.  Case in point: dimmer switches.  I've been swapping dimmer switches for simple on/off ones for literally (mumble mumble) decades.  It's dead simple.

Except now it's not.  Most new light bulbs are LED type, because Congressional Lobbyists for General Electric wanted all of us to pay $5/bulb instead of 50 cents.  Thanks ever so much, Congress.  But the Twilight Lone experience doesn't end just at sticker shock.  Consider the failure points:

1. Your LED bulbs must be "Dimable".  They won't dim if they're not, and you'll pay a premium for this.
2. Your dimmer switch must be for LED bulbs.  It won't work with normal incandescent ones (assuming you can even get these anymore).  You will (wait for it) pay a premium for this.
   
3. The new dimmer switches are bigger than the old ones.  This isn't a problem if you have only one switch in the electrical box; this is a big, big problem (see what I did there?) if you have multiple switches in the same box, covered with a multi switch face plate.

That last one means that there are lights that I simply cannot dim, because I can't swap out an existing on/off switch for  one of the new, high-falutin' (and expensive) LED dimmer switches because it simply won't fit. 

Gee, thanks for jacking everything up, Congress.  Nobody's life, liberty, property, or sanity are safe when you're in session.  Jerks.

More on the Herculaneum Scrolls

This is an excellent layman's introduction to what the big deal is about the Herculaneum Scrolls.  Short answer: it's a very big deal indeed.

This video gives background on why Herculaneum is such a unique site, and why the scrolls discovered there could only have been found there.  Highly, highly recommended.

The terms "Software Engineering" and "Military Intelligence" are strangely related

It is said that Engineering is "Science that works", so we have to relegate "Software Engineering" to the same bucket as "Military Intelligence" and "Jumbo Shrimp".  Exhibit A for the prosecution is this month's Microsoft Patch Tuesday, which fixes a data leakage vulnerability caused by a divide by zero condition:

CVE-2023-20588 is a “division-by-zero” vulnerability affecting specific AMD processors that can “potentially return speculative data resulting in loss of confidentiality.”

Microsoft addressed the vulnerability in its Patch Tuesday update round, as the latest Windows versions enable mitigation and protection.

[blink] [blink]

Oooooh kaaaaay.  Maybe I'm old fashioned but aren't folks taught that divide by zero is no bueno?  Like taught that in Coding 101?

All I can think is, well, bless their little hearts.  Wow.

Friedrich Nietzsche - Eine Sylvesternacht, for violin and piano

Did you know that Friedrich Nietzsche - yes, that Friedrich Nietzsche of ubermensch fame - was an amateur composer?

He was not highly regarded by the Great and the Good of his day.  Wagner scoffed at his works, but then Nietzsche had somewhat impertinently sent a piano composition as a birthday gift to Wagner's wife.  The conductor Hans von Bulow said that one of Nietzsche's pieces was "the most undelightful and the most antimusical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time".

Other than that, maestro, how did you like the piece?

Me, I don't think it's half bad.  It's squarely in the Romantic Period style, and is good music to listen to on a Sunday morning as you fix your coffee.