AI Hilarity

Midwest Chick (you do read her every day, don't you?  Thought so.) posts about how a Professor was smarter than most of his students, catching most of them using AI to cheat on an assignment:

A very clever professor in Mississippi decided to test and see if his students were cheating using AI. So he put some code in his exam instructions using white font that couldn’t be seen by the students, but could be seen by an AI if a copy/paste was used. 

Click through for the details (which are hilarious) but even more so for the comments her readers left.  My favorite was one from Carl Bussjaeger:

Oh, yes. I should probably mention DuckDuckGo’s AI. When called out on all of its hallucinations, it informed that if I don’t want it to make s–t up when asking strictly factual questions, I have to specifically TELL it not to make s–t up. 

 Sure you can trust AI.  Just tell it not to make s**t up ...

How the USA won the Cold War

We did it by treated German POWs held in the USA well.  Not just the US Government, but the American people treated them well.  They had been told by the Nazis that America was weak, divided, and a mongrel race.  The POWs saw the American people and society with their own eyes and then went home after the war.

And then built modern Germany.

We came to America as enemies, as Nazis, as believers in a lie.  We left as friends, as democrats, as men who had seen the truth.   

Many of the POWs who were employed on Kansas farms corresponded for decades with the families who showed them friendship as POW workers.

Playback has been disabled for this video (from which I got the quote above), but I encourage every reader to go watch it.  If you don't - like I did - end up with watery eyes then we just cant be friends anymore.  And to those who think this video is a one-off, there are more.  So many more.  You can watch them at the link (from Youtube suggestions) or you can watch this: 

And a note to the Usual Suspects who fancy themselves as "Anti Nazi": this is what anti-Nazi is really about.  This is how you turn actual, you know - Nazis - into anti-Nazis.  It must really bust your chops to have Primary Sources telling you that your philosophy of life is full of shiest.  You Commie Bastards.

Oh, this will too (note the substitution of the word freiheit - freedom - for freunde -  I could translate for you but I wouldn't want to insult you; me, I think that Schiller would have approved of Bernstein's substitution at the fall of the Berlin Wall).

Don't listen to "Studies" of gun crime

AWA over at Gunfreezone posts about a new study showing that increased Concealed Weapon permitting leads to increased gun crime:

Concealed-carry laws boost gun crime by a third, study finds

A new study finds concealed-carry laws lead to a boost in gun crime by between 29% and 32%, mostly by triggering a surge in gun theft.

The study comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that struck down New York’s attempt to limit the ability to carry a gun outside their homes. That ruling was seen as particularly significant as other states have sought to restrict concealed-carry permits.

Oh, it isn’t people being shot. It is guns being stolen.

He recommends clicking through to read the whole thing. I don't. I've seen enough studies about gun control.  As the old saying goes, if you torture the data enough it will confess to anything.

Many years ago, Eric Raymond wrote a detailed post about how the gun control study sausage is made.  It was brutal, and is a must-read for everyone in our community.  He gives example after example of malfeasance in the academic literature, from "Arming America" which made up its data to the AMA "43 times more likely to die from a gun" that refused to release their data.  Go RTWT, but this sums up the top dirty tricks that they use:

I described the errors as “systematic” before the jump because there is a pattern of distortions in the anti-gun literature that have been repeated over decades even though they violate known good practice in the social and medical sciences. These include but are not limited to:

Failure to control for socioeconomic differences between star and control groups, even when the differences are known to correlate with large differences in per-capita rates of criminal deviance

Choice of study periods that ignore well-documented trends that run contrary to the study’s conclusions immediately before or after the period.

Selective use of suicide statistics, counting them only in star but not control groups and/or ignoring massive evidence that would-be suicides rapidly substitute other methods when firearms are not available.

Tendentious misapplication of Uniform Crime Report data, for example by ignoring the fact that UCR reports of homicides are entered before trial and therefore fail to account for an unknown but significant percentage of findings of misadventure and lawful self-defense.

And I described this pattern as “fraud” before the jump because the magnitude of these errors would be too great and their direction too consistent for honest error, even if we did not in several prominent cases have direct evidence that the fraud must have been intended.

My guess is that the new study falls into the second of his categories (selective choice of study periods) at the very least, and probably the misapplication of UCR data.  Quite frankly, the last 20 years simply do not show any obvious corollary of relaxed CCW laws and crime - or they show a corrolation between relaxed CCW laws and lower crime.  A 30% increase is simply not what I've seen at all.  My suspicion is that the data were tortured for a long time before they confessed to this.

Tagged "Junk Science" because, well, you know.

When culture collapses

This is perhaps 2300 years old:

ambisinistral describes it well:

The Boxer at Rest is a bronze Hellenistic sculpture dating from somewhere between 330 - 50 B.C. Rather than showing a heroic figure, it shows a battered boxer. His nose is broken, his lip is split and he has cauliflower ears as well as numerous cuts. The statue also has copper inlaid to represent splattered blood.

There are more photos at his place, and I strongly encourage you to go look.  The anonymous artist knew well how to represent a timeless subject, these two millennia ago.

We've lost this.  The so-called "art community" not only lacks the talent to produce a work as timeless this, it doesn't have any interest in doing so.  Here are a few examples of the wasteland that is modern sculpture.

Alberto Giacometti, Cat

Henry Moore, Double Oval

David Smith, CUBI VI 

Lest you think that I'm being unfair to the "art community", these are all from the Wikipedia page on Modern Sculpture.  These are the sculptures highlighted by people who are jazzed by the subject, and this is the best they can come up with.

It reminds me of this:

The Golden Madonna, ca. 980 AD

This was made after the "Carolingian Renaissance" of Charlemagne, an age where the civilization of the post-Roman barbarian kingdoms had recovered enough to explicitly model itself on the Roman Empire.  It has been said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor and empire, but it was marketed that way at the time.  And this was the best that they could do, 1300 years after The Boxer At Rest.  It wasn't nearly as technically proficient, but they were trying.

The Holy Roman Emperors at least wanted to restore art to its former glory, but it would be another 500 years before Michelangelo actually pulled that off.

Today's "art community" doesn't even want to do this.  The people who preen as a "cultural elite" are not even up to the level of Dark Ages barbarians.  At least the barbarians aspired to standards.

It takes someone really smart to screw up that phrase

But Gun Controllers are up to the challenge.

Of course, it may just be that nobody is as blind as the man who refuses to see ...

Quote of the Day, Wal*Mart edition

Heh:

But hey, TrailerParkTrashMart, thanks for opening the market up for every other brick-and-mortar firearms retailer in the country, and eliminating your loss-leader negotiating position to sell firearms below cost just to drive littler guys out of business. Firearms makers can now tell you to kiss their ass when you want their product cheaper year-over-year. That just ended too, whether you figured it out or not. Sam is probably spinning in his grave, and his half-wit kinfolk heirs clearly haven't the wits to run a roadside chicken stand. If he were alive, he'd kick their asses, then disown them all.

... 

I'll still visit your stores though.
Just to use the bathroom.
80-20 my turds land in the middle of the floor though, or in the sink bowl, every time.
Have fun with that. I sure will.
Be a real shame if something that simple caught on nationwide.

Remember, guys, the enemy always gets a vote. ;)
And I'll be eating a lot more ethnic foods, and voting often.
Got a hankerin' for some Panda Express broccoli beef today...

"Cleanup on Aisle 2..."

The whole thing is as good.  The Raconteur Report: purveyors of quality rants since 2008 ...