This and That

LLM BRIEFS

It is not hallucinations, it is bullshit.

LLM Cheat Failure Follows Double Laziness
Professor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible
First: so lazy as to use an LLM to write the paper. Second: so lazy as to not read the results before turning them in. Important lesson: all AI slop must be read at least once by a human being before being used.

Verbal version

If you are going to use AI to write your speech, read it out loud at least once

D-coded? Of Course It Is
Musk thinks Claude provides too many pro-Democrat answers (d-, get it?). Well, of course, as a Trump lickspittle,  Musk no doubt has his thumb on the scale at Grok. Whereas an engine that is merely ostensibly full of the world’s knowledge favors the Democratic Party. Are LLMs intelligent? No. Does the weight of the world’s knowledge favor Dems over Maga? Of course.
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Hallucinations Cost $300,000 each.
A Munich court ruled that when AI speaks on behalf of a company, it represents the company. You can’t say “the AI made it up.” It’s the company’s responsibility. Google’s AI Overviews accused two German publishers of running scams. No source said it. The AI invented it. “The algorithm did it” is officially dead as a legal defense. Details (and references) here
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IKEA replaced 8,500 support jobs with AI.
All 8,500 were retrained as remote design advisors. That human-led service became a $1.4B revenue line.
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Thinking Like An LLM
“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”
– Sydney Harris
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Committing Journalistic Malpractice
Comparing dollar expenses over time is journalistic malpractice unless inflation-adjusted (AlJazeera). Did the Manhattan Project cost $2 billion? WRONG! Inflated: $37 billion. The $1.6 trillion AI investment still tops it, just not by so much. If you’ve seen uninflated Manhattan Project numbers, please share them. Claude can’t find any: another LLM fail. I know they exist.
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Power To The Incorrect People
Massive hyperscale data centers—and the energy-intensive servers used for machine learning models—are the primary drivers leading to the fastest electricity demand growth in the U.S. since 2000. Exelon CEO Calvin Butler told the Financial Times the U.S. could face power blackouts as soon as 2027 due to the strain on the grid from growing electricity demand, and higher power bills are needed to fund new infrastructure.

JUST PLAIN BRIEFS

Best Journalism Movie Page Found Here
The best journalism page on the internet, written by… well, modesty forbids.
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Rudyard Kipling And Me
Do you like Kipling? I don’t know, I’ve never kippled. Clark Smith quotes Kipling’s Gentleman’s Wisdom: “A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.” For 60 years, I’ve been saying, “You can’t be too thin, too rich, or have too many…” fill in the blank with something unrelated and silly.
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What is it with movie directors, rain and standup sex?
 The Hidden Meaning of Rain in Movies: When and Why Filmmakers Use It, and These are the reasons why people have sex standing up in movies. Rain and upright sex are common in entertainment (for technical reasons and storytelling reasons) and rare in real life—difficult and messy.