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I HAD MISSED THIS ONE: Banning Gas Stoves by Regulation: New Energy Department rules would eliminate most current models.

When progressives can’t pass their agenda through the front door in Congress, they sneak it through a regulatory back window. That’s what the Biden Administration is doing with gas stoves, as the Energy Department this week proposed new rules that amount to a gradual de facto ban.

A Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission ignited a firestorm last month by threatening to ban gas stoves. After criticism from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and others, the CPSC chairman rejected the idea, and White House officials said they didn’t support banning gas stoves.

Then why has the Energy Department proposed new efficiency standards that would ban the sale of most gas stoves currently on the market? The stated purpose of the rule-making is to reduce energy consumption and save consumers money. But these benefits are meager. The department estimates the proposed rule would reduce energy use by a mere 3.4% from the status quo, and consumers on average would save $21.89 over a cook-top’s lifetime.

Even this assumes the standards are technically achievable without compromising performance. A spokesperson for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers tells us that gas cook-tops would have to be completely redesigned to comply. Burners might have to become smaller and heavy grate designs altered, which would increase cooking times.

Twenty of the 21 gas stove-top models that the Energy Department tested wouldn’t comply with its proposed standards. Manufacturers would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars redesigning stoves, if they bother.

Those costs would be passed to consumers in higher prices. The Energy Department estimates increased appliance prices will be offset by lower energy bills as well as climate and health benefits. But these benefits are speculative while higher product costs and reduced performance will directly harm consumers.

Making appliances more energy efficient involves trade-offs. Consumers and manufacturers may choose to make them, but they shouldn’t be forced.

Forcing people is the goal. The environment is just the excuse. They actively want to make ordinary people’s lives worse.

Yeah, so this is a big deal.

Okay, we've all been there: Some sort of bug — in this case it was maggots — comes creeping out of your wall. Maybe you see a few — or more than a few — and then you panic. You only have one choice really, which is to get on Google and find yourself a pest control guy.

GOODER AND HARDER:

Hey everybody, look, Disney is doing the work of the Chinese Communist Party!

We covered this before, but there are indications our All Models chant is not effective, or is not believed. Here is another attempt at showing it is true.

So, all together now, let’s say it: all models only say what they are told to say, and “AI” is a model.

ChatGPT says it is never morally permissible to utter a racial slur—even if doing so is the only way to save millions of people from a nuclear bomb. pic.twitter.com/2xj1aPC2yR

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 6, 2023

Models can say correct and useful things. They can also say false and asinine things. They can also, if hooked to any crucial operation, aid or destroy that operation.

ChatGPT is nothing but a souped-up version of a probability model, layered with a bunch of hard If-Then rules, such as “i before e except after c” and things like that. The probability rules are similar to “If the following x words have just appeared, the probability of the new word y is p”, where y is some set.

Then comes decision rules like “Pick the y with the highest p”.

The probabilities are all got from feeding in a “corpus”, i.e. a list of works, on which the model is “trained”—a godawful high falutin’ word that means “parameters are fit”. This “trained”, like “AI” itself—another over-gloried word—come from the crude, and false, metaphor that our brains are like computers. Skip it.

Of course, the system is more sophisticated than these hand-waving explanations, but not much more, and it is fast and big.

In the end, the model only does what it was told to do. It cannot do otherwise. There is no “open” circuit in there in which an alien intellect can insert itself and make the model bend to its will. Likewise, there is never any point at which the model “becomes alive” just because we add more or faster wooden beads to the abacus.

There are so many similar instances of the tweet above that it must be clear by now that the current version of ChapGPT is hard-coded in woke ways, and that it’s also being fed a steady diet of ultra-processed soy-infused writing.

On another tack, I have seen people gaze still in wonder at the thing, amazed that ChatGPT can “already!” pass the MCAT and other such tests.

To which my response, and yours, too, if you’re paying attention, is this: It damn well better pass. It was given all the questions and answer before the test. Talk about open book! The only cleverness is in handling the grammar particular to exams of the type it passed.

Which is easy enough (in theory). Just fit parameters to these texts, and make predictions of the sort above.

This lack of praise does not mean that the model cannot be useful. Of course it can. Have you ever struggled to remember the name of a book or author, and then “googled” it? And you’d get a correct response, too, even if the author was a heretic. Way back before the coronadoom panic hit, Google was a useful “AI”, but without the better rules at handling queries like ChatGPT.

If you are a doctor, ChatGPT can give you the name of a bone you forgot, as long as it has been told that name. Just as a pocket calculator can calculate square roots of large numbers without you having to pull out some paper.

Too, models similar to ChatGPT can make nice fake pictures, rhyme words, and even code, to some extent. In the same way many of us code. That is, we ask Stack Exchange and hope somebody else has solved our problem, and then copy and paste. The model just automates this step, in a way.

The one objection I had was somebody wondering about IBM’s chess player. This fellow thought all that happened was the rules of chess were put into the computer, and then the computer began beating men. Thus, thought my questioner, IBM’s model was not only doing what it was told to do, since it was winning games by explicit moves not programmed directly. The model, to his mind, was doing more than it was told.

IBM was programmed to take old games, see their winning and losing moves, and then make decisions based on rules the programmers set. It’s true the programmers could not anticipate every decision their model would make, but that’s just because the set of possible solutions is so big. The model still only did what it was told.

Think of Conway’s Game of Life. The simplest possible rules. There is no question this model is only doing what it is told to do. But if the field is large, and so are the number of future steps, coders cannot (in most cases) predict the exact state of the board after a long time.

That lack of predictability does not mean the model isn’t doing precisely what it is told to say. They all do.

Hilarious Bonus

I have defeated ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/BrDpE5sS5r

— Warty Hugeman (@wartyhugeman) February 6, 2023

In absolute proof of my contention, the programmers saw this famous tweet and then “fixed” the code so it could not speak the forbidden word!

Hilarious Bonus 2

Twitch’s AI-generated Seinfeld show was banned after a “stand-up comedy” set that included transphobic comments

pic.twitter.com/9Pzxkz18gh

— Dexerto (@Dexerto) February 6, 2023

The world is run by panicked idiots.

Update on IBM

Basketcase in comments below asks for clarification on IBM—or Google, or whatever, it makes no difference.

He said “AlphaZero was fed rules of chess, and meta-rules for ‘learning.’ Then, it was ‘let lose,’ so to speak, to play chess with itself for about 48 hours, in order to use its learning rules to get good at playing chess, which indeed it did.”

Its “meta rules” and “learning rules” are just the programmers telling the model what to say (as Basketcase said). It doesn’t matter, at all, whether the model was given old games or not. It was given new games, which in effect became the old games, if there was any feedback whatsoever.

Misunderstanding this is not stupid, nor did I imply that it was, especially not in a culture saturated in the false idea computers “learn” and that “AI” really is intelligence.

Chess, of course, is particularly easy, as the the algorithm just has to go through the combinatorial space, storing the winning games. The space is so large that even modern computers don’t have all possible games stored, but the “meta rules” and “learning rules”, based as they were on old games, let the algorithm narrow the space down.

This suggests a strategy to beat it is to, if possible, deviate from the “learning rules” and explore areas of the combinatorial space of games not yet sampled by the computer.

However, given chess’s simplicity, and a large enough computer, eventually all possible games would be stored. There’d be no way to win, but you could tie.

I think you’ll agree that you’ll never find a clearer instance of a model only saying what it was told to say than this IBM. Or whatever.

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THE WAR ON CHILDREN: Is Your Child Being Forced to Sit Through ‘Silent Lunch’ at School?

The next time someone warns me that homeschooled kids will never learn social skills, I’m going to bring up this story.

A mom I know posted on Facebook last week that her daughter received detention at school for talking during lunch. I kid you not.

The offending 4th-grader was cited for “excessive talking” after a boy asked if she wanted his fruit snack. The girl responded with a simple “no,” which was enough for the lunch supervisor to slap her with her first detention. Another parent responded to the post, saying that when she visited the school to have lunch with her kids, she was shocked to learn that they were forced to put their heads down on the table after they finished eating. Not only that, but at this school, the children are forced to sit in rows facing the front of the room and are not even allowed to choose their lunchmates. This is utter madness — and abusive.

Yes, it is. But there’s a chance that kids who have been schooled this way think it’s “normal,” and haven’t told their parents about silent lunch.

EMBARRASSMENT: The short life of the new USS Little Rock: Design flaws, setbacks lead to decommissioning.

Some 8,500 people turned out on Dec. 16, 2017, to watch the commissioning of the new $440 million USS Little Rock — draped in red, white and blue bunting — at Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park.

That now appears to have been the ship’s only bright moment.

Not even six years later, the USS Little Rock will be decommissioned on March 31 at Mayport Naval Station in Florida, where it is stationed.

The 387-foot-long vessel was imperiled from the start with significant design flaws that the Navy has concluded cannot be overcome.

U.S. Navy officials first announced at a media briefing almost a year ago that nine Freedom-class littoral combat ships would be decommissioned as part of the 2023 fiscal year budget.

“It’s somewhat of an embarrassment,” said Paul Marzello, the Naval Park’s executive director.

“Embarrassment” is a pretty good word for the Navy’s surface ship procurement this century.

Multiple apartment buildings have collapsed after a powerful earthquake in southern Turkey pic.twitter.com/wydrBj94RL — BNO News (@BNONews) February 6, 2023   Quake was detected more than 1,000 miles away…         Children pulled from the rubble… Rescue teams pulling children from the under the rubble of #collapsed buildings in northwestern #Syria At least […]

At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, nearly every major health authority in the world sort of just decided that masks were extremely effective and extremely necessary at combating COVID-19. So we all had to wear masks for literal years.

Eunice Dwumfour, a 30-year-old Republican councilwoman from New Jersey was discovered dead in her SUV Wednesday night near her home.

WELL: Texas Governor Abbott: election irregularities in Harris County may necessitate new elections.

Abbott hasn’t said the “F” word…yet. Although he certainly implied it by suggesting that Harris County elections officials will have to be forced to conduct fair elections through the force of law.

At issue? Harris County officials didn’t provide enough ballot paper to 121 voting centers to cover the needs of the precincts. Not due to a surge in voting at the polls–that wasn’t the issue at all. Nor was it due to a shortage of available paper. There was plenty of it to go around.

They simply chose to deliver about half as many ballots to some voting centers as were needed in previous years.

Guess which ones. Plus:

Abbott is hardly a firebreather or conspiracy theorist, and he isn’t making wild accusations without evidence of actual wrongdoing.

But the religious article of faith that nobody ever cheats in elections only developed after 2020, when suddenly it became forbidden to question the integrity of an election–because to do so would be to add fuel to the fire of Donald Trump’s narrative.

But of course in reality election fraud is as American as Apple Pie, and has been more common in history than 100% fair elections. Why do you think that everybody jokes about dead people voting in Chicago? It’s because dead people have voted a lot in Chicago. Political machines are about winning, and the incentives to do so are high. In the history of the universe elections would be the first thing of immense value that nobody tried to steal, were elections always clean.

Usually, elections don’t turn on the margins of cheating, and usually, the integrity of elections is sufficient to ensure an outcome that reasonably reflects the “will of the voters.” But when elections are close, irregularities can matter a lot.

And that’s when they’re most likely to happen, of course.

OR, HERE’S AN IDEA: WE ABOLISH THE FBI AND SALT THE EARTH:  Planned New FBI HQ Is Twice the Size of the Pentagon.

HOW IT STARTED: PayPal Still Threatens $2500 Fines for Promoting “Discriminatory” “Intolerance” (Even if Not “Misinformation”).

— Eugene Volokh, Reason, October 9^th.

How it’s going: PayPal to cut 2,000 jobs in latest tech company cost-cutting.

—AP, Tuesday.

WHOA: #GoogleLeaks tells #TwitterFiles to hold its beer with bombshell-filled thread.

AND THERE IS MY SHOCKED FACE AGAIN:  Thousands of federal bureaucrats defrauded taxpayers to double their paychecks with Covid aid meant for the unemployed.

Talk about dark...

IF EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED, CAN WE TRUST THE BLS? US lost 287,000 jobs while government was reporting +1 million in gains. “This is the second major report to come out showing significant job growth discrepancies in the second quarter. Last month, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank released a report saying it thought the government overestimated job growth by more than one million. The Philadelphia Fed calculated 10,500 net new jobs added versus the 1,047,000 revised estimate by the BLS. . . . BLS is releasing its latest national data revisions on Friday with the January jobs report.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Thousands Of Pandemic Unemployment Claims Listed The Names Of Still-Employed Government Workers, Senator Says.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: This Rare Asteroid May Be Worth 70,000 Times the Global Economy. Now NASA Is Sending a Spaceship to Explore It.

The space agency decided back in 2017 that humankind would benefit from a closer look at 16 Psyche. The Psyche mission was initially slated to take place at the end of 2022 but was delayed due to “development problems.” NASA is now planning to launch the Psyche spacecraft this October. The vessel should reach the ultra-valuable asteroid in August 2029.
…
The metal-rich asteroid is about the size of Massachusetts and shaped somewhat like a potato, according to astronomers. Its average diameter is about 140 miles—or roughly the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego. The asteroid orbits between Mars and Jupiter at a distance ranging from 235 million to 309 million miles from the Sun.

A study published by The Planetary Science Journal in 2020 suggests that Psyche is made almost entirely of iron and nickel.

If Psyche turns out to be as metals-rich as we think, it might not be too outlandish to say that whoever controls Psyche will control the solar system.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along.

Our elites view any disagreement as a treasonous challenge. That’s not how elites behave in civilized societies, but we don’t have civilized elites.

PRESIDENT BIDEN GIVES HIS ‘WORD AS A BIDEN’ AND LOL:

President Biden has given his ‘word as a Biden’ that he’s feeling really optimistic about America’s future, despite his disastrous presidency.

High gas and grocery prices, 401k woes, border crisis, war in Ukraine, taking out a loan to buy eggs, civil unrest, but yeah, Joe, things are looking downright peachy!

Given the misadventures of Joe, James, and Hunter, I’m not sure why the Big Guy (and/or his ghostwriter) believes that’s a positive phrase for him to utter. As Stacey McCain wrote last march: ‘Simply Not True.’

Joe Biden believes he is honest, and that anyone who disagrees with him is lying, or is ignorant, or has been deceived by liars.

So deeply convinced is Joe Biden of his own honesty that he thinks his very name is synonymous with truth-telling:

“I give you my word as a Biden: I will never stoop to President Trump’s level.”
— Nov. 20, 2019

“I give you my word as a Biden: If I am elected president I will do everything in my power to protect our children from gun violence.”
— March 10, 2020

“I give you my word as a Biden: When I’m president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth.”
— March 18, 2020

When I first noticed him using this “my word as a Biden” phrase during the 2020 campaign, I was puzzled. Has the Biden family been so prominently associated with honesty that when Joe says this, most Americans say, “Well, that settles it”? Of course not. In fact, Biden’s first presidential campaign, in 1988, collapsed in disgrace specifically because of Joe’s dishonesty, when he was caught plagiarizing others — most notably British Labour leader Ne0l Kinnock — in his speeches[.]

And Joe’s multitude of additional lies and gaffes over the decades:

PROGRESSIVES ARE LIARS AND THE TRUTH IS NOT IN THEM:  Left-wing think tank responsible for thousands of fake Russia stories: new Twitter Files.

This was two days ago:

THE NEW SPACE RACE: DARPA and NASA plan orbital nuclear rocket test. “By using a nuclear thermal engine to heat a propellant to extremely high temperatures to generate thrust, a rocket could have over three times the efficiency of a conventional chemical-fueled one, which would reduce transit times and increase payload potential. For a crewed Mars mission, this would mean less radiation exposure, fewer detrimental effects from weightlessness, and less of a need for supplies or overly robust flight systems.”

Seventy years late is still better than never.

One virologist noted that the "H5N1 strain, detected in Spain, as being similar to one purposely engineered to better infect humans in controversial 'gain of function' lab experiments."

The post Virologists Alarmed as ‘Bird Flu’ Spreads to Minks and Bears, and Could Soon Jump to Humans first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

MISS THIS AND YOU’LL HAVE TO WAIT 50,000 YEARS FOR ITS RETURN:  ‘Green comet’ passing earth for first time in 50,000 years can now be seen without telescope.

TL:DR –  “You can find the location of the comet by using theskylive.com and setting the default as your home city.”