John Oliver on AI Slop: John Oliver is always funny and often insightful.
Defeating a Virus That Killed Half a Billion People - The Plea. Timely and important. Trigger warning: Images of diseased people.
Operation Midnight Hammer: What a story.
Helicopter Money. Literally. Talk about going out in style.
Does CPS Investigate One Third of All Children in the US? Yes. But…
The scale of CPS investigations in the US is staggering. Like all things, this trend began in the late 60s and early 70s as mandatory reporter laws expanded and caused massive growth in child maltreatment reports. Since the 90s, the number of reports has stayed pretty stable and the number of substantiated investigations and interventions has been falling.
The CPS could probably scale back it’s interventions for cases of maltreatment that only involve neglect, especially those that only involve lack of supervision rather than physical neglect. Other tradeoffs between false positive and false negative investigations and interventions are more difficult to have a strong opinion on given the terrible outcomes on both sides of the trolley track.
There are probably some available pareto improving moves. The most straightforward in my view would be increasing staffing and state capacity in family courts so that cases can be reviewed more accurately and without requiring months or years of effort and tens of thousands of dollars on the part of the parents.
Tech C.E.O. Pays $400,000 to Conduct the Toronto Symphony (NYT):
After the performance, Cheung and the orchestra received a standing ovation. He said he was grateful for the opportunity.
Will AI Drive 20%+ Annual GDP Growth?:
Steam, electricity, computers delivered enormous benefits while their economic importance shrank through success. AI will transform society profoundly. But 20% GDP growth? History says no.
Medical Superintelligence from Microsoft?:
Microsoft’s LLM is not only designed for multiple-choice questions, but also for real medical diagnoses in realistic scenarios – and outperforms even top models such as o3.
In a large-scale study with over 300 case studies from the New England Journal of Medicine, the system achieved a diagnostic accuracy of over 80%. This is not only four times higher than the participating doctors, but also marks a qualitative leap: the AI was not only more accurate, but also made more economical decisions – with around 20% lower costs because it avoided unnecessary tests.
Microsoft claims their new AI framework diagnoses 4x better than doctors.
I’m a medical doctor and I actually read the paper. Here’s my perspective on why this is both impressive AND misleading …
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Final thought: We don’t need AI that can diagnose every rare disease. We need AI that knows when to diagnose and when to reassure. That’s the real art of medicine.
Gymnastics Bot using LEGO SPIKE Prime. My weekend project.