Interesting Links for 10-05-2025

[andrewducker]

1. British Property Management Firms Are Helping Russians Avoid Sanctions

(tags:uk russia OhForFucksSake )

2. Amazon's warehose robots can now stow items faster than most humans

(tags:robots amazon )

3. Trans Labour councillor quits and accuses Starmer of 'throwing transgender people under a bus'

(tags:transgender lgbt labour )

4. Why the rich paid less tax in the 1970s - despite 98% tax rates

(tags:tax uk history )

5. "Letting AI make up cases" hits the UK legal system

(tags:law ai fraud OhForFucksSake uk )

6. The House of Lords wants opinions from autistic people (diagnosed or undiagnosed), or people who care for them.

(tags:autism houseoflords )

7. Scientists turn lead into gold at the LHC!

(tags:materials gold lead )

8. Always, always check the answers the AI gives you.

(tags:comic genocide funny ai )

9. Video Essay Condescendingly Reads Wikipedia at You

(tags:funny satire videos )

10. American men who refer to themselves as 'moderate' or 'centrist' score basically the same on values and opinions as people who identify themselves as 'conservative'

(tags:USA politics )

Comments

[simont]

Of course, #8 is an older joke than the modern notion of "AI", and indeed doesn't need AI at all. Even traditional optimisation techniques like gradient descent, simulated annealing or genetic algorithms will do well at finding the outcome you didn't at all want but your cost function forgot to rule it out!

[andrewducker]

I believe that before that one had to go to a genie or monkey's paw to get that kind of answer!

[simont]

I mean you can understand the genies being wilfully unhelpful. They must have been so sick of every smartarse who picked up a lamp saying "AHA I wish for a BAJILLION EXTRA WISHES bet I'm the first person ever to think of that."

[andrewducker]

And are very very grumpy for having such a crick in the neck.

[dewline]

3. I am currently convinced that Starmer is doing exactly as he's been accused of. No matter what the rest of the Labour membership may want to do.

6. Interesting to know this.

7. So all that the alchemists were missing were the proper tools?

10. A worrying thing, this. Deeply worrying. Long suspected, as noted by others.

[calimac]

8. A couple things about this mystify me. One is, whether AI generated the fake citations or not, where did they come from? But second and more important, why didn't someone note this earlier? I spent enough time working at a law school to pick up some of the lingo and principles, and one thing I picked up is that, when citing a case, you always check to make sure it's still current law, i.e. not been overruled by something subsequent. In the US this is, or was back then, called "shepardizing," because it meant to look it up in Shepard's Citations.
But I guess Shepard's would only list cases that have been cited, so if it's never been cited it wouldn't be there, so non-existence wouldn't ring an alarm.

[andrewducker]

As far as I can tell, these people aren't doing any checking at all. Sadly, the document has now been taken down, but the transcript of two lawyers getting torn apart by a judge for doing something similar a while back basically had them admit that they thought *the AI* was doing the checking.

[andrewducker]

Found the judge's order, which makes things clearer: https://reason.com/volokh/2025/05/13/ai-hallucination-in-filings-involving-14th-largest-u-s-law-firm-lead-to-31k-in-sanctions/

[conuly]

10. American men who refer to themselves as 'moderate' or 'centrist' score basically the same on values and opinions as people who identify themselves as 'conservative'

Not so surprising. Have you ever read The Authoritarians?

[andrewducker]

I have not! What do I need to know?

[conuly]

Well, there's a free PDF, for one.

But one of the things he notes in the book is that people who score high on tests of right wing authoritarianism are much more likely than the general population to say they want to be completely average in all areas. Here, I'll quote the relevant passage:

You can also gauge the conventionalism of authoritarian followers through my “feedback-conformity experiments.” I simply tell a group who earlier had filled out a scale for me what the average response had been to each item, in the sample as a whole. For example, I would tell them that the average answer to Item 1 of the RWA scale was a “+1,” the average answer to Item 2 was a “-2,” and so on. Then I ask the sample to answer the scale again, with the average-answers-from-before staring them right in the face. The point, as you have no doubt surmised, is to see which extreme moves more toward the norm, the lows or the highs. High RWAs shift their answers toward the middle about twice as much as lows do. This even works on hard-core authoritarian beliefs such as their answers about homosexuals and religious fundamentalism.

Which explains another peculiar finding. If I tell a group of former subjects most of what I’ve told you in this chapter--which I think raise some questions about how “Blessed are the authoritarians”--and then ask the sample what they personally would like their own RWA scale score to be, what do you think happens? The low RWAs say they’d like to be low RWAs. So do the middles. But the highs usually say they want to be middles, not lows. I thought this happened because highs often dislike the people who would score low on the RWA scale, and that may be part of the explanation. But I also discovered that if you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place “being normal” substantially higher than most people do. It’s almost as though they want to disappear as individuals into the vast vat of Ordinaries.