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ChatGPT: Trust, but verify? Or don't trust at all? It's getting dangerous

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 Like many people who have been studying artificial intelligence, I was interested to try out the new OpenAI-based ChatGPT interface. Early reports suggest it is good at telling stories, and perhaps plays a little fast and loose with facts. The promise of a general AI bot is captivating. The power of the entire Internet to provide information, natural language processing to figure out what you're looking for and how to respond in a way that's useful, and of course the ability for computers to do what they were originally designed to do: compute. It will make suggestions based on thousands of calculations, all in a few seconds. What if its calculations are wrong? I ran a test today that I expected ChatGPT to ace. It was simple: how much money can you get in a standard briefcase? I knew it would have to do some searching to find the dimensions of bills, the dimensions of briefcases, and do a little math. This could be extended to see how much money could fit in a swimming pool, e
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John Locke, an old Subaru, and the ethics of blocking traffic

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By now most people have seen video of a man in a Subaru driving through a crowd of protesters in Minneapolis. The crowd sees the Subaru approaching, and acts to block him from continuing. We don't know what was said, just that the driver honked furiously, then tried edging forward. One young woman who refused to move was bumped and knocked over, at which point, he was mobbed with people pounding on his car. He decided to get out of Dodge and bumped/pushed his way through the crowd to freedom. What of it? Pedestrians traditionally have the right of way when interacting with motor vehicles, even if said pedestrians are stupid. How much of that rule applies when they are illegally blocking a street? If my daughter can't run a lemonade stand without a permit, but people can illegally block traffic (no permit) without fear of any police intervention, we have a strange inversion of law. When you pick your targets based upon likelihood of compliance, you are part of the problem.
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Who built ORCA? That's the wrong question

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Ten days after an extremely disappointing election, the pundit class is pointing fingers in every direction. What caused the Romney loss? Was it the ground game? The media putting its thumb on the scales? Failure to press Benghazi as an issue? Ideology? Apathy? Gaffes? There's been plenty of good and bad pontificating on all of the above. Certainly the much-vaunted Project Orca was a failure. But why? I'd like to take a closer look today, and address the recent "who built it" scapegoat effort. As someone who has managed web-based software application products and projects since there have been web-based software applications, and a Project Orca observer on the ground in Ohio on election day, I thought I'd bring my perspective to the problem. Not to spoil the ending, but I believe that the application itself was the least of Team Romney's problems on election day, and were overshadowed by problems with deployment and fatal problems with the concept itself.
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Fact Check

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So it's interesting that all these news organizations are starting the Orwellian "fact check" campaigns. Isn't that part of every journalist's job? Are they admittedly only checking the facts in the one article each day? Sounds about right. But now we've gone beyond cherry-picking whose facts to check, and have wrapped opinion journalism snugly in the context of a fact check. Here's one from ABC on Romney's speech: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/fact-check-mitt-romneys-republican-national-convention-speech/story?id=17119764#.UEYSFiIWoRY Please tell me which fact he got wrong. Some of these are jaw-dropping, like the one about the Poles and Czechs. BTW, what do Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa think about it? Dare they ask? Read the tortured logic on how the Medicare cuts aren't really cuts, and the only word that will spring to mind is "shill."
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GOP Convention Notes: Day 1

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Kelly Ayotte had a slower delivery than a unionized pizza shop. Good grief. Gilchrist's accent reminds me of home. Kasich knocked it out of the park at the Romney rally on Saturday, borrowed heavily from it for today, but wasn't nearly as good in such a formal setting. Would love to catch Gwen Ifil's mic open after she finished with Terry Branstead. Mark Shields seems completely baffled by the purpose of the convention. Wow. Huge ovation for Scott Walker's entrance. Well deserved. 94% of employers think Wisconsin headed in the right direction vs just 10% previously. 225th anniversary if US Constitution coming up. I wonder if anyone will care when we hit 250? Every question from Judy and Gwen is challenging. Does anyone doubt that tune will change in a few weeks? "is it hard being so smart? What's on your iPod?" Senator Barrasso has some gravitas. Shoved Shields' EPA question neatly back down his throat. Wow, they are jumping all over th
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Baffling

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Catching upon some of James Delingpole's work for The Telegraph in which he notes the industrial blight that is about to be unnecessarily perpetrated upon the people of Wales in the form of wind turbines. Beautiful countryside will become disfigured, for the purpose of gaining an unreliable energy source. When you think of how many people live on an island as small as the U.K, it's remarkable such tracts of virtually unmolested land exist at all. But they do, and we'll mar them in the name of being green. Of course, the irony of this is that we can't drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because if it's "pristine-ness." That the actual area where oil will be extracted is possibly the ugliest natural place on planet earth, that no human being would ever willingly venture there were it not for oil, that the entire industrial footprint would be the size of a medium-sized airport seem not to matter to these zealots who seem to think that  all
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The Man with the Mustache

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Well it's 2011. That means it's time to start seriously talking about 2012, no? Jay Nordlinger at National Review makes a good case for John Bolton. I can't say I can disagree with anything about the man; I do question his electability. Still, why not latch onto this guy during primary season instead of anybody else? When Palin and Huckabee are mentioned as possible strong candidates, I shudder. Probably because I believe it. I read something interesting the other day about the two strains of candidates emerging in the Republican primary season: ideological and managerial. Palin heads up the ideological wing and thus has huge Tea Party support. Romney heads the managerial wing and gets more traditional (and RINO) support. The managerial type is going to be more apt to get crossover milquetoast votes... those same voters that switch back and forth depending upon which way the wind is blowing. However, I think the ideological side can attract votes too, if it's positione
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