My opinion as a pragmatist is that most western institutions do a passably good job most of the time, but are imperfect and need to be constantly scrutinized to make sure they're serving the interests of the taxpayers. But what I'm talking about here is trust. There are many things that institutions could do to communicate in a way that doesn't do so much harm to their trustworthiness. I think that's an area where people are still learning how to do it "the right way." We're not there yet.

Wait, I thought Tylenol caused autism. Is there Tylenol in the vaccines? What's going on? LOL

First of all, trust in institutions is falling everywhere across the western world, not just in the US, and that drop in trust is bipartisan in the US. Secondly, there are real reasons for a general decline in institutional trust. In medicine, but also in economics, with the 2008 financial crisis that was caused by a failure of the institutions that are supposed to regulate such things. The rush to label anyone who questioned the origin of the COVID-19 virus as racist, only to have most authorities eventually admit that a Wuhan lab leak was not only possible, but likely, was another example. Again, the falling trust isn't a left or right issue. Does it help when RFK Jr. is running the CDC? Obviously not. But do you really think the state governments are immune to this falling trust? Definitely not.

What's funny is that the CDC still publishes measles data but I wonder how long that will continue.

While I count myself among the tribe of people who think we should govern ourselves based on evidence-based logic and reason, I have to admit, my tribe is a rather small minority. If the majority of the people in a democracy will not buy into an idea simply because you've provided a sound and well-reasoned argument, then we're going to have to fall back on practical lessons. You'd think measles coming back would be a pretty good object lesson, but apparently not.

Another article where we see that things started getting worse in the 2012 to 2014 timeframe. Which just happens to be when a lot of teenagers started to get smartphones. It's not a coincidence.

You don't understand the problem. The LLM won't "rip off" content from a website like GoodFood. That's now how it works. It doesn't copy stuff wholesale. It's a text generator that tends to generate text that looks like its training data, in a similar way that a person retelling a story or a joke will retell it from memory, but the memory isn't a facsimile, just like our memory isn't verbatim. When outputting the text, it'll be similar, but it won't be identical. I mean, it might be, but it might output something completely different just due to a neural net weight that was affected by some other training data that was kinda similar.

Exactly. As technologists, we need the output of computers to be precise and accurate. LLMs might be precise, but they're very often inaccurate, and that's not acceptable to us.

The average person doesn't live in a world where accuracy matters to them. A colleague said she used AI all the time, and I asked her how. She said she often tells it the contents in her fridge and asks it for a recipe that would use those ingredients. She said, "yeah, and it's really accurate too." I don't know how you measure accuracy on a test like that, but it doesn't really matter. If you're just mixing some ingredients together in a frying pan, you probably can't go too far wrong. As long as you don't ask it for a baking recipe, it'll work out.

And I think that's what's going on. The people who love AI don't know enough to realize when it's wrong, or are just asking it open ended questions, like you would ask a fortune teller, and it spits out something generic enough that you can't disprove it anyway.

Bullshit. I live in the western US and have regularly driven through some of the least-populated areas of the country, but I've never seen an area you can go 500 miles without encountering any infrastructure. You might be able to accomplish it if you take careful note of where the truck stops are and go out of your way to avoid them, but on any realistic route you'll encounter truck stops -- if not towns -- at least every 150 miles.

As for charging infrastructure, if you stay on the interstates I don't think there's anywhere in the country you can go more than 100 miles without finding a Tesla Supercharger. Those aren't designed for truck charging, but this demonstrates that building out the infrastructure isn't that hard.

They certainly seem to have completely missed Article I. You know, the part that says that the legislature makes the laws? Even if you think restricting AI regulation to the federal government is a good idea, the right way to do it isn't with an executive order to set up a DOJ task force aimed at litigating state AI regulations out of existence based on complex legal theories about interstate commerce. The right way is for Congress to pass a law barring states from regulating AI. This is simpler, cheaper and should invoke public debate about the issue, which is how things are supposed to be done in constitutional republics.

I don't even think Trump is taking this route because he and his advisors don't believe they have the votes for it. I think they're doing it this way because they don't even consider governing through legislation rather than through executive power. Granted that Congress is fairly dysfunctional, but they actually can and do make laws... and the way to fix the dysfunction is to work the system.

I agree. Where I can find data to backup his claims, I generally accept what he says. Otherwise, I'm like, "hmm, ok, maybe."

The above was already quite long, but allow me to add a bit :-)

I spent a few minutes looking for the state of the art in C++/Rust interop for contexts that don't have a nice intermediary like binder. It turns out that the situation isn't as bad as I thought. The CXX project enables automatic generation of bi-directional definitions between Rust and C++ and is being used at scale by the Chromium project and that seems to be going pretty well.

There's also a Google-funded Rust Foundation project to define a better solution, though I don't see what, if anything, has happened since it was announced last year. Hopefully that's because there's a small group working too hard to waste a lot of time talking about it.

The reason I went to look is that my new team (I left Google a couple of months ago) might need such a thing. I've been asked to define an API that would benefit from being implemented in Rust and usable from C++ and Rust.

Telling people that vaccines are bad, ensuring that any parent who wishes to refuse to vaccinate their children is fully supported in that decision, and working to make vaccines harder to get, more expensive and more painful (RFK Jr. wants to separate the MMR vaccine into three shots, each of which will still require three injections, so kids will have to get 9 shots to be fully vaccinated instead of three).

This is similar to their plan to fight inflation by imposing tariffs and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates in spite of rising inflation (note that this last part hasn't really happened yet -- the interest rate cuts have been measured, cautious and justified by economic conditions -- but Trump is working on it). Though to be fully fair, by making the tariffs arbitrary and capricious so that business leaders are completely unable to plan, Trump is also causing a contraction in US economic activity that might eventually generate significant unemployment, which actually does reduce inflation. I see no corresponding "silver lining" in the mumps plan, though.

And, ultimately, slavery was a far less efficient and effective economic system. One might think that keeping a big chunk of the populace poor is efficient, since you're not "wasting" a lot of production on providing them with unnecessary goods and services, but it's really not, at least not since the industrial revolution. I think the core reason that it's so inefficient is the same reason that Marxist communism is inefficient: From an economic perspective, both systems value the masses only for their physical labor, and fail to cultivate and take advantage of their brains, which also actually tends to reduce their labor output. Harnessing the distributed ingenuity of your workforce requires giving your workforce some reason to exercise ingenuity and some way to benefit from doing so.

It's going to be interesting (or maybe terrifying, or maybe just sad) to see what happens when we fully automate ingenuity, too, which will mean that the system no longer depends on or benefits from distributed ingenuity because the machines are smarter and think faster, just as the machines are already stronger and indefatigable.

I don't think vibe coding is going to last long as a thing, because it's just a sort of intermediate step to telling the AI to do what you want and having it do that. Right now, people are telling the LLM to write code to accomplish a thing and then running the code to see how it works, then telling the LLM to refine it, but that's a lot of unnecessary extra steps. I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future people will just tell the LLM what they want to do, which may require creating a custom user interface to make user interaction convenient, and may require creating databases or performing network queries or whatever, and the LLM will understand what they want, and do it.

In that future, it's possible that the LLM may generate code to implement the requested functionality, but if it does so that will be a compute-saving shortcut, essentially a way to cache the LLM's work and be able to repeat it with less effort. There won't be any need to show any of the code to the user, or even tell the user that the LLM chose to generate some code.

As an aside, the whole notion of leaning "prompt engineering" is another intermediate step that will die. The whole point of natural language-capable AI is that it will be able to understand what humans want when we express ourselves as we would to other humans. As the LLMs get more capable, it will become less necessary to treat them as something different from an entity that is fully capable of understanding and acting on human communication.