• Yes, it’s getting all too easy to generate completely realistic photo images using Google’s Pixel 9 and Magic Editor/Reimagine functionality.  This has the potential to become a dangerous tool, especially without proper watermarking.  See this article in the Verge. An excerpt:

“The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark.) Google told us that the outputs of Pixel Studio — a pure prompt generator that is closer to DALL-E — will be tagged with a SynthID watermark; ironically, we found the capabilities of the Magic Editor’s Reimagine tool, which modifies existing photos, were much more alarming.”

• From Jamelle Bouie’s August 10 opinion piece in the NYT, JD Vance has right-wing friends in high places:

“When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans…

Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”…

Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.””

• David Wallace-Wells delivers his usual excellent piece in the NYT, this time discussing our woeful public health efforts on H5N1.

• Highly recommended reading regarding how far the republican presidential candidate strays from reality, both from the New York Times.

The first, from Steve Rattner –  Don’t Take Trump’s Word for It. Check the Data. One telling excerpt (out of many):

Lie: “Our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down because they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them into our country.”

Truth: Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.

The other, by Linda Qiu: Trump’s 2024 Convention Speech Had More Falsehoods Than His 2016 One

• An excellent essay By Robert E. Rubin and Kenneth I. Chenault in the NYT – The Enormous Risks a Second Trump Term Poses to Our Economy. An excerpt:

“The two of us have been involved in business, government and policy for many years, with more than a century of experience between us. We’ve worked with elected officials and business leaders across the ideological spectrum. And we believe a straightforward assessment of Mr. Trump’s economic policy agenda — based on his public statements and on-the-record interviews, such as the one he recently conducted with Time magazine — leads to a clear conclusion.

When it comes to economic policy, Mr. Trump is not a remotely normal candidate. A second Trump term would pose enormous risks to our economy.”

• Ezekiel Emanuel writes in the Atlantic about his impression of Joe Biden’s fitness.  Alas, I agree with his conclusions; though Mr. Biden is remarkably active for his age, he is definitely showing some signs of functional cognitive decline.  I would for for him over DJT in a heartbeat, but I think he would do a service to his country if he were to step aside for a younger candidate.

• As always, Matt Levine adroitly skewers finance-related misadventures and curiosities. His June 20 Bloomberg posting was especially comically worthwhile.  I found this AI Sorting section especially funny and enclose this excerpt:

“A dumb simple model of artificial intelligence companies is:

1. 1. It would be good to develop good AI (AI that helps humans), but bad to develop bad AI (AI that kills or enslaves humans).
   2. If you try to build good AI, there is some risk of building bad AI instead (your robot tricks you into thinking that it’s nice, then enslaves you), so you have to be very very careful. You can’t move too fast; you have to check carefully, at each step, to make sure that your robot is not secretly evil.
   3. Company A is formed by idealistic AI researchers who want to create good AI. They work together well for a while.
   4. Disagreements develop. Some researchers at Company A say “we need to work faster to build good AI, because if we don’t, someone else will come along and build bad AI first instead.” Others say “no, we can’t work faster, that would compromise our ability to check that the robot is not evil.” 
   5. The first group wins the argument, for reasons.[5]
   6. The people who lose the argument, who are genuinely worried about bad AI, quit Company A in outrage and go start Company B, with the goal of carefully and safely creating good AI.
   7. They work together well for a few months.
   8. Disagreements develop at Company B. Some researchers say “we need to work faster to build good AI, because otherwise Company A will build bad AI first. That’s why we quit, after all.” Others say “no, we can’t work faster, that would compromise our bad robot checks. That’s why we quit, after all.”
   9. The first group wins the argument, for the same reasons as in Step 5.
   10. The people who lose the argument quit and start Company C.
   11. This keeps repeating: Company C eventually splits over similar tensions, but also Company A and Company B can themselves keep dividing as some people want to move faster than others.
   12. Eventually all the AI researchers are very finely sorted by aggressiveness, so that Company Z is full of purists who are too cautious ever to build anything at all, while Company A is full of people who are like “actually being enslaved by robots would be pretty cool.””

• This was a cool study positing that the Earth passed though a dense interstellar cloud 2-3 million years ago. It was a clever use of computational modeling to recreate the paths of our solar system and the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds through millions of years. From commentary in the Harvard Gazette re. the study by Opher and Loeb in arXiv.

“The evidence exists in the form of noticeable peaks in the deposition of two radioactive isotopes: iron 60 and plutonium 244. Both are very rare, created when massive stars explode in supernova. Those isotopes are thought to be more plentiful in the interstellar medium.

“It is everywhere, in the deep ocean, on the moon, on ice in Antarctica,” Opher said. “These papers describe a global phenomenon. Something happened. And iron 60 is not produced on Earth. So I knew that somehow this iron 60 got trapped in dust, and somehow, 2 to 3 million years ago, we had more dust delivered to us.”… “Our work should trigger more studies into this question,” Loeb said. “It draws attention to our cosmic neighborhood as having potential influence on life on Earth. We usually tend to just look at it and enjoy it, but we are actually moving through interstellar space, and there could be risks along the way.””

• Glen Kessler from the Washington Post refutes *rump’s latest hash of untruths regarding his trial and conviction.

• Matt Yglesias does a good job reporting on the ways *rump has mistreated people in his May 22 Slow Boring newsletter Trump Scams the People Who Trust Him.  An excerpt:

“What makes Trump uniquely dangerous is his disregard for the rule of law. But while it’s certainly possible that Trump will leverage that disregard to advance conservative policy aims, what he has actually consistently done throughout his career is seek personal financial benefit, specifically at the expense of his fans and admirers.”