Fun Uses of AI (or if picky, machine learning)
• This was a fun read from the NYT on how some farmers are integrating machine learning – From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I.
Most.Corrupt.President.Ever.
From “There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This” — a May 20, 2026 NY Times editorial:
“Congress and the executive branch built rules and traditions to ensure that federal agencies, especially the Justice Department, operated in the public interest, rather than that of the president. Mr. Trump has tried to break this system. Once he is gone, it will need to be rebuilt, and better than before. He has exposed and exploited its flaws and gaps. Unless they are filled, Mr. Trump’s corruption and perversion of justice risk becoming the norm.
In the meantime, Americans should be cleareyed about what the president is doing. He is taking their money and showering it on criminals.”
Yup.
Clinical Performance of AI on Real Cases
This is a pretty interesting paper published in the April 30 edition of Science ( Peter G. Brodeur et al., Performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician. Science 392,524-527 (2026). DOI:10.1126/science.adz4433 ).
Open access available here:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433
It discusses some of the earlier OpenAI models’ (e.g. o1-preview and GPT-4) performances on generating differential diagnoses and then looked at how o1 and 4o performed on real world ED and ICU admissions when compared to two Internal Medicine physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433
It discusses some of the earlier OpenAI models’ (e.g. o1-preview and GPT-4) performances on generating differential diagnoses and then looked at how o1 and 4o performed on real world ED and ICU admissions when compared to two Internal Medicine physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston.
Excerpts from the article:
“The o1 model identified the exact or very close diagnosis (Bond scores of 4 to 5) in 67.1% of cases during the initial ER triage, 72.4% during the ER physician encounter, and 81.6% at admission to the medical floor or ICU—surpassing the two physicians (55.3, 61.8, and 78.9% for Physician 1; 50.0, 52.6, and 69.7% for Physician 2) at each stage.”
and
“We emphasize that our study addresses only text-based performance for both humans and machines; clinical medicine is multifaceted and awash with nontext inputs, including auditory (such as the patient’s level of distress) and visual information (for example, interpretation of medical imaging studies) that clinicians routinely use. Existing studies suggest that current foundation models are more limited in reasoning over nontext inputs (26, 27); future work is needed to assess how humans and machines may effectively collaborate (28) in use of nontext signals.”
Progress apparently continues apace; as these are now “older” models, I would agree with the authors that “Although we expect performance to be sustained or improved with newer models (27, 29), further studies should be done to elucidate how performance varies across models and to study how humans and LLMs may collaborate.”
On Prediction Markets
• Caveat emptor. From Matt Levine’s excellent Money Stuff, on Polymarket bots:
“Anyway Bloomberg’s Carolyn Silverman, Nathaniel Popper and Marie Patino report:
Over 100,000 accounts lost at least $1,000 on Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of every wallet active since the beginning of 2025. That is almost twice the number that made at least that much.
Among the winners, a majority of the profits were raked in by a tiny slice of what look to be automated bots, based on the Polymarket trade records compiled by the data firm Dune. Everyone else, in aggregate, lost $131 million. …
While prediction markets have been described as peer-to-peer, the Polymarket records suggest the role of the sportsbook is now largely being played by the sort of automated, high-frequency traders that have long dominated other financial markets. The most active accounts on the site were a small proportion of wallets, but accounted for most of the trading volume.“
Worst…President…Ever
• Thomas Edsall has it right in his NYT guest essay: titled “Easily the Worst President in U.S. History”:
“The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.” Worth the read.
A Weird Time to Be Alive…
• A nice essay from Charlie Warzel, writing in The Atlantic – “An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive.” A snippet: “The world witnessed the best and worst of humanity in a single week.”
Don’t Be Like Russia
On Good Friday, Sam Sifton writes in his NYT The Morning newsletter on a story by C.J. Chivers on how Russia weaponized the cold this past winter in their attacks against Ukraine:
“His reporting comes from a residential neighborhood at the northeastern edge of Kyiv called Troieshchyna. Most of the buildings you’ll see there are classic late-Soviet apartment blocks — giant stacks of prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, some rising 15 stories or more above the street. Few have boilers to provide heat. Instead, the Soviet government built centralized thermal plants to supply hot water and heat to dozens, even hundreds, of buildings at a time.
This winter, one of the coldest in Ukraine in close to 20 years, Russian forces used long-range strikes to target those plants, rendering huge swaths of Troieshchyna virtually uninhabitable.
Here’s Chivers:
The attacks of early January severed more than 400,000 households from electricity, city officials said, and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Problems compounded from there. Once buildings become cold enough, pipes freeze and residents lose running water. In this way, a measure of cruelty from long-range attacks can be distributed to an entire population in their homes without hitting the homes at all. Call it sanctuary denial on the cheap or, in the words of Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, a premeditated assault “on the life-support system of a modern city.”
Ukrainians called what followed the “kholodomor,” a sort of portmanteau of the Ukrainian words for “cold” and “plague.” More than 600,000 residents fled the city in search of warmth and safety as Russian drones continued to strike.”
Chivers’s story is here. Don’t be like Russia; stand with Ukraine.
Artemis II
• The live video feed from the Artemis II mission: https://www.youtube.com/live/6RwfNBtepa4
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window on April 2, 2026, after completing the translunar injection burn:
More Worthwhile Reading
• More worthwhile reading:
First, from the NY Times Editorial Board, Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran:
“There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon. We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.
Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.”
And also from the Times, a most excellent essay from Phil Klay: Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran. It’s definitely worth reading.