Google Assistant is a failed category, and everybody knows it. APIs are constantly broken, and the Assistant itself is, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently put it, "Dumb as rock."

1/ But I still love mine. I've got 3 I constantly use to catch up on news or my YouTube channels when I'm preparing food or brushing my teeth. I have routines to set my alarm and turn off the lights when I come and go. One is always within earshot when I need simple arithmetic.

2/

1/4 Should we pause LLM dev? No. 🧵

National security & global democracy depend on AI supremacy. Russia will continue to iterate on Yandex & China on GLM-130B. Rogue actors will soon carry an LLM as capable as GPT-4 in a briefcase &, later, on a chip. 2/4 Obtaining & transporting LLMs will be easier than medical-grade cobalt. An attack could be launched from anywhere. We’ll need better AI as a countermeasure. To stay ahead, we need millions of people continually interacting with the most current versions of ChatGPT et al. Why?

Is ChatGPT like Mary the colorblind neuroscientist?

Does knowledge of the color red depend on qualia (internal experience)?

quote/

Every neural network represents words, sentences, concepts, through representations, embeddings, high-dimensional vectors....

1/ ...And one thing we can do is we can look at those high-dimensional vectors and we can look at what’s similar to what: How does the network see this concept or that concept? So we can look at the embeddings of colors and embeddings of colors happen to be exactly right....

2/

1/ The Loudoun alleged rape saga. Here's what I see (bear with me—long🧵ahead). Thanks to @jessesingal for motivating me. @jessesingal 2/ The anti-trans movement has found its Joe the Plumber & his name is Scott (also a plumber).

Watching the Loudoun Board June 22 meeting, 2 initial obvs: the public comment period was over but anti-8040 parents kept on talking and finally gave the mic to a female student...

@LeonydusJohnson 1/ Take a look at Cheryl Harris’ foundational (1993) essay, “Whiteness as Property,” in which she considered how a legal expansion of affirmative action, inspired by the redistributive policies ANC in post-apartheid South Africa, could be a model for the US. @LeonydusJohnson 2/ She contemplates how the gov could use AA to justify seizing land and property at below market value:

harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/upl…

And see Judge Bernice Donald’s dissent in Antonio Vitolo, et al v. Isabella Guzman, where she argues: (1) The SBA funding gap between minority-owned

@mattyglesias 1/ Take a look at Cheryl Harris’ foundational (1993) essay, “Whiteness as Property,” in which she considered how a legal expansion of affirmative action, inspired by the redistributive policies ANC in post-apartheid South Africa, could be a model for the US. @mattyglesias 2/ She contemplates how the gov could use AA to justify seizing land and property at below market value:

harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/upl…

And see Judge Bernice Donald’s dissent in Antonio Vitolo, et al v. Isabella Guzman, where she argues: (1) The SBA funding gap between minority-owned

CRT: Questioning or Destroying?

1/ CRT scholars Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic say Critical Race Theory “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, 2/ and neutral principles of constitutional law" (‘Intro to Crit Race Theory,’ 2001).

It’s good to question things, right?

Sure it is. But what does that look like in practice? Two examples:

[1] Cheryl Harris’ foundational (1993) essay, “Whiteness as Property,” in which

Is the “Cultural Explanation for Violence” Right?

1/ It’s currently not popular because it distracts from systemic racism (which is real) and can be made friendly to racial essentialism (which is not).

But we simply can’t explain violence gaps on the basis of poverty alone. 2/ Three counterexamples:

[1] High poverty but low violent crime in NYC in the last decade of the 19 century:

quote/

From 1890 to 1899 there were a total of 675 murders in New York City, which is less than there were in any one year in Gotham between 1970 and 1990.

1/ Poverty Causes Violent Crime, Right? Not Necessarily

Have we read Kevin D. Williamson’s ‘Big White Ghetto’ yet?

quote/

“The overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two-thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average, 2/ according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.”

[...]

There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York.

@SethAbramson 1/ No one serious is claiming children are being assigned essays from professional legal studies journals. The point is a whole new K-12 pedagogy is emerging downstream from these grad-school ideas. @SethAbramson 2/ Founders of CRT and curriculum designers/ instructional coordinators have explicitly used the term “CRT” to describe educational practices.

@DB1212013 @mattyglesias 1/ Here are some further examples.

Buffalo Public Schools has implemented antiracist curricula at various grade levels, including “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics.” In the kindergarten curriculum, children are required to watch a video dramatizing the death @DB1212013 @mattyglesias 2/ of black children and warning them (kindergarteners) to beware of “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.” Middle school students are taught that “white elites work to perpetuate racism through politics, law, education, and the media,” and that “all white people play a

It’s not just TikTok, Trump is banning WeChat. The consequences?

-Disruption of communication between family members in the US and China

-Disruption of communication between Apple manufacturing engineers (and other ODMs) and Chinese factories

1/ -Disruption of Walmart’s business in China (9% of Walmart’s international market) that rely on WeChat microapps

-Disruption of American brands in China that rely on the WeChat payment platform (e.g., Starbucks)

2/