Tasks

• Ping LASIGE about book and talk
• Ping NATO
• R for lunch
• 5:30 Spanish

SBIRs

• More RAG work. Make it so that the default context prompt can be overridden
• More NSTIC? Put together a fun set of images and JSON to try the concept on

It is November already! And midterms tomorrow. Hoping for the best and fearing the worst

Tasks

• MPT at 6:30

SBIRs

• Progress with RAG in the WG app
• Need to make a method that rolls up all the specific RAG code so that it can be called easily.
• Meet with Aaron for NSTIC?

Tasks

• Mop – done
• Groceries – done
• New chainring on Bruni – done
• TexStudio on Mac
• Transfer MediaPlayer files to Mac

Tasks

• Bills – done
• Dishes – done
• Chores – mostly done. Still need to mop
• Bank – closed today! Monday I guess?
• Concert! Fun

SBIRs

• More discussions with AD about NSTIC. I think we have a plan

This is quite good: Online Privacy and Security | Consumer Advice

Tasks

• 5:30 Spanish (do homework!)

SBIRs

• Having fun with duckdb and DataFrames
• Start on NSTIC proposal/whitepaper. Chatting with AD about options.

Mostly chores yesterday, but I did lock in a TV appearance for Monday.

How AI agents shape experts’ judgment calls \ Anthropic

• We wanted to look at whether experts really do make those important decisions, or whether in practice they defer to their AI agents. In a study we report in a new paper, we asked 50 professional analysts to do a realistic statistical analysis with Claude Code. They all had experience in causal inference—that is, working out from data whether one thing causes another. Their task was to advise a farming cooperative on whether an advisory service it was running was effective and should be expanded.

Tasks

• Din with S&V, then Caligari
• Kirkus reviews will review your book

SBIRS

• Working on direction cosines in Dataframes – done. Want to try some SQL to get paragraphs next
• Maybe chat today with Aaron about NSTIC – tomorrow
• 3:30 NDS Kickoff – done

Why is AI-generated language so hard to understand?

• There is a widespread sense that AI-generated text has recently become harder to understand. In this study, we investigate a set of psycholinguistic features that are known to correlate with human processing difficulty (e.g., object relative clauses, long syntactic dependencies, low-frequency n-grams). Using a novel corpus of AI-generated text across diverse domains, we find that AI models use these difficult features more often than paraphrases generated by round-trip translation. Compared with human writing, all nine frontier and near-frontier models use more inanimate subjects with animate verbs and more low-frequency n-grams, and most also use longer dependencies, more stacked nouns, and more reduced object relatives in conversation; we also demonstrate substantial variation across model families. We propose and test a hypothesis as to why: while human language is optimized for successful communication, AI-generated text is increasingly optimized for other goals like math, code, and reasoning, in which there is a pressure for \textit{information density} rather than successful communication. We provide a proof-of-concept for this hypothesis by fine-tuning a language model under a length penalty, which leads to a divergence from human-like linguistic behavior. Our findings highlight the axes of misalignment between linguistic processing demands in humans and LLMs, and point toward possible remedies.

Tasks

• Pinged Carlos, Antonio, and Mateusz about giving a talk
• Still need to ping Jimmy, Shemei (and Alden?). Done
• Ping Jeff. Done. Interesting and mysterious pingback!
• Add something about ECHOTRIBBLE to the blog post. Done

SBIRs

• Slides for sprint review – done
• Stories – done
• Sprint planning – done
• Added text_tab_data property so that pasted text can be seen by the model. It’s a little clunky in that you have to click the “submit” button to load it into the variable. Maybe I should just change the name of the button?

The Man Who Saved the Internet Yesterday – The Atlantic

• There’s not enough priority and money going to properly maintain the IT infrastructure in various places. It’s not only companies; it’s also a lot of outdated consumer electronics that are going to be attacked. I kind of agree that everything’s moving fast now, and it’s taking a toll on the people who are defending the stuff. At the same time, maybe this is the turning point where we actually start caring about this.

Hey! I have a book out!

Tasks

• Tried Langua out. I think I like it
• Bills – done
• Dishes – done
• Chores – started
• Add ride for Sunday
• 5:00 Chat with AM

SBIRs

• 2:00-3:00-ish Chat with AD

AI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens Next

• It should also be noted that Taylor’s other blog post is called “Anything connected to the internet is going to get hacked to pieces,” which includes the lines “software engineers have spent the past 40 years writing vulnerable, dogshit software. LLMs are easily above the bar needed to break into said software.”

Tasks

• Chainring? Done
• 5:30 Spanish – cancelled, started a trial subscription to Languatalk

SBIRs

• 8:00 Meeting with CD – done
• 9:00 Standup – done
• Lots of quasi-proposal work

Tasks

• 2:00 Dance class
• Groceries
• Pinged Tim about the overgearing on the Bruni

SBIRs

• My screenshot wasn’t working after my Ubuntu upgrade. Turns out something changed in Weyland maybe? Anyway, I have to run in X Windows now. So odd
• Got the embedding working on the pdfs in the project with the additional text indexing

Some good news! Alberta voters reject plan for referendum to leave Canada

• With more than 1.5m votes counted, 76% supported remaining in Canada, while close to 24% backed beginning a process toward separation, according to unofficial results from Elections Alberta.

And opening October 23!

And to balance out the good news: The Army Wants to Sic AI Agents on Its Enemies. What Could Go Wrong?

• A PowerPoint presentation to interested vendors at a June 24 ARCYBER event provided a hypothetical example of this self-direction. Once ECHOTRIBBLE is uploaded to a laptop, the software on its own “identifies other potential targets” on the same network and then “produces a replica of itself tailored specifically for the iPad, Apple desktop, and Windows 11 PC.”

Tasks

• 8:30 Bike
• 5:30 Spanish
• Sent a supportive email to Eric H
• More GG prep
• Gave Ricardo my old laptop

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• More WG app dev. Get the embeddings for the pdfs and rework the DataFrames so they have the embedding, distance, and document position data. I want to pull the paragraphs that contain the sentence that matches

How one hacker used AI agents and a few thousand dollars to break into scores of sites

• In a report provided to Reuters ahead of publication on Monday
  , opens new tab, Fagerland said the hacker was one of several he discovered while scanning the web for inadvertently exposed instances of Cairn, an open-source AI problem-solving platform popular with hackers. Beginning around October 2, Fagerland said he found about two dozen instances of Cairn being used for malicious activity, which allowed him ​to quietly peer over the cybercriminals’ shoulders as they set their AI tools loose on the world.

Tasks

• Winterizing appointment – November walk-in
• 3:00 – Computer – done

SBIRs

• Get re-acquainted with the codebase
  • Add a non-chess, “default parser” project – started
• See what’s going on with MDA – all kinds of things?

Tasks

• Ride for tomorrow? Done
• Add expenses. Done all the Wise parts. Need to do the rest. Also, Splitwise has very annoying dark patterns
• Started downloading backups and ordered a few things.
• Dinner with TH and RE. Nice!
• Outline a post/article about how the basis for thinking is different for the more extreme people who are biased towards authoritarian or egalitarian beliefs. Set up with Pratto and Sidanius to show this is based in observed reality. Discuss how reasoning from a social dominance perspective is fundamentally different from inverse dominance, and how socially observable reality is distinct from objectively observable reality. Describe the benefits and drawbacks of each system. Make the caze that this is the basis for all politics. Cite Bohem (plus the story about how I found it) and Scott as well.

Vacation was nice!

Tasks

• Laundry – done
• Pay bills – done
• Groceries – done
• Dancing – done
• Started grey goo backups

SBIRs

• Just checked in. Had a weird conversation about writing with Eric H.

‘123456’ password linked to Denmark data breach affecting 8.8M people

• A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark’s Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company’s account protected by the password “123456.” The person told Danish news outlet Politiken they had no intention of selling or leaking the data. The newspaper reported that at least three company accounts, including an administrator account, used the same password.