The original data from Paul Krugman’s opinion piece today

SBIRs

• 11:00 Meeting with Matt. Hopefully Ron can upload, otherwise Matt can present
  • Really good discussion, with plot envelopes. Directed him to write a document for his future self
• Suspended weekly meetings until the Phase II extension
• More work on WE. It’s due in a week
• Some work with the USNA folks
• RAG meeting with NASA folks – AXIS – chatbot and smart documentation
• Send note to Doreen – done

GPT Agents

• 3:00 Meeting with Alden
• 7:00 LLM + graph datasets for hallucination reduction – meh. Rag with nicer DB

Call dentist!

Human languages with greater information density have higher communication speed but lower conversation breadth

• Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (for example, time, space, colour, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing about its relation to human communication. We first show that across a sample of ~1,000 languages, there is broad variation in how densely languages encode information into words. Second, we show that this language information density is associated with a denser configuration of semantic information. Finally, we trace the relationship between language information density and patterns of communication, showing that informationally denser languages tend towards faster communication but conceptually narrower conversations or expositions within which topics are discussed at greater depth. These results highlight an important source of variation across the human communicative channel, revealing that the structure of language shapes the nature and texture of human engagement, with consequences for human behavior across levels of society.

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• AI Ethics?
• Mostly work on WE paper.

Stitches out at 4:00!

SBIRs

• Working on WE paper
• 11:00 SimAccel review – nope
• 1:30 SimAccel outbrief – really confused. Marketing has a very specific idea of what they want to do and won’t lead. So instead we have a “rewrite this until we’re happy” perspective. Aaron pushed back, and I think that they will write the template first and we’ll fill in the pieces.
• 2:00 MDA – found a problem with the ship distribution and FOM generation. It’s all too tight around the launch point. This is good for testing on the Lambda box, but not what we need for the DTA example. I asked Matt to produce an “envelope” that shows where valid FOMs are calculated with respect to a single trajectory. He should be done tomorrow. And, of course everything either stops or pauses on Thursday.

“I’m not that interested in like the Killer Robots walking down the street direction of things going wrong I much more interested in the like very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention um… things just go horribly wrong” – Sam Altman, at the World Government Summit Feb 13, 2024

Welp, today I am 0100 0000 (binary) years old. On the other hand I just hit 40 in hex!

My brain on Ozempic

• They’re not really “weight-loss drugs” at all. They’re something far more powerful and surreal: injectable willpower.

SBIRs

• Sent a note to T and Aaron stating I plan to retire in a year
• 9:00 Standup
• Made good progress on the W.E. paper yesterday but also got pulled into the Tradewinds thing and a capabilities brief prep
• Need to send my info over to NIST
• More W.E.
• 5:15 Book club. Finish chapter 1!

GPT Agents

• 2:00 Meeting – cancelled due to deadlines

SBIRs

• No meetings!
• Going to spend most of the day working on the WE paper. My angle is that AI will begin to occupy the places that animals did in the past. AI of different capacity will be employed to solve different scales of problems. Like animals, the AI will mostly do what it’s told, but it will inevitably misbehave. We had entire careers where people managed animals as tools (Teamsters!), and we will need something like that going forward (AI Whisperers and Prompt Engineering!) . There will be people who have a knack for these things, and there will be others that don’t but need the best performance out of the system that they can get. The background section will first set up the analogy that compares modern AI to animals, and then discusses how humans have managed these systems in the past, with Mahouts being the most extreme example. Which will get us to the next section, since WEs were the most sophisticated LAWS of ancient times.
• Really good source material on AI Whisperers from Forbes: Rise Of The AI Whisperers

Looks like a wet day:

Wrote up my philosophy on leaps of faith for a friend

Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models

• This work describes a chronological (2000–2019) analysis of sentiment and emotion in 23 million headlines from 47 news media outlets popular in the United States. We use Transformer language models fine-tuned for detection of sentiment (positive, negative) and Ekman’s six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) plus neutral to automatically label the headlines. Results show an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000. Headlines from right-leaning news media have been, on average, consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets over the entire studied time period. The chronological analysis of headlines emotionality shows a growing proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness and a decrease in the prevalence of emotionally neutral headlines across the studied outlets over the 2000–2019 interval. The prevalence of headlines denoting anger appears to be higher, on average, in right-leaning news outlets than in left-leaning news media.

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup
• 1:00 MDA
• Otherwise, work on the crappy first draft for the intro and background sections of the W.E. paper. Wrote 500 words and stalled out
• Set up NIST talk, I think
• Got my UMBC profile information sent out

Adding the hill climbing to the terrain app. I’ll see if it works later

Gonna risk pushing doctors orders and go for an easy ride at lunch

SBIRs

• IUI stuff. Permission, register, reserve hotel – done
• Continue W.E. Some progress. Had a good chat with Aaron about rescoping and changing the framing to account for everything that’s happened in the past year in AI
• 2:00 MDA meeting. Working on getting all the new data sent over by Feb 22
• Discovered The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology
  • JDMS: The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology is a quarterly refereed archival journal devoted to advancing the practice, science, and art of modeling and simulation as it relates to the military and defense. The primary focus of the journal is to document, in a rigorous manner, technical lessons derived from practical experience. The journal also publishes work related to the advancement of defense systems modeling and simulation technology, methodology, and theory. The journal covers all areas of the military / defense mission, maintaining a focus on the practical side of systems simulation versus pure theoretical applications.

Starting a 2D fractal terrain cross-section tool to describe life choices for a friend:

Forgot to take notes from yesterday

SBIRs

• Sent the final final report to Lauren
• 9:00 standup. Lots of work on JSC, which continued through the day
• Prep for the USNA meeting, which went better than last time. Hopefully they are on the right track
• Book club! We decided to do Sciences of the Artificial. We’ll discuss the first chapter next week. Probably worth discussing who Herbert Simon was, too.
• The Killer Apps paper was accepted!

GPT Agents

• Looking into the call for an article on antisemitism for APA’s The psychology of antisemitism, which led to the NSF “dear colleague” letter from the NSF on The Social and Behavioral Science of Bias, Prejudice and Discrimination (BPD), which led to the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. I’d like to use this as an opportunity to build belief space maps.

The much feared “third day of increasing discomfort” has not hit yet. Fingers crossed. There is a lot of swelling. I sorta look like I’ve been punched.

SBIRs

• Had an interesting chat with Aaron about using prompt swarms as a ‘social simulator.’ There may be something there as a way to test out manipulation strategies and mitigations
• More on the W.E. paper. Finished the specified changes. Now I need to start on the bug stuff. Loaded up the 3000.9 and the RAI strategy docs into ContextExplorer. Need to play around with using that for the intro.
• Verify that we received no feedback from the customer for the preliminary final, then change the cover so that it’s just ‘Final Report.’ Sent
• Some chatter about LM and SA/DTA

GPT Agents

• Meeting with Alden

Feeling much better today, though the instructions from the doctor say that I’ll be getting more achy for the next two days or so.

SBIRs

• Doing status by email, since Matt and I have both had surgery
• The no-cost extension is moving, I’m curious if it will happen.
• If no response from the government by COB today, the preliminary report becomes the final. Need to change the cover page and re-submit
• The paper got released from purgatory on ArXiv! Killer Apps: Low-Speed, Large-Scale AI Weapons
• Submitted the MORS abstract!
• Back to work on W.E.

GPT Agents

• Need to close the loop on the NIST talk
• Need to get info to the folks at UMBC
  • Biography (including research area/interests)
  • Headshot
  • LinkedIn, Personal website (if you have one)

Dental surgery today, so probably no posting. I do need to submit the abstract, but there is plenty of time

Bursts of contemporaneous publication among high- and low-credibility online information providers

• In studies of misinformation, the distinction between high- and low-credibility publishers is fundamental. However, there is much that we do not know about the relationship between the subject matter and timing of content produced by the two types of publishers. By analyzing the content of several million unique articles published over 28 months, we show that high- and low-credibility publishers operate in distinct news ecosystems. Bursts of news coverage generated by the two types of publishers tend to cover different subject matter at different times, even though fluctuations in their overall news production tend to be highly correlated. Regardless of the mechanism, temporally convergent coverage among low-credibility publishers has troubling implications for American news consumers.

Russia amplifies calls for civil war in the U.S.

• This follows a familiar pattern in which Russia disseminates propaganda and disinformation demonizing immigrants and portraying them as disease-ridden or as dangerous criminals, then weaponizes the backlash in order to promote far-right, pro-Russia candidates and parties with harsh anti-immigrant agendas as the “solution” to a problem they themselves helped to create.

Was going to do the Groundhog Day club ride but it is just too cold and wet. Once a week for that kind of thing is enough. Still, early spring! Going to enjoy this until the Eastern Shore floods and Western Maryland is on fire.

Chores

• Clean house – done!
• Call dentist to see if there is any prep for Monday – done!
• Follow up on referral – oops
• Shopping – done!
• Clean & lube bike – nope, maybe tomorrow
• 8:00 Gershwin

SBIRs

• Work a bit on the W.E. paper – nope
• Slides for Monday! Stories are already in – done!

No ride for tomorrow yet! Put something together just in case – looks like I’m leading it