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From my morning reading

 Just so we know how sincere Putin is about ending the war with Ukraine-- (from the Dispatch)

  • Hours before the White House meeting, Russia launched ballistic missiles and military drones into Ukraine in an overnight aerial attack that killed 14 civilians, including at least three children, and injured more than a dozen others. “Russians are deliberately killing people, particularly children,” Zelensky wrote on X, noting that Russia targets residential buildings and other civilian sites. The attacks killed seven people in the northeast Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, including an entire family with two children.

From the Atlantic, a brilliant essay on AI's delusional promise

Lately, I’ve been preoccupied with a different question: What if generative AI isn’t God in the machine or vaporware? What if it’s just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? Right now, the models don’t think—they predict and arrange tokens of language to provide plausible responses to queries. There is little compelling evidence that they will evolve without some kind of quantum research leap. What if they never stop hallucinating and never develop the kind of creative ingenuity that powers actual human intelligence?

..... Good enough has been keeping me up at night. Because good enough would likely mean that not enough people recognize what’s really being built—and what’s being sacrificed—until it’s too late. What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises? What if we spend so much time waiting and arguing that we fail to marshal our energy toward addressing the problems that exist here and now? That would be a tragedy—the product of a mass delusion. What scares me the most about this scenario is that it’s the only one that doesn’t sound all that insane.

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