Author name: DJ Henderson

WHO starts cutting costs as US withdrawal date set for January 2026

global health, health, outbreaks, public health, Tedros, UN, us, WHO, withdrawal / DJ Henderson / January 24, 2025

“Just stupid”

On January 23, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sent a memo to staff announcing the cost-cutting measures. Reuters obtained a copy of the memo.

“This announcement has made our financial situation more acute,” Tedros wrote, referring to the US withdrawal plans. WHO’s budget mainly comes from dues and voluntary contributions from member states. The dues are a percentage of each member state’s gross domestic product, and the percentage is set by the UN General Assembly. US contributions account for about 18 percent of WHO’s overall funding, and its two-year 2024-2025 budget was $6.8 billion, according to Reuters.

To prepare for the budget cut, WHO is halting recruitment, significantly curtailing travel expenditures, making all meetings virtual, limiting IT equipment updates, and suspending office refurbishment.

“This set of measures is not comprehensive, and more will be announced in due course,” Tedros wrote, adding that the agency would do everything it could to protect and support staff.

The country’s pending withdrawal has been heavily criticized by global health leaders and US experts, who say it will make the world less safe and weaken America. In a CBS/KFF Health News report examining the global health implications of the US withdrawal, Kenneth Bernard, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who served as a top biodefense official during the George W. Bush administration, did not mince words:

“It’s just stupid,” Bernard said. “Withdrawing from the WHO leaves a gap in global health leadership that will be filled by China,” he said, “which is clearly not in America’s best interests.”

WHO starts cutting costs as US withdrawal date set for January 2026 Read More »

Anthropic builds RAG directly into Claude models with new Citations API

AI, AI Citations, AI confabulation, AI hallucination, Anthropic Claude, Citations, Claude, large language models, machine learning, openai / DJ Henderson / January 24, 2025

Willison notes that while citing sources helps verify accuracy, building a system that does it well “can be quite tricky,” but Citations appears to be a step in the right direction by building RAG capability directly into the model.

Apparently, that capability is not a new thing. Anthropic’s Alex Albert wrote on X, “Under the hood, Claude is trained to cite sources. With Citations, we are exposing this ability to devs. To use Citations, users can pass a new “citations: enabled:true” parameter on any document type they send through the API.”

Early adopter reports promising results

The company released Citations for Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku models through both the Anthropic API and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, but it’s apparently already getting some use in the field.

Anthropic says that Thomson Reuters, which uses Claude to power its CoCounsel legal AI reference platform, is looking forward to using Citations in a way that helps “minimize hallucination risk but also strengthens trust in AI-generated content.”

Additionally, financial technology company Endex told Anthropic that Citations reduced their source confabulations from 10 percent to zero while increasing references per response by 20 percent, according to CEO Tarun Amasa.

Despite these claims, relying on any LLM to accurately relay reference information is still a risk until the technology is more deeply studied and proven in the field.

Anthropic will charge users its standard token-based pricing, though quoted text in responses won’t count toward output token costs. Sourcing a 100-page document as a reference would cost approximately $0.30 with Claude 3.5 Sonnet or $0.08 with Claude 3.5 Haiku, according to Anthropic’s standard API pricing.

Anthropic builds RAG directly into Claude models with new Citations API Read More »

For real, we may be taking blood pressure readings all wrong

blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, death, health, heart failure, lying down, mortality, sitting, stroke / DJ Henderson / January 24, 2025

For people who had high blood pressure readings only when sitting (normal readings while lying down), there was no statistically significant difference in risk of coronary heart disease, heart failure, or stroke compared to people with normal blood pressure. The only statistically significant differences were a 41 percent higher risk of fatal coronary heart disease (compared to the 78 percent seen in those with high readings lying down) and an 11 percent higher risk of all-cause mortality.

(In this study, high blood pressure readings were defined for both positions as those with systolic readings (the top number) of 130 mm Hg or greater or diastolic readings (the bottom number) of 80 mm Hg or greater.)

The people with the highest risks across the board were those who had high blood pressure readings while both sitting and lying down.

“These findings suggest that measuring supine [lying down] BP may be useful for identifying elevated BP and latent CVD risk,” the researchers conclude.

Strengths and hypotheses

For now, the findings should be considered preliminary. Such an analysis and finding should be repeated with a different group of people to confirm the link. And as to the bigger question of whether using medication to lower supine blood pressure (rather than seated blood pressure) is more effective at reducing risk, it’s likely that clinical trials will be necessary.

Still, the analysis had some notable strengths that make the findings attention-worthy. The study’s size and design are robust. Researchers tapped into data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, a study established in 1987 with middle-aged people living in one of four US communities (Forsyth County, North Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Washington County, Maryland).

For real, we may be taking blood pressure readings all wrong Read More »

Stargate AI-1

Stargate / DJ Henderson / January 24, 2025

There was a comedy routine a few years ago. I believe it was by Hannah Gadsby. She brought up a painting, and looked at some details. The details weren’t important in and of themselves. If an AI had randomly put them there, we wouldn’t care.

Except an AI didn’t put them there. And they weren’t there at random.

A human put them there. On purpose. Or, as she put it:

THAT was a DECISION.

This is the correct way to view decisions around a $500 billion AI infrastructure project, announced right after Trump takes office, having it be primarily funded by SoftBank, with all the compute intended to be used by OpenAI, and calling it Stargate.

OpenAI: Announcing The Stargate Project

The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately.

Note that ‘intends to invest’ does not mean ‘has the money to invest’ or ‘definitely will invest.’ Intends is not a strong word. The future is unknown and indeed do many things come to pass.

This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.

This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.

One of these things is not like the others. Secure American leadership in AI, generate massive economic benefit for the entire world, provide strategic capability to allies, sure, fine, makes sense, support reindustrialization is a weird flex but kinda, yeah.

And then… jobs? American… jobs? Um, Senator Blumenthal, that is not what I meant.

Pradyumna:

> will develop superintelligence

> create thousands of jobs

????

Samuel Hammond: “We’re going to spend >10x the budget of the Manhattan Project building digital brains that can do anything human brains can do but better and oh, by the way, create over 100,000 good paying American jobs!”

There’s at least some cognitive dissonance here.

Arthur B: The project will probably most likely lead to mass unemployment but in the meantime, there’ll be great American jobs.

If you listen to Altman’s announcement, he too highlights these ‘hundreds of thousands of jobs.’ It’s so absurd. Remember when Altman tried to correct this error?

The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.

Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners.

If you want to spend way too much money on a technology project, and give the people investing the money a remarkably small share of the enterprise, you definitely want to be giving Masayoshi Sun and Softbank a call.

“Sam Altman, you are not crazy enough. You need to think bigger.”

The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.

This proves there is real activity, also it is a tell that some of this is not new.

As part of Stargate, Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and NVIDIA going back to 2016 and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.

This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services.

Increase consumption of compute is different from Azure as sole compute provider. It seems OpenAI expects plenty of compute needs to go around.

All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI—and in particular AGI—for the benefit of all of humanity. We believe that this new step is critical on the path, and will enable creative people to figure out how to use AI to elevate humanity.

Can’t stop, won’t stop, I suppose. ‘Enable creative people to elevate humanity’ continues to miss the point of the whole enterprise, but not as much as talking ‘jobs.’

Certainly $500 billion for this project sounds like a lot. It’s a lot, right?

Microsoft is investing $80 billion a year in Azure, which is $400 billion over 5 years, and I’d bet that their investment goes up over time and they end up spending over $500 billion during that five year window.

Haydn Belfield: Stargate is a remarkable step.

But, to put it into context, Microsoft will spend $80 billion on data centers this year, over half in the U.S.

Stargate’s $100 billion this year is more, but a comparable figure.

Rob S.: This is kind of misleading. Microsoft’s spend is also enormous and wildly out of the ordinary. Not normal at all.

Haydn Belfield: Definitely true, we’re living through a historic infrastructure build out like the railways, interstate highways or phone network

What I want to push back on a bit is that this is *the onlyeffort, that this is the manhattan/Apollo project

The number $500 billion is distributed throughout many sites and physical projects. If it does indeed happen, and it is counterfactual spending, then it’s a lot. But it’s not a sea change, and it’s not obvious that the actual spending should be surprising. Investments on this scale were already very much projected and already happening.

It’s also not that much when compared to the compute needs anticipated for the scaling of top end training runs, which very much continue to be a thing.

Yusuf Mahmood: Stargate shouldn’t have been that surprising!

It’s a $500 Bn project that is set to complete by 2029.

That’s totally consistent with estimates from @EpochAIResearch’s report last year on how scaling could continue through 2030.

$500 billion is a lot is to the extent all of this is dedicated specifically and exclusively to OpenAI, as opposed to Microsoft’s $80 billion which is for everyone. But it’s not a lot compared to the anticipated future needs of a frontier lab.

One thing to think about is that OpenAI recently raised money at a valuation of approximately $170 billion, presumably somewhat higher now with o3 and agents, but also potentially lower because of DeepSeek. Now we are talking about making investments dedicated to OpenAI of $500 billion.

There is no theoretical incompatibility. Perhaps OpenAI is mining for gold and will barely recoup its investment, while Stargate is selling pickaxes and will rake it in.

It does still seem rather odd to presume that is how the profits will be distributed.

The reason OpenAI is so unprofitable today is that they are spending a ton on increasing capabilities, and not serving enough inference to make it up on their unit economics, and also not yet using their AI to make money in other ways.

And yes, the equilibrium could end up being that compute providers have margins and model providers mostly don’t have margins. But OpenAI, if it succeeds, should massively benefit from economies of scale here, and its economics should improve. Thus, if you take Stargate seriously, it is hard to imagine OpenAI being worth only a fraction of $500 billion.

There is a solution to this puzzle. When we say OpenAI is worth $170 billion, we are not talking about all of OpenAI. We are talking about the part that takes outside investment. All the dramatic upside potential? That is for now owned by the non-profit, and not (or at least not fully) part of the valuation.

And that is the part that has the vast majority of the expected net present value of future cash flows of OpenAI. So OpenAI the entire enterprise can be worth quite a lot, and yet ‘OpenAI’ the corporate entity you can invest in is only worth $170 billion.

This should put into perspective that the move to a for-profit entity truly is in the running for the largest theft in the history of the world.

Didn’t they have an exclusive partnership?

Smoke-Away: OpenAI and Microsoft are finished. There were signs.

Microsoft was not moving quickly enough to scale Azure. Now they are simply another compute provider for the time being.

Sam Altman: Absolutely not! This is a very important and significant partnership, for a long time to come.

We just need moar compute.

Eliezer Yudkowsky (Quoting Smoke-Away): It is a pattern, with Altman. If Altman realizes half his dreams, in a few years we will be hearing about how Altman has dismissed the U.S. government as no longer useful to him. (If Altman realizes all his dreams, you will be dead.)

Roon: Not even close to being true.

Microsoft is one of the providers here. Reports are that the Microsoft partnership has now been renegotiated, to allow OpenAI to also seek other providers, since Altman needs moar compute. Hence Stargate. Microsoft will retain right of first refusal (ROFR), which seems like the right deal to make here. The question is, how much of the non-profit’s equity did Altman effectively promise in order to get free from under the old deal?

Remember that time Altman promised 20% of compute would go to superalignment, rather than blowing up a sun?

Harlan Stewart: Jul 2023: OpenAI promises to dedicate 20% of compute to safety research

May 2024: Fortune reports they never did that

Jul 2024: After 5 senators write to him to ask if OpenAI will, @sama says yes

It’s Jan 2025. Will OpenAI set aside 20% of this new compute to safety, finally?

Connor Axiotes: @tszzl (Roon), can you push for a significant part of this to be spent on control and alignment and safety policy work?

Roon: I’ll do my part. I’m actually on the alignment team at openai 🙂

So that’s a no, then.

I do expect Roon to push for more compute. I don’t expect to get anything like 20%.

Elon Musk (replying to the announcement): They don’t actually have the money.

Sam Altman: I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time.

Elon Musk (continuing from OP): SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I have that on good authority.

Sam Altman: Wrong, as you surely know.

Want to come visit the first site already under way?

This is great for the country. I realize what is great for the country is not always what is optimal for your companies, but in your new role, I hope you will mostly put the United States first.

Satya Nadella (CEO Microsoft, on CNBC, when asked about whether Stargate has the money, watch the clip at the link his delivery is perfect): All I know is, I’m good for my $80 billion.

If you take the companies collectively, they absolutely have the money, or at least the ability to get the money. This is Microsoft and Nvidia. I have no doubt that Microsoft is, as its Nadella affirmed, ‘good for its $80 billion.’

That doesn’t mean SoftBank has the money, and SoftBank explicitly is tasked with providing the funding for Stargate.

Nor does the first site in Texas prove anything either way on this.

Remember the wording on the announcement: “which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years.”

That does not sound like someone who has the money.

That sounds like someone who intends to raise the money. And I presume SoftBank has every expectation of being able to do so, with the aid of this announcement. And of working out the structure. And the financing.

Mario Nawfal: Sam Altman’s grand plan to build “Stargate,” a $500 billion AI infrastructure exclusively for OpenAI, is already falling apart before it even starts.

There’s no secured funding, no government support, no detailed plan, and, according to insiders, not even a clear structure.

One source bluntly admitted:

“They haven’t figured out the structure, they haven’t figured out the financing, they don’t have the money committed.”

Altman’s pitch? SoftBank and OpenAI will toss in $15 billion each and then just… hope the rest magically appears from investors and debt.

For someone obsessed with making AI smarter than humans, maybe he should try getting the basics right first – like not creating something that could destroy all of humanity… Just saying.

But that’s why you say ‘intend to invest’ rather than ‘will invest.’

Things between Musk and Altman did not stop there, as we all took this opportunity to break open the International Popcorn Reserve.

Elon Musk: Altman literally testified to Congress that he wouldn’t get OpenAI compensation and now he wants $10 billion! What a liar.

Musk’s not exactly wrong about that. He also said and retweeted other… less dignified things.

It was not a good look for either party. Elon Musk is, well, being Elon Musk. Altman is trying to throw in performative ‘look at me taking the high road’ statements that should fool no one, not only the one above but also:

Sam Altman: just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself…

Teortaxes (quoting Altman saying he respects Elon’s accomplishments above): I find both men depicted here unpleasant and engaging in near-psychopathic behavior, and I also think poorly of those who imagine Sam is trying to “be the bigger man”.

He’s a scary manipulative snake. “Well damn, fyou too Elon, we have it” would be more dignified.

There’s a subtle art to doing this sort of thing well. The Japanese especially are very good at it. All of this is, perhaps, the exact opposite of that.

Sam Altman: big. beautiful. buildings. stargate site 1, texas, january 2025.

Altman, you made it weird. Also guache. Let’s all do better.

Trump world is not, as you would expect, thrilled with what Musk has been up to, with Trump saying he is ‘furious,’ saying he ‘got over his skis.’ My guess is that Trump ‘gets it’ at heart, because he knows what it’s like to hate and never let something go, and that this won’t be that big a deal for Musk’s long term position, but there is high variance. I could easily be wrong about that. If I was Musk I would not have gone with this strategy, but that statement is almost always true and why I’m not Musk.

This particular Rule of Acquisition is somewhat imprecise. It’s not always true.

But Donald Trump? Yeah. It definitely never hurts to suck up to that particular boss.

Sam Altman (January 22, 2025): watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the npc trap).

i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!

Altman does admit this is a rather big change. Anyone remember when Altman said “More terrifying than Trump intentionally lying all the time is the possibility that he actually believes it all” or when he congratulated Reid Hoffman for helping keep Trump out of power? Or “Back to work tomorrow on a new project to stop Trump?” He was rather serious about wanting to stop Trump.

You can guess what I think he saw while watching Trump to make Altman change his mind.

So they announced this $500 billion deal, or at least a $100 billion deal with intent to turn it into $500 billion, right after Trump’s inauguration, with construction already underway, with a press conference on the White House lawn.

And the funds are all private. Which is great, but all this together also raises the obvious question: Does Trump actually have anything to do with this?

Matthew Yglesias: They couldn’t have done it without Trump, but also it was already under construction.

Daniel Eth: Okay, it’s not *Trump’sAI plan. He announced it, but he neither developed nor is funding it. It’s a private initiative from OpenAI, Softbank, Oracle, and a few others.

Jamie Bernardi: Important underscussed point on the OpenAI $100bn deal: money is not coming from the USG.

Trump is announcing a private deal, whilst promising to make “emergency declarations” to allow Stargate to generate its own electricity (h/t @nytimes).

Musk says 100bn not yet raised.

Peter Wildeford: Once upon a time words had meaning.

Jake Perry: I’m still not clear why this was announced at the White House at all.

Peter Wildeford: Trump has a noted history of announcing infrastructure projects that were already in progress – he did this a lot in his first term.

Jacques: At least we’ll all be paperclipped with a USA flag engraved on it.

Trump says that it is all about him, of course:

Donald Trump: This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president.

…

The president said Stargate would create 100,000 jobs “almost immediately” and keep “the future of technology” in America.

I presume that in addition to completely missing the point, this particular jobs claim is, technically speaking, not true. But numbers don’t have to be real in politics. And of course, if this is going to create those jobs ‘almost immediately’ it had to have been in the works for a long time.

Shakeel: I can’t get over the brazen, brazen lie from Altman here, saying “We couldn’t do this without you, Mr President”.

You were already doing it! Construction started ages ago!

Just a deeply untrustworthy man — you can’t take anything he says at face value.

Dylan Matthews: Everything that has happened since the board fired him has 100% vindicated their view of him as deeply dishonest and unreliable, and I feel like the popular understanding of that incident hasn’t updated from “this board sure is silly!”

[Chubby: Sam Altman: hype on twitter is out of control. Everyone, chill down.

Also Sam Altman: anyways, let’s invest half a trillion to build a digital god and cure cancer one and for all. Oh, and my investors just said that AGI comes very, very soon and ASI will solve any problem mankind faces.

But everyone, calm down 100x]

I agree with Dylan Matthews that the board’s assessment of Altman as deeply dishonest and unreliable has very much been vindicated, and Altman’s actions here only confirm that once again. But that doesn’t mean that Trump has nothing to do with the fact that this project is going forward, with this size.

So how much does this project depend on Trump being president instead of Harris?

I think the answer is actually a substantial amount.

In order to build AI infrastructure in America, you need three things.

You need demand. Check.
You need money. Check, or at least check in the mail.
You need permission to actually build it. Previously no check. Now, maybe check?

Masayoshi Sun: Mr. President, last month I came to celebrate your winning and promised $100B. And you told me go for $200B. Now I came back with $500B. This is because as you say, this is the beginning of the Golden Age. We wouldn’t have decided this unless you won.

Sam Altman: The thing I really deeply agree with the president on is, it is wild how difficult it has become to build things in the United States. Power plants, data centres, any of that kind of stuff.

Does Sun have many good reasons to pretend that this is all because of Trump? Yes, absolutely. He would find ways to praise the new boss either way. But I do think that Trump mattered here, even if you don’t think that there is anything corrupt involved in all this.

Look at Trump’s executive orders, already signed, about electrical power plants and transmission lines being exempt from NEPA, and otherwise being allowed to go forwards. They can expect more similar support in the future, if they run into roadblocks, and fewer other forms of regulatory trouble and everything bagel requirements across the board.

Also, I totally believe that Sun came to Trump and promised $100 billion, and Trump said go for $200 billion, and Sun now is at $500 billion, and I think that plausibly created a lot of subsequent investment. It may sound stupid, but that’s Grade-A handling of Masayoshi Sun, and exactly within Trump’s wheelhouse. Tell the man who thinks big he’s not thinking big enough. Just keep him ramping up. Don’t settle for a big win when you can go for an even bigger win. You have to hand it to him.

It is so absurd that these people, with a straight face, decided to call this Stargate.

They wanted to call it the Enterprise, but their lawyers wouldn’t let them.

Was SkyNet still under copyright?

Agus: Ah, yes. Of course we’re naming this project after the fictitious portal through which several hostile alien civilizations attempted to invade and destroy Earth.

I just hope we get the same amount of completely unrealistic plot armor that protected Stargate Command in S.G.1.

Roon: the Stargate. blasting a hole into the Platonic realm to summon angels. First contact with alien civilizations.

Canonically, the Stargates are sometimes used by dangerous entities to harm us, but once humanity deals with that, they end up being quite useful.

Zvi Mowshowitz: Guy who reads up on the canonical history of Stargate and thinks, “Oh, all’s well that ends well. Let’s try that plan.”

Roon: 🤣

Is this where I give you 10,000 words on the history of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis and all the different ways Earth and often also everyone else would have been enslaved or wiped out if it wasn’t for narrative causality and plot armor, and what would have been reasonable things to do in that situation?

No, and I am sad about that, despite yes having watched all combined 15 seasons, because alas we do not currently have that kind of time. Maybe later I’ll be able to spend a day doing that, it sounds like fun.

But in brief about that Stargate plan. Was it a good plan? What were the odds?

As is pointed out in the thread (minor spoilers for the end of season 1), the show actually answers this question, as there is crossover between different Everett branches, and we learn that even relatively early on – before most of the different things that almost kill us have a chance to almost kill us – that most branches have already lost. Which was one of the things that I really liked about the show, that it realized this. The thread also includes discussions of things like ‘not only did we not put a nuclear bomb by the Stargate and use a secondary gate to disguise our location, we wore Earth’s gate code on our fing uniforms.’

To be fair, there is a counterargument, which is that (again, minor spoilers) humanity was facing various ticking clocks. There was one in particular that was ticking in ways Earth did not cause, and then there were others that were set in motion rapidly once we had a Stargate program, and in general we were on borrowed time. So given what was happening we had little choice but to go out into the galaxy and try to develop superior technology and find various solutions before time ran out on us, and it would have been reasonable to expect we were facing a ticking clock in various ways given what Earth knew at the time.

There’s also the previous real life Project Stargate, a CIA-DIA investigation of the potential for psychic phenomena. That’s… not better.

There are also other ways to not be thrilled by all this.

Justin Amash: The Stargate Project sounds like the stuff of dystopian nightmares—a U.S. government-announced partnership of megacorporations “to protect the national security of America and its allies” and harness AGI “for the benefit of all of humanity.” Let’s maybe take a beat here.

Taking a beat sounds like a good idea.

What does Trump actually think AI can do?

Samuel Hammond: Trump seems under the impression that ASI is just a way to cure diseases and not an ultraintelligent digital lifeform with autonomy and self-awareness. Sam’s hesitation before answering speaks volumes.

That’s not how I view the clip at the link. Trump is selling the project. It makes sense to highlight medical advances, which are a very real and valuable upside. It certainly makes a lot more sense than highlighting job creation.

Altman I don’t see hesitating, I see him trying to be precise while also going with the answer, and I don’t like his previous emphasis on jobs (again, no doubt, following Trump’s and his political advisor’s lead) but on the medical question I think he does well and it’s not obvious what a better answer would have been.

The hilarious part of this is the right wing faction that says ‘you want to use this to make mRNA vaccines, wtf I hate AI now’ and trying to figure out what to do with people whose worldviews are that hopelessly inverted.

That moment when you say ‘look at how this could potentially cure cancer’ and your hardcore supporters say ‘And That’s Terrible.’

And also when you somehow think ‘Not Again!’

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Welp, looks like Trump sure is getting backlash to the Stargate announcement from many MAGAers who are outraged that AGIs might develop mRNA vaccines and my fucking god it would be useless to evacuate to Mars but I sure see why Elon wants to

To people suggesting that I ought to suck up to that crowd: On my model of them, they’d rather hear me say “Fyou lunatics, now let’s go vote together I guess” than have me pretend to suck up to them.

Like, on my model, that crowd is deadly tired of all the BULLSHIT and we in fact have that much in common and I bet I can get further by not trying to feed them any BULLSHIT.

There is a deep sense in which it is more respectful to someone as a human being to say, “I disagree with your fing lunacy. Allies?” then to smarm over to them and pretend to agree with them. And I think they know that.

RPotluck: The MAGAsphere doesn’t love you and it doesn’t hate you, but you’re made of arguments the MAGAsphere can use to build the wall.

There’s a certain kind of bullshit that these folks and many other folks are deeply tired of hearing. This is one of those places where I very much agree that it does hurt to suck up to the boss, both because the boss will see through it and because the whole strategy involves not doing things like that, and also have you seen or heard the boss.

My prediction and hope is that we will continue to see those worried about AI killing everyone continue to not embrace these kinds of crazy arguments of convenience. That doesn’t mean not playing politics at all or being some sort of suicidal purist. It does mean we care about whether our arguments are true, rather than treating them as soldiers for a cause.

Whereas we have learned many times, most recently with the fight over SB 1047 and then the latest round of jingoism, that many (#NotAllUnworried!) of those who want to make sure others do not worry about AI killing everyone, or at least want to ensure that creating things smarter than humans faces less regulatory barriers than a barber shop, care very little whether the arguments made on their behalf, by themselves or by others, are true or correspond to physical reality. They Just Didn’t Care.

The flip side is the media, which is, shall we say, not situationally aware.

Spencer Schiff: The AGI Manhattan Project announcement was followed by half an hour of Q&A. Only one reporter asked a question about it. WHAT THE FUCK! This is insane. The mainstream media is completely failing to convey the gravity of what’s happening to the general public.

As noted elsewhere I don’t think this merits ‘Manhattan Project’ for various reasons but yes, it is kind of weird to announce a $500 billion investment in artificial general intelligence and then have only one question about it in a 30 minute Q&A.

I’m not saying that primarily from an existential risk perspective – this is far more basic even than that. I’m saying, maybe this is a big deal that all this is happening, maybe ask some questions about it?

Remember when Altman was talking about how we have to build AGI now because he was worried about a compute overhang? Yes, well.

Between the $500 billion of Stargate, the full-on jingoistic rhetoric from all sides including Anthropic, and the forcing function of DeepSeek with v3 and r1, it is easy to see how one could despair over our prospects for survival.

Unless something changes, we are about to create smarter than human intelligence, entities more capable and competitive than we are across all cognitive domains, and we are going to do so as rapidly as we can and then put them in charge of everything, with essentially zero margin to ensure that this goes well despite it obviously by default getting everyone killed.

Even if we are so fortunate that the technical and other barriers in front of us are highly solvable, that is exactly how we get everyone killed anyway.

Holly Elmore: I am so, so sad today. Some days the weight of it all just hits me. I want to live my life with my boyfriend. I want us to have kids. I want love and a full life for everyone. Some days the possibility that that will all be taken away is so palpable, and grief is heavy.

I’m surprised how rarely I feel this way, given what I do. I don’t think it’s bad to feel it all sometimes. Puts you in touch with what you’re fighting for.

I work hard to find the joy and the gallows humor in it all, to fight the good fight, to say the odds are against us and the situation is grim, sounds like fun. One must imagine Buffy at the prom, and maintain Scooby Gang Mindset. Also necessary is the gamer mindset, which says you play to win the game, and in many ways it’s easiest to play your best game with your back against the wall.

And in a technical sense, I have hope that the solutions exist, and that there are ways to at least give ourselves a fighting chance.

But yeah, weeks like this do not make it easy to keep up hope.

Harlan Stewart: If the new $500b AI infrastructure thing ever faces a major scandal, we’ll unfortunately be forced to call it Stargategate

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Way more game makers are working on PC titles than ever, survey says

game development, gaming, PC Gaming, valve / DJ Henderson / January 23, 2025

Four out of five game developers are currently working on a project for the PC, a sizable increase from 66 percent of developers a year ago. That’s according to Informa’s latest State of the Game Industry survey, which partnered with Omdia to ask over 3,000 game industry professionals about their work in advance of March’s Game Developers Conference.

The 80 percent of developers working on PC projects in this year’s survey is by far the highest mark for any platform dating back to at least 2018, when 60 percent of surveyed developers were working on a PC game. In the years since, the ratio of game developers working on the PC has hovered between 56 and 66 percent before this year’s unexpected jump. The number of game developers saying they were interested in the PC as a platform also increased substantially, from 62 percent last year to 74 percent this year.

While the PC has long been the most popular platform in this survey, the sudden jump in the last year was rather large. Credit: Kyle Orland / Informa

The PC has long been the most popular platform for developers to work on in the annual State of the Game Industry survey, easily outpacing consoles and mobile platforms that generally see active work from anywhere between 12 to 36 percent of developer respondents, depending on the year. In its report, Informa notes this surge as a “passion for PC development explod[ing]” among developers, and mentions that while “PC has consistently been the platform of choice… this year saw its dominance increase even more.”

The increasing popularity of PC gaming among developers is also reflected in the number of individual game releases on Steam, which topped out at a record of 18,974 individual titles for 2024, according to SteamDB. That record number was up over 32 percent from 2023, which was up from just under 16 percent from 2022 (though many Steam games each year were “Limited Games” that failed to meet Valve’s minimum engagement metrics for Badges and Trading Cards).

The number of annual Steam releases also points to increasing interest in the platform. Credit: SteamDB

The Steam Deck effect?

While it’s hard to pinpoint a single reason for the sudden surge in the popularity of PC game development, Informa speculates that it’s “connected to the rising popularity of Valve’s Steam Deck.” While Valve has only officially acknowledged “multiple millions” in sales for the portable hardware, GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless estimated that between 3 million and 4 million Steam Deck units had been sold by October 2023, up significantly from reports of 1 million Deck shipments in October 2022.

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All federal agencies ordered to terminate remote work—ideally within 30 days

Donald Trump, Policy, remote work, return-to-office, telework / DJ Henderson / January 23, 2025

Exceptions may be granted

Ezell’s memo expanded criticism of the Biden administration’s approach to remote work, suggesting that it enabled federal unions’ alleged attempts “to abuse the collective-bargaining process to guarantee full-time telework into the indefinite future and forestall any requirement to return to the office.”

Suspecting that the “rampant use of telework is likely underreported,” the committee’s report concluded that “even the reported levels are excessive, there is little evidence that it is enhancing productivity or addressing recruitment and retention gaps, and there is evidence it is harming agency missions and citizen-facing services.”

To overcome these supposed deficiencies, the committee recommended that remote work policies be linked to performance metrics, rather than “employee preferences or union demands.” Any remote work that is granted should be tracked through automated systems, the report further prescribed, and any attempts for federal agencies to compete for talent using remote work perks should not be tolerated.

This will allow the government to alleviate the “national embarrassment” of empty offices and “dispose of unneeded property and terminate unnecessary leases,” the report said.

While some employees may be eligible for RTO exemptions—either to accommodate a disability or qualifying medical condition, or for some “other compelling reason certified by the agency head and the employee’s supervisor”—Ezell’s memo insisted that a general return-to-office push was necessary. He said that Trump’s presidential memo reflected “a simple reality” that “the only way to get employees back to the office is to adopt a centralized policy requiring return-to-work for all agencies across the federal government.”

“Seeking to cajole individual agencies to try to get employees to return to the worksite has not succeeded,” Ezell said.

Although Trump’s memo set no deadline for RTO efforts to begin, Ezell gave federal agency heads rather short notice to fall in line. All agencies must submit their RTO plans by 5 pm ET on Friday, January 24, Ezell’s memo said.

Those plans should specify “the date that the agency will be in full compliance with the new telework policy,” with a recommended deadline of 30 days to comply, Ezell said.

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Doom: The Dark Ages wants to be more like the original Doom

gaming / DJ Henderson / January 23, 2025

In place of Doom Eternal‘s “jump and shoot” gameplay loop, The Dark Ages focuses on more of a “stand and fight” mentality, the developers said. If Doom Eternal was like flying a fighter jet, then The Dark Ages is more like controlling a tank, they added by way of analogy.

Less fighter jet, more tank Credit: Bethesda Softworks

That means a “flatter” game space, where the old-fashioned “strafe-to-aim” strategies work more effectively than in recent Doom games, with less need to be constantly floating through the air. The developers say they’re returning to the slower projectile speeds of the original Doom games, too, allowing players to more easily weave between them in a sort of first-person take on a shmup pattern. At the same time, your own projectile weapons tend toward the medium to short range, the developers said, encouraging you to take the fight close to the enemies.

While staggering enemies to set up instant Glory Kills is still a core part of The Dark Ages, the developers said the system has been redesigned to avoid taking control away from the player for extended, repetitive canned animations. The new Glory Kill system allows for instant, physics-based attacks that can be activated from any angle without interrupting the gameplay flow.

The more things change

The Dark Ages developers also promised a more open design, where the usual more linear corridors are interspersed with larger playspaces that let you decide which direction to go and which objective to pursue in what order. And the standard shooting action will be broken up into specific sections where you control a 30-story mech or fly a powerful dragon.

*Fleetwood Mac voiceYou can go your own way… Credit: Bethesda Softworks

But the core game will still include the requisite raft of secret areas and hidden nooks to discover, the developers promised. This time around, though, those secrets are more directly tied to your power progression rather than just being collectible in-game trinkets, the developers said.

It’s all in service of pushing toward a game that feels “new but familiar,” Martin said. The Dark Ages is still about the same sense of exploration and power that all good Doom games capture. But Martin said the development team is comfortable experimenting with what that specific sense of power is, “especially if the change you make brings it closer to classic Doom.”

But “I want to play a Doom game,” he added. “We don’t [want to] change so much that it’s not a Doom game.

Doom: The Dark Ages is scheduled to hit Windows, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on May 15.

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Court rules FBI’s warrantless searches violated Fourth Amendment

fbi, FISA, Fourth Amendment, national security, Online Privacy, Policy, section 702 / DJ Henderson / January 23, 2025

“Certainly, the Court can imagine situations where obtaining a warrant might frustrate the purpose of querying, particularly where exigency requires immediate querying,” DeArcy Hall wrote. “This is why the Court does not hold that querying Section 702-acquired information always requires a warrant.”

Ruling renews calls for 702 reforms

While digital rights groups like the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) cheered the ruling as providing much-needed clarity, they also suggested that the ruling should prompt lawmakers to go back to the drawing board and reform Section 702.

Section 702 is set to expire on April 15, 2026. Over the years, Congress has repeatedly voted to renew 702 protections, but the EFF is hoping that DeArcy Hall’s ruling will perhaps spark a sea change.

“In light of this ruling, we ask Congress to uphold its responsibility to protect civil rights and civil liberties by refusing to renew Section 702 absent a number of necessary reforms, including an official warrant requirement for querying US persons data and increased transparency,” the EFF wrote in a blog.

A warrant requirement could help truly end backdoor searches, the EFF suggested, and ensure “that the intelligence community does not continue to trample on the constitutionally protected rights to private communications.”

The ACLU warned that reforms are especially critical now, considering that unconstitutional backdoor searches have been “used by the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans, including protesters, members of Congress, and journalists.”

Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, dubbed 702 “one of the most abused provisions of FISA.”

“As the court recognized, the FBI’s rampant digital searches of Americans are an immense invasion of privacy and trigger the bedrock protections of the Fourth Amendment,” Toomey said. “Section 702 is long overdue for reform by Congress, and this opinion shows why.”

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Trump’s FCC chair gets to work on punishing TV news stations accused of bias

brendan carr, Policy, Trump / DJ Henderson / January 23, 2025

Carr has made it clear that he wants the FCC to punish news broadcasters that he perceives as being unfair to Trump or Republicans in general. He claimed that NBC putting Harris on Saturday Night Live before the election was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule,” even though NBC gave Trump two free 60-second messages in order to comply with the rule.

Carr also told Fox News that he is interested in investigating the complaint against CBS when the FCC reviews a pending deal involving Skydance and Paramount, which owns and operates 28 local broadcast TV stations of the CBS Television Network. “I’m pretty confident that news distortion complaint over the CBS 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC’s review of that transaction,” Carr said.

Carr “intends to weaponize the FCC”

After Rosenworcel dismissed the complaints, the Center for American Rights said it would keep fighting. “We fundamentally believe that several actions taken by the three major networks were partisan, dishonest and designed to support Vice President Harris in her bid to become President,” the group said in a statement provided to Ars last week. “We will continue to pursue avenues to ensure the American public is protected from media manipulation of our Republic. The First Amendment does not protect intentional misrepresentation or fraud.”

In a statement applauding Carr’s reversal today, the group said that Rosenworcel’s “last-minute actions were political, not based on a principled defense of the First Amendment.”

Networks have denied allegations of bias. “Former President Donald Trump is accusing 60 Minutes of deceitful editing of our Oct. 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That is false,” CBS said. “60 Minutes gave an excerpt of our interview to Face the Nation that used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes. Same question. Same answer. But a different portion of the response.”

Rosenworcel last week also rejected a petition to deny a license renewal for WTXF-TV in Philadelphia, a station owned and operated by Fox. The Media and Democracy Project petition alleged that Fox willfully distorted news with false reports of fraud in the 2020 election that Trump lost.

Rosenworcel said the complaints and petition she dismissed “come from all corners—right and left—but what they have in common is they ask the FCC to penalize broadcast television stations because they dislike station behavior, content, or coverage.” Yesterday, advocacy group Public Knowledge said that “in reinstating just those complaints that suit his partisan agenda, Chairman Carr has made it plain he intends to weaponize the FCC to threaten political speech and news coverage he disagrees with.”

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Trump admin fires security board investigating Chinese hack of large ISPs

Cyber Safety Review Board, Policy, salt typhoon, Security, Trump / DJ Henderson / January 22, 2025

“Effective immediately, the Department of Homeland Security will no longer tolerate any advisory committee[s] which push agendas that attempt to undermine its national security mission, the President’s agenda or Constitutional rights of Americans,” the DHS statement said.

The Cyber Safety Review Board operates under the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been criticized by Republican lawmakers for allegedly trying to “surveil and censor Americans’ speech on social media.”

Democrat: Board will be stacked with Trump loyalists

A Democratic lawmaker said that Trump appears ready to stack the Cyber Safety Review Board with “loyalists.” House Committee on Homeland Security Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) made the criticism in his opening statement at a hearing today.

“Before I close, I would also like to express my concern regarding the dismissal of the non-government members of advisory committees inside the Department, including the Cyber Safety Review Board and the CISA Advisory Committee,” Thompson’s statement reads. “The CSRB is in the process of investigating the Salt Typhoon hack of nine major telecommunications companies, and it is a national security imperative that the investigation be completed expeditiously. I am troubled that the President’s attempt to stack the CSRB with loyalists may cause its important work on the Salt Typhoon campaign to be delayed.”

Thompson said Republicans have been trying to shut down CISA over “false allegations and conspiracy theories.” The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 alleged that “CISA has devolved into an unconstitutional censoring and election engineering apparatus of the political Left.”

The DHS memo dismissing board members was published yesterday by freelance cybersecurity reporter Eric Geller, who quoted an anonymous source as saying the Cyber Safety Review Board’s review of Salt Typhoon is “dead.” Geller wrote that other advisory boards affected by the mass dismissal include the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board, the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council, the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, and the Secret Service’s Cyber Investigations Advisory Board.

“The CSRB was ‘less than halfway’ done with its Salt Typhoon investigation, according to a now-former member,” Geller wrote. The former member was also quoted as saying, “There are still professional staff for the CSRB and I hope they will continue some of the work in the interim.”

House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) told Nextgov/FCW that “President Trump’s new DHS leadership should have the opportunity to decide the future of the Board. This could include appointing new members, reviewing its structure, or deciding if the Board is the best way to examine cyber intrusions.”

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Fast radio burst in long-dead galaxy puzzles astronomers

astronomy, astrophysics, fast radio bursts, magnetars, Science / DJ Henderson / January 22, 2025

A surprising source

FRBs are of particular interest because they can be used as probes to study the large-scale structure of the universe. That’s why Calvin Leung, a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, was so excited to crunch data from Canada’s CHIME instrument (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment). CHIME was built for other observations but is sensitive to many of the wavelengths that make up an FRB. Unlike most radio telescopes, which focus on small points in the sky, CHIME scans a huge area, allowing it to pick out FRBs even though they almost never happen in the same place twice.

Leung was able to combine data from several different telescopes to narrow down the likely position of a repeating FRB, first detected in February 2024, located in the constellation Ursa Minor. When he and his CHIME collaborators further refined the accuracy of the location by averaging many bursts from the FRB, they discovered that this FRB originated on the outskirts of a long-dead distant galaxy. That throws a wrench into the magnetar hypothesis because why would a dead galaxy in which no new stars are forming host a magnetar?

It’s the first time an FRB has been found in such a location, and it’s also the furthest away from its galaxy. CHIME currently has two online outrigger radio arrays in place—companion telescopes to the original CHIME radio array in British Columbia. A third array comes online this week in Northern California, and according to Leung, it should enable astronomers to pinpoint FRB sources much more accurately—including this one. Data has already been incorporated from an outrigger in West Virginia, confirming the published position with a 20-times improvement in precision.

“This result challenges existing theories that tie FRB origins to phenomena in star-forming galaxies,” said co-author Vishwangi Shah, a graduate student at McGill University. “The source could be in a globular cluster, a dense region of old, dead stars outside the galaxy. If confirmed, it would make FRB 20240209A only the second FRB linked to a globular cluster.”

V. Shah et al., Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad9ddc (About DOIs).

T. Eftekhari et al., Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad9de2 (About DOIs).

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Apple Intelligence, previously opt-in by default, enabled automatically in iOS 18.3

AI, Apple, apple intelligence, ios 18.3, macos 15.3, Tech / DJ Henderson / January 21, 2025

Apple has sent out release candidate builds of the upcoming iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS 15.3 updates to developers today. But they come with one tweak that hasn’t been reported on, per MacRumors: They enable all of the AI-powered Apple Intelligence features by default during setup. When Apple Intelligence was initially released in iOS 18.1, the features were off by default, unless users chose to opt-in and enable them.

Those who still wish to opt out of Apple Intelligence features will now have to do it after their devices are set up by navigating to the Apple Intelligence & Siri section in the Settings app.

Apple Intelligence will only be enabled by default for hardware that supports it. For the iPhone, that’s just the iPhone 15 Pro series, iPhone 16 series, and iPhone 16 Pro series. It goes further back on the iPad and Mac—Apple Intelligence works on any model with an M1 processor or newer.

Apple is following in the footsteps of Microsoft and Google here, rolling out new generative AI features to its user base as quickly as possible and enabling some or all of them by default while still labeling everything as a “beta” and pointing to that label when things go wrong. Case in point: The iOS 18.3 update also temporarily disables all notification summaries for apps in the App Store’s “news and entertainment” category, because some of those summaries contained major factual inaccuracies.

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