March 30, 2025

I REMAIN PUZZLED BY THIS: Why do LLMs make stuff up? New research peers under the hood.

The answer provided here doesn’t actually explain why the models make up fake articles with fake citations, for fake books with fake ISBN numbers. I’m also troubled that we didn’t completely understand this from the beginning.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 105

HMMMM: “Signalgate” is a Masterclass in the application of Useful Idiots.

Last week, The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg discovered that he had somehow been added to a group chat (GC) on Signal titled “Houthi PC small group” by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. This GC appeared to have top cabinet members of the Trump administration on its roster. Goldberg appears shocked to be included in this GC, especially as a journalist intensely critical of the current administration. His last article was titled, Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’, so he probably wondered why he was added. At first, he doubts the veracity that the GC he’s been added to is genuine. He writes:

“After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.”

Suffice to say, Mr. Goldberg stayed in the GC, only leaving it this past Sunday, March 23rd. He then wasted no time furiously banging out a 3500 word essay on his adventures in GC land, replete with accompanying screenshots of the chat. How he had time to do this between scheduling cable news interviews is a testament to this true American patriot. (sarcasm)

However, is that really the entire narrative? That a Progressive-Liberal journalist just happened to be accidentally added to a high-level chat group discussing policy positions and goals? One that includes some of the most powerful figures in the current administration? Which led to the inevitable story being leaked?

Occam’s razor

I lean towards a theory of “Signalgate” being intentional (1), starting with some of the members the chat.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

And now for this weekend’s latest attack on Hegseth: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Included Wife in Sensitive Meetings: Report.

The Edith Wilsons of the multiverse all smile.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll 50

KINDA MAKES YOU QUESTION THE VALUE OF ACADEMIC POLITICAL SCIENCE, DOESN’T IT?

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 60

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Are Democrats Whitewashing Hitler with Lame Attacks on Trump?

I’m old enough to remember when Hitler personified incomparable, bottomless, merciless evil. These days he’s mostly used by the left as a cudgel to hammer, ineffectively, Donald Trump. In doing so, Democrats risk trivializing and even sanitizing Hitler.

What sets Hitler apart from other monstrous 20th century dictators — such as Mao Zedong and Stalin — was his all-consuming Jew hatred, his unprecedented Jewish murders, his factories of death and extermination that slaughtered 6 million Jews.

Mao and Stalin (himself an antisemite) each killed more people than Hitler, yet the German fuhrer is recognized as the worst tyrant. The reason is clear — the Holocaust.

There have been other genocides, such as those of Turkey against the Armenians and the Hutus against the Tutsis in civil war in Rwanda.

But in none was genocide as central to a regime’s core and purpose as in Hitler’s Germany. None of those other murderous campaigns erected a massive industrial complex of death camps devoted to the annihilation of one people.

You can’t separate Hitler from his pathological loathing and mass murder of Jews.

If someone is likened to Hitler, it’s inescapable that this person must be a rabid Jew hater.

To invoke Hitler without his murderous antisemitism is to homogenize him as another one of the 20th century’s dictators, just the most infamous.

In doing so, Democrats purge him of his singular crime against humanity.

President Trump is Hitler, shout progressives.

That would be the same Trump whose grandchildren are Jewish. The same Trump who is described by Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of the Jewish state, as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

Some Hitler.

* * * * * * * *

We should never forget who Hitler was.

Volumes have been written about him. Among the most intriguing was Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil by Ron Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum examined many of the theories and explanations about Hitler.

After doing so, he cautioned that explaining Hitler can carry a potential downside.

We should remember, he said:

“To resist the way explanation can become evasion or consolation, a way of making Hitler’s choice to do what he did less unbearable, less hateful to contemplate, by shifting responsibility from him to faceless abstractions, inexorable forces, or irresistible compulsions that gave him no choice or made his choice irrelevant.

“To resist making the kind of explanatory excuses for Hitler that permit him to escape, that grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh.”

Are the Democrats’ frivolous invocations of a Hitler without the Holocaust opening another avenue to grant him the posthumous victory of a last laugh?

Also trivializing Hitler is that these same attacks are made by the left whenever there’s a president with an (R) after his name in the White House. In 2003, Jonah Goldberg responded to the left’s unceasing “Bush=Hitler” attacks:

I don’t say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example, during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things” that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

Last year, the left was begging this former Hitler to endorse Kamala Harris, as Dick Cheney, Bush’s co-Hitler 20 years ago, did.

And if you missed it yesterday, Benjamin Kerstein on the Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis. “The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity. Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 93

GREAT MOMENTS IN ASTROTURFING: Asphalt Assault: Anti-Tesla Protesters Unleash Their Scariest Weapon Yet – Nazi-Infused Line Dancing!

Tesla protesters in Seattle, Washington pulled out their scariest secret weapon against Elon Musk – line dancing. It was an assault on the eyes. Protesters hate Musk’s electric vehicles but enjoy the Electric Slide.

Have a look. (WATCH)

The irony of choosing the Electric Slide was not lost on commenters.

Other Tesla protestors had their talking points preprinted in large type, just like a Biden press conference. (Why didn’t his handlers talk him into attempting the electric slide?):

And then everybody quit at noon.

No word yet, if like the mob in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, they all went off for brunch afterward “to have a little sponge cake und a little wine,” before contemplating their next assault on civilization.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 121

THE GOP IS GOING TO HAVE TOO MUCH MATERIAL FOR MIDTERM CAMPAIGN ADS. HOW WILL THEY CHOOSE?

Posted at 12:18 pm by Glenn Reynolds 59

MARS TO COME: I’ve started a Substack for astronomy, space news, space art, because honestly there’s way too much stuff for my once-weekly Sky Candy at PJ Media. Today, I’ve got some cool pictures by Casey Handmer PhD of a terraformed Mars.

Posted at 10:40 am by Charlie Martin 26

SURPRISE ON THE HILL: Turns out, according to recent survey of congressional aides reported on HillFaith, that more than half, 52 percent, of the respondents say religious faith issues are discussed in their offices.

Posted at 8:45 am by Mark Tapscott 41

MARK HEMINGWAY: America’s Librarians Became Militantly Political, And Now They Suffer The Consequences.

Churchill once said of John Foster Dulles that he was “the only case I know of a bull who carries his own China shop around with him.” Had Churchill miraculously lived another 60 odd years, I think he would agree that when it comes to this particular metaphor, Dulles has been outclassed. At the dawn of Trump’s second term, we even see that the bull has become self-aware and is deliberately trying to break as much of the federal crockery as he can get away with.

Last week, Trump issued an executive order proposing the shuttering of seven obscure federal agencies, notably including the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Churlish former Labor Secretary Robert Reich went into high dudgeon, or in Reich’s case maybe just dudgeon, to let us know “Tyrants view educated citizens as their greatest enemy. Slaveholders stopped the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Dictators censor media. That’s why Trump is attacking education, science, museums, and the arts. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.”

Well, I guess you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I’m no fan of tyranny, slavery, Nazis, or book burning. I have written tens of thousands of words opposing government censorship, I have made a living reading and reviewing books, and I spent 17 years on the board of a private school. I hope it is apparent I care about knowledge and education. And speaking as an ostensibly educated, literate, patriotic American, I am asking the Trump administration to follow through and please, please, please in italics, stick it to America’s librarians.

To be clear, I’m also excited by the prospect of any number of museums being collateral damage, but the issue of political insanity in museums, particularly the art world, has already been well noted. Indeed, you know most museum officials have anti-American politics the same way you know that someone is vegan, into astrology, or didn’t vote for Trump – they’ll tell you. Five years ago, the director of the Met actually said to The New York Times “There is no doubt that the Met and its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy.’’ I had to read “its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as” a few times and got so turned around I didn’t know whether to object to the self-abasing radicalism or elocution lessons from Kamala Harris.

In contrast to the caricature of snobbish museum curators, librarians have been freeriding on a mostly positive cultural stereotype of old biddies who yell at kids to keep quiet but somehow also know how to help you find obscure information on local zoning laws if it comes to that.

The reality is that sometime in the last few decades the vocation of local librarian acquired a uniquely left-wing nimbus. It’s hard to say whether there was an organized takeover of the profession or it organically attracted a new generation that saw their primary vocational responsibility as agents of radical and unwelcome social change. Regardless, they’ve become a threat to future generations and are making us dumber.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll 148