Dr. Drew on Damar Hamlin
March 28th, 2023Via: Chief Nerd:
? Dr. Drew Questions What Happened to Damar Hamlin Nearly Three Months Ago
"Things would cause sudden no pulse, rearrest in the ER, and the pulmonary status to lag behind neurological would be a pulmonary embolus. And a pulmonary embolus happens during acute COVID, which he did… pic.twitter.com/5r3wh74sFa
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) March 28, 2023
Toxic Chemical Spill Ignites Water Safety Fears for 14 Million People
March 28th, 2023Via: The Defender:
Residents of Philadelphia and the surrounding area demanded clarity about the safety of their drinking water from city officials on Monday, three days after chemicals leaked from a plant into a tributary of the Delaware River, which provides water for about 14 million people in four states.
About 8,100 gallons of acrylic polymer solution leaked from a burst pipe at the chemical plant Trinseo PLC in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on March 24, entering Otter Creek, which flows into the Delaware River.
The solution contained butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate and methyl methacrylate, which are used in paints and adhesives.
Exposure to butyl acrylate and ethyl acrylate is associated with breathing difficulties, and the latter is listed as a “potential occupational carcinogen” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Despite the leak of the chemicals, city officials did not alert residents until the morning of March 26, when they said people in Philadelphia should use bottled water to prevent exposure and warned that although contamination had not yet been detected in the drinking supply, water from Otter Creek could have traces of chemicals.
Hours later, Michael Carroll, the city’s deputy managing director for transportation, infrastructure and sustainability said residents no longer needed to buy bottled water — which had rapidly sold out at stores across Philadelphia following the earlier warning — and that the chance of contamination was diminishing over time.
Media Loses Confidence in Preferred Pronouns After Transgender Shooter Attacks Christian School
March 28th, 2023Via: Summit News:
The media appears to have developed a sudden confusion surrounding preferred pronouns after a woman who identified as a man attacked a Christian school in Nashville, killing three children and three adults.
28-year-old Audrey Hale carefully planned out the assault on The Covenant School, leaving behind maps and a manifesto, the details of which have yet to be revealed.
Given Hale’s transgender identity, many have speculated that the massacre was motivated by Tennessee’s recent ban on all forms of “gender-affirming” transgender care for minors as well as drag queen shows, although others have suggested the motive was Hale’s resentment at having been made to attend the school.
Whatever the motive, the media’s reaction was to lose confidence in its assertion that transgender pronouns should be respected.
Despite Hale, a biological woman, having started identifying as a man in recent months, BBC News expressed confusion over the issue, despite authorities making clear the culprit was transgender.
Italy Bans Insects from Pasta and Pizza
March 28th, 2023Via: The Freedom Corner with PeterSweden:
The new rules require that food containing insects be labeled with large letters and displayed on separate shelves from the rest of the food so that people don’t accidentally eat the bugs. The insect food will also be labeled with warnings about risks associated with eating it.
And traditional Italian food like pasta and pizza will be BANNED from containing flour made from insects.
RESTRICT Act: Overly-Broad and Has Major Privacy and Free Speech Implications
March 28th, 2023Via: Reclaim the Net:
Observers note that if somebody or something is designated as a threat to national security, under the proposed legislation, the government would be given full access to these entities.
The text of the act singles out several usual suspects as foreign adversaries, such as Russia, China, Iran, etc., but, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of commerce are free to add new “foreign adversaries” to the list, while not under obligation to let Congress know about it.
They would also be given 15 days before notifying the president.
Critics make a point of the fact that US citizens marked as national security threat can also be considered and treated using the provisions of this proposal as “foreign individuals.”
And when this designation is in place, then the threat of “any action deemed necessary” to mitigate it kicks in, which could result in people being ordered to pay a million dollar fine, spend 20 years in prison, or lose all assets (and these forms of punishment would be meted out without due process).
No limits are put on the funding and hiring to enforce the act, and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) would not apply.
All that just to “ban” TikTok?
Either way, The White House is in favor of passing RESTRICT Act.
Western Australia: How the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ Became the World’s Control Group for the Largest Vaccination Trial Ever
March 28th, 2023Via: Umbrella News:
Isolated from the rest of the world, the Australian state of Western Australia (WA) managed to keep Covid out for most of 2021. During that time, almost four million doses of Covid vaccine were administered to the population. WA’s vaccine safety surveillance report for 2021 has just been released and the results are grim: an ‘exponential increase’ in adverse events, with hospitals struggling to cope.
…
From the report, “The number of adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) reported to Western Australia Vaccine Safety Surveillance (WAVSS) was significantly higher in 2021 than in previous years… due to the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccination program.”
In 2021, AEFIs for Covid vaccines were reported at almost 24x the rate of AEFIs for all other vaccines combined.* The report refers to this phenomenon as an ‘exponential increase,’ which is clearly visible in the accompanying graph.
…
Safety surveillance data from the WA experiment shows that, in the absence of Covid infections in the community, and in comparison to traditional vaccines, Covid vaccines are associated with significant harm. The precautionary principle would suggest that the Covid vaccine program should be paused until further investigation can be carried out to determine why WA experienced such an ‘exponential increase’ in AEFIs following the Covid vaccine rollout.
IRS “Attempt To Intimidate” Journalist Matt Taibbi During Govt Weaponization Hearing
March 28th, 2023Via: ZeroHedge:
While ?@mtaibbi? & I were testifying before Congress on the weaponization of the federal government, an IRS agent showed up at his house. What an amazing coincidence https://t.co/gRGSIa3HRr
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) March 28, 2023
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4, “Exhibits Emergent Behaviors and Capabilities Whose Sources and Mechanisms Are, at This Moment, Hard to Discern Precisely”
March 26th, 2023They don’t know how it works.
Via: arXiv – Microsoft Research:
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4 [Ope23], was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions.
Up to 80 Percent of Workers Could See Jobs Impacted by AI
March 26th, 2023Paper: GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models:
Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. The influence spans all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure. Notably, the impact is not limited to industries with higher recent productivity growth. We conclude that Generative Pre-trained Transformers exhibit characteristics of general-purpose technologies (GPTs), suggesting that these models could have notable economic, social, and policy implications.
Via: New York Post:
Researchers from OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania argued in a new research paper that AI could soon be shaking up some fields following the rise of ChatGPT, a shockingly intelligent chatbot released in November.
Researchers argued that 80 percent of the US workforce could have at least 10 percent of their work tasks affected by the introduction of ChatGPT.
They also found that about 19 percent of workers may find at least 50 percent of their duties impacted by GPT, or General-purpose technologies.
Researchers also found that higher-income jobs will likely have greater exposure to GPT, but that it will span across almost all industries.
Extraordinary: The Revelations
March 26th, 2023Via: Unidentified:
