Did TikTok just reshape the youth vote?

Swiping up on geriatric politicians

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, January 14-20, 2024

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Editor’s News Note:

Did Tiktok just reset the US youth vote?

On Saturday evening TikTok shut down with the following notice:

That was a big enough story that within an hour Saturday Night Live had a sketch on the shutdown:

On Sunday morning TikTok notified its 150 million US users it was back with this note:

The Vietnam protests and Watergate shaped the youth vote for generations. What will be the impact of tens of millions of Gen Z and Millenials getting this notification?

Comment of the Week

Jack Baruth in Avoidable Contact: in which language models live large

The history of human technological achievement is, often, the history of something being productively used for a purpose apart from its original intent. Zepbound, Viagra, Rogaine come to mind, but don’t forget that radar was a byproduct of research on “death rays” and the tube guitar amplifier is only valuable to musicians because of how it sounds when it’s being operated outside its normal parameters.

I’ve been wondering for a while what “AI” might actually be good for. It’s certainly not “intelligent” in any real sense, and the “hallucinations” to which it is prone make it dangerous to use in most contexts. Our good friend Christopher Feola has come up with one thing it does very well, however:

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[I]t’s no surprise that there was a bipartisan consensus last month that the 1,500-plus page bill would sail right through the House and the Senate. After all, it was a bill authorizing critical spending to prevent a government shutdown. Who was going to be able to read all that in 36 hours, never mind decipher it?

Hold my Mountain Dew Baja Blast, said a legion of nerds, who immediately began feeding the bill into ChatGPT and Grok, and asking the AIs to summarize and analyze.

Within minutes news of a lot of non-essential spending in the bill was flashing across social media… Within 24 hours the bill was dead. A replacement bill was passed in time to avert the shutdown; it had shed 1,400 of those 1,500 pages.

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Large language models have the power to summarize massive documents. Very few people other than hapless English students with “Moby-Dick” or “Ulysses” assignments need that power on a regular basis… but it sure comes in handy when reading deliberately Byzantine new law!

Another possible use: to read software End-User License Agreements and ferret out the unpleasant parts.

Naturally, this will spur a demand for LLMs that can write “AI-unreadable” documents, which in turn will lead to LLMs that can decipher such documents, and so on. As with the “Red Queen” in Lewis Carroll’s book, sometimes you have to run like hell just to maintain your current position. Imagine a future where your “AI” screen calls for you… while other AIs try like hell to create a call that won’t get screened. Gosh, think of all the GPU cycles this can consume, all the heat it can generate! Yet nothing ever seems to be done about that environmental catastrophe.

If we ever get a truly wise computer, someone should ask it why that’s so.

Perfecting Equilibrium Stories

Feola Elsewhere on the Internet

On Pentax Forums:

The Pentax K-3 III is available and part of Ricoh Imaging Americas 2025 plans

The K-3 III and K-3 III Monochrome remain active products in North America

By cjfeola in Pentax Announcements on Jan 19, 2025

The Pentax K-3 III is available and part of Ricoh Imaging Americas plans for 2025, according to company president Ken Curry.

Rumors have swirled around the camera since mid-week, when the camera was listed as discontinued on Ricoh's Japanese website. The K-3 III Mononchrome, which is same camera without the color Bayer array, is still listed as a current product.

While it's not clear at this point what is going on in Japan, Curry said they are moving ahead with both models in North America.

“We cannot provide comment on the business in Japan, but we can confirm that the PENTAX K-3 III is still available in the U.S. and is part of our plans for 2025,” said Curry.

Pentax Forums has queries into Ricoh about the status of the K-3 III in Japan and the rest of the world. We will update this story as more information becomes available.

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Friday January 24th - Foto.Feola.Friday

Sunday, January 26th — A Little RAGtime: We have now entered the third great storm of information technology innovation, when new hardware and software converge to unleash legions of nerds creating things that are entirely new. Large Language Models are not intelligent, artificial or otherwise. But nerds are busy chaining LLMs together into entirely new types of information tools. This week we’ll look at RAGs, Agents, Workflows and other tools, and show how they can be chained together to create entirely new types of information machines.