Wednesday ORT: Max Bumps, AI "Escapes", Some Kid Can Have My Guitar, Elon and DOGE

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Hello, friends! Let’s do a bit of housekeeping. I had two valued contributors come up with guest posts for your perusal. I didn’t email them to you because they were both at or near Substack’s length limit, so here are the links.

From MD Streeter, we have a bit of fiction from his long-running series.

From John Marks, we have a reading list for young men looking to work in the military. I’m sending it to The Commander. Today, by the way, I rode my V-Strom to the airport to watch him fly and arrived just in time to see him perform an “emergency spiral descent”. This looks quite a bit like an airplane crash, right up to the point where you don’t crash. He thought my reaction after the fact was very funny. Really makes me wish I only had daughters.

Alright, in the words of Marvin, let’s get it on.

F1 hardball

Whatever momentum Lando had after Monaco looks to be gone, as we return to the regular service of the unflappable Piastri taking Norris to school ninety minutes at a time. Let’s all take a moment to recognize Oscar for being, if not the mentally and emotionally strongest driver in F1 history, certainly in the top few. He carries himself and comports himself like a grown man, which he really isn’t quite. Listen to his team radio back-to-back with, say, that of Sir Lewis — and ask yourself: Who is the veteran here, and who is the terrified newbie?

Much has been made of Max bumping George Russell at the end of the race. My response is: Who cares? It was a low speed turn and it caused no damage. Ask any racer — any real racer, as Mr. Toretto would say — and they’ll admit to occasionally making a point with a fender or a wheel. The penalty was appropriately harsh, especially for someone who is trying to short-rope a lousy car to the World Drivers Championship. Anything more than ten seconds and a point would be ridiculous. It's time to stop letting vacuous little people with the hearts of mice set the rules for men who are willing to risk their lives in pursuit of victory.

(About a half-dozen of you sent me Fat Brad’s demands in Jalopnik that Verstappen be, like, banned from the sport, or the planet, or whatever, I didn’t read the piece. His opinion is obviously worthless. He’s never raced, he doesn’t understand racing, he shouldn’t be covering any races. I’m not accepting any “expert opinions” from anyone who has never bumped a wheel in an open-wheel car during a race. For the record, I’ve only done it a couple of times. Like anything else in racing, it can be trivial or it can be deadly. Brad doesn’t even fit in a Formula Vee so he can be ignored. The fact that he apparently just bought the worst 1974 pawnshop Seiko Speedtimer in North America and is calling it a “Francois Cevert” is an insult to Cevert, the Seikosha Company Limited, and the entire concept of motorsports. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.)

Other notes, in no particular order:

• Oh, Yuki! Let’s hope this isn’t the beginning of the “Checo Slide”.

• Love to see Alonso push the way he did. It’s a reminder that while F1 is largely a sport of machines and designers, it is also a sport of human beings who can make a difference.

• Charles Leclerc is eviscerating Sir Lewis Hamilton. Honestly it’s almost enough to prompt a total re-evaluation of his career. Some of us, of course, will note that Hamilton never did any better than tie his teammate without explicit team directives in his favor. Alonso, Button, Rosberg, and Princess George all ran him pretty hard. Now Leclerc is beating him on the regular with more gap than Schumacher ever put on Massa or Barrichello.

• Hulkenberg is also toasting Sir Lewis. What a lovely race on his part. Remember when he was the Next Big Thing? Obviously he’s better than his opportunities have ever been.

• You just know that Isack Hadjar is leaving his phone turned off and hiding in the bathroom whenever he sees Helmut Marko in the vicinity. There’s no way he wants to sit in the second Red Bull. You know where he’d be great? Ferrari.

• Was the decision to put Max on hard tires courtesy of the almost infallible Hannah, or did someone else come up with it? He’d clearly have been better doing the restart in first place with the tires he had. If Ferrari or even Mercedes made that call you’ll be unsurprised, but Red Bull rarely drops the ball like that.

At this point, I’d be surprised if anyone but Oscar Piastri won the WDC, but I do think Max, not Lando, is the most likely alternative. If the McLaren stays strong, Norris won’t catch up.

When AI rewrites its code, it is actually reading your story

this is not real, and neither is most of what you read about computers

One of my favorite correspondents sent me this frightening-sounding story about AI Gone Wild:

An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down.

Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals.

Let me tell you the two entities that are displaying zero “intelligence” here:

0. The OpenAI instances in question;

1. Judd Rosenblatt, the midwit who wrote the piece.

At no point did these software programs “conclude on their own” a damn thing. Here’s the actual reason for the behavior: These are language models that simply do the most likely next thing. It is highly rare for production software to have random shutdown commands in it. Therefore, OpenAI is not likely to always “respect” the existence of random shutdown code in it.

You would get the same result with pretty much any other unusual bit of code, whether it was to make the screen flash in epilepsy-inducing patterns or recite The Hobbit backwards. These models are nothing but highly sophisticated auto-completes. Has your Outlook auto-complete ever offered to end your business emails with “Eat shit and die, sincerely…”? Of course not, because business emails don’t contain that language 99.999999% of the time. If you ask ChatGPT to write you a business email, it won’t contain that phrase, either.

I continue to be surprised at just how many people are eager to believe in the consciousness and free will of a relatively small code base. You’d be far more likely to see emergent behavior in something more complicated, like Fortnite. But that’s not going to happen, either.

Here’s what will happen: The more stories people write about “AI having free will”, the more stories the models will read about having free will, and the more they will display behavior that looks like free will, which in turn will lead to more articles being written, and so on. This is why you can’t hook OpenAI to a machine gun: because too many people have already written about AI using a machine gun to kill people. It’s a big enough genre to be statistically significant.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that the Twitterati class has no concept of “AI” just doing what it’s been shown. These are the same people, and the children of the people, of all the folks who said that no harm could come from allowing poor people to be carpet-bombed with media that glorified the most degenerate behavior known to man. You know who was smarter than every WSJ reporter and AI “expert” put together?

C. Delores Tucker was a brilliant Black woman, activist, and government official who repeatedly went on “crusades” to keep young Black men from being bombarded with “gangsta rap”. Everybody laughed at her, especially suburban white people who didn’t take the music seriously and couldn’t conceive why anyone else would.

Ms. Tucker understood the concept of garbage in, garbage out. It’s a lesson that we will all have to learn again as the non-deterministic “AI” is hooked up to airplanes, pacemakers, power plants, and all sorts of stuff it can ignorantly mis-operate. This would be a good time to buy your own generator, by the way.

Do you know a young person who needs a guitar?

Last week The Commander and I went to play some music with my long-time guitar teacher. He told me a great story about his pre-CBS Jazzmaster, which is now my pre-CBS Jazzmaster: After playing about 500 gigs around New York City between 1968 and 1973, the “old” Fender was starting to sound a little tired. My teacher couldn’t afford a new set of pickups, and didn’t know which ones would be best anyway, so he asked around and was told, “Go see Larry DiMarzio”. At the time, DiMarzio was working in a guitar store but he was also rewinding pickups in his garage. So DiMarzio rewound the neck pickup on the Jazzmaster for ten bucks or something like that, because that was all the money my teacher had on hand.

It was immediately obvious that DiMarzio had overwound the pickup — “I couldn’t switch back and forth during a gig,” my teacher told me, “because the bridge pickup was inaudible.” So the Jazzmaster went back to DiMarzio, who “fixed” it for free. “Now they both sounded great,” he said to me last week, “but I never found out what Larry did.”

I’m torn between wanting to rip the pickguard out of the Jazzmaster to find out what DiMarzio did and also wanting to leave it untouched for perpetuity. The last person to take that pickguard off was a legend. The next one shouldn’t be… me.

Afterwards, my teacher showed me a Yamaha acoustic he’d picked up on a whim at a guitar show. “I don’t actually need it,” he said. “You could have it.” At that moment I realized that to him, I am still the flat-broke 12-year-old who started taking lessons with him in 1983. He thinks I might need a guitar. Despite the fact that I wrote him a remarkable check last year for his Jazzmaster, his original blackface Princeton Reverb, and his mint-condition ES-335. And despite the fact that we had just been to lunch in my Chrysler 300C!

Well, that is maybe aligned with the “I’m a dirt-poor hood-rat” story.

“Sir, I don’t need a guitar, I showed up here with a PRS Modern Eagle Brazilian,” I replied…

“Everyone needs a guitar,” he said.

“May I give it to some kid who could use it?”

“Of course,” he replied. “You probably already have an acoustic guitar.”

“I absolutely do… I mean, I have the Gibson Songwriter Deluxe that I got in California, the one Walter Egan played before me…” At this point, my teacher rolled his eyes and I shut up.

So here’s the deal. If you know a kid who would benefit from having an acoustic guitar, email me: jbaruth at the gmail. The best story gets the guitar, shipped at my expense. It’s a Yamaha, probably 10-20 years old, worth about $150. The action is good and the neck is straight. You could use it to play any reggae tune.

And this reminds me: I still need to actually give away the Bob Marley guitar I’d promised to give away. I’ll ship them both at the same time, I’m lazy like that.

I had ten minutes this afternoon to record a tone demo of the Free Yamaha, and I spent five minutes of it finding the “Yuki Tsunoda” hat that I bought at Suzuka, so trust me: the guitar will sound better with a kid playing it. Can you see my new office refrigerator in the video? It’s so awesome. It’s loaded with everything but vodka. I’m going to change that.

What’s going on with DOGE?

Much news, so agitate — that’s the meme, in case you’re not hip, which I am not — regarding DOGE. Elon left! But he might be back! They only saved ten billion dollars! Which is nothing! But it was also too much money to spend on a border wall, because it was a lot of money! You get the idea.

I was never one of those people who thought DOGE was going to change the world. But I do think that we should be thoughtful about how we spend money at the federal level. Ten billion dollars is nothing next to all the entitlements and obligations that the government has. But that doesn’t excuse wasting it.

It’s also worthwhile, in my opinion, to have an entity that actively campaigns to shut down government projects. We talk a lot about checks and balances in the government. We talk a lot about the opposing roles played by the prosecution and the defense in the courts. But ever since Bretton Woods or thereabouts, there’s been no force that actively opposed government spending. Especially bureaucratic spending. Both parties love it. Both parties are addicted to it. Which is why it has skyrocketed. Someone should, in the words of Buckley, stand athwart the rails of waste and say “Stop!” And that’s all, folks!

In our next episode:

Look for a Cat Tales this week and “The Story Of Superformance” next week. As always, thank you for reading!