Infection with the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles appears to raise the risk of dementia, new research says. CC-licensed photo by NIAID on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. No, I’m not scratching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
A man sued Avianca Airline. His lawyer used ChatGPT • The New York Times
Benjamin Weiser:
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The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured [in August 2019] when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.
When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”
There was just one hitch: no one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief.
That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.
The lawyer who created the brief, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court on Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research — “a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable.”
Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for three decades, told Judge P. Kevin Castel that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline. Mr. Schwartz said that he had never used ChatGPT, and “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real.
It had said yes.
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Schwartz very much at the “find out” stage of proceedings, though the judge has called a hearing for June 8 to figure out whether to chastise him, so things could get even worse. I’m guessing Mr Mata will suggest that Levidow, Levidow & Oberman send their bill to ChatGPT. Though the case is ridiculous anyway.
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Why Tears of the Kingdom’s bridge physics have game developers wowed • Polygon
Nicole Carpenter:
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There’s a bridge to cross the lava pit in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Marakuguc Shrine, but it’s broken. More than half of the bridge is piled on top of itself on one side of the pit, with one clipped-off segment on the other. The bridge is the obvious choice for crossing the lava, but how to fix it?
A clip showing one potential solution went viral on Twitter shortly after Tears of the Kingdom’s release: The player uses Link’s Ultrahand ability to unfurl the stacked bridge by attaching it to a wheeled platform in the lava. When the wheeled platform — now attached to the edge of the bridge — activates and moves forward, it pulls the bridge taut, splashing lava as it goes, until the suspension bridge is actually suspended and can be crossed. But it wasn’t the solution itself that resonated with players; instead, the clip had game developers’ jaws on the ground, in awe of how Nintendo’s team wrangled the game’s physics system to do that.
To players, it’s simply a bridge, but to game developers, it’s a miracle.
“The most complicated part of game development is when different systems and features start touching each other,” said Shayna Moon, a technical producer who’s worked on games like the 2018 God of War reboot and its sequel, God of War: Ragnarök, to Polygon. “It’s really impressive. The amount of dynamic objects is why there are so many different kinds of solutions to this puzzle in particular. There are so many ways this could break.”
Moon pointed toward the individual segments of the bridge that operate independently. Then there’s the lava, the cart, and the fact you can use Link’s Ultrahand ability to tie any of these things together — even the bridge back onto itself.
…Tears of the Kingdom was seemingly built on top of Breath of the Wild, reportedly with a large portion of the same team working on it.
“There is a problem within the games industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special.”
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Meta Quest 3 real life hands-on: how it compares to Apple mixed-reality headset • Bloomberg
Mark Gurman:
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though Apple’s device remains under wraps, I have gotten a chance to test out Meta’s upcoming model, the Quest 3.
I went hands-on with a prototype version of the headset, trying to get a sense of how it may stack up against Apple’s device. I tried out the Quest 3’s interface, video pass-through mode, software features and gaming capability.
The device, codenamed Eureka, feels far lighter and thinner than the existing Quest 2 from 2020. The strap to place it on your head seems a bit stronger, and it uses fabric on the sides instead of the Quest 2’s plastic.
…The actual clarity and VR displays within the Quest 3 feel similar to those in the Quest 2 — despite the resolution being rumored to be slightly higher. But there are two areas where I saw major improvements: video pass-through for mixed reality and the device’s speedier performance.
Video pass-through is the heart of mixed reality. It relies on external cameras to let headset wearers see a live video feed of the real world, creating an augmented reality effect without the use of clear lenses. While I don’t believe the Quest 3’s video pass-through performance will come close to that of the Apple device (which will have about a dozen cameras), it is a night-and-day improvement over the Quest 2.
Due to the dual RGB color cameras, video pass-through on the Quest 3 presented colors more accurately and offered an almost lifelike rendering of the real world. I was even able to use my phone while wearing the headset, something that often feels impossible on a Quest 2.
…Though Meta hasn’t yet found the “killer app” for its headsets, the company does have a several-year advantage over Apple in top-flight games built for VR.
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The headline is an utter fib, because Gurman has no idea how this compares to Apple’s headset. He also likens the forthcoming competition between the two to iPhone v Android, because it’s “pricey v cheap”. Except we don’t know the price of Apple’s headset.
Notice that lack of a killer app, though. What the hell is it? I still wonder.
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Meta, Amazon, Twitter layoffs hit teams fighting hate speech, bullying • CNBC
Hayden Field and Jonathan Vanian:
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Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms.
The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles on Facebook as a way to verify their trustworthiness.
But CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to make 2023 the “year of efficiency” spelled the end of the ambitious effort, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality agreements.
Over multiple rounds of layoffs, Meta announced plans to eliminate roughly 21,000 jobs, a mass downsizing that had an outsized effect on the company’s trust and safety work. The fact-checking tool, which had initial buy-in from executives and was still in a testing phase early this year, was completely dissolved, the sources said.
…Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying, which has been linked to higher rates of adolescent self-harm, and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence.
…Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about 200 content moderators in early January. It also laid off at least 16 members of Instagram’s well-being group and more than 100 positions related to trust, integrity and responsibility, according to documents filed with the US Department of Labor.
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Of course they’re seen as just a cost; so they’ll be highly likely to get fired. Not releasing the Facebook tool seems like a big mistake though.
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Causal evidence that herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases • medRxiv
Markus Eyting, Min Xie, Simon Heß, Pascal Geldsetzer:
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Those born before September 2 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, while those born on or after September 2 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine. By using country-wide data on all vaccinations received, primary and secondary care encounters, death certificates, and patients’ date of birth in weeks, we first show that the percentage of adults who received the vaccine increased from 0.01% among patients who were merely one week too old to be eligible, to 47.2% among those who were just one week younger.
Apart from this large difference in the probability of ever receiving the herpes zoster vaccine, there is no plausible reason why those born just one week prior to September 2 1933 should differ systematically from those born one week later.
We demonstrate this empirically by showing that there were no systematic differences (e.g., in pre-existing conditions or uptake of other preventive interventions) between adults across the date-of-birth eligibility cutoff, and that there were no other interventions that used the exact same date-of-birth eligibility cutoff as was used for the herpes zoster vaccine program.
This unique natural randomization, thus, allows for robust causal, rather than correlational, effect estimation. We first replicate the vaccine’s known effect from clinical trials of reducing the occurrence of shingles. We then show that receiving the herpes zoster vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis over a follow-up period of seven years by 3.5 percentage points (95% CI: 0.6 – 7.1, p=0.019), corresponding to a 19.9% relative reduction in the occurrence of dementia.
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The idea of viruses being key to multiple serious disorders which nonetheless don’t have obvious causes is increasingly popular with scientists: CMV was shown to have a lingering effect more than a decade ago, and there are others. If a virus seriously increases the risk of dementia, that points to disease mechanisms too.
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VC firm Paradigm shifts its crypto-only focus to include AI • The Block
Yogita Khatri, Frank Chaparro, and Nathan Crooks:
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Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, one of the most established and active players in the space, is going beyond just blockchain and highlighting a focus on a broader array of “frontier tech” that includes artificial intelligence, two sources with knowledge of the matter told The Block.
The change is subtlety visible on the firm’s website, with the company now calling itself a “research-driven technology investment firm” as opposed to one that specifically invested in “disruptive crypto/Web3 companies and protocols.” The revision appears to have gone live around May 3, according to the Wayback Machine that’s operated by the Internet Archive.
A line that said “we believe crypto will define the next few decades” was removed from the home page, which now makes no mention of web3 or blockchains. One source who was not authorized to speak publicly said the change didn’t mean the company was shying away from crypto but rather highlighting its reach into adjacent areas.
The company’s portfolio section of the website still lists dozens of firms associated with crypto, decentralized finance and NFTs.
The person familiar with the strategy said the company had not changed its mandate and continued to focus on crypto and web3, with no practical change. The updated website copy was meant to emphasize its technical research, the person said, noting that Paradigm had backed companies that have explored new technologies within their core strategy such as AI Arena.
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They’ll get rid of the web3 stuff in a few months, never fear. It’ll be “Oh, we’ve always taken a keen interest in AI!”
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Three journals’ web domains expired. Then major indexes pointed to hijacked versions • Retraction Watch
Anna Abalkina:
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When web domains of legitimate journals expire, fraudulent publishers have an opening to hijack them by registering the expired domains and creating clone websites that mimic the genuine journal.
In 2015, John Bohannon found fraudulent publishers had hijacked the websites of several legitimate journals indexed in Web of Science. The expired domains of GMP Review and Ludus Vitalis, which Web of Science listed as their official homepages, were registered by the fraudulent publishers, who created clone journals offering to publish papers for a fee.
Taking over expired domains remains a successful strategy for fraudulent publishers, because potential authors may use the websites listed in scientometric databases to verify the authenticity of a journal. Recently, three examples have come to light of journals with domains that expired and were hijacked by fake journals.
One of the hijacked titles is the Russian Law Journal. The website of the journal expired at the end of 2022, and a new journal imitating the original was set up by January 2023.
Clarivate’s Master Journal List still pointed to the compromised site, and unauthorized content penetrated the Web of Science Core Collection as well. The genuine journal stopped publishing in 2021, so all 59 papers indexed in 2022 and 2023 potentially originate from the hijackers
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The motive is a little obscure: is it so hijackers can get junk papers indexed? That’s about the only valuable (to them) exploit on offer. But the web domain registration system remains a problem. How do you protect something like that which needs protecting, while not protecting the bad actors?
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Tesla leak reportedly shows thousands of Full Self-Driving safety complaints • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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A Tesla whistleblower has leaked 100GB of data to the German outlet Handelsblatt containing thousands of customer complaints that raise serious concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features.
The complaints, which were reported across the US, Europe, and Asia, span from 2015 to March 2022. During this period, Handelsblatt says Tesla customers reported over 2,400 self-acceleration issues and 1,500 braking problems, including 139 reports of “unintentional emergency braking” and 383 reports of “phantom stops” from false collision warnings.
Some of the incidents mentioned by Handelsblatt include descriptions of how cars “suddenly brake or accelerate abruptly.” While some drivers safely gained control of their vehicle, Handelsblatt says others “ended up in a ditch, hit walls or crashed into oncoming vehicles.”
The documents obtained by the outlet also outline Tesla’s policies when responding to the issues customers experience and suggest that Tesla likes to keep its vehicles’ data under wraps.
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Principally, that any information or feedback relating to the incident should only be passed verbally direct to the customer – not emailed, texted or left in a voicemail. Transparency!
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OpenAI may leave the EU if regulations bite, says CEO • Reuters
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Wednesday the ChatGPT maker might consider leaving Europe if it could not comply with the upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) regulations by the European Union.
The EU is working on what could be the first set of rules globally to govern AI. As part of the draft, companies deploying generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems.
Before considering pulling out, OpenAI will try to comply with the regulation in Europe when it is set, Altman said in an event in London.
“The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating, but we have heard it’s going to get pulled back,” he told Reuters. “They are still talking about it.”
The EU parliamentarians reached common ground on the draft of the act earlier this month. It will now be debated between the representatives of the Parliament, the Council and the Commission to thrash out the final details of the bill.
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Putting this down as a marker. As others have said, Altman has both said that he wants regulation, and that he doesn’t want (this) regulation. Well, which is it?
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
There is something about that supposed ChatGPT story which makes me suspicious. I can’t spend much time chasing this down, it’s not worth it, maybe I’m wrong. But, this does not compute to me:
“Is varghese a real case,” he typed, according to a copy of the exchange that he submitted to the judge.
“Yes,” the chatbot replied, offering a citation and adding that it “is a real case.”
Finding out if something is a real case does not have to be taken on trust. It’s not a mysterious art. Cases can be looked up (I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve done it many times). Now, it may not be trivial for non-lawyers to do, since the relevant databases can require expensive subscriptions, and learning the actual process of lookup is indeed specialized knowledge. But it should be trivial for a longtime lawyer working for a law firm.
“Are the other cases you provided fake,” Mr. Schwartz asked.
ChatGPT responded, “No, the other cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases.”
I would think here that the very obvious next step is just to check that the cases do exist in the legal databases. Here’s what strikes me as odd – I readily understand thinking that the cases don’t need to be checked at all, trusting the chatGPT output implicitly. That’s a mistake, but it’s easy to see how to make that mistake, anyone could make it. However, wondering if the cases are real, asking about it, BUT then never checking against the relevant database – that’s where I think something doesn’t fit.