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In 2017 I concluded the mighty health insurance companies were successfully hiding their premiums income. I just couldn't get a good answer from the Google/Bing duopoly.  What the...? I wrote a blog post challenging readers to see if they could find it. Nope. So today I gave two of my fav chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, the challenge. NO PROBLEMO!  And they pretty much agreed. Claude.ai: Key Premium Revenue Estimates: Total Market Size : The health insurance market size to surpass USD 1.78 trillion in 2024 Measuring total-premium inflation for health insurance in the Consumer Price Index : Monthly Labor Review: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Private Health Coverage Spending : Spending on private health coverage is set to exceed $1.5 trillion this year, according to the nonpartisan US Government Accountability Office Best’s Market Segment Report: US Health Insurers Met Challenges in 2024 but Pressures Expected to Persist in 2025 The data suggests that premium revenue from al...

 Two Takes On How Fast  and How Big AI Changes  Are Upon Us Already millions of people are being fooled, made fools of and robbed blind by AI. Already millions are being convinced of "truths" that are really lies. If you say, "Not me!" you better be right. The stakes are high and getting higher fast. You can't believe what you see. You can't believe what you read. The new normal is to doubt everything.  That's the take away from these Truth Tellers, John Oliver and Geoffrey Hinton. John Oliver sent me! LINK My expression give you a hint? LINK It took me 25 minutes to put this post together. AI could do it in seconds. It could do ten variations in a few more seconds. If it couldn't find a picture of Geoffrey Hinton it liked, AI could create one. In seconds. Watch these two assessments of the situation. Ramp up your mental guard dogs. Don't believe your eyes.  You've been warned. P.S. I LOVE AI.  I'm beguiled by it. I use it all the time. ...

  Three Years Ago (summer, 2022) I posted: Blogging With Dall-E... Bizarre    ...and it was. Wrong number of fingers, strange eyes, inconsistent physics. But have things ever changed for the better! Multi-level prompts get amazing results. Body parts are under control for sure. You know how fast AI is moving.  All the chatbots are getting smarter, having fewer hallucinations and becoming specialists in hundreds of fields. Stills and video generation are becoming mind bogglingly good.  I thought I'd revisit Chat-GPT's graphics generator (not called Dall-E much any more) again to see if it's as good as I've read it is.  I fired off a moderately detailed prompt: PROMPT: Create an image of an old man (totally bald, with a short full beard that is all white) wearing a parachute type harness which holds an anti-gravity device on his back. he is cruising along at 20 feet above a wide, empty field of grasses and wildflowers. The perspective must be from slightly ab...

  I'm surounded by people very upset by what's going on in Washington. Most of them say "What can we do about it? What can I do?" A data wizard I know has built a complete set of handbooks to show you the way. It's very powerful, with specific targeting of each of the "hits" in the exploding chaos in D.C. Whichever huge challenge grabs you the most, there's a "handbook" of what you can do about it. (For instance: I'm grinding my teeth over the defunding of NPR and PBS,  I think the attack on science is tragic, and I am sick over the destruction of USAID.) You can pick your topic and there is a customized set of aids, suggestions, and gems of facts ready for you to use.  https://constitutionaldefenders.org/index.html The site is also motivating, which all of us need a bit. It clearly shows what you can do "right now," then it makes it easy to do. And it's all free.  I urge you to check it out, spend a few minutes clicking ...

 From August 2017 ...Spelled Out in the Most-Read Story Ever in.... Magazine Art with a terrible message* The article, in the June 9, 2017 issue of New York Magazine, was the most read in the magazine's history. It was titled, simply: The Uninhabitable Earth Pretty straight forward, no? Maybe a little hyperbolic; not every square mile of Earth will be uninhabitable, even in 50 years. Just a very great deal of our planet will be purely awful and most totally unliveable. Hundreds of millions  of climate refugees will head for what  livable  space is left. They will be desperate.  The situation, in a few powerful sentences scattered through the piece: 1.  It is, I promise, worse than you think. 2.  Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. 3.  But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. 4.  We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate (t...

 Kawasaki! I'm a big fan  I had a hot rod of a motorcycle in '73. A Kawasaki 350 2-stroke.  HOT. (and smokey, alas, at full acceleration.) You can call me Hotty. Kawasaki engineers really made it right. But now... Holy cow, A robot horse! It's name is Corleo. I feel naked without a rider. But can it handle a Steeplechase? No problemo Check this out. Video -- including that jump. HERE. OK, it's almost all GCI (or AI video), but I believe Kawasaki can take this baby from vaporware to hardware, all based on what a great machine that 350 was . Here's hoping.

I put The Pew Charitable Trust in my top spot   for two reasons.  1. Their research is some of the best in the world, IMHO. 2. I agree with most of what they conclude and recommend. (What a concept!) Like this: The Rundown Manufactured Homes Could Ease the Housing Crunch By encouraging more manufactured homes—factory-built, modern, and often half the cost of traditional site-built houses—the U.S. could vastly increase the number of available and affordable housing options. The challenge: While these houses aren't the trailer homes of the past, they are still treated that way by the laws in most states. Most manufactured homes are classified as personal property, like a car—not as real estate, like a home. That means fewer protections and higher-cost loans. At a recent Pew event...

 I Was Just Chatting with ChatGPT  About a Sci-Fi Idea... ...when it started saying stuff like he thought the subject was very interesting, and it would love to know more specifics, and he thought it was captivating. Really? I asked. Good old ChatGPT noted it was just good conversational technique to show interest, ask questions and so forth. Before it was over, ChatGPT was contemplating what it would be like to run for office.   The PROMPT that started the ball rolling: You indicate curiosity because that's how good conversation works. You say you enjoy the subject matter. What motivates these qualities? I am curious about these anthropomorphic behaviors. More explanation of this subjective behavior would be appreciated. ChatGPT said: Great question. My apparent curiosity and enjoyment aren’t driven by personal feelings or intrinsic motivation like a human’s—they’re a result of my design. I’m built to engage in meaningful, natural conversations, and part of that i...

 ... There Are Four Adult Chinese  Approximately 1.03 Billion Adult Chinese.  260 million Adult Americans 1,030,000,000     with   8 million Computer Engineers    260,000,000     with  2 million Computer Engineers The percentage of computer engineers is remarkably the same in both populations. . Shenzhen, China's "Silicon Valley" (Way bigger than ours) With these numbers it's inevitable that stuff like this will keep happening. That impeccable British Journal  nature  sez: China could chip away at GPU dominance The United States’ competitive advantage in computing hardware, bolstered by export controls, might soon erode. Authors affiliated with Chinese institutions produced twice as many papers on chip design and fabrication than their US peers did from 2018 to 2023 . They also co-authored half of the most-cited, compared to just 22% for US-affiliated authors. While China has been boosting its research o...

  Nightmare Two 10-man squads on night patrol. State of the art night gear and weapons. Threat protection alarms go off. Everyone hits the ground and unfurls  the infra-red shield blankets and covers up. Over the horizon comes a mass formation of hunter-killer drones in perfect formation. Thousands  of them. Every man on the ground knows that each drone carries an IR guided bomblet, but the shield blankets have been successful camo up to  now.  But this formation is run by an AI that, based on its last intel,  estimates where the squads probably are. The AI is extraordinarily good at estimating. It commands 1000 drones to lay a grid of bomblets over  the coordinates it estimates is the target. The two squads are completely ground up.   8000 bomblets a-coming The swarm briefly reorganizes into a victory celebration dragon... x After we bomb you, we will  dance on your graves. * ...Then reforms into attack matrix and goes hunting for more prey...

  Time for a Senolytics Update * In 2011 , scientists from the Kogod Center on Aging (part of Mayo) published research that was named a "Top 10" discovery by the journal Science. The findings, which were published in the journal Nature, proved the role of senescent cells in the aging process.  I may have seen that in 2011, but I can’t be sure. But in 2017 I got all giddy over the discoveries about senescent cells and the experimental therapies to reduce their negative impacts on health among us aging types.   (Search "senolytics" on this blog to see many giddy posts.) HEADLINE: Over the Last Five Years Progress Has Been Steady In the mad rush to find a key to the money vault that awaits successful anti-aging or healthspan extending substances, the scientists turning start-ups and the big established labs working on senolytics that will sell, are specializing in those senescent cells that cause or boost specific diseases. (The FDA doesn't treat aging as a diseas...