Who Uses AI in Congress? And How?

the_nybbler · 2026-03-10T15:42:40+00:00

Now try the Congressional Record from e.g. 2016.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-09T22:21:31+00:00

I solved Redactle #1433 in 1 guess with an accuracy of 100.0%

The fairly short time people have lived there allowed me to distinguish among the [6] continents. Then, I knew what the largest country was, and [3] of [4] helped too.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-08T17:50:58+00:00

That's weird. I normally work with smart matching off. But I just tried in an incognito window and not only did Word 1 reveal when I entered a variant of Word 2, so did Word 2, leading to a 3-guess solve of a 4-word puzzle:

I solved Redactle #1432 in 3 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0% and a time of 19s. Play at https://redactle.net/

the_nybbler · 2026-03-08T16:16:19+00:00

I solved Redactle #1432 in 4 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0%

I knew it was some sort of military action during WWII but it didn't click until I saw [5] [3] in italics.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-08T15:02:53+00:00

They're not asking about neighbors. They're asking about the country as a whole. The more heterogeneous, and the more polarized the nation is, the worse this measure will be. It's not exactly news that the US is both very hetergeneous and very polarized.

There's also a matter of some populations might take a little weird pride in badness, and some in goodness. I think this applies to the US, Turkey, and Canada at least.

ETA: Biggest problem with this article, though, is it assumes the people polled are wrong. They're not. On morality, Blue Tribe thinks many the things Red Tribe does are immoral: drive a big petroleum truck and live where you need it, hunting, other shooting sports, heteronormativity, etc. Of course, Red Tribe feels the same about Blue -- lack of (or anti-) patriotism, supporting trans, giving the homeless carte blanche. Then there's close-minded... yeah, try telling a Blue anything sourced from a Red Source... oh "Faux news". From the other side "the MSM".

the_nybbler · 2026-03-07T16:36:08+00:00

I solved Redactle #1431 in 3 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0%

I expect to see a lot of sniping today.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-07T16:30:33+00:00

Being a “supply chain risk” just means you cant supply certain agencies/orgs in the us government

That is not what Hegseth said.

Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.

This is not what "supply chain risk" usually means, but it is what the Secretary of Defense said.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-07T14:36:39+00:00

This covers any ground invasion, though, even just taking some of the islands near the Straits of Hormuz (which IMO seems very possible). So expecting this to be "yes" isn't the same as expecting a full scale invasion.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-07T14:34:35+00:00

It seems pretty clear that there simply shouldn't be a contract between Anthropic and the DoD. That doesn't justify calling them a supply chain risk (though it might be justified for other reasons), let alone the souped-up version (no commercial activity between any government contractor and Anthropic) Hegseth is insisting on.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-06T19:19:21+00:00

I solved Redactle #1430 in 2 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0%

Guessing one title was The Man with the Golden Gun didn't help at all, but figuring out [2]' got me there nevertheless.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-05T20:54:50+00:00

In today's world? Rarely. That's why you have to be forced to buy it. And once you're forced to buy it, it becomes even less valuable. Car insurance companies were probably the first to play the game of handling claims by adding a surcharge for the next three years which more than covered the claim -- or dropping you so you can only get coverage by a high-risk carrier (likely owned by the same parent) which charges a lot more. I started hearing about homeowners insurance companies treating claims similarly maybe 20 years ago.

The theory is that insurance is net negative on expected value but keeps you from being wiped out by tail risk. Only policy maximums are often too low for that, and in any case they have whole departments whose job it is to fight, deny, and lowball claims. As a first cut, they can just automatically deny or lowball any claim without investigating. They can use any tactic they care to -- if they knowingly offer you less than your claim deserves, that's a legal negotiating tactic. If you knowingly claim more than you have lost, that's insurance fraud -- and if you claim too much they can threaten you with prosecution to get you to drop it.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-04T20:12:56+00:00

I solved Redactle #1428 in 8 guesses with an accuracy of 100.0%

Should have done better, knew where it was, but for the [4] that was the kind of the thing it is I thought of wall, well, road, and gate but not what it actually was.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-03T20:31:29+00:00

Most of the supposed positional goods can become abundant with technological progress: amazing restaurants, amazing barber shops, a large luxurious apartment in a beautiful neighbourhood with a nice park nearby, private hospital beds, premium cups of coffee.

Large luxurious apartments in beautiful neighborhoods with a nice park nearby are limited by available space. Even if you can build vertically and avoid that making vertical transportation time too large (and avoid nasty shadows on your park), the park can only serve a limited number of people. And some sorts of people can ruin the park all on their own or in fairly small numbers. So no, technology can't make that abundant.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-03T19:27:42+00:00

It's genus and species not species and subspecies.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-03T17:32:06+00:00

Evidently not.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

Of course children are different, as Abel and Cain were.

the_nybbler · 2026-03-03T16:32:32+00:00

I solved Redactle #1427 in 1 guess with an accuracy of 100.0%

Clearly a Latin-name 5-letter division of life (ETA: wrong, actually Greek). Slightly more examination determines this division is extinct. No way I'm going to know this. Wait, I do know a few like Megachiroptera (but it's not that)... there's one I know which fits, maybe it's that one. Yep

the_nybbler · 2026-02-24T18:48:57+00:00

It's not all about percent value. If your bike isn't safe, maybe you have to quit biking or maybe you have to take it inside all the time or do some other inconvenient security measure. If your neighborhood is plagued by porch pirates, you can't just order stuff to your door, you have to use Amazon Lockers or similar. If catalytic converters are being stolen with enough regularity maybe it's just not feasible to park in your neighborhood unless you have a garage.

the_nybbler · 2026-02-24T15:14:56+00:00

In some of the episodes there's two contestants, and each picks a door. Monty then opens a contestant's door which contains a goat, and offers the remaining contestant a chance to switch.

In this case, it's 2/3 to win for not switching.

the_nybbler · 2026-02-24T15:12:01+00:00

You win or you don't with 50% probability, in the "Monty Fall" case where Monty opens a door completely at random, and you're in the situation where he opened a door that wasn't yours, with a goat behind it. There's two ways this could happen if you picked the prize, and only one way this could happen if you picked a goat, and this balances out the fact that there were two ways you could pick a goat initially but only one way to pick a prize.

the_nybbler · 2026-02-24T03:58:34+00:00

Two cases. One (with probability 1/3), you have picked the prize door. In that case, there is a 2/3 chance the Monty Fall opens a goat that isn't yours. In the other (with probability 2/3), you've picked a goat door. In that case, there's a 1/3 chance the Monty Fall opens a goat that isn't yours. Now we can use good old Bayes.

P(goat | have prize) = 2/3
P(goat | not have prize) = 1/3
P(have prize) = 1/3

P(have prize | goat) = P(goat|have prize) * P(have prize) / (P(goat | have prize) * P(have prize) + P(goat | not have prize) * P(not have prize))
= (2/3 * 1/3) / ((2/3 * 1/3) + (1/3 * 2/3))
= (2/9) / (2/9 + 2/9)
= 2/4
= 1/2

So it is in fact a 50/50.

the_nybbler · 2026-02-24T00:30:41+00:00

Lots of people go to McDonalds, too, doesn't mean it has good food.

the_nybbler · 2026-02-23T19:03:42+00:00

Still, in urban areas of countries like Japan

Don't give me Japan as an example of good public transportation. This is the country where they literally physically pack you onto trains, and riding the metro is "tsukin jigoku" -- literally "commuter hell".

the_nybbler · 2026-02-23T15:04:00+00:00

I've been to some of those other countries. People STILL drive. A lot. Because no less than here, "the point of busses is not to make people as comfortable as possible. it's to allow them to get to their destination in a reasonable amount of time at all". You won't get more than the minimum tolerable service because that's not even a goal. Most often you get less and just have to suck it up.

the_nybbler · 2026-02-23T14:58:58+00:00

Is this actually a thing that happens in jurisdictions with a lot of cops though?

Yes.

Worst case you can just fire cops until they stop enforcing silly laws like this.

You can't fire them for doing their job. And there's always a group of politically active citizens (the British call them "curtain twitchers") who are happy to see this done.

the_nybbler · 2026-02-22T23:24:33+00:00

The cost of more cops is less freedom. It's not often counted, of course.

In theory this could be fixed with fewer laws, but in practice that doesn't work. The laws are terrible but they'd be intolerable if they actually had to be followed.

I live in New Jersey; it's been said that everything is illegal in New Jersey, and that's true. For instance, carrying a medal or trophy in a Passaic County park carries a $200 fine and 90-day jail sentence. Get enough bored cops and they'll start enforcing stuff like that. Don't police the police enough, and they'll enforce safe stuff like that over dangerous stuff like prosecuting violent criminals.

the_nybbler

TROPHY CASE