About Perplexity

Some months ago, I became aware of Perplexity, an AI powered search engine at https://www.perplexity.ai/ . Initially it didn't seem to be interesting after trying Microsoft's AI Copilot chatbot and getting disappointing results. However, Google's regular search algorithm was giving back less useful, more irrelevant results over time. 

Google's deterioration in search result quality prompted regular but occasional Perplexity searches, the results of which were hit or miss, but usually reasonably good hits. With time, my ability to ask questions and follow-up questions got more sophisticated and on-point. With less room for misinterpretation of my questions, Perplexity's results generally got better. By now, more than half of my searches are with Perplexity, not standard Google. That was quite unexpected. I had been primarily using Google search since the early 2000s and did not expect that anything could displace it.

Using AI raises some questions. One is energy use by AI compared to standard searches. A traditional Google search query uses approximately 0.0003 kWh (1.08 kJ) of energy. By contrast, an AI-powered search query uses about 10 times more energy. 1 kJ is the energy dissipated as heat with an electric current of one ampere passing through a resistance of one ohm for one second. Anyway, the amount of energy use for AI searching is huge. If most online searching converts to AI, gigantic amounts of new electricity generation will be needed.

Another is who owns Perplexity. Perplexity AI is a privately-owned startup company founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Aravind Srinivas currently serves as the CEO of Perplexity. The company raised a total of $165 million in funding as of 2024. The company reached a valuation of over $1 billion in 2024, making it a "unicorn" startup. Notable investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Nat Friedman, and Garry Tan, among others. I don't know anything about those owners but they could wind up being a new batch of billionaires. That makes them potentially important politically and socially.

FWIW, some of the wonks over at r/lexfridman are impressed with the depth of knowledge that Srinivas has. 

Another issue with AI is when it gets answers wrong, it can be really wrong. It is best to know something about what you ask for so that a bad answer can be more easily spotted. If you know nothing about what you ask about, checking some of the links to information sources is needed. But even then, AI can sneak bad answers past a person. One problem with AI is that it usually isn't as good as a person at summarizing information. An article about research in Australia on AI search results commented that "AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information."

I found the same with some of my searches. However, searches with little or no nuance, e.g., recitation of science facts or calculations, have been reliable for me so far. 

One weakness is searches that ask about commercial products. AI tends to rely on what companies says about their own products. That can easily lead to false answers. One example was a query about the publisher of clinical evidence about the sleep aid Relaxium Sleep, an over the counter product that recently started advertising on TV. I asked Perplexity if the publisher, Annex Publishers, was a reputable science source. Perplexity said it was a good publisher. Based on the Relaxium clinical sleep data, I knew the publisher was fly-by-night crap and the Relaxium people were quacks. 

So I posed a follow-up question asking why Perplexity said Annex Publishers was reputable when in fact it published low quality to fraudulent science data. That apparently prompted Perplexity to change its search parameters to look for indicia of high quality science publishing, not to take the propaganda Annex put out about itself. The new answer was that Annex indeed was a source of low quality science information, which its publishing guidelines made clear.

From what I can tell, it looks like AI search really could come to dominate online search. At this point, I presume I am a beta tester for Perplexity and sooner or later, the searches will need to be monetized either by larding answers up with ads or by charging people to use the energy-guzzling search engine. 

I'm not sure what I will do when that day comes. I'll figure it out then. But at least now I can clearly see how AI could and probably will become a huge deal.

Tim Walz, not masculine enough.

 You heard it here first people. Tim Walz is not masculine. How do we know this?

Fox News’ Jesse Watters dismissed Tim Walz’s “masculinity” by pointing to the Minnesota governor drinking milkshakes on the campaign trail Wednesday.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/critics-shake-off-jesse-watters-065230731.html

He continued, “The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”

Walz used a straw for a milkshake. Fox News is absolutely right to attack his masculinity.

Straws, as all the bros banging plates around down at the gym will tell you, are the least-masculine way for a man to drink a vanilla ice cream shake.

Not clear how Tim Walz's masculinity will recover from 'strawgate'

More important, the sharp-eyed Watters absolutely NAILED Walz by noticing that he was consuming his vanilla ice cream shake with – and if you have male children in the room, make sure they don’t hear this – a straw.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/09/05/tim-walz-milkshake-masculinity-jesse-watters-straw-fox-news/75089097007/

Meanwhile, seems Jesse Watters missed this................

Some religious musings…

This is kinda long, so bear with me.

I was looking back through some of the hardcopy correspondence I had many years ago with my Christian stepkids.  Here’s an interesting little tidbit I found, and presented them with: 

Well, that’s quite the “story.”  I don’t know about you, but my head is still spinning. 😵

Questions:

1. Is that all this chronology is, a “story?”  Metaphor woven into something humans can relate to (complete with protagonist, antagonist, hero, foil, etc.)?

2. Other than my overly dramatic style (which I pride myself in 😉), what did I get wrong there in my writeup?  Not nuanced enough?  There are missing details that really matter?

3. What kind of person gives this bizarre scenario a pass; that is to say, willingly accepts it with no questions asked?

Make sense of this God story for me (something I would call the main premise of the Bible), because I’m at a loss.  No offense but I’m just calling it like I see it.  I’m sayin’ there seems to be only one perverted/mixed up/confused Character in this story (no Names mentioned 🤐).

Bible Title Redux

What would you rename the Bible:

• God… Profile of a Psychopath?  Or,
• God… An exercise in the workings of the human psyche?  Or,
• God… Other [your reduxed title here]

(by PrimalSoup)

Bits: Kavanaugh Hearing; DJT explicitly admits losing in 2020; Arrogant oligarchs & their bad science

This 46 second video from the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing is good to know about.

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Lots of reporting about what DJT says is his usually language ambiguous language. He uses ambiguity to give him room to weasel out of what he says in case he makes a boo-boo. But this time, he unambiguously said that he lost the 2020 election to Biden. At ~0:10 to 0:32 of this 5:22 video, DJT says he lost "by a whisker", which is actually true.

"I lost" -- WTF??

Here DJT publicly denies his core lie. Stolen election!! That was the lie that underpinned his 1/6 coup attempt and has dominated his rhetoric since the 2020 election. That is why red states have been frantically passing voter suppression and election subversion laws, purging voter rolls and getting rid of voter data collection and analysis. They intend to steal the 2024 election in secrecy. 

Q: Will DJT and/or his campaign pull a classic DJT and respond with something like this?

Of course not. 

He obviously said what he didn't say!

Honestly, DJT may still believe it never was a lie. I guess that converts his assertion from bullshit (not a lie, which is knowing and intentional) to a mere falsehood. Stay tuned, politics fans. More malarkey to come. 

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Various sources have been reporting that billionaires see themselves as genetically superior and want elites like themselves to rule the world. One source reports:

Elon Musk has used his large platform on X to promote a theory that a free-thinking “Republic” could only exist under the decision-making of “high status males” – and women or “low T men” would not be welcome in it.

On Sunday, Musk re-posted a screenshot of the theory – which appears to have been conceived on 4chan in 2021– on the social media site.

The theory, written by an anonymous user, suggests that the only people able to think freely are “high [testostrone] alpha males” and “aneurotypical people”, and that these “high status males” should run a “Republic” that is “only for those who are free to think.”

“People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism,” the post reads.

“Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective ‘is this true?’ filter,” it adds. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”

“Aneurotypical” is not a word but one can assume the original poster meant neurodivergent people.

Another reports:

Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’

Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.

“I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn’t fix the problem, we could be gone,” Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.

Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents’ calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.

Aw, ain't that cute. But why only 8? How about 14? We can only hope that little Octavian, Titan Invictus, and Torsten will soon be joined by little Hercules, Artemis, Tiberius, Athena, Genghis, Loki, Ereshkigal, Augustus, Tiamat, Vlad the Impaler, and Donald Trump Jr. Jr. in the family herd. After they grow up, they will each make their own herd of genetically superior oligarchs! 

Ahhh! Hordes of genetically superior elites!

The pile of diapers is crushing me!

Another criticism of the MSM reporting on DJT

LGBQT Nation published an opinion blasting the MSM, especially the NYT for failing to properly report about DJT by normalizing him:

The mainstream media has totally failed to live up to 

the challenge of covering Donald Trump

The media, led by The New York Times, keeps downplaying Trump's scandals and lies, making him look normal

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the scene, the mainstream media has struggled with how to deal with him as a candidate. At first, they were enchanted by his sheer weirdness, which made for great copy and footage. But when Trump flooded the field with lies, they couldn’t bring themselves to use the term. They used “falsehoods” or “claims without evidence.” Most of all, they treated Trump as if he were just like any other candidate, even when he was anything but.

You would think that by the third time around, the media would have learned its lesson. If anything, the media has gotten worse. This election cycle, reporters at major outlets seem to be going out of their way to treat Trump ever-so-gently, normalizing his most dangerous behavior.

Perhaps the worst offender is the self-appointed paper of record, The New York Times. When the scandal broke about Trump illegally filming for a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery last week – while his aides physically assaulted a worker – the Times reported that the “campaign clashed with an official” at the cemetery, which downplayed just how brazen Trump’s actions were. The paper then followed up with another story about how Trump “returns to the politics of forever wars,” as if that was the story instead of how the Trump campaign broke the law prohibiting using the hallowed ground for political purposes.

In short, the politics became the story, not the scandal.

Or look at the paper’s coverage of Trump’s cognitive decline.

Oh, wait. That was just reserved for Joe Biden.

Instead, the Times decided to run a story about Trump’s truly bizarre rantings at his rallies. They didn’t question the stability of someone who worries about being eaten by sharks or praises Hannibal Lecter. Rather, they came up with this humdinger of an appraisal: “It is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills, and Rosie O’Donnell.”

Who are we kidding here? Trump’s inability to think linearly hints at cognitive issues. He is now the oldest candidate to run for president. Instead of a serious look at whether he’s displaying exactly the kind of problems that the Times took Biden to task for, the paper came up with a cutesy little piece that quotes English professors instead of geriatricians.

Reporters think that criticism is a sign that they are doing their job. They have the same sense of infallibility as the pope does.

But the fact is that the press has spent the past nine years normalizing a man who is not normal. They treat him like any other candidate – indeed, better than any other candidate. If Kamala Harris did a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, the press would be all over her. Never mind a credible story about a $10 million cash bribe from Egypt. You probably haven’t heard about that one, but that’s another Trump story that has come and gone over the past few weeks.

The scandals, the increasingly bizarre behavior, the felonies, the insurrection – it’s all too much to fit into that template. So it falls by the wayside. When it comes to the task of telling the truth, too much of the mainstream media isn’t up to the job.

That speaks for itself. Disappointingly, the opinion did not mention DJT's kleptocratic authoritarianism. He is not just abnormal. He is far worse than merely abnormal. In my opinion, commentary like this is significantly deficient if those two aspects of his character is not at least mentioned when it is appropriate to a piece of reporting or commentary. 

I give this criticism a rating of semi-woke but acceptable.

Law school: What about rights the constitution is silent about?

What happens to rights not enumerated (explicitly stated) in the constitution? Do does that power flow automatically to the people, congress, the president or the USSC? Some legal scholars argue that unenumerated rights flow to the people. The Bill of Rights seems to be in accord with that assessment. The 9th Amendment reads as follows:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The 9th is one of the original 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights. The 9th makes it clear that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are not an exhaustive list, and that people retain other rights not specifically mentioned. However, the Supreme Court usually treats the Ninth Amendment as a guiding principle rather than a source of substantive rights, something I have never understood. The courts acknowledge the existence of unenumerated rights, but the 9th does not specify what those rights are or how they should be determined. This has leads to debate and interpretation in legal and political spheres about what constitutes a fundamental right deserving of constitutional protection. From what I can tell, there is no good way to distinguish a fundamental right from a non-fundamental one, and the USSC has been reluctant to "find" fundamental rights the Constitution protects.  

So, what about abortion, same sex marriage, the right to marry generally, privacy, contraception, interstate travel, procreation, custody of a person's children, vote, control of important decisions about one's health care or body, and slew of other things? None of those are mentioned in the constitution. 

Before the Roe v Wade decision in 1972, the states regulated abortion. After Roe, the court found a right to an abortion, but put a limit on it, allowing the states to regulate abortion of late term pregnancies. Basically, the Roe court gave most of the scope of a right to an abortion to the people. The states were left with a small portion of that right. It was a compromise that tipped the balance of power to the people, but left power to regulate late term abortions to the states. The court decided there was a right to abortion in the shadow of the right to privacy and under the 14th Amendment due process clause (reasoning that never made much sense to me). 

So, what about how the self-professed, freedom-loving radical right authoritarian Republicans think about and deal with these things? After I slapped it once, Perplexity said this:

Q: Republicans have recently restricted abortion rights, an unenumerated right, so why do you say that there are no recent examples of Republicans specifically asserting that unenumerated rights, such as abortion, are subject to federal or state regulation?

A: I apologize for the confusion in my previous response. You are correct, and I should have interpreted the search results more accurately. Let me provide a more appropriate answer based on the information available. Recent examples show that Republicans have indeed asserted that abortion rights, which are considered unenumerated rights, are subject to federal or state regulation. In 2022, the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, supported by Republican-appointed justices, effectively allowed states to regulate abortion. Following this decision, Republican-led states have enacted various abortion restrictions, demonstrating their belief that this unenumerated right is subject to state regulation. Although former President Trump has recently stated he would leave abortion laws to the states, this shift in position contradicts previous Republican efforts to restrict abortion at the federal level, including a 20-week abortion ban passed by House Republicans during Trump's presidency.

That makes perfect sense. Authoritarians want power to accrue to elites and capturable (corruptible) governments, while draining it from democratic, pro-civil liberty governments and the people. State governments are much more easily captured than a national government. Although they claim to support democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law and the Constitution, authoritarian American institutions such as DJT, his MAGA, the morally rotted GOP and Christian nationalist theocrats oppose all of that.

In essence, American radical right authoritarianism has turned the Constitution on its head. It wants to give power to captured governments and courts that elites can mostly or almost completely control. Authoritarianism has to do that because the Constitution is inherently pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian by virtue of the 9th and other Amendments. That those Amendment have to be subverted.

From what I can tell, our Constitution is ossified and needs updating. Unfortunately, it is impossible to change it by proposed congressional amendments. Our society is too bitterly divided. And, efforts to change it could make it less democratic and more hostile to civil liberties than it is now. That's what the American authoritarian wealth and power movement wants to do by calling for a Convention of States. Since each state gets only 1 vote on each proposed constitutional amendment, this would favor rural states. Authoritarians want to use that to neuter civil liberties and laws they dislike, primarily laws that interfere with wealth and power accumulation by elites.