And by the way, did you know that among the many types of inlets'firth, ria, bayou, bight'stands the mighty seapoose' A seapoose is, very specifically, a shallow inlet along the shore of Long Island'you know, as in that old Southampton idiom 'Any seapoose in a storm.'...
Readers' faith in publications and writers relies on a belief that the information provided is true and accurate to the best of the writer's knowledge. When I get something wrong, I owe it to you to correct myself. Today, I have that unpleasant task. For years, I have argued that the idea of balancing the budget by eliminating government 'waste, fraud, and abuse' was a canard. In 2020, I wrote that 'there really isn't that much waste, fraud, and abuse in the system.' In 2024, when President-Elect Trump announced the creation of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, I said that the phrase was a meme with no real substance to it'Trump claimed DOGE would save money in part by weeding out fraudulent uses of social services, an unrealistic strategy based on an exaggerated problem. Politicians invoked the phrase waste, fraud, and abuse because no one could possibly be against those things, but for the same reason, those things would have been eliminated long ago if they were common and easy to spot....
Just in time to create a new Super Bowl ad, Crypto.com founder Kris Marszalek has made the priciest domain purchase in history, buying AI.com for $70 million, according to the Financial Times. The deal, paid entirely in cryptocurrency to an unknown seller, shatters previous records. (Broker Larry Fischer, who facilitated the sale, is presumably celebrating his good fortune.) Marszalek plans to debut the site during Sunday's big game, offering consumers a personal AI agent for messaging, app usage, and stock trading. 'If you take a long-term view ' 10 to 20 years ' [AI] is going to be one of the greatest technological waves of our lifetime,' he told the FT. The purchase rewrites the domain record books ' not that crypto industry itself is known for its restraint when it comes to spending. Previously, CarInsurance.com held the crown at $49.7 million (2010), followed by VacationRentals.com ($35 million in 2007) and Voice.com ($30 million in 2019). Other eye-popping sales include PrivateJet.com ($30 million), 360.com ($17 million), and Sex.com, which has sold twice for over $13 million each time, though its second owner went bankrupt trying to monetize it....
Large language models (LLMs) can pass postgraduate medical examinations and help clinicians to make diagnoses, at least in controlled benchmarking tests. But are they useful in real-world settings, which have too few physicians to check the answers, as well as long patient lists and limited resources' Two studies published in Nature Health on 6 February suggest that they are up to the task. The work reveals that cheap-to-use LLMs can boost diagnostic success rates, even outperforming trained clinicians, in health-care settings in Rwanda1 and Pakistan2. In Rwanda, chatbot answers outscored those of local clinicians across every metric assessed. And in Pakistan, physicians using LLMs to aid their diagnosis achieved a mean diagnostic reasoning score of 71%, versus 43% for those using conventional resources. 'The papers highlight how LLMs might be able to support clinicians in lower- and middle-income countries to improve the level of care,' says Caroline Green, director of research at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, UK....
