Knocking At The Gate

  This article by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards in Pro Publica reveals that t he raids on federal agencies have come to the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, unlawfully "canceling" millions of dollars of in research contracts. The AI-slinging team of course has no idea what they're doing — not only do they not understand the policies they are undermining, but they don't even seem to understand the data they are feigning to analyze. Snatching a gigantic database with elements coded for machine tabulation and then running it willy-nilly through language-based LLMs will inevitably produce nonsensical results, but the team doing it are hooting and hollering because they think they've accomplished something. It would have been efficient to simply ask the data scientists in charge of those databases what they wanted to see, but the new administration has committed itself to ignoring experts. What the team of invaders almo...