Kevin Drum 🕸

A Southwest jet landing at John Wayne Airport.

It's been quite a week. On Monday everything seemed fine: no fevers, no neurological symptoms, no nothing. So I was discharged from the hospital. The next day I had my last visit to the day hospital, with no problems. After that I had a final consult on Friday, so we hung around the hotel for ...continue reading "Health update"

This is Hilbert, sitting in his box but peering out very suspiciously indeed. Why he feels the need to be suspicious, I couldn't tell you.

This is the mural at the entrance to the MacArthur/Westlake metro station across from MacArthur Park.

Here are the latest CPI inflation rates. As usual, they are month-over-month, recalculated to an annual rate: The headline rate was up in April, but basically still declining on a trendline basis. Core inflation is worse: It's at 5.0% and has been flat for the past six months. Overall, it was a so-so inflation report. ...continue reading "CPI moves sideways in April"

This is the Los Angeles skyline at dusk taken from Angeles Crest Highway. The bright star at the upper right is Venus. Downtown LA is between the two low peaks toward the right.

This is Werner, the bus driver during our tour of the battlefields and cemeteries of Normandy.

A couple of days after we got to City of Hope I headed over to San Marino to take pictures at the Huntington Library. This is a sundial near the front of the botanical gardens. It was, scandalously, half an hour off when I got closer to take a look at it.

I'm fine! In fact, I'm about to be discharged from the hospital back to the hotel. More later.

This is now officially one of the worst experiences of my life. Two of the top three have involved neupogen, a white blood stimulant. In fairness, it worked spectacularly this time around (0.5 to 14.7 in less than 48 hours) but the pain and other side effects were horrible. I'm better now, but this morning ...continue reading "Health update"

Here is Charlie peering out at me from behind the ferns in our backyard. He is hoping in vain for a tuna taco to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. But it is not to be.

This is a bush poppy, I think. I took this photo on the path leading from Angeles Crest Highway to Colby Canyon Falls, which is both pretty and easy to get to. It will probably get even prettier when our massive snowmelt begins in earnest, but I will likely be housebound by then, so I'll ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

More about Clarence Thomas and his seemingly endless stream of gifts from Harlan Crow: “This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years. The ethics lawyer ...continue reading "Yet more on Clarence Thomas"

Jesus. I'm out of it for a couple of days and it turns out that Harlan Crow paid something on the order of $150,000 in private school tuition for Clarence Thomas's grand-nephew, who Thomas raised "like a son." Needless to say, none of this was reported. The best explanation Crow could come up with was ...continue reading "Yet more Clarence Thomas corruption this morning"

I spoke too soon on Sunday. Things were very definitely not back to normal. I spent Monday back at the hotel, where things seemed OK at first. My temperature was elevated, but not in the danger zone, and by bedtime it was down to 99.2. The next morning we trotted over to the Day Hospital ...continue reading "Health update"

April is too early for good Milky Way photography, but during my last trip to the desert I decided to try it out anyway. Right now the Milky Way doesn't rise above the horizon until about 3 am, and even then it's sort of dim. Still, I was out there anyway at 3 am, so ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I feel terrible today. Not in any way that's dangerous, though. The treatment is progressing normally. More details later.

This is a typical weekend crowd along the Seine checking out the famous green bookstalls. These days about half the stalls sell mostly the same mass-produced bits of tourist stuff, but the other half still have interesting specialties (music, art, Romanian poetry, whatever) and are fun to browse around in.

In case you're interested, Bob Carpenter has a short technical explanation of how modern Large Language Models (like GPT-4) work: In a nutshell, language modeling is the simple task of predicting the next subword (“called a token”) based on the previous sequence of subwords. The state-of-the-art had stalled for years on n-gram models that use ...continue reading "A quick primer on how LLMs work"

Here is James Fallows: I think this interp is correct. —Thomas gets all the attention. —But Alito is the one who has defined, and utterly discredited, the current court. Both are resentment-driven. But Alito is resentful about ... what, exactly? https://t.co/9RJIs1DEpv — James Fallows (@JamesFallows) May 1, 2023 Alito has always been by far the ...continue reading "Sam Alito is a hack"