Smart Glasses.

On the brink of new physics. Let's go Mets.

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1. Rose Horowitch:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. (Source: theatlantic.com)

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2. Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them." In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media. This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said. "This synergy between LLMs and reverse face search allows for fully automatic and comprehensive data extraction that was previously not possible with traditional methods alone," their Google document said. Where previously someone could spend substantial time conducting their own search of public databases to find information based on someone's image alone, their dystopian smart glasses do that job in a few seconds. (Sources: arstechnica.com, docs.google.com, 404media.com)

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3. From the Harvard Business Review:

Corporations can spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on legal services. These firms, whose lawyers may cost thousands of dollars per hour, probably don’t feel like legal cost is declining. But this is about to fundamentally shift.

Let’s take the example of commenting on the proposed Treasury Department cryptocurrency rule, which had roughly 100,000 words. At 225 words per minute, it would take the average person almost eight hours just to read the legislation. It might then take them another two to compose a reply. We’re not even talking about analytical time — just the time it takes to digest and formulate a response. With average corporate hourly rates of $500, that 10 hours of work would be $5,000. With more expensive lawyers doing more extensive work, it could be much more.

We shared the proposed cryptocurrency rule with a number of consumer-facing large language models (LLMs), which generated concise, understandable overviews of the proposal in minutes. When we told the LLM to adopt different personas — a Bitcoin broker, a Bitcoin buyer — it explained to us why we should care and drafted comments we could have submitted. This took virtually no time or money.

Imagine if these tools are weaponized against your company. Let’s say you’ve expanded into a new market where a competitor feels threatened and decides to go on the legal offense. They use an AI tool to comb public information about your company and file hundreds of copyright infringement, IP, and trade secret theft cases. The scale means you can’t just ignore it or settle for a nominal amount. (Read the rest. Source: hbr.org)

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4. The Economist:

Traditional methods of diagnosing mental-health conditions require patients to speak directly to a psychiatrist. Sensible in theory, such assessments can, in practice, take months to schedule and ultimately lead to subjective diagnoses.