How do we know the AI output is accurate? What observable evidence is there? From the article:
> Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. ...
> The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have to be identified. ...
> After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It's easier said than done - both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they're almost indistinguishable from each other.
> So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light.
LegionMammal978 36 days ago [-]
The ML ink-detection models aren't spitting out Greek text. They're just predicting ink locations, which can be calibrated and cross-checked by manual inspection with the original. (E.g., an earlier article showed how ink particles showed up as a shift in texture.) They operate on a lower level than letters and words, so if the ink does correspond to Greek letters that come out to recognizable Greek words forming sensible passages, it's good evidence that the output is correct.
Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors.
teleforce 36 days ago [-]
I think this is where most of the ML/AI practitioners need to focus on.
Instead of obsessing over other accuracy technique for fully autonomous detection they should focus on human assisted detection to improve the quality/value of the solution. In this case recall/sensitivity is the utmost important accuracy metric and try to get it closer to 100% if possible. Hence even if the ML/AI got it wrong (due to false positive detection), at least the human experts can have a look at it and hopefully eliminate any false positive. It also considerably reduce the burden of the upstream manual based inspection/automation since it is machine automated. This can also mitigate and hopefully prevent false negative detection because false negative detection will not has the opportunity for further inspection/verification by the human experts or trained inspectors. Essentially the AI/ML is functioning as the filter shifting through the massive data very quickly (with minimum or zero false negative), and then the results are then verified by the much slower human experts.
ctrlp 36 days ago [-]
Very clever
mmooss 36 days ago [-]
> Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors.
That's often an argument for AI systems: Is it better than humans (than avoiding car accidents, reading text, reading x-rays, etc.). But in science we need observable evidence.
StableAlkyne 36 days ago [-]
> But in science we need observable evidence.
The observable evidence here is the raw x-ray data. Based on the article, what is being done here was using ML to process that X-ray data, to create another set of output that the humans could analyze.
I understand jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon, but this ain't ChatGPT. Using ML to process complex instrument output has been used since at least the 70s. This is much closer to statistics based approaches than it is to some random startup trying to sell your manager on some snake oil AI-assisted whatever.
I don't know your background, so I'm sorry if I'm assuming anything. Any chance you articulate what specifically you don't like about the method they used to process the data, other than "It's ML?"
mmooss 35 days ago [-]
> I understand jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon
Why be an asshole? What do you accomplish? I now have zero interest in what you have to say. I stopped there.
StableAlkyne 35 days ago [-]
No animosity was meant there, friend. Completely above board, I get that a lot of people see "ML" and jump to conclusions given the hype around "AI" in the last couple of years.
mmooss 35 days ago [-]
> No animosity was meant there
Lol. That only supports my original assessment. Bye!
LegionMammal978 36 days ago [-]
We have plenty of observable evidence that the output of these detection models correponds to real ink residue, at least on one of the scrolls where the distinct texture is most obvious [0]. The models definitely aren't making things up out of pure noise.
And if they did, then it almost certainly wouldn't come out as identifiable Greek letters, since these models are strictly looking at local patches of texture to identify the presence or absence of ink. Again, these aren't just black boxes spitting out long passages of Greek text, everything past the initial ink detection is still done by hand.
The question is, do the researchers use the ML/AI system to discover and identify likely text - which could be great - or do they use its output conclusively?
In fairness, the paper may answer that question but I don't have time now ...
coffeebeqn 36 days ago [-]
Things like OCR or detection ML models don’t generally have the same drawbacks / hallucinations as LLMs for example. They’re not 100% accurate but they also won’t return made up results. Detecting a pattern is very different from any kind of “reasoning”
ben_w 36 days ago [-]
Two things:
1. OCR absolutely does "hallucinate", and the word better suits that domain of OCR than the domain of LLMs as OCR will sometimes "see" text that doesn't actually exist.
2. This isn't OCR, it's more like contrast enhancement on a CT scan. Looking at a the project website, there's other work to figure out the shape of the paper surface because that's not obvious or simple either.
The output of this model is what might be given to an OCR, but given how noisy the picture in the article is, I suspect not.
omoikane 36 days ago [-]
> How do we know the AI output is accurate?
From the blog post where they announced 2023 grand prize: they did a couple of things to verify the results, including scanning the same area multiple times and making sure that multiple models produce similar results.
They also created their own scroll, cooked it, and scanned it to create a ground truth dataset.
mmooss 35 days ago [-]
I'm sure they work to improve the accuracy of the output but it's not 'truth' unless it's the same data - which of course is impractical.
That is, unless 'truth' means something different in ML, which would be troubling!
luma 33 days ago [-]
Ground truthing does in fact mean something different in ML but I’m not clear on how that is troubling.
mmooss 33 days ago [-]
If I understand you, AI/ML is redefining "truth" from facts of reality to whatever the input (or maybe the internal state) says. It's corrupt, a lie, and will obviously output inaccuracies - but only inaccurate by reality's standard!
HPsquared 36 days ago [-]
It's doing a search operation, which AI is fantastic at. The operator can then verify the output.
That CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.
SV_BubbleTime 36 days ago [-]
I get the ideologues here being mad… but I don’t get mad to the point where people need to pretend this guy isn’t highly intelligent. Doesn’t it make it better that there are really sharp people on the “DOGE” team.
Shouldn’t people be more mad at dummies doing it?
xhevahir 36 days ago [-]
It's good that smart people are involved if we take it at face value that they're trying increase "government efficiency," as opposed to, say, dismantling the welfare and regulatory state; if the latter are their aim, and if we don't want them to accomplish such a goal, we should not be cheered to learn that they're such clever lads.
generalizations 36 days ago [-]
> dismantling the welfare and regulatory state
Pretty sure that's exactly what the US voted for in the last election, considering that was pretty explicitly promised. I think most of the US is cheering them on as they do it.
seanmcdirmid 36 days ago [-]
That's what 49.8% of the voters voted for. So not really "most" for any reasonable meaning of the term "most".
briandear 36 days ago [-]
People don’t elect presidents, states do, and states elected Trump with a 312 to 226 electoral vote margin — so the states overwhelmingly voted for Trump. The purpose of the United States federal government is very strictly spelled out — and the 10th amendment makes it very clear that powers not expressly mentioned in the Constitution are reserved for the states. The U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.
seanmcdirmid 35 days ago [-]
Electoral votes don’t support a president’s agenda, people do. Being underwater already at the beginning of his term means the other politicians that have to work with him (who also have to get elected) are more under pressure not to. That’s why not having the support of most voters is relevant in Trump getting things done. Grand parent basically said this guy has a mandate from the American people and he really doesn’t. Heck, it was big news that his disapproval rating is almost the same as his approval rating now, the most popular he has ever been but still not liked by most Americans.
SV_BubbleTime 35 days ago [-]
Trump‘s popularity is currently polling higher than it ever has. 53% according to CBS which has never once overestimated in Trump’s favor.
He is more popular now than any point in his first term.
seanmcdirmid 35 days ago [-]
Yes which is still not very popular. The poll I’m looking at on 538 puts his disapproval and approval rating as almost finally meeting for once.
tasty_freeze 36 days ago [-]
Trump won by a very small margin, 1.5%, and didn't even get 50% of the popular vote. It isn't a "landslide" or "mandate" no matter how many times they claim it. Yes, Trump won, but that isn't grounds for ignoring the constitution. There is a separation of powers and Trump can't delegate powers which aren't his to Musk to delegate to technoboys.
klipt 36 days ago [-]
Unfortunately the only leverage Congress has to stop Executive overreach is impeachment.
If they refuse to impeach, then they are tacitly handing the Executive ever more power, essentially moving us from a republic to an elected dictatorship.
And given that the GOP has a majority, no matter how slim, it seems very unlikely they will impeach.
HPsquared 36 days ago [-]
The executive branch systematically dismantling itself doesn't sound like "ever more power".
saulpw 36 days ago [-]
It is if they are dismantling the pieces for their own benefit. Removing power from the institution and giving it to themselves.
klipt 35 days ago [-]
If Congress already passed a law to regulate food so customers don't get poisoned.
And the president can say "I'm gonna ignore that and dismantle the agency Congress set up to do it"
What power does Congress have anymore?
SV_BubbleTime 35 days ago [-]
Is that honestly what is happening though? Or is that an exaggeration and presumption to try and make your point?
Fact, no one can show that USAID’s more curious and controversial grants served American interests.
briandear 36 days ago [-]
312 to 226 isn’t a “small margin.”
You don’t measure a baseball game by number of hits or strike outs, but by the number of runs scored. The popular vote is literally irrelevant.
tzs 35 days ago [-]
The assertion was about what the population supports. For that question it is the popular vote that matters, not the electoral college vote.
rbetts 36 days ago [-]
Why do MAGA conservatives cheer the over-turning of Chevron, dramatically limiting the executive branch's power to interpret law, while also simultaneously cheering Trump's initiative to seize Congress's power of the purse?
What's the internal logic that rationalizes executive regulatory power being unconstitutional with a legal presidential power to unilaterally ignore Congress's funding allocations?
bbarnett 35 days ago [-]
Most Americans, whether on the left or right, have no real idea how government works, what branch has what powers, and more importantly why.
They have no understanding of history, of how important such separation of power are.
In such context, it is easy to see the logic. They have no idea the relevance, only that their team likes the outcome.
36 days ago [-]
ryeights 36 days ago [-]
Who is saying he isn’t intelligent? And can’t smart people do bad things?
SV_BubbleTime 36 days ago [-]
Are things you disagree with bad by definition or assumption? Or because you were told… because unless you have a front row seat, everything you know is because someone else already parsed that info for you.
pavel_lishin 36 days ago [-]
> unless you have a front row seat, everything you know is because someone else already parsed that info for you.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, it is pointless for us to discuss anything we're not actively doing.
SV_BubbleTime 35 days ago [-]
Interesting idea.
Perhaps you could also investigate the motivation of the people who tell you how to feel and what to think?
Along those lines… how many were receiving say, USAID themselves?
pavel_lishin 35 days ago [-]
I'm not sure who you're having a conversation with, but I don't think it's me.
briandear 36 days ago [-]
What’s bad about finding waste? Many appropriations are expired yet still keep getting paid out. That’s crazy.
The liberal media echo chamber is preventing people from using common sense. When media and congressional democrats literally call us “Nazis” — it’s hard to take any of it seriously.
“Trump is a fascist”
If that’s true, he’s the first fascist in history to attempt to make the government smaller.
Apparently being interested in free speech and smaller government and reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is fascism.
The problem with it is that if you're claiming Musk gives a rat's ass about free speech, there are many, many examples that disprove it. He has literally banned people on X or taken away their checkmarks or added checkmarks to people because he didn't like what they had to say. He's not a free speech absolutist, he constantly censors people who say things he doesn't like.
In theory, DOGE isn't a bad idea, but you look at the implementation, and you look at the moves Musk has made to remove his enemies from their positions, and you look at the things they won't touch - their goals align more with making the billionaire class richer than anything relating to free speech or reducing waste. Musk lies constantly, with and without reason. I personally think he's so used to it, he can't help lying at this point.
SV_BubbleTime 36 days ago [-]
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atombender 35 days ago [-]
People are upset partly because the new administration is taking the law into its own hands, and partly because it seems to be acting without any planning or research, and seems to be going about it recklessly and without concern for consequences.
Regarding USAID specifically, it was set up in the aftermath of the Foreign Assistance Act by John F. Kennedy, and as an agency it was later established as law by Congress. Trump cannot legally shut down USAID without another act of Congress, and he cannot legally redirect its funds, which have already been appropriated. The administration is well within their right to change how the funds are allocated, but so far the stated intention has been to shut off all foreign aid, not change what aid is provided.
The fact that Warren Christopher etc. wanted to get rid of USAID 27 years ago is irrelevant, since that plan was never adopted and did not call for shutting off foreign aid, so it's not comparable. It's just misdirection.
It's also difficult to take arguments for "government waste" seriously in the case of USAID. First, the agency has a tiny budget of around $50B (2023), 16x less than Medicare, or around 0.8% of the entire state budget. Secondly, it was explicitly set up to give away money. Waste is its raison d'etre! Reports show its admin overhead being around 7.7%, which is very low for an aid organization.
It's pretty clear that USAID isn't cut because of waste, but because the Trump administration wants to stop giving aid to poor foreign countries. However, they're not so inclined to say that out loud.
It's also a self-own because USAID is an important soft power tool. It's one of the ways the US can project a positive image on the world, something it has been very good at since the post-war period.
SV_BubbleTime 35 days ago [-]
Trump is clearly not shutting USAID down.
He has cut the staff from 1400 to 300. And it will now be serving US interests.
No need to panic now.
atombender 35 days ago [-]
From more than 14,000 to around 290, according to several sources, including Atul Gawande [1].
The administration has now shut down CFPB (also illegally, I believe) [2], an agency that has done nothing but good for the average American.
So much potential and he dropped out of school to become a Thiel/Musk minion.
ksenzee 36 days ago [-]
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userbinator 36 days ago [-]
In the future, perhaps we may see "first glimpse inside burnt floppy disk after 2k years"?
HPsquared 36 days ago [-]
"Electron microscope image of partially-melted optical disc"
baruz 36 days ago [-]
They said that the work was a Greek Epicurean work, but described it as finding fulfillment in the pleasures of life. The Greek Epicureans were of the opinion that avoiding pain and suffering was the object of ethical philosophy, which is not the same thing, at all.
t_mann 36 days ago [-]
> Epicureanism ... declares pleasure to be its sole intrinsic goal.
> Epicureans had a very specific understanding of what the greatest pleasure was, and the focus of their ethics was on the avoidance of pain rather than seeking out pleasure.
So whether the description of the work (as GP critiques) is correct, really comes down to whether the definition of 'pleasure' used is as in Epicureanism. Certainly someone unfamiliar would misunderstand it.
declan_roberts 36 days ago [-]
Isn't reading a wrapped scroll with AI what one or the DOGE guys is famous for? Is this his same technology or something different?
36 days ago [-]
unit149 36 days ago [-]
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dark__paladin 36 days ago [-]
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52-6F-62 36 days ago [-]
Seriously. Working overtime…
focusgroup0 36 days ago [-]
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shark_laser 36 days ago [-]
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muglug 36 days ago [-]
What are you talking about?
The BBC doesn’t get any USAID funding. The BBC News website is supported by UK television license payers, and for non-UK folks it has banner ads which help pay for hosting and other costs.
There's a separate non-profit, BBC Media Action (formerly the BBC World Service Trust) with a completely different remit to the BBC that receives some USAID funding, but is mainly funded by the UK government.
manymany 36 days ago [-]
[flagged]
JoeDaDude 36 days ago [-]
You may, or may not be asking in jest. In any case, I think you are alluding to the fact that Luke Farritor, winner of the Vesuvius challenge in 2023 and former SpaceX intern, is now employed by Elon Musk in the Department of Government Efficiency, ostensibly to find waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending.
Why? Is the guy suddenly not sharp and talented anymore?
mattigames 36 days ago [-]
It's likely that the talents needed to solve a technical challenge such as finding text in CT scans of heavily burned pages using machine learning doesn't mean he will have the same level of success when dealing with insights about socioeconomic issues in both the local and global scale and all the politics that such endeavor needs, specially when there is a heavy bias to an existing decision, the decision to reduce funds (meaning, even if he concludes that there is one particular endeavor where the government should spend more, it would be frowned upon by his boss and peers)
mattigames 36 days ago [-]
Just the cutting of everything USAID shows how little he understands of politics, the soft power that such organization earns for the country cannot be overstated, but in the business context Musk knows best there is really not equivalent, so he thinks such spending counts as "inefficiency", turns out countries are not companies and Musk and friends are in for a rude awakening and the country is the one who will suffer because of it as it increasingly alienates it's allies.
bboygravity 36 days ago [-]
So you're saying the kid who digitally unwraps Vesivius scrolls is not smart enough to write automated systems to detect that Covid payments to literal
"Free money LLC"
are likely fraudulent?
Just to name an example.
ben_w 36 days ago [-]
Without comment on the guy himself — I assume he's enthusiastically trying to do the best for the world, like most people — there's a huge gap between "let's find and stop very obvious fraud" and "let's cancel all soft power spending everywhere immediately because I don't know what value it has and don't want to spend money for the time it takes to find out".
The former is police work.
The latter is a practical demonstration of Chesterton's Fence, which is the "conservative" part of the word "conservative".
decremental 36 days ago [-]
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lexicality 36 days ago [-]
Presumably yes, if they were written on papyrus, set on fire and then buried in volcanic ash for a thousand years first.
Possibly more efficient options are available...
2OEH8eoCRo0 36 days ago [-]
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fambalamboni 36 days ago [-]
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dmolony 36 days ago [-]
Luckily they explained what papyrus is. The BBC is now doing ELI5.
ben_w 36 days ago [-]
You say that like 6 year olds regularly use papyrus.
Despite that it was once common, very few people today have any more reason to know about it than they have to know about silphium or electrum.
> The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.
> But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text.
"scientists"
They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists. They were largely college kids.
College kids can be scientists. Anyone doing science is a scientist.
There are even middle-school kids doing science. Or random adults with non-STEM jobs collecting data as a hobby for Citizen Science.
We should be careful not to gatekeep the words science or scientist. The more mad scientists we have throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, the more things we can discover.
generalizations 36 days ago [-]
I absolutely agree, and the (possibly badly said) intention was to highlight that credit is not being given where credit is due. "scientists" being a way to obscure the actual people who pulled this off.
moonlet 36 days ago [-]
Yup as long as it’s done in a scientific way and published under peer review doesn’t matter who did it - that’s the great thing about blind publication review in a lot of fields
throwaway48476 36 days ago [-]
Exactly. Science is a process not an ideology.
MadnessASAP 36 days ago [-]
The difference between screwing around and science is writing things down.
- Abraham Lincoln (probably)
hinkley 36 days ago [-]
You’re gonna be shocked to learn how many research papers the “primary author” is the faculty advisor, that the second author is a grad student who wrote the entire paper, and the professor only observed/inspired the project and proofread the paper.
I completely agree. They even have a picture of the light source used to do the scans as if that's more important than the people who did the actual work.
I can't understand the editorial bent in this article. I think editors believe scientists to be vaunted and inaccessible creatures that live in the rarefied climbs of "science mountain." Meanwhile it's just some kid down the block who would love to be interviewed by the BBC.
adastra22 36 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure Luke has a lot more things to worry about right now than being interviewed by the BBC, lol.
timewizard 35 days ago [-]
That's nice of you to decide that for him and for all the people who read that publication.
adastra22 35 days ago [-]
The context missing here is that Luke is one of the principal analysts at DOGE, and the target of A LOT of mainstream media hit pieces over the last week.
> Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. ...
> The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have to be identified. ...
> After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It's easier said than done - both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they're almost indistinguishable from each other.
> So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light.
Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors.
Instead of obsessing over other accuracy technique for fully autonomous detection they should focus on human assisted detection to improve the quality/value of the solution. In this case recall/sensitivity is the utmost important accuracy metric and try to get it closer to 100% if possible. Hence even if the ML/AI got it wrong (due to false positive detection), at least the human experts can have a look at it and hopefully eliminate any false positive. It also considerably reduce the burden of the upstream manual based inspection/automation since it is machine automated. This can also mitigate and hopefully prevent false negative detection because false negative detection will not has the opportunity for further inspection/verification by the human experts or trained inspectors. Essentially the AI/ML is functioning as the filter shifting through the massive data very quickly (with minimum or zero false negative), and then the results are then verified by the much slower human experts.
That's often an argument for AI systems: Is it better than humans (than avoiding car accidents, reading text, reading x-rays, etc.). But in science we need observable evidence.
The observable evidence here is the raw x-ray data. Based on the article, what is being done here was using ML to process that X-ray data, to create another set of output that the humans could analyze.
I understand jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon, but this ain't ChatGPT. Using ML to process complex instrument output has been used since at least the 70s. This is much closer to statistics based approaches than it is to some random startup trying to sell your manager on some snake oil AI-assisted whatever.
I don't know your background, so I'm sorry if I'm assuming anything. Any chance you articulate what specifically you don't like about the method they used to process the data, other than "It's ML?"
Why be an asshole? What do you accomplish? I now have zero interest in what you have to say. I stopped there.
Lol. That only supports my original assessment. Bye!
And if they did, then it almost certainly wouldn't come out as identifiable Greek letters, since these models are strictly looking at local patches of texture to identify the presence or absence of ink. Again, these aren't just black boxes spitting out long passages of Greek text, everything past the initial ink detection is still done by hand.
[0] https://scrollprize.org/firstletters#caseys-crackle-pattern
In fairness, the paper may answer that question but I don't have time now ...
1. OCR absolutely does "hallucinate", and the word better suits that domain of OCR than the domain of LLMs as OCR will sometimes "see" text that doesn't actually exist.
2. This isn't OCR, it's more like contrast enhancement on a CT scan. Looking at a the project website, there's other work to figure out the shape of the paper surface because that's not obvious or simple either.
The output of this model is what might be given to an OCR, but given how noisy the picture in the article is, I suspect not.
From the blog post where they announced 2023 grand prize: they did a couple of things to verify the results, including scanning the same area multiple times and making sure that multiple models produce similar results.
https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-these-pi...
That is, unless 'truth' means something different in ML, which would be troubling!
News from Scroll 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955356 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857417 - Oct 2023 (210 comments)
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861 - Feb 2024 (216 comments)
Shouldn’t people be more mad at dummies doing it?
Pretty sure that's exactly what the US voted for in the last election, considering that was pretty explicitly promised. I think most of the US is cheering them on as they do it.
He is more popular now than any point in his first term.
If they refuse to impeach, then they are tacitly handing the Executive ever more power, essentially moving us from a republic to an elected dictatorship.
And given that the GOP has a majority, no matter how slim, it seems very unlikely they will impeach.
And the president can say "I'm gonna ignore that and dismantle the agency Congress set up to do it"
What power does Congress have anymore?
Fact, no one can show that USAID’s more curious and controversial grants served American interests.
You don’t measure a baseball game by number of hits or strike outs, but by the number of runs scored. The popular vote is literally irrelevant.
What's the internal logic that rationalizes executive regulatory power being unconstitutional with a legal presidential power to unilaterally ignore Congress's funding allocations?
They have no understanding of history, of how important such separation of power are.
In such context, it is easy to see the logic. They have no idea the relevance, only that their team likes the outcome.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, it is pointless for us to discuss anything we're not actively doing.
Perhaps you could also investigate the motivation of the people who tell you how to feel and what to think?
Along those lines… how many were receiving say, USAID themselves?
The liberal media echo chamber is preventing people from using common sense. When media and congressional democrats literally call us “Nazis” — it’s hard to take any of it seriously.
“Trump is a fascist”
If that’s true, he’s the first fascist in history to attempt to make the government smaller.
Apparently being interested in free speech and smaller government and reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is fascism.
The people screaming loudest about USAID for example huge hypocrites, or have a very short memory: https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/icymi-washing...
https://x.com/tracking_doge/status/1888032469699498379?s=46
In theory, DOGE isn't a bad idea, but you look at the implementation, and you look at the moves Musk has made to remove his enemies from their positions, and you look at the things they won't touch - their goals align more with making the billionaire class richer than anything relating to free speech or reducing waste. Musk lies constantly, with and without reason. I personally think he's so used to it, he can't help lying at this point.
Regarding USAID specifically, it was set up in the aftermath of the Foreign Assistance Act by John F. Kennedy, and as an agency it was later established as law by Congress. Trump cannot legally shut down USAID without another act of Congress, and he cannot legally redirect its funds, which have already been appropriated. The administration is well within their right to change how the funds are allocated, but so far the stated intention has been to shut off all foreign aid, not change what aid is provided.
The fact that Warren Christopher etc. wanted to get rid of USAID 27 years ago is irrelevant, since that plan was never adopted and did not call for shutting off foreign aid, so it's not comparable. It's just misdirection.
It's also difficult to take arguments for "government waste" seriously in the case of USAID. First, the agency has a tiny budget of around $50B (2023), 16x less than Medicare, or around 0.8% of the entire state budget. Secondly, it was explicitly set up to give away money. Waste is its raison d'etre! Reports show its admin overhead being around 7.7%, which is very low for an aid organization.
It's pretty clear that USAID isn't cut because of waste, but because the Trump administration wants to stop giving aid to poor foreign countries. However, they're not so inclined to say that out loud.
It's also a self-own because USAID is an important soft power tool. It's one of the ways the US can project a positive image on the world, something it has been very good at since the post-war period.
He has cut the staff from 1400 to 300. And it will now be serving US interests.
No need to panic now.
The administration has now shut down CFPB (also illegally, I believe) [2], an agency that has done nothing but good for the average American.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/usaid-job-cut...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulation/vought-moves-to-defan...
So much potential and he dropped out of school to become a Thiel/Musk minion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
What the OP actually says is 'fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things' which is very much in line with Epicurean thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism#Pleasure
> Epicureans had a very specific understanding of what the greatest pleasure was, and the focus of their ethics was on the avoidance of pain rather than seeking out pleasure.
So whether the description of the work (as GP critiques) is correct, really comes down to whether the definition of 'pleasure' used is as in Epicureanism. Certainly someone unfamiliar would misunderstand it.
The BBC doesn’t get any USAID funding. The BBC News website is supported by UK television license payers, and for non-UK folks it has banner ads which help pay for hosting and other costs.
There's a separate non-profit, BBC Media Action (formerly the BBC World Service Trust) with a completely different remit to the BBC that receives some USAID funding, but is mainly funded by the UK government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpflT8XuSyg&t=11s
"Free money LLC"
are likely fraudulent?
Just to name an example.
The former is police work.
The latter is a practical demonstration of Chesterton's Fence, which is the "conservative" part of the word "conservative".
Possibly more efficient options are available...
Despite that it was once common, very few people today have any more reason to know about it than they have to know about silphium or electrum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum
> But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text.
"scientists"
They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists. They were largely college kids.
This has a lot more interesting detail. https://scrollprize.org/
There are even middle-school kids doing science. Or random adults with non-STEM jobs collecting data as a hobby for Citizen Science.
We should be careful not to gatekeep the words science or scientist. The more mad scientists we have throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, the more things we can discover.
I can't understand the editorial bent in this article. I think editors believe scientists to be vaunted and inaccessible creatures that live in the rarefied climbs of "science mountain." Meanwhile it's just some kid down the block who would love to be interviewed by the BBC.