Pay Dirt is Slate's money advice column. Send it to Kristin and Ilyce here. I just turned 54, married, no children. Two decades ago, I took my liberal arts degree(s) and got an entry-level job at a solid healthcare company and have moved up to the point where I think I've reached my max potential. I am punching above my weight in my current role.

Reasoning in humans is prone to biases due to underlying motivations like identity protection, that undermine rational decision-making and judgment. This motivated reasoning at a collective level can be detrimental to society when debating critical issues such as human-driven climate change or vaccine safety, and can further aggravate political polarization. Prior studies have reported that large language models (LLMs) are also susceptible to human-like cognitive biases, however, the extent to which LLMs selectively reason toward identity-congruent conclusions remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate whether assigning 8 personas across 4 political and socio-demographic attributes induces motivated reasoning in LLMs. Testing 8 LLMs (open source and proprietary) across two reasoning tasks from human-subject studies -- veracity discernment of misinformation headlines and evaluation of numeric scientific evidence -- we find that persona-assigned LLMs have up to 9% reduced veracity discernment relative to models without personas. Political personas specifically, are up to 90% more likely to correctly evaluate scientific evidence on gun control when the ground truth is congruent with their induced political identity. Prompt-based debiasing methods are largely ineffective at mitigating these effects. Taken together, our empirical findings are the first to suggest that persona-assigned LLMs exhibit human-like motivated reasoning that is hard to mitigate through conventional debiasing prompts -- raising concerns of exacerbating identity-congruent reasoning in both LLMs and humans.

A Maryland court has ordered a blogger known as "Ziz", who leads a cult-like group connected to six killings, to be held without bail. The blogger, Jack LaSota, 34, of Berkeley, California, was arrested Sunday along with Michelle Zajko, 32, of Media, Pennsylvania, and Daniel Blank, 26, of Sacramento, California. The Zizians, as the group are known after their apparent leader, have been tied to the killing of a United States Border Patrol agent David Maland last month near the Canadian border, as well as five other killings in three states. LaSota, Zajko and Blank were arrested in Frostburg, Maryland, on Sunday afternoon. The judge in the case ordered LaSota to be held without bail, citing concerns about her being a flight risk and a danger to public safety.

At least two hours have gone by in the Pistol 101 class, and no student has fired a bullet or even picked up a gun. This isn't a lesson for anyone eager to pull the trigger. Tom Nguyen's teaching style is patient, aimed at demystifying an object many of his students have spent their lives fearing, even hating. Something of a leftist firearms whisperer, Nguyen pokes fun at stereotypical American gun culture, mocking "alpha male" behavior and the John Wick film franchise with its video game levels of violence. Owning a gun doesn't have to define your personality, he preaches, and it doesn't mean you have to seek conflict. "Being peaceful," he says, "is not the same as being helpless, or harmless."

A police officer was shot at a Fort Lauderdale hotel, and this is the dispatch for backup. Authorities said a mother in Florida has been charged after day care staff found a handgun inside her 2-year-old son's lunchbox. Shanae Davis, 39, faces several charges including allowing a minor to obtain a firearm and child neglect after a teacher at Jackson's Daycare Center in Riviera Beach opened the lunch box with a 9mm Glock 43 handgun inside it. According to police documents, the discovery caused concern by the teachers. Parents who later learned about the incident were also stunned, WPEC reported.

In this paper, we introduce Uni3D-LLM, a unified framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to integrate tasks of 3D perception, generation, and editing within point cloud scenes. This framework empowers users to effortlessly generate and modify objects at specified locations within a scene, guided by the versatility of natural language descriptions. Uni3D-LLM harnesses the expressive power of natural language to allow for precise command over the generation and editing of 3D objects, thereby significantly enhancing operational flexibility and controllability. By mapping point cloud into the unified representation space, Uni3D-LLM achieves cross-application functionality, enabling the seamless execution of a wide array of tasks, ranging from the accurate instantiation of 3D objects to the diverse requirements of interactive design. Through a comprehensive suite of rigorous experiments, the efficacy of Uni3D-LLM in the comprehension, generation, and editing of point cloud has been validated. Additionally, we have assessed the impact of integrating a point cloud perception module on the generation and editing processes, confirming the substantial potential of our approach for practical applications.

Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Bullard said after one year in effect, the SAFE-T Act is having the "intended result" and damaging the policing profession in Illinois. With the calendar-page turn to 2024 on Monday comes 320 new state laws that Illinois residents will need to navigate. Some will have a widespread effect, including a law banning semi-automatic rifles and another requiring paid time off. But others won't have an immediate or noticeable impact, including a law that lets county governments consider a potential contractor's participation in an approved apprenticeship program in determining the winning low bid for a project. One law that took effect in 2019 but is still impacting tens of thousands of workers is an increase in the minimum wage.

Traditional surveillance systems rely on human attention, limiting their effectiveness. This study employs convolutional neural networks and transfer learning to develop a real-time computer vision system for automatic handgun detection. Comprehensive analysis of online handgun detection methods is conducted, emphasizing reducing false positives and learning time. Transfer learning is demonstrated as an effective approach. Despite technical challenges, the proposed system achieves a precision rate of 84.74%, demonstrating promising performance comparable to related works, enabling faster learning and accurate automatic handgun detection for enhanced security. This research advances security measures by reducing human monitoring dependence, showcasing the potential of transfer learning-based approaches for efficient and reliable handgun detection.

Americans can now pre-order a'Smart Glock' that requires facial recognition and fingerprint technology to fire. Start-up firearms manufacturer Biofire is selling the futuristic-looking 9mm handgun for $1,500 with orders due to ship in 2024. The smart gun scans two forms of biometric ID, an optical fingerprint sensor and 3D infrared facial recognition, to ensure that only the gun's true owner can activate the firearm – cutting down on accidents and misused stolen weapons. The Broomfield, Colorado-based company hopes its pistol will put a dent in America's cycle of gun violence. More than 13,900 people have already been killed by guns in the U.S. in the first four months of 2023 alone, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

Kurt'The CyberGuy' Knutsson joined'Fox & Friends Weekend' to discuss smart guns and its ability to lock when being handled by an unauthorized user. The Biofire smart gun is expected to hit the market in 2024. Some believe that when it does, it could significantly help curb the gun crisis we're facing in this country. One of the main advantages of Biofire's smart guns is that they can dramatically reduce accidental shootings at home. Last year, the New England Journal of Medicine report revealed that firearm-related accidents, homicides and suicides are the primary cause of death for children and teenagers in the U.S. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, SECURITY ALERTS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER In addition, smart guns can also help reduce gun theft.