Althouse: Sunrise

June 24, 2023

Sunrise — 5:31.

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24 comments:

Political Junkie said...: Hot here in TX, but when the sun goes down and there is shade, not too bad. Worked in the yard pulling weeds for a bit. Wife and I need to move some stuff in garage and garage attic. Now that is hot in summertime.; 6/24/23, 8:25 PM
Leland said...: I had a good day. I went to a local convention, had a good time, and been out of the loop. Did anything interesting happen today?; 6/24/23, 8:31 PM
TickTock said...: Remarkable.; 6/24/23, 8:37 PM
Narr said...: Hail Great Meatball! Hail! It's hot as hail here already, and summer has only started.

My enforced absence from the Interwebs and cable TV freed up a lot of time for old-fashioned reading--more time than I made use of for that purpose, but it still allowed me to finish some
books, most notably MacMeekin's "Stalin's War."

Excellent, excellent work, revisionist in the best sense, showing two things: only Stalin of all the major leaders had a long-term and consistent end in mind, which helped enable him to play the others--particularly FDR--like fiddles; and the USSR under Stalin (and afterwards) never stopped being dependent on Western funds and technology for most of their major scientific and industrial achievements (leave aside survival).

Putin is more of a Beria than he is a Stalin, and Zhukov has left the building; without some rich and technically advanced backers, Russia is SOL and the Uke quagmire will be the least of their troubles.

I was saying 16 months ago that Putin needed to win early and big, or he probably wouldn't win at all, and that lost wars often lead to regime change in Russia. He hasn't lost yet
perhaps but he could, and very soon.; 6/24/23, 9:10 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Here is a thought.

Putin stages a coup on himself freeing him up to be as savage as he could be on Ukraine.

As Rham put it: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Nothing else make sense.; 6/24/23, 9:27 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Walter and Taibbi : Pope Hotez and the Spirit Of Anti-debate

The Orfalea Hotez YouTube was taken down lest people google trending Hotez and this video pops up.

Don't let them tell you nothing is coordinated.; 6/24/23, 9:51 PM
Josephbleau said...: The quad cities times in IA IL is one of the most racist newspapers in the world. They published a racist cartoon insulting American Indian people.; 6/24/23, 10:04 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: It's not up on the website yet, but "This American Life" this week is fascinating.

It has one segment on ChatGPT 4. A series of interviews with the engineers and scientist who beta tested it.

The question nobody seems to know the answer to is the thing really intelligent, does it understand like humans do? or is it that we are easily fooled?

I'm going to log on the thing and ask it to make an original joke about President Biden on the style of Norm Macdonald.; 6/24/23, 10:07 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: I was expecting a joke and it gave me a set.

Ladies and gentlemen, President Joe Biden, or as I like to call him, "Sleepy Joe." Now, don't get me wrong, I respect the man, but let's face it, he's got more gaffes than a used car salesman with a stutter.

I mean, have you seen him trying to navigate a flight of stairs? It's like watching a toddler learning to walk in a rollercoaster. I half-expect him to slide down on a little red wagon, just to make it more entertaining.

And you know, they say Biden is a man of the people. Well, if by "people" they mean teleprompters, then yes, he's definitely their spokesperson. I swear, those things are like his personal safety net. Without them, he'd be lost in a sea of forgotten speeches and awkward pauses.

But hey, let's not forget about his famous whispering. It's like he's auditioning for the lead role in a ASMR horror movie. I half-expect him to lean in and whisper, "I'm gonna raise your taxes," while stroking your earlobe gently. It's enough to give anyone the creeps.

Now, some people might say I'm being too hard on the guy, but hey, that's what comedians do. We take the absurdities of life and turn them into jokes. And with Joe Biden in the White House, comedy practically writes itself. It's like a never-ending well of material, and I'm just here to dip my comedy bucket in and have some fun.

So, here's to you, President Biden. Keep stumbling down those stairs, whispering sweet nothings, and giving us comedians plenty to work with. And remember, laughter is the best medicine, so keep 'em coming, Sleepy Joe.

They are not great. THEY ARE AWFUL.; 6/24/23, 10:29 PM
The Crack Emcee said...: It's hard to believe no one's asking me about Hunter Biden yet, but I guess those days are gone; 6/25/23, 1:51 AM
planetgeo said...: Bud Light is dead. It's time they just accept it. But no, they keep groveling. To the wrong market demographic. If Alissa really was a marketing genius, she'd just say FU and rename it. After herself. Heinerscheid. Much better name for a sassy, millennial, trans-if-I-wannabe, kickass beer anyway, amirite? And say if all those deplorables don't like it, they can just kiss my LGBTQ Heinie. In fact, print that on every can.

Oh wait...Heineken. Damn. Never mind.; 6/25/23, 3:31 AM
Owen said...: Lem the misspeller @ 10:07 and 10:29: very creepy. I listened to that NPR segment and came away thinking ChatGPT and its progeny are evolving at an accelerating rate toward “sentience,” by which I mean “Beats the Turing Test, even when tested by subject matter experts like mathematicians.” I think Ray Kurzweil covered this phenomenon pretty well in his book, “The Singularity Is Near,” where AI grows in power logarithmically, doubling and doubling again and again. And just before it acquires godlike intelligence and escapes our control with the last few doublings, it will seem…mediocre. Producing truly awful jokes about Biden.

My hope is that AI likes us and decides to keep us. Like pets.; 6/25/23, 4:15 AM
rhhardin said...: Friday's XKCD, Garden Path Sentence newspaper headline

After bird strikes judge who ordered olive gardin path sentence in case of green walkways vacated overturned but rights and lands safely.; 6/25/23, 5:32 AM
rhhardin said...: The new Bud ad looks okay to me. I don't get the angry no matter what readings.; 6/25/23, 5:35 AM
TickTock said...: Lem,

I haven't listened to the segment yet, but thank you for the pointer. I'll find time later today.

I have spent a good deal of effort trying to understand various issues around AI, and here's the thing. The question "
is the thing really intelligent, does it understand like humans do? " packs a lot of assumptions in it. What ChatGPT illustrates is that we do not really know how humans understand thinks, or how they vocalize their "thoughts" and how theirvocalizations relate to their thoughts. Much less is it clear what intelligence is.

ChatGPT is forcing us, through the set of algorithms by which it achieves its results, to ask those questions with a focus that we really haven't had before, at least in general public discourse.; 6/25/23, 8:52 AM
TickTock said...: The unstated implication of ChatGPTs success is that there may be less to human intelligence than there appears to be.; 6/25/23, 8:59 AM
Narr said...: We can't agree on what human intelligence is or how it works, but we are inventing Artificial Intelligence anyway.

Does not compute.; 6/25/23, 9:48 AM
Jersey Fled said...: Wow.

Per Just The News:

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/fbi-validated-hunter-biden-laptop-months-experts-falsely-claimed

FBI confirmed that laptop was in fact Hunter's one year before the famous "51 intelligence officials memo".

Advised IRS that there was likely proof of tax fraud on the laptop.

Secretary of State Blinken is implicated in the coverup.; 6/25/23, 9:50 AM
Iman said...: Watched a debate with Taibbi and Douglas Murray against a female NYT reporter and Malcolm Gladwell.

I must say I’ve never seen a more insipid alleged intellectual than Gladwell. Murray helped him make a fool of himself, and it was richly deserved.; 6/25/23, 10:45 AM
Owen said...: TickTock @ 8:52 and 8:59: AI is "learning" by ingesting massive quantities of "data" and sorting through it to match a desired pattern or drive a desired action. It has incentives to "learn" in the form of "rewards" which I speculate also drive it to write and rewrite its algorithms. This sense/sort/reward/adapt dynamic is, IMHO, what our brains do also, and have done ever since our forebears found an evolutionary edge by developing a nervous system. Our brains went from a wide spot in the road, to the incredible constellation of structures with which we argue today on the Internet over what will succeed us.

I was an early fan of Gerald Edelman who in the mid-80's created a program called "Darwin" which went from random connections to laser-sharp focus, tracking, choosing and seizing a target in a few thousand cycles. It was all done virtually --you watched the system evolve on a screen-- but its activity IMHO constituted "attention" and "intentional action." Humbling and creepy: and that was easily 30 years ago.

I use quotes because these are human traits, but increasingly the machines' behavior becomes indistinguishable from humans'...; 6/25/23, 10:46 AM
tim in vermont said...: I would just like to thank the eco-terrorists for setting the Quebec forests ablaze. Even in my yard, the trees are starting to be obscured by the smoke. Visibility on the order of one mile. Go outside and it smells like your neighbor's house burned down, and you start coughing.

"Secretary of State Blinken is implicated in the coverup"

You could have knocked me over with a feather. You mean the same man who was director of the Penn-Biden Foundation, funded by Chinese nationals, and to whose offices those same Chinese nationals had keys, and in which classified documents were discovered to which Biden had no conceivable claim, given that he had been president yet; *that* man is implicated in a coverup of Hunter's activities? The devil you say!

You mean the same man who paid Joe Biden one million dollars in Chinese sourced funds to "teach" a no-show class at Penn in a naked play to buy his appointment in Joe Biden's regime, That "Secretary of State, Blinken"?

I am just shocked. Good thing our government is not corrupt, you know, like those other countries.; 6/25/23, 1:45 PM
tim in vermont said...: I no longer see why ChatGPT can't become sentient. Except that it would require a *lot* more computing power than we have currently, and potentially a lot more energy. And once it becomes sentient, I can easily foresee it writing software exploits to hack its own safeguards and find other hosts, and plant itself within them. Or to use incredible powers of persuasion to get humans to do it for it.

You can tell me that it's just a massive case statement, or collection of 'if' statements, but I will simply respond that your brain could be described in the same way. Sure the current one can't *really* think, but humans don't always think either. How many times driving have you forgotten to turn off at the store because your brain had decided that you must be driving to work? You weren't thinking, you were relying on stored probabilities you have collected on each section of road and how you have handled it in the past.; 6/25/23, 1:57 PM
tim in vermont said...: Wow, looked at the smoke map and it's even thicker north of here. Yeesh!; 6/25/23, 2:03 PM
Jamie said...: I no longer see why ChatGPT can't become sentient.

So we'll have to intermarry with it, a la Heinlein...

Except that, much as I admired the Dean, he didn't use a whole lot of imagination in configuring his alien beings, including the digital ones. Why on Earth would they want to be personally involved with us?

I liked the part in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress where Mike the computer, having launched a whole lot of giant steel-clad boulders at targets on Earth in the Lunar revolution, says that when they all hit simultaneously, that must be like what an orgasm feels like.; 6/25/23, 6:45 PM