४ फेब्रुवारी, २०२३
At the Saturday Night Café...
"The US military has shot down the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon over the Atlantic Ocean off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, a US official said Saturday."
"Parts of the Northeast woke up to the coldest morning in decades on Saturday, with temperatures 30 degrees or more below average and wind chills in the extremely dangerous category."
"Well, Ann, I did in fact read the whole thing, and a more pustulent agglomeration of rubbish I've never seen. That glossary alone — about half the length — is pure screwballery."
Why can't ChatGPT write a poem praising Trump? It's too hard to make a rhyme for "orange."
Skin of orange
He's just like Hitler
Except for his hair
And his hands are littlerOf course, being "just like Hitler" is not a "positive attribute" — in fact this is the opposite of a poem of praise — and there's still no rhyme for "orange." But there's an apt rhyme for "Hitler," and there's the push that gets us to think of the age-old problem of rhyming with "orange."
"She had been a village beauty before marriage, noted for her skill at dancing the bolero and rattling the castanets..."
"Even as city officials credited Scorpion officers with bringing down violent crime, their presence had spread fear in the predominantly low-income neighborhoods they patrolled..."
If you can't get rid of your gas stove, use the microwave more! Use the "toaster oven, air fryer, Instant Pot... or an electric kettle or hot water heater."
"Wisconsin has long been unique in allowing graduates of its two law schools to become licensed to practice law without taking the bar exam..."
From "UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN LAW SCHOOL WILL NOT PARTICIPATE IN U.S. NEWS SURVEY," a statement from the dean, Dan Tokaji (at the Law School website).
"By 1960, the United States had been flying U-2 spy planes into Soviet airspace since the mid-1950s."
From "What a Cold War spy-plane crisis teaches us about China’s balloon antics" by Richard Aldous, "Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War."
At least it's obvious that ChatGPT is hopelessly biased.
The damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable. pic.twitter.com/s5fdoa8xQ6
— 🐺 (@LeighWolf) February 1, 2023
For more discussion of this problem, see "ChatGPT’s creators can’t figure out why it won’t talk about Trump" (Semafor). What a terrible headline! Say only what you can know.Uh, what?
— 🐺 (@LeighWolf) February 1, 2023
We imagine it’ll be abused to shape false perceptions and change the outcome of elections by feeding millions of people lefty BS about a variety of political topics.
Way to play dumb though.
३ फेब्रुवारी, २०२३
"The labor market shattered expectations in January, as the economy added 517,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.4 percent, a low not seen since May 1969..."
"The object flew over Alaska's Aleutian Islands and through Canada before appearing over the city of Billings in Montana on Wednesday..."
"Young lady, you've made me a lot of money," said Kurt Vonnegut to book designer Carin Goldberg.
Here is the Washington Post obituary, "Carin Goldberg, designer of book covers and Madonna’s first album, dies at 69/John Updike called her book covers — which numbered in the thousands — 'bold and festive.'"
And here's her Instagram page, where you can see a lot of her work, including this:
"[T]he gap between Covid-19 mortality and overall excess mortality has proved remarkably, and mystifyingly, persistent...."
Writes David Wallace-Wells, in "Why Are So Many Americans Dying Right Now?" (NYT).
[A]lmost every week for more than six months, the agency has calculated that total excess mortality was 50 percent larger than and often almost twice as large as the number of official Covid-19 deaths.... What are the hypotheses?
Sushi tero — sushi terrorism... contaminating the food at the kaitenzushi — conveyor-belt restaurant.
Such scenes would elicit disgust anywhere. But they have set off a national wave of revulsion in Japan, known for its exacting standards of both hygiene and politeness. This week, Sushiro, a conveyor belt sushi restaurant chain where one of the most-viewed recent videos was filmed, took the rare step of submitting a complaint to the police about a boy who licked unused cups and soy sauce bottles and touched other people’s sushi after licking his fingers....
"Many divorcing Moms throw up all sorts of reasons why they alone must have sole physical custody, or limit a father’s parenting time to an absolute minimum, for a nursing child."
A website for a law firm called "The Firm for Men" is quoted in "In child custody dispute, breastfeeding mom is ordered to use bottle 'It’s about using breastfeeding as a weapon against visitation,' said a lawyer for the baby’s father" (WaPo).
२ फेब्रुवारी, २०२३
At the Cold Night Café...
"Rolling Stone said Jan. 6 leaders used ‘burner’ phones" to communicate with top Trump officials. "Where’s the evidence?"
Asks Eric Wemple (at WaPo).
“According to the three sources, some of the most crucial planning conversations between top rally organizers and Trump’s inner circle took place on those burner phones,” wrote investigative reporter Hunter Walker. The contacted associates included White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump campaign consultant Katrina Pierson, and Eric and Lara Trump, the article alleged....
"Given the app’s use by about a third of the U.S. population and its association with the everyday expression of political and personal views..."
From "The Problem With Taking TikTok Away From Americans" by Glenn S. Gerstell (of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service).
"The American Medical Association put out a 54-page guide on language as a way to address social problems — oops, it suggests instead using the 'equity-focused' term 'social injustice.'"
Writes Nicholas Kristof in "Inclusive or Alienating? The Language Wars Go On" (NYT).
१ फेब्रुवारी, २०२३
"I think we’re probably going to be embarrassed by the pandemic, every kind of reaction to it and the way it’s sort of defined our time."
Writes the essayist/novelist Natasha Stagg, one of many contributors to "Future Cringe/One day we’ll look back on this moment and wonder: What were we thinking?" (NYT).
"The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. "
A boy thinks he might be in trouble, arrives at a plausible defense and delivers it in the most delightful regional accent on the face of the earth.
"At its worst her Leslie is a one-note cliché and a clunky Frankenstein’s monster of Jane Fonda in The Morning After, Faye Dunaway in Barfly, and Tilda Swinton in Julia, with just a dash of Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas."
From "Andrea Riseborough doesn’t deserve Oscar nod — Danielle Deadwyler was robbed/The British actress’s performance in To Leslie is a one-note cliché, says the Times film critic Kevin Maher" (London Times).
"I genuinely wake up most mornings convinced I look great. I feel thin, fit, good looking and ready to take on the day."
I found that because — go to the link to see — it contains the phrase "body eumorphia," an unusual phrase that I'd arrived at independently after stumbling into the New York Post headline, "Sam Smith on finally having the 'opposite' of body dysmorphia: ' look fabulous.'"
Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman react to the claim that the #1 cause of obesity is genetics.
३१ जानेवारी, २०२३
"Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something..."
"... had some kind of nobility, hating this thing here, and that thing there, and that other thing over there, and making sure that everybody around me knew it, not just knew, but felt it too, contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of joy, contemptuous of happiness in others, well, this whole attitude just felt, I don’t know, in the end, sort of dumb."
Writes Nick Cave, responding to a fan who asked "When did you become a Hallmark card hippie? Joy, love, peace. Puke! Where’s the rage, anger, hatred? Reading these lately is like listening to an old preacher drone on and on at Sunday mass" — at The Red Hand Files.
After his younger son Arthur, aged 15, fell off a cliff and died, Cave thought about "the precarious and vulnerable position of the world" and felt he ought to try to help the world, "instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it."
In 2022, his older son Jethro died, aged 31.
Project Veritas is doing some high-tech trolling of Pfizer.
We rented an LED truck and parked it outside of @pfizer world headquarters in Manhattan today⁰⁰Stay tuned… pic.twitter.com/P9waV9vx86
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 31, 2023
"They made a Hitler chatbot. Like, what are the ethics of that?"
“It’s as if all of the ghosts of all of these people have hired the same PR consultants and are parroting the same PR nonsense,” [said Cooper].... An app that obscures the controversial aspects of historical figures’ pasts or that falsely suggests they were repentant would be dangerous in an educational setting, Cooper told The Post.
“This type of whitewashing and posthumous reputation smoothing can be just as, if not more, dangerous than facing the explicit antisemitic and racist rhetoric of these historical figures head on,” Cooper said.
"For more than 1,000 nights, Isaac Ortman, 14, has slept beneath the stars in his backyard in Duluth, Minn., including on a night when the temperature dipped to minus-38 degrees."
"Mr. Bragg’s decision to impanel a grand jury focused on the hush money — supercharging the longest-running criminal investigation into Mr. Trump..."
"... represents a dramatic escalation in an inquiry that once appeared to have reached a dead end. Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury about a case focused on Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he fraudulently inflated the value of his assets to secure favorable loans and other benefits. Yet in the early weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case and decided to abandon the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.... Although he balked at charging Mr. Trump over the asset valuations, this is a different case, and Mr. Bragg is now a bolder prosecutor...."
Write William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess, Jonah E. Bromwich and Hurubie Mekoin "Manhattan Prosecutors Begin Presenting Trump Case to Grand Jury/The Manhattan district attorney’s decision represents a dramatic escalation of the inquiry, and potentially sets the case on a path toward criminal charges against the former president" (NYT).
"Over the course of the investigation into Mr. Trump, the hush money payment was discussed within the district attorney’s office with such regularity that prosecutors came to refer to it as the 'zombie theory' — an idea that just won’t die.... Defense lawyers might also argue that Mr. Trump, who was a first-time presidential candidate, did not know that the payments violated election law...."
Althouse and Meade text, just now, about Biden's announcement that he will end the Covid 19 emergency on May 11th.
(The photo I shared with Meade comes from my son Chris. You can see a larger version of that picture here. From there, you can get to more of his photos from Kobe (and Kyoto), Japan.)
"Jesus Christ is Alive"... trending on Twitter.
# 3
— josh kettles (@joshkettles) January 23, 2023
The Lamentation by Marco Basaiti, 16th Century#ArtButMakeItSurvivor #survivor pic.twitter.com/ujVFfMFt9C
३० जानेवारी, २०२३
At the Monday Night Café…
"He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence."
Writes Patti Smith in "He Was Tom Verlaine/Patti Smith remembers her friend, who possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music" (The New Yorker).
"His chief aim, he asserted, is to bring egalitarianism to a legislative process dominated by lobbyists and powerful committee chairmen."
"Last week, in a conversation with colleague Gail Collins, [Bret] Stephens argued that a couple with a combined income of $400,000 a year doesn’t necessarily have a lifestyle we’d describe as 'rich.'"
Writes Megan McArdle in "The $400K conundrum: Why America’s urban rich don’t feel that way" (WaPo).
"Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect the free version of a 2022 AI to be able to discuss heady philosophies of personhood and the nature of sentience..."
Writes Phil Rhodes in "The melancholy experience of making an AI friend" (Red Shark).
I'm reading this after writing about my desire for an AI app that would engage me in philosophical conversations. I said I wasn't looking for "a companion to stave off loneliness or make me feel good about myself — e.g., Replika."
But Rhodes's "Rachael" does come from the app Replika. He writes:
"I see that you're going to get rid of your piano. Good luck with that. We couldn't even give ours away so I took it apart and cut it up..."
Breaking up a piano made me think about this great 80s video where they destroy a piano:
The perfection that is Mick Jagger on TikTok.
Having just blogged about a NYT encolumnization of a viral video of people fighting in a restaurant, I wanted to serve you a delightful palate cleanser:
"There’s something about this haunting insomniac aesthetic that seems to live on in videos like the Waffle House melee."
Writes Niela Orr in "The Waffle House Brawl Belongs in a Museum/In video after viral video, fast-food employees keep being forced to punch above their weight. You can find the disquieting energy of these clips in classic art, too" (NYT).
"Declaring Emergencies and Banning ‘Latinx’: First Acts for 9 New Governors."
Wes Moore... the first Black governor of Maryland... issued an executive order to establish the Maryland Department of Service and Civic Innovation. One thing it could oversee would be a program he suggested to let high school graduates do a paid year of community service....
Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania/Through an executive order, Governor Shapiro opened the vast majority of jobs in the state government — 92 percent of them — to people without four-year college degrees.
From the list of Republicans:
"Thinking it might be fun to try to see how the language model performs as a Socratic conversation partner, I attempted a rough version of Plato’s Crito...."
Writes philosophy professor Justin Weinberg (at Daily Nous).
२९ जानेवारी, २०२३
At the Snow Car Café...
"Flattery (also called adulation or blandishment) is the act of giving excessive compliments..."
"Yes, the French are... lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think."
"A customer allegedly asked an employee, who had been drinking, to remake a poorly made sandwich and she became confrontational about it..."
From "Law roundup: Sandwich artist can’t handle critique" (Daily Inter Lake).
"House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has backed his fellow Republicans into a corner with one of the promises he made to his far-right flank to land his job..."
"I think Bezos came in thinking he understood technology in a way that old-fashioned newspaper people don’t."
Said Eli Noam, tele-information professor (and author of "Who Owns the World’s Media?"), quoted in "Bezos and Washington Post show honeymoon is over for tech mogul media owners" (The Guardian).