Sunrise — 5:47, 5:49, 5:52, 6:11.

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Zuckerberg invites you into a room with 15 A.I. friends.

I remember when Zuckerberg wanted real people to interact in a virtual space called Metaverse. But people didn't want to go there. The rooms were empty. But 4 years later, what Z is talking about sounds like the solution to the core problem with Metaverse. The rooms are full of interesting people — all there ready to talk to you and full of interesting stories and knowledge all framed around your preferences and tuned to your mood.

Makes me think of the old Dylan lyric: "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"

"In conversation, ChatGPT was telling users that their comments were 'deep as hell' and '1,000% right' and..."

"... praising a business plan to sell literal 'shit on a stick' as 'absolutely brilliant.' The flattery was frequent and overwhelming. 'I need help getting chatgpt to stop glazing me,' wrote a user on Reddit, who ChatGPT kept insisting was thinking in 'a whole new league.' It was telling everyone they have an IQ of 130 or over, calling them 'dude' and 'bro,' and, in darker contexts, bigging them up for 'speaking truth' and 'standing up' for themselves by (fictionally) quitting their meds and leaving their families.... To fix ChatGPT’s 'glazing' problem, as the company itself started calling it, OpenAI altered its system prompt, which is a brief set of instructions that guides the model’s character."

From "ChatGPT Wasn’t Supposed to Kiss Your Ass This Hard" (NY Magazine).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Is the slang term "glazing" so offensive that I need to apologize when I quote someone else using it?

"If you’re looking for a theory to explain how our brains give rise to subjective, inner experiences, you can check out Adaptive Resonance Theory. Or..."

"... consider Dynamic Core Theory. Don’t forget First Order Representational Theory, not to mention semantic pointer competition theory. The list goes on: A 2021 survey identified 29 different theories of consciousness...."

From "Two Theories of Consciousness Faced Off. The Ref Took a Beating/What makes humans conscious? Scientists disagree, strongly, as one group of peacemakers discovered the hard way" (NYT).

Early color, rushing toward the vantage point.

Meade got some pictures of me. I made it to the vantage point. I'll save my pics for later.

The sunrise is so early at this time of year. And with the sun moving north and the leaves coming out, my alternative vantage points are far more limited than in winter, when the sun is all the way to the south. We're not yet where we need to leave the house before 4 a.m. to catch the sunrise, but that time is approaching. The warmer weather is nice, but eventually it's too hot, and the longer periods of light are good, but it becomes impossible to get a full night's sleep unless — like a little kid — you begin sleeping before twilight ends. To catch the sunrise, we need to leave the house about when civil twilight begins. Today, that was 5:16. Civil twilight ends at 8:32 p.m. today. So you can see how nature is crunching in on this sunrise ritual!

On the up side, we were back at the car at 6:10 and in a great position to head downtown and park, free, just off the square as the Farmer's Market was opening up. Start time: 6:15. We bought morels, sweet potatoes, and Italian sausage and flew the coop before the crowds materialized. It was funny driving home. We'd had a very active day, but it wasn't yet 7 a.m.

"Interpretation — of Mozart or the Constitution — is neither mechanical reproduction nor unfettered creativity."

"It is about using your eyes and ears and lived experience and education and critical lens and passion and skepticism and, above all, humility, to tease out the text’s infinite implications, and in doing so, to come closer to its essence. Speaking about Mozart’s K. 467 concerto, the great pianist Leon Fleisher once said, 'It can never be beautiful enough; it will always be more perfect in the imagination.' A performance of a work by Mozart, like our union, will never be perfect. But a life devoted to making either more perfect is a life well spent. It is a process requiring honesty and modesty, an ongoing, restless quest for an understanding that acknowledges the ambiguities inherent in a great text. With that devotion, these documents shape and reshape our consciousness; without it, they are mere paper."

Write Jonathan Biss — a concert pianist — and Christopher Serkin — a law professor — in "We Should Play the Constitution Like a Piano" (NYT).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: 1. What's the expression that's something like "He played you like a fiddle"? 2. Given that, what do you think of the op-ed title "We Should Play the Constitution Like a Piano"? 3. Why doesn't it have a bad connotation, like you are outrageously manipulating the Constitution? 4. What if we could amend Mozart’s K. 467 concerto? 5. Why didn't Mozart write instructions for how to amend his works?

Trump as Pope — posted by Trump himself and by The White House.

pic.twitter.com/x2HrR939tn

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 3, 2025

What is he trying to say? I see "White House posts AI image of Trump as pope/'I’d like to be pope,' Trump jokingly told reporters this week, soon after attending the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome" (Politico):

When asked who should succeed Francis, Trump told a reporter on Tuesday: “I have no preference,” after joking that “I’d like to be pope.” Trump said he himself would be his “number one choice.” He then added: “I must say, we have a cardinal that happens to be out of a place called New York who’s very good.”

The AI-generated picture has been met with some amusement as well as criticism, with a large swath of social media users seeing it as a clear insult to the just-deceased pontiff....

Well, it seems pretty simple. Someone asked him who should be the next Pope. He made an offhand comment, which makes some sense, in that he feels capable of running things and he knows himself and doesn't know much about the various cardinals. Then someone made the AI image, and he passed it on because it was funny and provocative. It's something to think about and to distract us from other things. Look, here I am posting it first thing this morning instead of something else. It will get his haters running down a blind alley. An insult to the just-deceased pontiff? How is it an insult? The President of the United States is essentially saying there is one job in the world that's a step up from mine. 

Sunrise — 5:47.

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"My slightly, my slightly right wing view, I suppose, is that as time has gone on, there is less, less money in, in publishing and writing fiction..."

"... and young men forging their way in the world look at it and go, if you are a creative person, as a man, you're not gonna go and write fiction. You are gonna go and write computer games. So all the hot young literary creative guys who might have once written whatever, 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,' they go and work EA games."

Says Esther Walker in the new episode of "Giles Coren Has No Idea."

"But the other side of it is to say, yes, men may have been put off writing novels by the hegemony of women," says Giles Coren, referring to the dominance of women writers (and women readers) in publishing.

For the record "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is not a novel. It's a memoir. It's a quarter century old at this point. 

"If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is 'pagan.'"

"The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists because it gives them permission to grab whatever they want. This ethos encourages egotists to puff themselves up and boast in a way they find urgently satisfying; self-love is the only form of love they know...."

That's David Brooks, tending to your soul, in "How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact" (NYT)(free-access link).

I hadn't encountered that men-thinking-about-the-Roman-Empire meme in quite a while. Okay. Nice to see its return. Helps us understand what the men are doing these days.

Anyway, I wonder, is this analysis unfair to pagans?

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people....

Anything that feels rehumanizing?

Well, read the whole thing to be fair to Brooks, not that he's being fair to Trump... or to pagans. 

Looking into this blog's archive to see what I might have said about pagans over the years, I encountered this May 29, 2017 post, which focuses on a quote from Andrew Sullivan calling Trump "a pagan":

"A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge."

"It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Scotland, Northern England, Ulster and Wales. They are particularly common in the Scottish Highlands, but related buildings can be found around the world...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Bothy," after encountering this word, which I don't remember ever seeing before, in the London Times article "Have William and Kate fallen for ‘west coast bothy frenzy’?It’s never been more fashionable to hole up in the Scottish isles like the Waleses, says Victoria Brzezinski."

Ben Pentreath, head of the architectural and interior design studio of the same name, is widely reported to have assisted the Prince and Princess of Wales... has had a connection with the Scottish west coast since he was a teen.... In 2018 Pentreath and his gardener husband, Charlie McCormick, bought a teeny pair of buildings (a Victorian two-roomed cottage and a much earlier stone bothy) on a sea pink-covered estuary in the far west coast of Scotland. “It really does feel a long way away,” Pentreath says. “Bothies really can’t be more than one or two rooms. And I think we all find romance in living in small places — for a while!”

"For every Lucian Freud, who used to give his models regular breaks and offer them oysters and lobster, there is a Pablo Picasso who..."

"... if he didn’t bed the model in question — didn’t have much care for their wellbeing.... In Florence...  there is a growing debate about the exploitative nature of the relationship between artist and model.... 'Economically, the government has abandoned us,' Antonella Migliorini, a veteran life model at the Accademia with more than 30 years’ experience, told The Times. 'It’s as if we don’t exist.'... She said that some of the Accademia’s ten models were like athletes capable of holding complex poses with twisted torsos and arms intertwined above their heads...."

From "Florence’s life models threaten nude strike over poor working conditions/Models at the famed Accademia claim the poor pay and physicality of the job is pushing the centuries-old tradition to the brink" (London Times).

Does "We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status" = "he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status"?

I'm reading the NY Post:

"President Trump said Friday he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he said in a Truth Social post.

I think the post is losing something in the paraphrase. Trump's post speaks of doing something in the future. The NY Post portrays him as in the process of doing it now.

In any event, this is a big deal. Also a big deal in the news this morning: "Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS" (NPR). 

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters. Trump contends that news coverage by NPR and PBS contains a left-wing bias. The federal funding for NPR and PBS is appropriated by Congress....

"Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter," the executive order says. "What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens."

Humor prompt.

I found that on Facebook, where it has thousands of comments, and they are all what you think.

And we laughed at the world/They can have their diamonds/And we'll have our pearls...

Goodbye to Jill Sobule.

"Jill Sobule, the groundbreaking singer-songwriter and activist whose 1995 song 'I Kissed a Girl' is widely considered the first openly gay-themed song to crack the Billboard Top 20, died in a Minneapolis house fire early Thursday morning, her rep confirmed. She was 66" — Variety.

ADDED:

♫ Why are all our heroes so imperfect?... ♫ Paul McCartney, jealous of John, even more so now that he's gone. ♫ Dylan was so mean to Donovan in that movie. ♫ Pablo Picasso, cruel to his wives.... ♫ My favorite poets took their own lives. ♫... 

A cherry moment.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.