I know, it's such a bummer! They post updates on Bluesky, and the last one I read (although several days ago) said they are strengthening their security in the wake of a DDS attack. They do expect to be back up after that. Apparently, the archives were untouched, so they are good there.
"In recovering from recent cyberattacks on October 8, the Internet Archive has resumed the Wayback Machine (starting October 13) and Archive-It (October 17), and as of today (October 21), has begun offering provisional availability of archive.org in a read-only manner. Features like uploading, borrowing, reviewing items, interlibrary loan, and other services are not yet available. "
It is said that Mary Philbin was deliberately not shown Chaney's makeup until the moment that she unmasked him in the shot, in order to get a more visceral reaction.
[starts to pick up word with intent to steal and walk away; finds surprisingly heavy; intertitle starts to bark frantically for M. Hahn; situation grows awkward]
Renovations can be stressful, especially if they cut off amenities. I lived through enough of them to empathize. I thought that might be related to the lack of sleep.
Just his image is scary as hell. Lugosi brought an erotic eeriness to the character. There is nothing erotic about this one. It's right out of the graveyard.
"London After Midnight"(1927) is said to be one of the great silent horror films. Written and directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney in makeup of his own design, it should be.
Alas, it is another of the lost films from the silent era, in that no intact copy is known to exist.
Chaney's makeup for London After Midnight scares the living bejeezus out of me. Something about the Victorian finery combined with the Bruce The Shark smile.
I *think* the story "The Man Who Smiles" is older, from maybe a late 1880s? As well, there's the William Castle film Mr. Sardonicus, but that was in the Fifties. It seems the idea of a man who's evil with a fixed grin has really been frightening to a lot of people.
(Robert Anton Wilson wrote about a similar trope of the Giggling Sadist, something that was equally creepy and disturbing and featured in a lot of media from the 1970s and 1980s.)
Oooh, London After Midnight is also the name of a LA band that has a major goth following. The singer is very progressive, and has been around since the 90s. He most definitely got the name from this film! Thanks for the mini-lesson, my friend.
Lon Chaney was such a great actor. I've seen some of his movies on TCM. In one, "The Unknown," he had a young co-star by the name of Joan Crawford. Crawford credited Chaney for helping her hone her acting skills.
Where did I read that republicans really only have two options concerning Trump's racist, myogenetic or frankly fascist remarks: 1. vehemently deny and sanewash them. 2. No comment and or 3. (political suicide) denounce said remarks as being un-American.
This is just about EVERY GOP so called representative. From the first Tab with SCOTT JENNINGS. Go home and take a look in the mirror dude. All of them cowards only willing to hold onto power rather than represent the American people.
For anyone following the Roberson Death Penalty case - here is his team’s rebuttal to REDACTED REDACTED BANHAMMERED REDACTED Paxton’s goddamned bullshit:
Oh my Most Wonderful and Beautiful Wonkette Queen Rebekah.....
I, a most humble and appreciative minion would most respectfully like to petition
for a Wonkette Credentialed White House Correspondent to spread Joy to the White House Pressroom and to support whoever CJ Craig emerges from the Light!@
About the AI article: I spend a lot of time thinking about AI because I can see how shitty it’s making my interactions with the internet, and because I know a lot about how education works, and how the brain works, and how much businesses and public agencies prefer to reduce numbers of workers even when that means the product or service is crappier.
I read the hype about AI the way I read the hype about Second Life as a transformative way to teach! Or Bitcoin as a transformative economic system! They all suffer from the fact that universal adoption of the technology will undermine the basis they stand on. You need a strong real economic system to base your cryptocurrency on, but you want everyone to move to the e dollars? Who is going to pay for that real dollar if no one is using them? Public investment when the crypto undermined the public good? The hype is intended to make things feel inevitable (so the costs shouldn’t be counted) and morally neutral or positive (so we won’t think too hard about the effects.)
It’s a MAJOR issue that AI doesn’t really know what is accurate and what isn’t. So that makes it tough to suggest that a student who doesn’t already have an understanding of a subject should trust what the AI summary tells them. Students like to remove all critical thinking from a task, because critical thinking is the hard part. They like to blame the source if it led them to inaccuracy. AI is like crowdsourcing on steroids here, because at least when they were using Wikipedia they might still be able to tell where the data was coming from and check up on it, and I could teach them how to think critically about each source. Not to mention that summarizing the information they’ve gathered is a major way to increase their own comprehension of a topic, but AI shimmers so temptingly. Having to integrate all that data is how we learn, it’s not just a cruel time-consuming boring task.
And as far as AI increasing efficiency: Mental downtime is an important part of learning and creativity. If a job has no room for that, because any of those mildly easy, mind wandering irksome tasks are outsourced to AI or software or peons, creativity suffers, and productivity too, because even the most mentally active of us can’t do all the big thinks all the time. But that is how AI is currently promoted, as a way to free you up for the big thinks constantly.
But the bigger issue is that the huge amount of background knowledge humans use to make decisions and be creative doesn’t come out of a single source or a summary thereof. If you never read a subordinate’s report, but instead rely on an AI summary, over time you lose your understanding of that subordinate, of their biases that might make one or another piece of their data more questionable, and you may amplify their mistakes. You lose a broad understanding of issues because you don’t have to do the sometimes frustrating tasks that train your brain to sort and rank and store information. You also need to know what’s going on in the world around you, in your industry, among your colleagues, etc, so all that information from the subordinate slots into everything else in your head. AI suggests itself as a shortcut but is it a shortcut if you are going to have to explicitly gather data that you previously would absorb while reading?
I’m reminded of my first year teaching, when I helped a teacher out with a lesson on categorization and realized that we now had to teach much older children than I expected how to put things in like groups and name those groups. I had not realized I’d had to learn that almost as soon as I could read, because searching by subject in a card catalog was how I could find a library book. But now, with the rise of keyword searching, kids didn’t have to learn that until fourth grade math. There’s nothing wrong with that, really, it’s just that we have to teach overtly something that was a daily life skill in the past.
My professional degree is in library and information science, so I am very, very fond of data and technology and how we can use them to make things better or worse. I am also very fond of accuracy, probably moreso than others who find AI interpretations good enough. I’ve not quite resigned myself to the enshittification of search engines that has resulted from first, keyword instead of fixed vocabulary searches, and now AI functions that are pretty sure I don’t want to search for an actual person’s FB page even if I start my search with @.
I would say, AI is not without its upsides, but most of those I’ve seen cited don’t strike me as very up, yet, and the power demands and cost are rather high for what we are getting.
You know what would be cool? It would be cool if California didn't have shitty Republicans like everyone else has shitty Republicans. Quick summary:
2021: 7 of 11 CA Republicans in Congress refused to certify the election results.
2024: 4 of 12 CA Republican incumbents promise to uphold the election results, and 2 of 3 Republican Congressional contenders have promised the same. But hey, at least that means the new guys sound like they are slightly better than the old guys.
Book Report: Ed Zitron is a Hack with an Axe to Grind
I preface by noting that I am very interested in AI and use it every day, mostly for computer programming tasks but also for many general topics.
Most of what Zitron says is true. The AI companies are every bit as economically unsustainable as Amazon was for twenty years. Look how badly that turned out. Also, AI hallucinates. It is wrong almost as often as a real person. Also, the use cases are not well understood. Also, OpenAI/Altman are kind of weird.
Disclaimer: My opinion on this comes not only from reading (skimming) this endless screed but seeing him in a long interview with Adam Conover where he made these same points.
But, his overall point derives from the assertion that AI is a "big stupid magic trick" is completely wrong and stems from narrow minded prejudice. I use AI every day. It is not a trick. It is insanely useful. I use it for coding. I have it read and fact check everything I write. I engage in long discourse on fancy topics I like (stellar nucleosynthesis, anyone; how about Napoleon's legacy or Caligula's reign or contract validity in clickwrap?)
You might say, I could have read web pages about those things. You're right. But you couldn't have read a couple of paragraphs and asked the web page about the thing that confused you. It is very powerful. As for work, AI has improved my life immensely and saved a huge amount of time.
I am an anecdote, not data. Zitron, it turns out only shows anecdotes, too. He concludes that his hallucination examples invalidate the entire AI premise. That's just silly. In my year of AI, it's mostly right. (I fact check pretty often.)
But worse, he has absolutely no imagination about the possible uses and that's why I call him a hack. He names the main, superficial use cases, says they have no value and condemns the project. It's true that nobody wants to see a movie made by an AI but lots of people want to have small drudgery tasks automated.
He also insists that copyright law will kill the industry based on the fact that they have been sued. But there have been no judgements against anyone and, Aside from the fact that our courts love corporations and want to preserver their investment, I don't see how current law will actually apply. Except that SCOTUS now just makes stuff up, copyright protects transformative uses and I cannot fathom any more transformative use than converting data into usable knowledge.
(Many think that's unfair. I disagree myself, but in any case, it will require new legislation to change.)
Ed's bottom line rests on "grotesque reckoning with a lack of creativity" and that is such bullshit that I can barely resist simple dismissal. Imagine calling an invention that, even if you hate it, is able to compose a haiku about my wife's love of her dachshund (true story) uncreative.
I don't know exactly how the AI boom will play out but
1) it's much more than "stupid" or a "trick". There are a lot of important potential uses.
2) The economics are sketchy but our society has supported much less obviously valuable things (see going to the moon, the internet, amazon.com). Further, the tech exists. It's not going to evaporate even if money slows down.
3) The courts are not going to murder AI for copyright or anything else. China will keep going and our government and corporations will find a way to keep up.
But, mostly, I despise his forced lack of insight into the potential upside of this tech. Imagine any student being able to access specific tutoring about anything as much as they want with patient, endless explanations. Imagine an AI that is trained on your government benefits and how to help you use them. How about bespoke vaccinations for any illness that afflicts you. A tool that reads something I'm interested in (this article) and lets me interrogate it until I understand as well as I want to.
AI is not without downsides but it is a fascinating and important tool that has the potential to vastly improve our lives. This guy thinks that's a "stupid, magic trick". He's wrong. He's a hack.
Ps, you can read my interrogation of the article. Note that GPT did not copy his article, I did. Here's the link:
An aside, I changed Citron to Zitron three separate times and this web page changed it back to Citron. That's so weird. I wonder if there is an AI editing the comments.
I rarely cook - or prepare food these days, but I did just add tiramisu to my Whole Foods delivery list. LOL
I would not play hide and seek with cops. When I was a little girl, and rode my bike through a neighborhood park, there was a policeman who liked to hide in the bushes, and jump out when younger children got to close to the golf course grounds. (We didn't go on them, we knew it wasn't allowed, and who wants to get hit with a golf ball?) I found out from my husband that older kids flipped him off, but we younger ones...it was not fun.
Remembering that, and having been a middle class white kid....I can't even imagine what children, not pure white (including several of my great grandchildren) have to be afraid of. It worries me all the time.
Mysterious Monument On Capitol Hill 'Honors' Jan. 6 With A Bronze Turd
It’s unclear who installed the monument.
The monument depicts the turd sitting on a desk with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) nameplate on it, with a plaque underneath reading:
'This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election.
President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as “unbelievable patriots” and “warriors.” This monument stands as testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.'
PSA - Just an aside for anyone who uses Bing as a search engine (I do and am seldom disappointed in results, plus I get pretty pictures), you can bypass their stupid "Copilot" AI feature by going to
Giving off some serious incel vibes, your hed gif source info: https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/the-phantom-of-the-opera
And a meme chat: https://open.substack.com/chat/posts/479a721e-a211-431f-b431-177f09a815d5?utm_source=share
Anyone up for a hike to Lon Chaney's fishing cabin? It's right up the road from me.
http://lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-fieldnotes/lonchaneycabin
Aw, the Phantom was just hiding his male-pattern baldness. Just like Tim Pool!
I saw that the Internet Archive got hacked and has been down for a while. I hope they get back up soon. They have been such a great resource for me.
They were yesterday. But not right now. Old timey radio and film noir fan here.
Whoops, there it is. Very slow.
I know, it's such a bummer! They post updates on Bluesky, and the last one I read (although several days ago) said they are strengthening their security in the wake of a DDS attack. They do expect to be back up after that. Apparently, the archives were untouched, so they are good there.
News fresh from the Archive: https://blog.archive.org/2024/10/21/internet-archive-services-update-2024-10-21/
"In recovering from recent cyberattacks on October 8, the Internet Archive has resumed the Wayback Machine (starting October 13) and Archive-It (October 17), and as of today (October 21), has begun offering provisional availability of archive.org in a read-only manner. Features like uploading, borrowing, reviewing items, interlibrary loan, and other services are not yet available. "
Thank you for the update!
Lon Chaney frightened us with his grotesque face makeup.
Liz Cheney frightens us with her truth.
BTW-Please do Rondo Hatton next. That guy did not even need makeup to make the people in the movie house scream.
It is said that Mary Philbin was deliberately not shown Chaney's makeup until the moment that she unmasked him in the shot, in order to get a more visceral reaction.
If true, it worked.
Scary!
What font did you use for the intertitles?
Intertitles.
Intertitlesintertitlesintertitlesintertitles.
[starts to pick up word with intent to steal and walk away; finds surprisingly heavy; intertitle starts to bark frantically for M. Hahn; situation grows awkward]
Charrington regular
Bless you, 1001 Fonts. I downloaded it and shall use it.
"Nosferatu" staring Max Schreck is a favorite of mine. The first time I saw it on PBS when I was about 12 it gave me nightmares for quite a while.
Nice mix of the Sisters of Mercy "Marian" with "Nosferatu" clips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FhFMkd4u_U
I think this is “Phantom of the Opera”.
I was just generalizing as per classic black and white horror films that are the foundation of the horror genre.
I've been awake for four days and am prone to tangents.
How is bathroom do-over coming?
This is such a mommy-blog question....
Renovations can be stressful, especially if they cut off amenities. I lived through enough of them to empathize. I thought that might be related to the lack of sleep.
Just his image is scary as hell. Lugosi brought an erotic eeriness to the character. There is nothing erotic about this one. It's right out of the graveyard.
Lugosi created the paramour vampire and added that sexual element to the character.
"London After Midnight"(1927) is said to be one of the great silent horror films. Written and directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney in makeup of his own design, it should be.
Alas, it is another of the lost films from the silent era, in that no intact copy is known to exist.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BY2UwZGM1NWItMDk3Yi00MGM1LWE2ZTgtYTY5MDgxOTA1YmI5XkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_.jpg
TCM did a “recreation” of the film using still photographs and production notes for Halloween years ago that was actually pretty good.
That is still available on YouTube.
Chaney's makeup for London After Midnight scares the living bejeezus out of me. Something about the Victorian finery combined with the Bruce The Shark smile.
Some think that look was inspiration for Batman's foe The Joker.
I *think* the story "The Man Who Smiles" is older, from maybe a late 1880s? As well, there's the William Castle film Mr. Sardonicus, but that was in the Fifties. It seems the idea of a man who's evil with a fixed grin has really been frightening to a lot of people.
(Robert Anton Wilson wrote about a similar trope of the Giggling Sadist, something that was equally creepy and disturbing and featured in a lot of media from the 1970s and 1980s.)
Oooh, London After Midnight is also the name of a LA band that has a major goth following. The singer is very progressive, and has been around since the 90s. He most definitely got the name from this film! Thanks for the mini-lesson, my friend.
And I learned of the band from you.
I spent the last two nights watching the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams.
I will spend the next two nights of my life questioning my life choices. That movie was ASS.
Huh, I liked it.
I did too, especially the end.
Yup, chilling.
Like if TFG wins, chilling...
Umm .. is that good or bad. Sorry, I'm old.
ASS = bad
THE TITS = good
Hey, don't blame me. I don't make this shit up.
The original is tits
Unless you like nice asses more than nice tits.
Eh, whatevs. We don't kink shame. Unless your name is Mark Robinson, then it's open season.
Hey, I once saw that guy and his son walking with the Queen.
His hair was perfect.
Obligatory bump/
So that’s what Trump looks like under the orange face paste.
Lon Chaney was such an incredible actor. Can you imagine any of today's talent sitting there doing their own special effects makeup like that?
Lon Chaney was such a great actor. I've seen some of his movies on TCM. In one, "The Unknown," he had a young co-star by the name of Joan Crawford. Crawford credited Chaney for helping her hone her acting skills.
Holy shirtballs!
Where did I read that republicans really only have two options concerning Trump's racist, myogenetic or frankly fascist remarks: 1. vehemently deny and sanewash them. 2. No comment and or 3. (political suicide) denounce said remarks as being un-American.
This is just about EVERY GOP so called representative. From the first Tab with SCOTT JENNINGS. Go home and take a look in the mirror dude. All of them cowards only willing to hold onto power rather than represent the American people.
Boils my freaking blood.
For anyone following the Roberson Death Penalty case - here is his team’s rebuttal to REDACTED REDACTED BANHAMMERED REDACTED Paxton’s goddamned bullshit:
https://www.cbs19.tv/article/news/local/legal-team-for-death-row-inmate-robert-roberson-responds-to-statement-released-by-attorney-general-ken-paxton/501-3806db98-7821-43b2-b982-31ed81e0a770
Meanwhile, "White House orders Pentagon and intel agencies to increase use of AI"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/24/white-house-ai-nation-security-memo/
Oh my Most Wonderful and Beautiful Wonkette Queen Rebekah.....
I, a most humble and appreciative minion would most respectfully like to petition
for a Wonkette Credentialed White House Correspondent to spread Joy to the White House Pressroom and to support whoever CJ Craig emerges from the Light!@
So let it be written????
About the AI article: I spend a lot of time thinking about AI because I can see how shitty it’s making my interactions with the internet, and because I know a lot about how education works, and how the brain works, and how much businesses and public agencies prefer to reduce numbers of workers even when that means the product or service is crappier.
I read the hype about AI the way I read the hype about Second Life as a transformative way to teach! Or Bitcoin as a transformative economic system! They all suffer from the fact that universal adoption of the technology will undermine the basis they stand on. You need a strong real economic system to base your cryptocurrency on, but you want everyone to move to the e dollars? Who is going to pay for that real dollar if no one is using them? Public investment when the crypto undermined the public good? The hype is intended to make things feel inevitable (so the costs shouldn’t be counted) and morally neutral or positive (so we won’t think too hard about the effects.)
It’s a MAJOR issue that AI doesn’t really know what is accurate and what isn’t. So that makes it tough to suggest that a student who doesn’t already have an understanding of a subject should trust what the AI summary tells them. Students like to remove all critical thinking from a task, because critical thinking is the hard part. They like to blame the source if it led them to inaccuracy. AI is like crowdsourcing on steroids here, because at least when they were using Wikipedia they might still be able to tell where the data was coming from and check up on it, and I could teach them how to think critically about each source. Not to mention that summarizing the information they’ve gathered is a major way to increase their own comprehension of a topic, but AI shimmers so temptingly. Having to integrate all that data is how we learn, it’s not just a cruel time-consuming boring task.
And as far as AI increasing efficiency: Mental downtime is an important part of learning and creativity. If a job has no room for that, because any of those mildly easy, mind wandering irksome tasks are outsourced to AI or software or peons, creativity suffers, and productivity too, because even the most mentally active of us can’t do all the big thinks all the time. But that is how AI is currently promoted, as a way to free you up for the big thinks constantly.
But the bigger issue is that the huge amount of background knowledge humans use to make decisions and be creative doesn’t come out of a single source or a summary thereof. If you never read a subordinate’s report, but instead rely on an AI summary, over time you lose your understanding of that subordinate, of their biases that might make one or another piece of their data more questionable, and you may amplify their mistakes. You lose a broad understanding of issues because you don’t have to do the sometimes frustrating tasks that train your brain to sort and rank and store information. You also need to know what’s going on in the world around you, in your industry, among your colleagues, etc, so all that information from the subordinate slots into everything else in your head. AI suggests itself as a shortcut but is it a shortcut if you are going to have to explicitly gather data that you previously would absorb while reading?
I’m reminded of my first year teaching, when I helped a teacher out with a lesson on categorization and realized that we now had to teach much older children than I expected how to put things in like groups and name those groups. I had not realized I’d had to learn that almost as soon as I could read, because searching by subject in a card catalog was how I could find a library book. But now, with the rise of keyword searching, kids didn’t have to learn that until fourth grade math. There’s nothing wrong with that, really, it’s just that we have to teach overtly something that was a daily life skill in the past.
My professional degree is in library and information science, so I am very, very fond of data and technology and how we can use them to make things better or worse. I am also very fond of accuracy, probably moreso than others who find AI interpretations good enough. I’ve not quite resigned myself to the enshittification of search engines that has resulted from first, keyword instead of fixed vocabulary searches, and now AI functions that are pretty sure I don’t want to search for an actual person’s FB page even if I start my search with @.
I would say, AI is not without its upsides, but most of those I’ve seen cited don’t strike me as very up, yet, and the power demands and cost are rather high for what we are getting.
I regret to inform you Tucker Carlson is sharing his fantasies again https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/24/2279162/-Tucker-Carlson-revives-the-weird-with-daddy-Trump-spanking-fantasy?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_2&pm_medium=web
You know what would be cool? It would be cool if California didn't have shitty Republicans like everyone else has shitty Republicans. Quick summary:
2021: 7 of 11 CA Republicans in Congress refused to certify the election results.
2024: 4 of 12 CA Republican incumbents promise to uphold the election results, and 2 of 3 Republican Congressional contenders have promised the same. But hey, at least that means the new guys sound like they are slightly better than the old guys.
https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2024/oct/24/most-california-republicans-in-congress-wont-commi/
Book Report: Ed Zitron is a Hack with an Axe to Grind
I preface by noting that I am very interested in AI and use it every day, mostly for computer programming tasks but also for many general topics.
Most of what Zitron says is true. The AI companies are every bit as economically unsustainable as Amazon was for twenty years. Look how badly that turned out. Also, AI hallucinates. It is wrong almost as often as a real person. Also, the use cases are not well understood. Also, OpenAI/Altman are kind of weird.
Disclaimer: My opinion on this comes not only from reading (skimming) this endless screed but seeing him in a long interview with Adam Conover where he made these same points.
But, his overall point derives from the assertion that AI is a "big stupid magic trick" is completely wrong and stems from narrow minded prejudice. I use AI every day. It is not a trick. It is insanely useful. I use it for coding. I have it read and fact check everything I write. I engage in long discourse on fancy topics I like (stellar nucleosynthesis, anyone; how about Napoleon's legacy or Caligula's reign or contract validity in clickwrap?)
You might say, I could have read web pages about those things. You're right. But you couldn't have read a couple of paragraphs and asked the web page about the thing that confused you. It is very powerful. As for work, AI has improved my life immensely and saved a huge amount of time.
I am an anecdote, not data. Zitron, it turns out only shows anecdotes, too. He concludes that his hallucination examples invalidate the entire AI premise. That's just silly. In my year of AI, it's mostly right. (I fact check pretty often.)
But worse, he has absolutely no imagination about the possible uses and that's why I call him a hack. He names the main, superficial use cases, says they have no value and condemns the project. It's true that nobody wants to see a movie made by an AI but lots of people want to have small drudgery tasks automated.
He also insists that copyright law will kill the industry based on the fact that they have been sued. But there have been no judgements against anyone and, Aside from the fact that our courts love corporations and want to preserver their investment, I don't see how current law will actually apply. Except that SCOTUS now just makes stuff up, copyright protects transformative uses and I cannot fathom any more transformative use than converting data into usable knowledge.
(Many think that's unfair. I disagree myself, but in any case, it will require new legislation to change.)
Ed's bottom line rests on "grotesque reckoning with a lack of creativity" and that is such bullshit that I can barely resist simple dismissal. Imagine calling an invention that, even if you hate it, is able to compose a haiku about my wife's love of her dachshund (true story) uncreative.
I don't know exactly how the AI boom will play out but
1) it's much more than "stupid" or a "trick". There are a lot of important potential uses.
2) The economics are sketchy but our society has supported much less obviously valuable things (see going to the moon, the internet, amazon.com). Further, the tech exists. It's not going to evaporate even if money slows down.
3) The courts are not going to murder AI for copyright or anything else. China will keep going and our government and corporations will find a way to keep up.
But, mostly, I despise his forced lack of insight into the potential upside of this tech. Imagine any student being able to access specific tutoring about anything as much as they want with patient, endless explanations. Imagine an AI that is trained on your government benefits and how to help you use them. How about bespoke vaccinations for any illness that afflicts you. A tool that reads something I'm interested in (this article) and lets me interrogate it until I understand as well as I want to.
AI is not without downsides but it is a fascinating and important tool that has the potential to vastly improve our lives. This guy thinks that's a "stupid, magic trick". He's wrong. He's a hack.
Ps, you can read my interrogation of the article. Note that GPT did not copy his article, I did. Here's the link:
https://chatgpt.com/share/671a681c-2c30-800c-aff4-f0a215618589
An aside, I changed Citron to Zitron three separate times and this web page changed it back to Citron. That's so weird. I wonder if there is an AI editing the comments.
"...your secret train..." Covertly or otherwise, trains are the best way to go anywhere.
The impressive thing about those secret trains is how they keep the tracks hidden.
local cops, bored, decide to invite locals to be hunted for sport
weird
I rarely cook - or prepare food these days, but I did just add tiramisu to my Whole Foods delivery list. LOL
I would not play hide and seek with cops. When I was a little girl, and rode my bike through a neighborhood park, there was a policeman who liked to hide in the bushes, and jump out when younger children got to close to the golf course grounds. (We didn't go on them, we knew it wasn't allowed, and who wants to get hit with a golf ball?) I found out from my husband that older kids flipped him off, but we younger ones...it was not fun.
Remembering that, and having been a middle class white kid....I can't even imagine what children, not pure white (including several of my great grandchildren) have to be afraid of. It worries me all the time.
When the truth is found to be lies,
And all the joy,
Within you dies,
Don't you want somebody to love,
Don't you need somebody to love,
https://youtu.be/a-C9pUGszsw?si=3E0vSSUXJttxq7os
Mysterious Monument On Capitol Hill 'Honors' Jan. 6 With A Bronze Turd
It’s unclear who installed the monument.
The monument depicts the turd sitting on a desk with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) nameplate on it, with a plaque underneath reading:
'This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election.
President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as “unbelievable patriots” and “warriors.” This monument stands as testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.'
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bronze-turd-monument-honors-jan-6_n_671a50c5e4b00589e7dc10af?utm_source=buzzfeed&utm_medium=iframely
PSA - Just an aside for anyone who uses Bing as a search engine (I do and am seldom disappointed in results, plus I get pretty pictures), you can bypass their stupid "Copilot" AI feature by going to
https://nochat.bing.com instead of www.bing.com.
Glad to see DOJ has put Musk on notice. Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse has a good info here:
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/is-doj-doing-enough-to-protect-the