86 Comments
Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Didn’t see that last bit coming. Whew

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

It was the perfect finish. Bravo!

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Roy, was this one hard to write or did it flow like an exploding sewer?

This AI/N word panic is, like, pressuring to repeat a point I've already made way too much this week, but tough: We're talking here about reality-detached idiots pandering to morons so, you know, nothing reasonable can be expected.

Personally, where I get lost is why saying the N word is in any way needed to save millions for a nuke, whatever *that* means. I mean, per my own precept, one shouldn't expect the idea to make sense but this is like pure mental asylum insane.

Those people...

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author

It came to me in a dream!

(But you know one has to work hard at these things nonetheless.)

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

I tried to get a Kipling thing going - I got as far as

" If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds full of bullshit lies-"

I was going to finish with

" you'll be an asshole my son ."

Then I realized Kipling probably

Used the N-Word more than Eazy-E in his prime and remembered an earlier vow I took to just leave Kipling out of it, whatever it was.

And yes. I've kipled before.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Before...?

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

😂

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

First, bravo Roy. Second, this whole ludicrous rightwing-generated "hypothetical" reminds me of George Carlin's "I Used to Be Irish Catholic" bit, where kids at his parochial school would think up increasingly absurd scenarios to confound the priest about Catholic rules: "what if you knew you couldn't eat meat on Fridays, but you were on an ocean liner, and you crossed the international date line, but you thought it was still Thursday...would that be a sin then, Father?"

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Hearted for the Irishness of the scenario, Catholic or otherwise.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

My favorite Carlin on Catholicism: It's your intention that makes an act a sin, so if you wake up in the morning and say "I'm going to go downtown and commit a mortal sin" - save your carfare! You've already done it.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

LOL. Carlin was a genius, and of course pointed out the absurdity of the whole "desire = the sin itself" formulation -- if wanting to commit the sin was as bad as committing it, you might as well go ahead and enjoy yourself.

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Ah, yes, the old "Jesus died for your sins. So don't let him down" ploy.

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LOL I always think of it as Talmudic and it's exactly the same

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Feb 9, 2023·edited Feb 9, 2023

A Jesuit priest and a Talmudic rabbi walk into a bar. By the time they've resolved the question of what kind of drink does or does not constitute an invitation to the sin of drunkenness, the bar has closed.

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And what if the ship would sink if you didn't eat the meat?

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

When reacting to racist shit from the Ben Shapiros and Michelle Malkins of the world, I have no problem dealing from the bottom of the deck: What the fuck do you assholes think will happen to you when the Christofascist win? Didn't Shapiro's experience with Breitbart teach him anything?

I'm a pink, pasty Celt with a last name that could fit a character in The Canterbury Tales. If I keep my mouth shut, nobody's coming for me. I can understand being a shit head because it's fun, but don't these guys read the news?

Never mind Critical Race Theory. How about some Critical Thinking?

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"with a last name that could fit a character in The Canterbury Tales"

I'm not remembering "The Fluttbucker's Tale".... but I'm not an expert in every Chaucerian manuscript.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

You'll have to shell out for the Director's Cut Special Blue Ray Edition. It's hard to find, and a little pricey. The extras include an archival BBC interview with olde Geoffrey. (You'll have to switch on the closed captioning for that part.)

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Why? Does he speak a nonstandard dialect of Chancery Southern Middle English...? Hmmm, surprising, but not impossible given scribal alterations

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Yeah, I was gonna say that comment was unlikely to go unchallenged by the GM.

Edit to add: Scribal!

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Ol’ Geoff stole The Fluttbucker’s Tale from the Pearl Poet.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

What?! And leave Race out of it??!! There's an entire juicymessysloppy chunk of this here "society" that would grind to a precipitous halt were that ever to happen. I mean, even the Canterbury Tales were racy!

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

"If you're imagining the Wife of Bath going about with a towel and a cake of soap, you've got entirely the wrong idea."

-- Richard Armour

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 9, 2023

Two marks for Richard Armour whom I keep seeing as Richard (in his) Armoire.

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Re: Shapiro and Malkin: leopards, faces, etc.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Of course Little Ben is reduced to plagiarizing the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie. Has he ever had an original thought?

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Well, his philosopher of choice is Aristotle, so the roots run deep

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Well, if it's Aristotle vs (say) Plato, that's not much of an insult. Shapiro struggles with things normal people have no trouble with (movies, songs, shopping, etc). He can hardly be expected to grapple with actual philosophical issues

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Classic.

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So I'm thinking Ben Shapiro probably isn't the right person to be making the argument humanity is worth saving.

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On one hand I'm so sick of these idiots being frivolous and asinine- on the other hand I'm really happy that these people are so frivolous and asinine.

I bet this took a lot of work. I'd have to have a big complicated serial killer victims looking flow chart stretched across 3 walls to keep it straight.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Looks like some jackass asked ChatGPT if it would be OK to say the N-word if it would prevent the destruction of the world, and it said no. That's it.

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023

ChatGPT for the win!

Which is not a thing I expected myself to write...

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I would have preferred "Fuck off, troll" instead of just "no" but maybe they're saving that for the version you have to pay for.

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Niche market, but probly profitable enough...

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

"Can I build a machine that will say 'N****r' for me so I don't get punched in the mouth like I deserve?"

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Presumably it's "if AI can say it I can too so it's perfectly normal and nobody can get mad at me, nyaaah!"

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"What if, and hear me out, I carried around a ventriloquist's dummy who also, get this, happened to be painted brown with dark curly hair, and then the *DUMMY* said the n-word? Then you'd have to punch the dummy, right? Right?"

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They might be willing to cut out the dummy and go directly to blackface because they REALLY do want to say the N-word.

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Maybe, but in the real world we just punch the ventriloquist FFS!

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023

2 marks for "hear me out", but see below (or above...I can never tell)

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seems like Ms. Shapiro's...uh...moisture problem could have made entrance somewhere here, but this is a classy joint!

otherwise, whew, that was good!

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This past week, in our monthly dept meeting, one of our older colleagues, a Oxfordian blowhard, went on a sputtering rant about the dangers of Chap.GPT, which he claimed could generate term papers that were "sophisticated & critically informed" and written with "stylistic panache." He concluded this Sarah Connor moment by proposing that the dept immediately mandated in-class final essay exams.

What I understand about the technology is that it at best generates impressive-sounding nonsense. That my colleague would be panicked by this says a lot about him.

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I had to look up "bumph" - great new word for me!

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

"generates impressive-sounding nonsense"

Hey, that's MY job!

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AI: "All of your job are belong to us!"

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

"...the dangers of Chap.GPT..."

Deliberate or a typo, this is exactly what an Oxfordian blowhard would complain about.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

We’ll know the AI is a real threat if it can get published in an academic journal.

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You're BOTH wrong. I've heard it can generate a lucid essay (w/ no "stylistic panache") that is not obviously written by a machine. I don't know how rife with cliches it is, but if it were, that would also suggest it was written by an undergraduate. Non-asshole academics do find this concerning.

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I've read quite a few of them, with the various pre-read declaratives so I knew they were AI-gen, and also I've been reading the opinions of a lot of profs and other wordy folk. My conclusion is Get Over It. There may be ways to track a digital submission to show AI involvement, or maybe not. But profs with panache will either punt, or make certain that their students actually learn something (or maybe know it already).

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

Even a stoned undergraduate who first learns about the Trolley Problem in Philosophy 101 understands that there isn't really a trolley.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

"You gotta ask yourself 'Do I feel lucky?' Well do ya, punk?! "

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

All I know is I've heard the "won't eat the bugs" crowd yell about how Satanic AI is, so I GUESS it's now evil to NOT use slurs, or something. I don't fucking know. When they run around and around the tree like this, aren't they supposed to turn into butter or something?

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

BTW, honest-to-Gobbs true story: back in the late 80s or so, I happened across a column in NY Newsday about AI, and the author was very unhappy about the concept. But it was odd, since what they were mad about was how AI would demean education and make college degrees worthless and like that there, and I'm reading this and getting confused, and then it hits me - they thought artificial intelligence was that thing from cyberpunk where you can jam a chip in your head and gain knowledge about something. Sweet screaming Jesus.

Almost as good was the letter to the editor (not the same paper) very mad about the air strikes in Bosnia, because it was so inconveniencing and disruptive and why didn't those greedy airport workers just do their jobs and liberals were probably behind it. *facepalm*

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It doesn't reflect well on the editors of that 2nd paper that they published that letter. Or maybe they published it for the entertainment value, I dunno.

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

To be fair, Elon Musk's freakish interest in racial slurs is somewhat understandable since he comes from a racist society that systematically treated blacks as inferior to whites in all ways, second-class non-citizens deserving whatever insults white people felt free to call them. On the other hand, Ben Shapiro comes from... um... never mind.

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author

Ha ha

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Yet somehow the hundreds of stories generated about Elon Musk every day somehow neglect to mention that.

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Lately, I've been thinking about the conceit that, if civilization is going to come to an end, it's going to happen right at the moment when YOU happen to be alive. Then you start looking around for the civilization-ender, and if you're a fucking moron, you come up with "Woke brain virus." And then, because you just happen to have been born into this critical civilization-ending moment, and if you also happen to be a billionaire (and did I mention fucking moron?) you start casting yourself in the role of civilization-saver. Next logical step is "I'll buy Twitter for WAY too much!" of course. He's actually said that "fixing" Twitter is essential to our survival as a species. OK, Elmo.

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I thought it was tunnels...damn, I can't keep up.

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Yes, tunnels. Also essential to our survival as a species. Also colonizing Mars. Also any other random thing that just popped into his head in the last 10 minutes.

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023

At the rate we're going, colonizing tunnels is starting to look like what passes for genius...

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I think this all ends like Dr. Strangelove: "We cannot allow a MINE SHAFT GAP!"

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(Insert bogus German accent here): "Mine SHAFT – it has a GAP!"

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Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

"How come the black AI can say the N Word and we can’t"

Shush, or we'll teach the AI to use pronouns.

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Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso

What if you slept

And what if

In your sleep

You dreamed

And what if

In your dream

You went to heaven

And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower

And what if

When you awoke

You had that flower in your hand

Ah, what then?

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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