Not only is AI destroying our intellectual space, the power requirements to make it happen are going to destroy our physical space. They are reopening Three Mile Island to give Microsoft the energy to proceed with their AI programs.
I mean what the fuck? It's the same bullshit as crypto currency - let's use enormous amounts of power for no discernible real reason. And someday soon we'll have to spend real money to bail out the fake money.
"... the power requirements to make it happen are going to destroy our physical space. They are reopening Three Mile Island to give Microsoft the energy to proceed with their AI programs."
Soon, they will need to burn one actual meat-&-bones writer alive in order to produce enough energy to ChapGPT one thousand ludicrous & poorly-sourced undergraduate papers...
They're going to run into a big problem very soon that there is LITERALLY not enough information to train generative AI to be better than it is now. I'm talking MULTIPLES of the entire human corpus.
Unrelated yet still somehow related - Tubi- the ubiquitous free channel with a stupid name- has a very clean copy of Welles Macbeth. I've watched the first 3 minutes four times in the last week. They also have a three and a half hour version of Greed. I haven't checked that one out yet.
“Dickens believed it was both the best and the worst of times. He believed polarization was the greatest threat to society. In conclusion, the French Revolution was a land of contrasts.”
Well, duh, how can you have an airline that only flies in one direction? "I'm flying Northwest from Miami to Seattle, but I've got to take United to get back."
Son of a bitch! I never caught that. You da man! That movie and "Foreign Correspondent" are tied as my favorite Hitch films, though "Lifeboat" continues to grow on me.
I wanted to say Shere Khan, which is how my brain remembers him. The original "Jungle Book", the movie I watched more than any other in the shortest time. Every showing except Thursday, which was Cub Scout meeting day. Later in life I got to know who Phil Harris was (see Jack Benny), and when I found out Louis Prima was the whitest white man that ever whited, you could'a knocked me over with a feather.
IMHO Hitchcock is really the first "modern" director. If, by "modern" you mean a propulsive plot that moves quickly enough so the audience doesn't get hung up on all the gaping holes, improbable coincidences, and nonsensical choices his characters make.
Sabotage and Foreign Correspondent (made in the early 40's!) are easily a match for any Marvel or Disney movie in their ridiculousness.
Propulsive is the word. I've also been thinking of these two in their war propaganda functions, with Foreign Correspondent coming pre-US entry into the war, and Sabotage as about the country now being all in. I'd started thinking Alan Baxter's creepy character would suit a certain incoming administration. Until realizing: the character was too soft-spoken, and knew nothing of trolling or owning the libs.
(one of the advantages of being autistic is being easily entertained. As my, oh, five cubic feet of Marvel comics attest. Having no innate understanding of neuro-typical emotions leaves me out of most movies. And how 'bout Goddamn rom-coms for ridiculousness. Even my retarded ass calls bullshit on that).
Days ago I re-watched it for the first time in years, and you're right. It's largely one set piece/MacGuffin after another. (Or, maybe the set pieces themselves are MacGuffins?) I love how McCrea 's Americanness is contrasted with, uh, George Sanders-ness.
Ridiculously enough, the thing is so involving that I'm left with nagging reality-based questions. How did they find a perfect copy of Van Meer to just walk on into that trap? Or is the whole scene on the steps staged, with some unseen elaborate steps taken to extricate the double from the mob scene? Very convenient of Mr. H to cut to the car chase and eerie windmills.
So much progress in movie-making is driven by the realization that audiences really don't care and will accept just about anything. My favorite example is Busby Berkely, who was the first to realize that an audience watching a movie about a stage musical didn't care if the shots they see could actually be seen by a real audience (how would people in the audience see those shots from above? A giant mirror over the stage? Who cares, shut up, it's fun!)
Stories about the famous mess of the unfinished script/filming of Casablanca, with Michael Curtiz saying: Don't worry, I make it go so fast no one notices.
I heard that 3-Mile Island thing and was concerned at first. But then I thought about how much we’ve learned since then and how we’ve grown, and how far we’ve advanced human knowledge, and - stop laughing, dammit!
Not-surprise: Perlstein's column this week was his first one at TAP that, like, let's say didn't work for me.
AI is both nascent and an incredibly vague term. It includes super fast calculating, parsing search engine results, a way for non-artists to create art, and is the trigger as it were for a parody for Apple. (Spoiler: Apple's parody amuses me because AI is that vague a concept.)
Such problem as there is, and it's Perlstein's, is that second aspect there: letting the search engine summarizes its own results so the searcher of information can save themselves the efforts.
And that, in turn, leads to something Perlstein either didn't address or I missed in the piece: the intellectual laziness of o many people -- their curiosity and ability are so limited that they have no desire nor ability to bother to assess that what they find in their searches aren't garbage.
So much information available via the intertubes and people just can't bother (because reasons) to be informed.
So, for example, we get people feeling screwed by the system, make to effort to learn why that's so and go with their feelings and elect Republicans who are, of course, part of the problem. You got the number 1, no need to get another number and add...
(As for this election cycle, it was like a mosaic of fails. My favorite though are the Democrats' failure to have a message that would excite their voters into going to vote combined with Harris' ending the campaign running as an alt-Republican. Not that as a DNC candidate she could do much else.)
The masters of the...uhmm...solar system will tell you none of that failure-to-think stuff is important because they will deploy the AI in such a way that non-thinking* humans will be delooped entirely.
The way you describe it here—and not inaccurately— how AI search result summaries get used perfectly matches how most folks think about political issues. They want a summary — and that is all.
For decades, I've noticed how students will express pious dismay that an article or even piece of literature could advocate a strong opinion. "Prof. H," they'd say, "Don't you think the Communist Manifesto seems a little... bias?" Yes sweetie, it's called, "Having an opinion." It's your job to figure out if you agree with it or why it might be incomplete.
I use some stand alone search thing for relatively easy stuff and then argue with it when it's wrong.
Also, my bar for "intellectually active" is a very low one. Content creation is a different thing entirely. And that imprecision in the term AI is a problem with the exception that the imprecision also makes Apple's partly parodistic use possible and amusing.
I refer my Right Honorable Friend (as they say during Question Time) to the answer Ben Franklin gave some years ago: "A Republic, if you can Keep it."
I don't know why it's always the responsibility of Democrats to have the perfect, handcrafted message for perfect, handcrafted results. A *bare* majority of Americans wanted chaos and disorder, not just because they want to move progress back at least a century, but because it's "fun" to "own the libs".
EDIT: OK, I'm pissed off now. Have you noticed that almost all of the people saying "Democrats need to move to the center (right) and change the head of the DNC" are White males?
The problem is thinking the messaging’s the problem, not the message. Substantive actions are needed, not a slightly different line of BS.
If you want any sort of decent society, it’s on the Democrats to deliver same. Or, rather, a Democratic Party that thinks the New Deal was a guide idea and should be the way to go.
If you want the actual norm, it’s not on the Democrats to take us there, it’s the 1890s, and the Republicans will have us back there soon enough.
Not that I’d know, but I’d like to think that in many instances, a bullshit detector would be enough, no deep knowledge required.
I’ll defer to you: am I misjudging, is it that labor intensive for voters to get a clue?
Maybe yes. I think of AOC’s discovery of AOC/Trump voters. The common factor is a sense that the system’s failing them. They then stop at that point and cast a vote with minimal thought solution-wise.
Maybe I’m giving the salts of the earth there too much credit?
I wouldn't say work, I'd say interest. Biden passed the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and a major infrastructure bill. How many Americans could tell you anything about any one of the three? And yes, I'd mostly blame the Democrats for not putting more effort into selling (and re-selling, and re-selling...) but no matter how hard you sell if people aren't paying attention they aren't paying attention.
Anyway, I'm skeptical that if those bills had done more very many people would have noticed the "more."
A common lefty critique of Biden is that he didn't do enough for the working class, but if the working class wasn't aware of what he had done, why do we think they'd be aware if he had done more?
To know what Biden did domestic policy-wise requires the initial interest but also work since nearly all of it was instantly memo4y-holed by our exceptional media (who are now proving that if Trump and SCOTUS run roughshod over the 1st amendment, the effect on the nation will be ~0).
"AI" is a deliberately vague term, because it is a marketing label searching for a use case. Silicon Valley is putting all its chips on AI because it is the last Next Big Thing standing (cryptocurrency is still a Ponzi scheme only good for money laundering, Web 3.0 is the punch line to a joke everyone's forgotten). Bogus info has always been with us (search for Covid coverup) AI simply automates it and hides its sources better.
People feel screwed for a host of reasons, and the why they already have will lead them where they want to go, AI or no. And the election is simple. A bare plurality of voters who bothered voted for Trump, who ran possibly the most honest campaign in American history. They either approved or didn't care. If Harris had used Hope instead of Joy it wouldn't have made any difference to those voters. Some insane chicken in every pot set of lies might have swung some of those oblivious voters. Maybe. And we're back to tactical poliics, where the best liar wins the election. Trump still wins.
I guess I should drop here the answer my neighbor the Jan-6-defendant-public-attorney gave me when I asked how the work is going (the following is from memory, not word-for-word):
"My job is not easy; most of these people are morons."
Roy, I want to believe you, but I wonder if we shouldn’t be drawing a different conclusion from the parallel journey of force-fed AI and fake politics. Namely that the proliferation of phony reality not only made it much easier for people to vote for Trump: “sure, he’s not what he says he is, but the price of eggs, etc.” but because garbage in, garbage out has become the norm, despite the fact it’s ugly and repellent. No, people don’t *LIKE* AI and they don’t like Trump (most of them). But they just sort of passively shrug with an attitude of “er, whatever, this is how it is now.”
In other words, I don’t see people’s stupidity or racism/misogyny or narcissistic self-interest as nearly as big of a threat as their passivity. I fear people have become totally inured to “consuming” politics and see the candidates as products being hawked. That the product being sold is shit just feels like business as usual to them. They’ve lost their sense of themselves as active participants in a democracy.
The kind of folks who buy shit off of TEMU, and shrug when it breaks the next day. And will never grasp the reality that the reason the crap is so cheap AND is so flimsy BOTH track back to Profit At ALL Costs.
Would it be ridiculous of me to suggest that somehow we're suffering from mass cultural depression? 'Cause this all sounds REALLY familiar.
Yes, the concept of 'value" seems to be lost on folks. Mrs. LP asked me yesterday, "Can you get a clock for the living room that won't break in two weeks?" Yes, ma'am, I can
"Why did you buy a truck (an S-10) with such an oversized engine?" Because I won't ever strain it, which is why it lasted past 200,000 miles...
My first stereo receiver (a Sherwood that didn't bother with an AM dial) was so over-built that when the filter capacitors finally gave out after 20-odd years, the repair shop could not find any that big. They ended up with a mil-spec one that was almost as big.
Just coincidentally, I needed to order another DVD player today because the one we've have for one entire year just broke. That one was a replacement for another one we had, also for one year, when it also broke. I'm convinced there's a chip inside that just counts, when days=365 it short-circuits the motherboard.
I've asserted for a while that the majority of Americans neither like nor understand politics and governance. That thermostatic thing is simply those voters throwing the bums out. Choices are a mix of tribal identity and entertainment value. This shambolic clown car was stable enough, as long as both political parties were committed to maintaining the system that gave them wealth and power. Things have changed, and those psuedo-random voters are completely unaware of that, because they consider politics a show. How they respond when Reality punches them in the mough is anybody's guess.
"They’ve lost their sense of themselves as active participants in a democracy." Yeah, but they squawk where the mush they're served tastes bad. That's how Trump lost in 2020.
". . . a significant number of voters knew that all that stuff was bullshit — and many of them voted for Trump anyway, with the misinfo and disinfo serving as an excuse rather than as a reason. "
Exactly. I would say that this applies to about 75 percent of the Trump voting people I know. Why? Because they see him as a Brer Rabbit, outwitting Brer Fox at every turn.
*The critically endangered itchy-scratchy brawr is reduced to a single patch planted in the White House garden during the second Shrub administration, as a practice site for his brush-chopping retirement sideline.
So sadly true. "Oh, the election of Barack Obama proves racism is over". After I got over the paroxysm of laughter, I thought, "No, this will drive the right ape-shit crazy".
Have we come a long way? Yep, when I was a kid, black folk lived in their own section of Russellville, called of course, N-town. Our local theater owner (of The Ritz, or The Rats as it was known, gives you something to pet while watching) scandalized the town by integrating the place before I was born.
Have we got a long, long way to go? Yes, and I fear that journey will require more time than the country as currently constituted will last.
Barack Obama *chose* to come from Chicago, The Most Heavily Segregated City In America. I respect him for that. Because I was around for its prequel, the Harold Washington mayoral campaign of 1983.
"If I thought voters were uniformly so stupid as to really believe that shit, I would have to conclude that they were irredeemable, and democracy finished."
Sadly, they ARE so stupid. And that makes them incredibly easy to deceive. Witness the rise of anti-vaccine as accepted orthodoxy now. The growing belief that there is a "secret government" that controls the weather through some hitherto unknown technology. The increasing number of people who are convinced that Ivermectin is actually like a vitamin that you need to take every day.
We're doomed because people are incredibly stupid, and getting dumber with every passing second.
People are UNEDUCATED, and that's a major plot point here. Intentionally starving kids of education, particularly depriving them when it comes to civics... created a couple generations of angry morons who feel (rightly) left behind and basically can't help themselves about railing against "elites" without even knowing what that really means. They stock the swamp themselves.
As an elitist I take personal responsibility for putting things right for all the little people. Once a quarter, from now on I'll be taking a derelict to lunch at one of the finer restaurants here in Helltown. During lunch we'll discuss the finer points of fiscal policy, climate change, college football, mattress substitutes and coal-rolling. I'm certain this initiative will lead to a brighter future for all humankind...
Part of this is self-inflicted. Seventy-five percent (my own estimate) of what ails American education can be attributed to White people hating to pay taxes to educate *their own* kids, never mind anyone else's. (Or paying taxes for anything to be honest.)
And, to make my point, if they understood how the taxation system works and why we have it, they wouldn't be such hardliners. E.g., taxes are very high in Scandinavian countries (where *gasp* many whites howl over the number of immigrants there but that's a dead cat for another day) but the wiser among the populace are overall pleased with the quality of life it brings them.
Yes, but it's ACTUALLY the fault of all those college kids who want free stuff!
Really, I think someone needs to do some deep analysis on the American idea of taxation and how it relates to the image we've been fed for decades about how we're more consumers than citizens.
George Monbiot is UK-based and he's been writing about this stuff for decades... check out 2003's The Age of Consent... how big corps and government collude to turn everyone into a consumer with the illusion of choice, when in fact all the decisions are already made for you.
Yeah, for a long time Americans and Western Europeans understood what their taxes bought. I still think it's no coincidence that the rise of global fascism and the passing of the last generations that have even a childhood experience of WWII are happening at the same time.
Agree it's not coincidence, it's kind of cause and effect. Not the sole cause of fascism's resurgence but definitely helps grease the wheel. Same with things like rationing, or make do and mend. Past a point people don't understand scarcity because they've never experienced it.
Taxes are the price of civilization. There is no asphalt fairy. But hey, if you fine Christians are cool with stealing government services, be my guest. Hell ain't half full yet.
I was listening to Ed Zitron's latest Better Offline podcast yesterday, and realized: you have a population of people who are validly critical of authority, and rightly so, because they keep getting told things are fine or at least improving regardless of what they see themselves. But they can't criticize wealth as power, because they aspire to that wealth themselves. So they direct that anger at authorities like scientists and doctors and "unelected bureaucrats" who keep telling them "no". Retargeted resentment plus traditional down-home American anti-intellectualism. It's safer to shit on Dr. Fauci than their boss.
"Stupid" and "Disinterested" are two very different things, and I should know, because I run into that distinction every day in my job.
People are plenty smart when thinking about a question that interests them, for the rest they do the minimum to get by (which is actually kinda smart, when you think about it.)
True. But stupid is quite prevalent out there. Just look at all the warnings printed on your daily-use items. There's a reason why shampoo comes with instructions.
There's always a lawsuit at the bottom of them all, ain't there. Why are there push-bar exit doors? Look up Chicago's Iroquois theater fire. If your stomach is strong enough, that is.
People tried to play catch with Jarts! People ate fucking Tide detergent pods! People permanently damaged their lungs trying to swallow a tablespoon full of cinnamon!
Hundreds of years ago, every village had its idiot, but he was just one idiot, and he was the only idiot you knew. Today, we've got a machine that hoovers up all the stories of EVERY village's idiot and rushes reports of their idiocy straight to us, is it any wonder we think people are getting stupider?
Amen. I had a high school classmate who got Ds and Fs consistently, but when we read To Kill a Mockingbird he got straight As. And once we were done with that, he went back to Ds and Fs.
I think we always approach this the wrong way 'round. We start with the disinterested, and ask why they're disinterested and how to make them interested. Perhaps we should start with people who stay engaged in politics in spite of it all, and ask then what keeps them involved? At least it would be a start.
The mother of a friend of mine is far from a stupid person, yet she believes some of the craziest stuff. "Oh, they're doing weather mods again." "All those people are getting sick because of the 5Gs." We've asked her what her sources are on this, and she gets evasive and changes the subject. I suspect that's because once she showed us a story from the source: RT. "That's Russia Today, it's a Russian propaganda site!", we said. She hasn't explained why she thinks that's a more reliable source than any legit ones like the Guardian, or whatever.
My guess is these so-called AI search queries will simply produce results that are paid for. Hell, searches already produce results that are paid for! "You want your business or ideas or political opinions pushed by our 'AI' thing? Just give us money."
Fortunately, I only saw political ads for the last few days of the campaigns, but I think they were instructive. The Trump and Harris ads were almost identical, both describing the candidate as someone who would work tirelessly to benefit average Americans. Of course Trump claiming that was a hooter to anyone who pays attention, but as you know, way too many people don't pay attention, and if I were one of them I would have thought Trump's ad was much more believable. So there's that.
In large part, I blame Obama and his 'they go low, we go high' strategy, which Harris obviously adopted as the campaign wore on. When she first took control, she promised to prosecute Trump, but quickly pivoted to the old Democratic fear of alienating the Fascists, racists, sex offenders, white collar criminals, science deniers, and other choice specimens of the far right. Along with that she adopted the Nancy Pelosi strategy of gettin in zingers just to piss off Trump, which had zero effect on people who don't follow politics all the time. Had she run an all negative, all the time campaign I think she would have won, probably easily.
That, and as I've mentioned before, the right openly and very successfully uses brainwashing techniques, constantly pushing fear and hate to weaken people's minds so they can instill new beliefs. At this point the Democrats really should be doing the same.
The difference, in both going hella negative and fighting brainwashing techniques with brainwashing techniques, is that all the negative stuff about the Republicans is true and there is very good reason to fear and hate them.
If we're doing Harris campaign post-mortems, I have to say I'm quite amazed that you had an incumbent administration, running for re-election, that just basically accepted that everyone thinks the economy sucks and there's nothing you can do to change their minds. Which leaves you with "Sure prices are way too high (a thing that happened, incidentally, during the four years my party was in power) but elect me and I'll make them lower!" Thinking about it that way, I'm not surprised that a lot of people found Harris' pitch unpersuasive.
For a comparison, imagine Trump was the incumbent President, running on exactly the same economic numbers Biden/Harris had. We all know exactly what he'd say, that "This is the greatest economy ever in all human history!" Sure, lots of people would call bullshit on that, but many would be persuaded, and not just Republicans. Because if you make an effort to persuade, some people are always persuaded. And if you make no effort to persuade, no people are always persuaded.
Can't find the cite now, but yesterday saw a claim that the DOGE bullshit will use AI to help with the efficiency measures. I suspect it will be both hilarious and tragically horrible.
Sorry, I got off on my usual rant about the weak and pathetic Democrats when your post is about AI and I think I may have found a way that I could use it.
It came to me while reading 'The Painted Protest,' an article by Dean Kissick in the current Harper's about the state of contemporary art. I'm sure the subtitle would put you off, and maybe much of the argument, but there is a lot of good insight in it as well, much of it germaine to things I've been thinking about for a long time regarding the textification of art. We'll see.
There's also a link to an old Tom Wolfe piece on the same subject, much of which is annoying in a Tom Wolfe kinda way. I found it interesting though, not for the subject matter but for the writing style. I've also been reading an old Henry Miller book and both of them reminded me that we've really gotten away from the 'go for it' style of writing, or at least it seems so based on the publications and little bit of fiction I still read.
And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, you tell me what you know!
Americans agree on a lot of big important issues: abortion, lgbtq+ civil rights, the unpopularity of Donald Trump, even the need to deal with climate change. I could go on, but this we know. At the same time, I'm always amazed at how narrow the margins are, at how in an electorate of 155 million the difference comes down to less than half a percent. How could it be that narrow, across that many people? We're told it's finely cut voter suppression, a few thousand here and there that adds up to a preposterous even split. But those voter suppression models will fail if enough people get angry, and even if the dems are sued into oblivion before the midterms, we know where the popular will is. We just need to find a way to ignite it.
I don't think this gets mentioned as often as it should, how remarkable it is that we're so evenly divided between the two parties, especially when the choice is - as one writer put it - between "diarrhea forever" and "everyone gets a puppy."
For Americans, it's just taken for granted that political divisions at the presidential level are 50-50 across the entire country, with local variations. 70-30 or 60-40 in California or Massachussetts or Alabama or Montana or wherever, but 50.1-49.9 for president, every single time, going back at least to Kennedy/Nixon.
I'm (originally) Canadian, and there's three or four or five parties competing for the electorate. And even with a first-past-the-post system, four or five parties end up in Parliament. Same with most countries around the world: Coalitions are a fact of human life. But here in the US, the biggest popular vote wins in my lifetime haven't been higher than 7 or 8%. That's just crazy.
In a town with two McDonalds franchises, each store gets about 50% of the business. (no, our two parties aren't both selling the same product, now go explain that to your low-info voter and tell me how that goes.)
My son and I have a word for folks that can't tell the difference between AI and a real person (aka A Turing Test) - morons. Granted we're both professional IT people, but still Geez Louise.
I remember a Scientific American article I read back in, oh, I'm gonna guess 1972. AI and nuclear fusion are "just around the corner". I been waiting for that corner a long damn time now. ChatGPT is a joke, a toy. "But it knows the entire Internet!". Yep, and as my old dean Don Mitchell (stamps floor, do you hear me down there, Don?), garbage in, garbage out. AI? Bullshit.
There are things it can do well, things with clearly defined rules, like the new anomaly checker at the large hadron collider or protein folding routines. General stuff? Nope. Especially since Americans are exceptionally fucking stupid.
Which brings me to my observation that America will be the only country that failed due to the stupidity of its electorate. That's how democracy works (How's that Brexit working out for ya, Britain?). To quote Agent K, ""A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." Oh well. K Sara Sara.
Worst part is that as the American public gets more and more moronic, that's what generative AI is going to work on, as well as text the AI itself generated, so you have a death spiral of enshittification.
Hopefully the limitations of generative AI will soon be obvious and we can move on, also hopefully without massive devastation and/or casualties.
My first exposure to the world of AI was back in the mid-80s, when the furniture company I was working for got a huge job for a company called AI.
For what it's worth, they chose weird woods that were sort of hard to source in certain materials - 3/4 veneeered plywood (for cabinets/drawer units) was readily available, but 1 1/4 veneered MDF (for desktops/uprights) was not. So they complained about how long it took to do the job.
My mistake, I was judging by what I saw (ha! see what I did there?) hanging on the wall at Home Depot: One handsaw specifically for cutting wood, called a "toolbox saw" because it's short enough to fit in a toolbox.
"...the misinfo and disinfo serving as an excuse rather than as a reason."
Man, I wish I saw this brilliant insight more often, in other, less enlightened parts of our commentariat.
Probably 95% of Trump's voters were Republicans, just as about 95% of Harris' voters were Democrats, but when have you ever seen a news story where the reporter asks, "Why did you vote for ___?" and the voter answers, "Because I'm a Republican and he's the Republican candidate, duh."
Voters know how the game is played, and know they should never cite their own party loyalty as the reason for their vote. Fortunately, their party provides them with plenty of "reasons" (free of charge!) if they should ever be asked.
"know a hawk from a handsaw"
I've never heard that! I love it!
Not only is AI destroying our intellectual space, the power requirements to make it happen are going to destroy our physical space. They are reopening Three Mile Island to give Microsoft the energy to proceed with their AI programs.
I mean what the fuck? It's the same bullshit as crypto currency - let's use enormous amounts of power for no discernible real reason. And someday soon we'll have to spend real money to bail out the fake money.
Dumbest God damn thing I ever heard of.
"... the power requirements to make it happen are going to destroy our physical space. They are reopening Three Mile Island to give Microsoft the energy to proceed with their AI programs."
Soon, they will need to burn one actual meat-&-bones writer alive in order to produce enough energy to ChapGPT one thousand ludicrous & poorly-sourced undergraduate papers...
They're going to run into a big problem very soon that there is LITERALLY not enough information to train generative AI to be better than it is now. I'm talking MULTIPLES of the entire human corpus.
It's from Shakespeare, so automatically good!
Unrelated yet still somehow related - Tubi- the ubiquitous free channel with a stupid name- has a very clean copy of Welles Macbeth. I've watched the first 3 minutes four times in the last week. They also have a three and a half hour version of Greed. I haven't checked that one out yet.
“Dickens believed it was both the best and the worst of times. He believed polarization was the greatest threat to society. In conclusion, the French Revolution was a land of contrasts.”
Hamlet: "I am but mad north by northwest; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."
Of course! " North by Northwest'
D'oh!
Thanks!
Summarily executed in 2010.
Thanks, Delta!
Well, duh, how can you have an airline that only flies in one direction? "I'm flying Northwest from Miami to Seattle, but I've got to take United to get back."
Hitchcock contains hidden depths (I thought the "hidden depths" in that movie were just the Freudian train-enters-tunnel shot at the end.)
As Saint George Carlin noted (in a quote used almost daily in Casa de LittlePig), "Ya don't have to be Fellini to figure that out".
Relevant point is about 1:20 in. But the entire piece is fabulous!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fKRdiSvq08
Hell, I learned a load of Shakespeare quotes just from Star Trek episode titles.
Because somebody has to...
https://youtu.be/ocq0-LINGyw
True dat, my brother.
Son of a bitch! I never caught that. You da man! That movie and "Foreign Correspondent" are tied as my favorite Hitch films, though "Lifeboat" continues to grow on me.
Thank you sir!
Foreign Correspondent is completely ridiculous. Completely wonderful, but completely ridiculous.
Oh, no argument there. My tastes are quite vulgar. But George Stevens is always a hoot, and it's fun to see Santa Claus plunge to his death.
George Sanders?
And yes, Edmund Gwenn as a villain. Talk about casting against type.
Whoops. I got CRS - can't remember shit.
I wanted to say Shere Khan, which is how my brain remembers him. The original "Jungle Book", the movie I watched more than any other in the shortest time. Every showing except Thursday, which was Cub Scout meeting day. Later in life I got to know who Phil Harris was (see Jack Benny), and when I found out Louis Prima was the whitest white man that ever whited, you could'a knocked me over with a feather.
IMHO Hitchcock is really the first "modern" director. If, by "modern" you mean a propulsive plot that moves quickly enough so the audience doesn't get hung up on all the gaping holes, improbable coincidences, and nonsensical choices his characters make.
Sabotage and Foreign Correspondent (made in the early 40's!) are easily a match for any Marvel or Disney movie in their ridiculousness.
Propulsive is the word. I've also been thinking of these two in their war propaganda functions, with Foreign Correspondent coming pre-US entry into the war, and Sabotage as about the country now being all in. I'd started thinking Alan Baxter's creepy character would suit a certain incoming administration. Until realizing: the character was too soft-spoken, and knew nothing of trolling or owning the libs.
Smile when you say Marvel, padnah. Excelsior!
(one of the advantages of being autistic is being easily entertained. As my, oh, five cubic feet of Marvel comics attest. Having no innate understanding of neuro-typical emotions leaves me out of most movies. And how 'bout Goddamn rom-coms for ridiculousness. Even my retarded ass calls bullshit on that).
Days ago I re-watched it for the first time in years, and you're right. It's largely one set piece/MacGuffin after another. (Or, maybe the set pieces themselves are MacGuffins?) I love how McCrea 's Americanness is contrasted with, uh, George Sanders-ness.
Ridiculously enough, the thing is so involving that I'm left with nagging reality-based questions. How did they find a perfect copy of Van Meer to just walk on into that trap? Or is the whole scene on the steps staged, with some unseen elaborate steps taken to extricate the double from the mob scene? Very convenient of Mr. H to cut to the car chase and eerie windmills.
So much progress in movie-making is driven by the realization that audiences really don't care and will accept just about anything. My favorite example is Busby Berkely, who was the first to realize that an audience watching a movie about a stage musical didn't care if the shots they see could actually be seen by a real audience (how would people in the audience see those shots from above? A giant mirror over the stage? Who cares, shut up, it's fun!)
Stories about the famous mess of the unfinished script/filming of Casablanca, with Michael Curtiz saying: Don't worry, I make it go so fast no one notices.
I heard that 3-Mile Island thing and was concerned at first. But then I thought about how much we’ve learned since then and how we’ve grown, and how far we’ve advanced human knowledge, and - stop laughing, dammit!
Not-surprise: Perlstein's column this week was his first one at TAP that, like, let's say didn't work for me.
AI is both nascent and an incredibly vague term. It includes super fast calculating, parsing search engine results, a way for non-artists to create art, and is the trigger as it were for a parody for Apple. (Spoiler: Apple's parody amuses me because AI is that vague a concept.)
Such problem as there is, and it's Perlstein's, is that second aspect there: letting the search engine summarizes its own results so the searcher of information can save themselves the efforts.
And that, in turn, leads to something Perlstein either didn't address or I missed in the piece: the intellectual laziness of o many people -- their curiosity and ability are so limited that they have no desire nor ability to bother to assess that what they find in their searches aren't garbage.
So much information available via the intertubes and people just can't bother (because reasons) to be informed.
So, for example, we get people feeling screwed by the system, make to effort to learn why that's so and go with their feelings and elect Republicans who are, of course, part of the problem. You got the number 1, no need to get another number and add...
(As for this election cycle, it was like a mosaic of fails. My favorite though are the Democrats' failure to have a message that would excite their voters into going to vote combined with Harris' ending the campaign running as an alt-Republican. Not that as a DNC candidate she could do much else.)
The masters of the...uhmm...solar system will tell you none of that failure-to-think stuff is important because they will deploy the AI in such a way that non-thinking* humans will be delooped entirely.
*ie 'all'
Hey, I think ... therefore I am
or is it I am therefore I think
Carry On Cogitatin'!
The way you describe it here—and not inaccurately— how AI search result summaries get used perfectly matches how most folks think about political issues. They want a summary — and that is all.
For decades, I've noticed how students will express pious dismay that an article or even piece of literature could advocate a strong opinion. "Prof. H," they'd say, "Don't you think the Communist Manifesto seems a little... bias?" Yes sweetie, it's called, "Having an opinion." It's your job to figure out if you agree with it or why it might be incomplete.
If you're offered an analytic tool that produces results that can't be trusted, the problem is not that the user is lazy but that the tool is shit.
Laziness is why they’re attracted to the summaries.
The core of the problem is that people tend to want to know what they want to know instead of what they need to know.
Yes, we definitely need some new people, these ones they sent us are shit.
Oh you. Another Carlin quote.
"What do you think about the dope problem?"
"I definitely think there are too many dopes, yes"
Yes! A Biblical smiting, a suite of plagues!
“I will not buy this tobacconist; it is scratched.”
Yes, if they were intellectually active or interested in "content" creation, they wouldn't need AI.
It has it's uses.
I use some stand alone search thing for relatively easy stuff and then argue with it when it's wrong.
Also, my bar for "intellectually active" is a very low one. Content creation is a different thing entirely. And that imprecision in the term AI is a problem with the exception that the imprecision also makes Apple's partly parodistic use possible and amusing.
I refer my Right Honorable Friend (as they say during Question Time) to the answer Ben Franklin gave some years ago: "A Republic, if you can Keep it."
I don't know why it's always the responsibility of Democrats to have the perfect, handcrafted message for perfect, handcrafted results. A *bare* majority of Americans wanted chaos and disorder, not just because they want to move progress back at least a century, but because it's "fun" to "own the libs".
EDIT: OK, I'm pissed off now. Have you noticed that almost all of the people saying "Democrats need to move to the center (right) and change the head of the DNC" are White males?
The problem is thinking the messaging’s the problem, not the message. Substantive actions are needed, not a slightly different line of BS.
If you want any sort of decent society, it’s on the Democrats to deliver same. Or, rather, a Democratic Party that thinks the New Deal was a guide idea and should be the way to go.
If you want the actual norm, it’s not on the Democrats to take us there, it’s the 1890s, and the Republicans will have us back there soon enough.
Doesn't this require voters who are actually paying attention enough to notice that "Substantive actions" are being made on their behalf?
Not so sure there’s all that much work involved.
Not that I’d know, but I’d like to think that in many instances, a bullshit detector would be enough, no deep knowledge required.
I’ll defer to you: am I misjudging, is it that labor intensive for voters to get a clue?
Maybe yes. I think of AOC’s discovery of AOC/Trump voters. The common factor is a sense that the system’s failing them. They then stop at that point and cast a vote with minimal thought solution-wise.
Maybe I’m giving the salts of the earth there too much credit?
I wouldn't say work, I'd say interest. Biden passed the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act and a major infrastructure bill. How many Americans could tell you anything about any one of the three? And yes, I'd mostly blame the Democrats for not putting more effort into selling (and re-selling, and re-selling...) but no matter how hard you sell if people aren't paying attention they aren't paying attention.
Anyway, I'm skeptical that if those bills had done more very many people would have noticed the "more."
A common lefty critique of Biden is that he didn't do enough for the working class, but if the working class wasn't aware of what he had done, why do we think they'd be aware if he had done more?
To know what Biden did domestic policy-wise requires the initial interest but also work since nearly all of it was instantly memo4y-holed by our exceptional media (who are now proving that if Trump and SCOTUS run roughshod over the 1st amendment, the effect on the nation will be ~0).
Of course like everything, it starts by caring…
Perhaps we need to update "Overton window" to "Overton Grand Canyon".
Overton Intergalactic Void
Close the damn window!
"AI" is a deliberately vague term, because it is a marketing label searching for a use case. Silicon Valley is putting all its chips on AI because it is the last Next Big Thing standing (cryptocurrency is still a Ponzi scheme only good for money laundering, Web 3.0 is the punch line to a joke everyone's forgotten). Bogus info has always been with us (search for Covid coverup) AI simply automates it and hides its sources better.
People feel screwed for a host of reasons, and the why they already have will lead them where they want to go, AI or no. And the election is simple. A bare plurality of voters who bothered voted for Trump, who ran possibly the most honest campaign in American history. They either approved or didn't care. If Harris had used Hope instead of Joy it wouldn't have made any difference to those voters. Some insane chicken in every pot set of lies might have swung some of those oblivious voters. Maybe. And we're back to tactical poliics, where the best liar wins the election. Trump still wins.
I guess I should drop here the answer my neighbor the Jan-6-defendant-public-attorney gave me when I asked how the work is going (the following is from memory, not word-for-word):
"My job is not easy; most of these people are morons."
"most"?
He was being generous to a few...
All the smart ones weren't at the Capitol that day.
How many of them want her to apply Admiralty Law to their cases?
As far as I know none of them were seaworthy...
Roy, I want to believe you, but I wonder if we shouldn’t be drawing a different conclusion from the parallel journey of force-fed AI and fake politics. Namely that the proliferation of phony reality not only made it much easier for people to vote for Trump: “sure, he’s not what he says he is, but the price of eggs, etc.” but because garbage in, garbage out has become the norm, despite the fact it’s ugly and repellent. No, people don’t *LIKE* AI and they don’t like Trump (most of them). But they just sort of passively shrug with an attitude of “er, whatever, this is how it is now.”
In other words, I don’t see people’s stupidity or racism/misogyny or narcissistic self-interest as nearly as big of a threat as their passivity. I fear people have become totally inured to “consuming” politics and see the candidates as products being hawked. That the product being sold is shit just feels like business as usual to them. They’ve lost their sense of themselves as active participants in a democracy.
Yes. Of all the takes, this is the correctest take.
Reality TV will be the death of us all.
"Reality TV" that's actually scripted and manipulated. IT'S LIES ALL THE WAY DOWN
I thought it was plastic...
"One word. Plastics"
The kind of folks who buy shit off of TEMU, and shrug when it breaks the next day. And will never grasp the reality that the reason the crap is so cheap AND is so flimsy BOTH track back to Profit At ALL Costs.
Would it be ridiculous of me to suggest that somehow we're suffering from mass cultural depression? 'Cause this all sounds REALLY familiar.
Yes, the concept of 'value" seems to be lost on folks. Mrs. LP asked me yesterday, "Can you get a clock for the living room that won't break in two weeks?" Yes, ma'am, I can
"Why did you buy a truck (an S-10) with such an oversized engine?" Because I won't ever strain it, which is why it lasted past 200,000 miles...
My first stereo receiver (a Sherwood that didn't bother with an AM dial) was so over-built that when the filter capacitors finally gave out after 20-odd years, the repair shop could not find any that big. They ended up with a mil-spec one that was almost as big.
Value. It's a thing.
Recapping! I've got a Scott tube amp that needs that done. The thing sounds like a damn motorboat if you turn the volume up enough.
I bow to your superior kick-assitude. Hell, I never heard of Scott amps. Thou art the man.
My brother is still hoarding tubes for the Macintosh amp he got from our great uncle, the one he purchased in the 50's...
Good on him. Macs were a lust object for me back in the day, before you had to have beaucoup blow-dough to but 'em.
Just coincidentally, I needed to order another DVD player today because the one we've have for one entire year just broke. That one was a replacement for another one we had, also for one year, when it also broke. I'm convinced there's a chip inside that just counts, when days=365 it short-circuits the motherboard.
I've asserted for a while that the majority of Americans neither like nor understand politics and governance. That thermostatic thing is simply those voters throwing the bums out. Choices are a mix of tribal identity and entertainment value. This shambolic clown car was stable enough, as long as both political parties were committed to maintaining the system that gave them wealth and power. Things have changed, and those psuedo-random voters are completely unaware of that, because they consider politics a show. How they respond when Reality punches them in the mough is anybody's guess.
"How they respond when Reality punches them in the mough is anybody's guess."
Blame the immigrants, blame themselves, blame anybody but the people who are to blame.
"They’ve lost their sense of themselves as active participants in a democracy." Yeah, but they squawk where the mush they're served tastes bad. That's how Trump lost in 2020.
Lots of folks might know a hawk from a handsaw, but do they know how a raven is like a writing desk? These are the important questions, Mr. Roso!
Hmmm...I useta know, but nevermore...
Nevertheless, we prattle on
Nevermind...
". . . a significant number of voters knew that all that stuff was bullshit — and many of them voted for Trump anyway, with the misinfo and disinfo serving as an excuse rather than as a reason. "
Exactly. I would say that this applies to about 75 percent of the Trump voting people I know. Why? Because they see him as a Brer Rabbit, outwitting Brer Fox at every turn.
Where's that brawr* patch when we needs it?
*The critically endangered itchy-scratchy brawr is reduced to a single patch planted in the White House garden during the second Shrub administration, as a practice site for his brush-chopping retirement sideline.
I think racism played a large role, says 65 year old Southerner (I.e. me)
Racism is in everything, hereabouts.
So sadly true. "Oh, the election of Barack Obama proves racism is over". After I got over the paroxysm of laughter, I thought, "No, this will drive the right ape-shit crazy".
Have we come a long way? Yep, when I was a kid, black folk lived in their own section of Russellville, called of course, N-town. Our local theater owner (of The Ritz, or The Rats as it was known, gives you something to pet while watching) scandalized the town by integrating the place before I was born.
Have we got a long, long way to go? Yes, and I fear that journey will require more time than the country as currently constituted will last.
Barack Obama *chose* to come from Chicago, The Most Heavily Segregated City In America. I respect him for that. Because I was around for its prequel, the Harold Washington mayoral campaign of 1983.
I am Fred Hampton!
"He's sacrificed *so much* for us!" 🤮
"If I thought voters were uniformly so stupid as to really believe that shit, I would have to conclude that they were irredeemable, and democracy finished."
Sadly, they ARE so stupid. And that makes them incredibly easy to deceive. Witness the rise of anti-vaccine as accepted orthodoxy now. The growing belief that there is a "secret government" that controls the weather through some hitherto unknown technology. The increasing number of people who are convinced that Ivermectin is actually like a vitamin that you need to take every day.
We're doomed because people are incredibly stupid, and getting dumber with every passing second.
People are UNEDUCATED, and that's a major plot point here. Intentionally starving kids of education, particularly depriving them when it comes to civics... created a couple generations of angry morons who feel (rightly) left behind and basically can't help themselves about railing against "elites" without even knowing what that really means. They stock the swamp themselves.
As an elitist I take personal responsibility for putting things right for all the little people. Once a quarter, from now on I'll be taking a derelict to lunch at one of the finer restaurants here in Helltown. During lunch we'll discuss the finer points of fiscal policy, climate change, college football, mattress substitutes and coal-rolling. I'm certain this initiative will lead to a brighter future for all humankind...
No, no, you're supposed to go to a diner and write down what they say!
No ink-stained wretch I!
Derelict consults his day planner and says "Next Tuesday?"
I'm buyin'!
...
...
Who's payin'?
Part of this is self-inflicted. Seventy-five percent (my own estimate) of what ails American education can be attributed to White people hating to pay taxes to educate *their own* kids, never mind anyone else's. (Or paying taxes for anything to be honest.)
And, to make my point, if they understood how the taxation system works and why we have it, they wouldn't be such hardliners. E.g., taxes are very high in Scandinavian countries (where *gasp* many whites howl over the number of immigrants there but that's a dead cat for another day) but the wiser among the populace are overall pleased with the quality of life it brings them.
Yes, but it's ACTUALLY the fault of all those college kids who want free stuff!
Really, I think someone needs to do some deep analysis on the American idea of taxation and how it relates to the image we've been fed for decades about how we're more consumers than citizens.
George Monbiot is UK-based and he's been writing about this stuff for decades... check out 2003's The Age of Consent... how big corps and government collude to turn everyone into a consumer with the illusion of choice, when in fact all the decisions are already made for you.
Yeah, for a long time Americans and Western Europeans understood what their taxes bought. I still think it's no coincidence that the rise of global fascism and the passing of the last generations that have even a childhood experience of WWII are happening at the same time.
Agree it's not coincidence, it's kind of cause and effect. Not the sole cause of fascism's resurgence but definitely helps grease the wheel. Same with things like rationing, or make do and mend. Past a point people don't understand scarcity because they've never experienced it.
Taxes are the price of civilization. There is no asphalt fairy. But hey, if you fine Christians are cool with stealing government services, be my guest. Hell ain't half full yet.
I was listening to Ed Zitron's latest Better Offline podcast yesterday, and realized: you have a population of people who are validly critical of authority, and rightly so, because they keep getting told things are fine or at least improving regardless of what they see themselves. But they can't criticize wealth as power, because they aspire to that wealth themselves. So they direct that anger at authorities like scientists and doctors and "unelected bureaucrats" who keep telling them "no". Retargeted resentment plus traditional down-home American anti-intellectualism. It's safer to shit on Dr. Fauci than their boss.
Eco kind of nailed it: https://bsky.app/profile/kateschapira.bsky.social/post/3lb3mn4xve22l
"Stupid" and "Disinterested" are two very different things, and I should know, because I run into that distinction every day in my job.
People are plenty smart when thinking about a question that interests them, for the rest they do the minimum to get by (which is actually kinda smart, when you think about it.)
True. But stupid is quite prevalent out there. Just look at all the warnings printed on your daily-use items. There's a reason why shampoo comes with instructions.
There's always a lawsuit at the bottom of them all, ain't there. Why are there push-bar exit doors? Look up Chicago's Iroquois theater fire. If your stomach is strong enough, that is.
People tried to play catch with Jarts! People ate fucking Tide detergent pods! People permanently damaged their lungs trying to swallow a tablespoon full of cinnamon!
Hundreds of years ago, every village had its idiot, but he was just one idiot, and he was the only idiot you knew. Today, we've got a machine that hoovers up all the stories of EVERY village's idiot and rushes reports of their idiocy straight to us, is it any wonder we think people are getting stupider?
Also, the village idiots weren't in touch with one another, nor did they have a platform where they could try to outdo one another in their idiocy.
"Sir, do you think ignorance and apathy are the main problem with government today?"
"I don't know, and I don't care".
Amen. I had a high school classmate who got Ds and Fs consistently, but when we read To Kill a Mockingbird he got straight As. And once we were done with that, he went back to Ds and Fs.
So what do we do about it?
Against human stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
I think we always approach this the wrong way 'round. We start with the disinterested, and ask why they're disinterested and how to make them interested. Perhaps we should start with people who stay engaged in politics in spite of it all, and ask then what keeps them involved? At least it would be a start.
The mother of a friend of mine is far from a stupid person, yet she believes some of the craziest stuff. "Oh, they're doing weather mods again." "All those people are getting sick because of the 5Gs." We've asked her what her sources are on this, and she gets evasive and changes the subject. I suspect that's because once she showed us a story from the source: RT. "That's Russia Today, it's a Russian propaganda site!", we said. She hasn't explained why she thinks that's a more reliable source than any legit ones like the Guardian, or whatever.
My guess is these so-called AI search queries will simply produce results that are paid for. Hell, searches already produce results that are paid for! "You want your business or ideas or political opinions pushed by our 'AI' thing? Just give us money."
AI! Yi Yi!!
Fortunately, I only saw political ads for the last few days of the campaigns, but I think they were instructive. The Trump and Harris ads were almost identical, both describing the candidate as someone who would work tirelessly to benefit average Americans. Of course Trump claiming that was a hooter to anyone who pays attention, but as you know, way too many people don't pay attention, and if I were one of them I would have thought Trump's ad was much more believable. So there's that.
In large part, I blame Obama and his 'they go low, we go high' strategy, which Harris obviously adopted as the campaign wore on. When she first took control, she promised to prosecute Trump, but quickly pivoted to the old Democratic fear of alienating the Fascists, racists, sex offenders, white collar criminals, science deniers, and other choice specimens of the far right. Along with that she adopted the Nancy Pelosi strategy of gettin in zingers just to piss off Trump, which had zero effect on people who don't follow politics all the time. Had she run an all negative, all the time campaign I think she would have won, probably easily.
That, and as I've mentioned before, the right openly and very successfully uses brainwashing techniques, constantly pushing fear and hate to weaken people's minds so they can instill new beliefs. At this point the Democrats really should be doing the same.
The difference, in both going hella negative and fighting brainwashing techniques with brainwashing techniques, is that all the negative stuff about the Republicans is true and there is very good reason to fear and hate them.
If we're doing Harris campaign post-mortems, I have to say I'm quite amazed that you had an incumbent administration, running for re-election, that just basically accepted that everyone thinks the economy sucks and there's nothing you can do to change their minds. Which leaves you with "Sure prices are way too high (a thing that happened, incidentally, during the four years my party was in power) but elect me and I'll make them lower!" Thinking about it that way, I'm not surprised that a lot of people found Harris' pitch unpersuasive.
For a comparison, imagine Trump was the incumbent President, running on exactly the same economic numbers Biden/Harris had. We all know exactly what he'd say, that "This is the greatest economy ever in all human history!" Sure, lots of people would call bullshit on that, but many would be persuaded, and not just Republicans. Because if you make an effort to persuade, some people are always persuaded. And if you make no effort to persuade, no people are always persuaded.
It's all been fixed since The Don was elected:
https://bsky.app/profile/tesler.bsky.social/post/3lbfcrm5rzc24
Egg prices plummet as chickens come home to roost
"Make my idiot supporters BELIEVE America is great again because they'll believe any fucking thing I say" didn't fit on the hat.
Very true.
Can't find the cite now, but yesterday saw a claim that the DOGE bullshit will use AI to help with the efficiency measures. I suspect it will be both hilarious and tragically horrible.
Safe bet.
Six-Fingered Mother of God!
Sorry, I got off on my usual rant about the weak and pathetic Democrats when your post is about AI and I think I may have found a way that I could use it.
It came to me while reading 'The Painted Protest,' an article by Dean Kissick in the current Harper's about the state of contemporary art. I'm sure the subtitle would put you off, and maybe much of the argument, but there is a lot of good insight in it as well, much of it germaine to things I've been thinking about for a long time regarding the textification of art. We'll see.
There's also a link to an old Tom Wolfe piece on the same subject, much of which is annoying in a Tom Wolfe kinda way. I found it interesting though, not for the subject matter but for the writing style. I've also been reading an old Henry Miller book and both of them reminded me that we've really gotten away from the 'go for it' style of writing, or at least it seems so based on the publications and little bit of fiction I still read.
Now I'm thinking about representative naturalist "useful" art, as opposed to abstract expressionistic "useless" art to evoke emotions.
I'm slow, I know, but what I'm seeing in the push for AI is that All Art Is Content, and therefore All Content Is Art.
In actuality Art Is Art, Content Is Content, and very seldom do the two mix.
And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, you tell me what you know!
I guess I have to look at the Harper's thing (thanks again btw) but I can guess why you're sure it will put me off and I agree.
It starts bad but ends well, imo
Americans agree on a lot of big important issues: abortion, lgbtq+ civil rights, the unpopularity of Donald Trump, even the need to deal with climate change. I could go on, but this we know. At the same time, I'm always amazed at how narrow the margins are, at how in an electorate of 155 million the difference comes down to less than half a percent. How could it be that narrow, across that many people? We're told it's finely cut voter suppression, a few thousand here and there that adds up to a preposterous even split. But those voter suppression models will fail if enough people get angry, and even if the dems are sued into oblivion before the midterms, we know where the popular will is. We just need to find a way to ignite it.
Yeah, there's DNC 'leadership', and actual leadership. What to do...what to do...
Of course, it's easy once you figure out the dozen or so individual reasons why the electorate will "ignite." <waves hand>
I don't think this gets mentioned as often as it should, how remarkable it is that we're so evenly divided between the two parties, especially when the choice is - as one writer put it - between "diarrhea forever" and "everyone gets a puppy."
For Americans, it's just taken for granted that political divisions at the presidential level are 50-50 across the entire country, with local variations. 70-30 or 60-40 in California or Massachussetts or Alabama or Montana or wherever, but 50.1-49.9 for president, every single time, going back at least to Kennedy/Nixon.
I'm (originally) Canadian, and there's three or four or five parties competing for the electorate. And even with a first-past-the-post system, four or five parties end up in Parliament. Same with most countries around the world: Coalitions are a fact of human life. But here in the US, the biggest popular vote wins in my lifetime haven't been higher than 7 or 8%. That's just crazy.
Yes, especially when - as you point out - there are margins of 30-40% at the state level, but somehow when you put it all together...
It makes sense if you think the majorty of voters have no idea what is going on beyond vibes, and make essentially random choices.
In a town with two McDonalds franchises, each store gets about 50% of the business. (no, our two parties aren't both selling the same product, now go explain that to your low-info voter and tell me how that goes.)
My son and I have a word for folks that can't tell the difference between AI and a real person (aka A Turing Test) - morons. Granted we're both professional IT people, but still Geez Louise.
I remember a Scientific American article I read back in, oh, I'm gonna guess 1972. AI and nuclear fusion are "just around the corner". I been waiting for that corner a long damn time now. ChatGPT is a joke, a toy. "But it knows the entire Internet!". Yep, and as my old dean Don Mitchell (stamps floor, do you hear me down there, Don?), garbage in, garbage out. AI? Bullshit.
There are things it can do well, things with clearly defined rules, like the new anomaly checker at the large hadron collider or protein folding routines. General stuff? Nope. Especially since Americans are exceptionally fucking stupid.
Which brings me to my observation that America will be the only country that failed due to the stupidity of its electorate. That's how democracy works (How's that Brexit working out for ya, Britain?). To quote Agent K, ""A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." Oh well. K Sara Sara.
Worst part is that as the American public gets more and more moronic, that's what generative AI is going to work on, as well as text the AI itself generated, so you have a death spiral of enshittification.
Hopefully the limitations of generative AI will soon be obvious and we can move on, also hopefully without massive devastation and/or casualties.
Would I had more upvotes for 'enshittification'. Bravo!
Credit where due: https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2023/01/cory-doctorow-on-the-enshittification-of-social-platforms.html
I stand corrected. Thanks, Boss. I had no idea Cory was such a potty-mouth.
And I must note, as a voice crying in the wilderness for decades,
Regarding "AI will kill us all!": DON'T GIVE THEM HANDS! Isolate, isolate, isolate.
My first exposure to the world of AI was back in the mid-80s, when the furniture company I was working for got a huge job for a company called AI.
For what it's worth, they chose weird woods that were sort of hard to source in certain materials - 3/4 veneeered plywood (for cabinets/drawer units) was readily available, but 1 1/4 veneered MDF (for desktops/uprights) was not. So they complained about how long it took to do the job.
Oh for crying out loud. As someone who did time at a furniture company, I feel your pain.
AI - Attempting Intelligence
Heard a good one. I forget the journalist's name, unfortunately.
"All our environmental laws are over 18 years old, so Matt Gaetz will have no interest in them".
Also, ya know what Gaetz calls "recess appointments"? Dates.
Well, it's gonna be kinda difficult to build stuff if you try to cut boards with a hawk. (The hawk won't appreciate it, either.)
A hundred years ago, every carpenter needed to know the difference between a crosscut saw and a rip saw, and to have one of each in their toolbox.
They still do, both hand (unpowered) and power.
My mistake, I was judging by what I saw (ha! see what I did there?) hanging on the wall at Home Depot: One handsaw specifically for cutting wood, called a "toolbox saw" because it's short enough to fit in a toolbox.
"...the misinfo and disinfo serving as an excuse rather than as a reason."
Man, I wish I saw this brilliant insight more often, in other, less enlightened parts of our commentariat.
Probably 95% of Trump's voters were Republicans, just as about 95% of Harris' voters were Democrats, but when have you ever seen a news story where the reporter asks, "Why did you vote for ___?" and the voter answers, "Because I'm a Republican and he's the Republican candidate, duh."
Voters know how the game is played, and know they should never cite their own party loyalty as the reason for their vote. Fortunately, their party provides them with plenty of "reasons" (free of charge!) if they should ever be asked.