Ringo looking groovy and other oddly satisfying and mildly interesting things I saw on the internet

Screenshot of a tweet with a photo of two men wearing orange safety vests, walking one ahead of the other, carrying a metal pole on their shoulders between them. Title is: “These fuckers are almost certainly on their way to be an obstacle in a motorcycle chase currently in progress.” Because in an action movie you’d see someone speeding along on a motorcycle and having to avoid going under the metal pole and getting clipped.

Black and white photo apparently from the mid-70s of teen-agers (they look to be about 15) slow dancing. The boys are wearing casual button down shirts and pants. The girls are wearing long dresses. The couples are pressed close together.

A black-and-white photo, I guess from the 1930s, of a woman in a dress and sweater standing in front of a row of kinetoscopes (those old timey one-person movie machines that you peered into). She’s bent slightly in front of a machine with the title “The Farmer’s Daughter,” and has her hand to her mouth, pretending to look shocked.

Looks like a photo of Ringo Starr and a pretty young blonde woman dressed very groovy, ca. 1970

tumblr.com/allhailthe70shousew

A surprising number of you seemed to enjoy the video of Minnie walking down stairs. Here is another.

On my walk with the dog this morning, I saw this gentleman living his best life.
Scenic photo of a man fishing in a small boat on a peaceful lake, surrounded by succulent foliage.

You are Atlas. You hold up the sky. If no one is on this page, the sky will fall. youareatlas.com via waxy.org

Larry’s red space suit and other oddly satisfying and mildly interesting things I saw on the Internet

The San Diego Human Relations Commission is a safe space for anti-semitism and transphobia. Or it was—the Human Relations Commission is losing humans, as three commissioners resign in protest over the bigotry. www.msn.com/en-us/new…

Things I saw walking this morning: That lawn has a lot going on. And Purple Snoopy does not live up to his publicity.

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: 'The machines we have now are not conscious'

Chiang is the author of brilliant stories which explore themes of consciousness and free will, including “The Story of Your Life,” which was adapted into the Hollywood movie “Arrival,” starring Amy Adams.

Chiang says machines learn language differently from human children, which leads journalist Madhumita Murgia to talk about how their “five-year-old has taken to inventing little one-line jokes, mostly puns, and testing them out on us. The anecdote makes [Chiang] animated.”

“Your daughter has heard jokes and found them funny. ChatGPT doesn’t find anything funny and it is not trying to be funny. There is a huge social component to what your daughter is doing,” he says.

Meanwhile ChatGPT isn’t “mentally rehearsing things in order to see if it can get a laugh out of you the next time you hang out together”.

…

… he asks me if I remember the Tom Hanks film Cast Away. On his island, Hanks has a volleyball called Wilson, his only companion, whom he loves. “I think that that is a more useful way to think about these systems,” he tells me. “It doesn’t diminish what Tom Hanks’ character feels about Wilson, because Wilson provided genuine comfort to him. But the thing is that . . . he is projecting on to a volleyball. There’s no one else in there.”

www.ft.com/content/c…

In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. At a time when few Russian journalists came to the U.S., Zorin traveled all across the country, and gained access few American journalists had. The Cold War was a battle of ideas, and Zorin saw himself on the front lines. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation.

— Children of Zorin, on the Last Archive podcast www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/…