I found this to be a fascinating story: “Digital humans” — realistic, AI-powered avatars — are poised to revolutionize human-computer interactions in the telecom sector. These avatars provide higher customer satisfaction and increased likelihood of purchases compared with traditional interfaces, according to research. Companies such as AT&T, Amdocs and ServiceNow are leveraging AI to automate network operations and enhance customer service.
Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.
Walking the dog this morning down a residential street, a white-haired older woman pulled up in a car next to me and rolled down her window and shouted something. I could not hear what she said, so I went a little closer and asked her to repeat it.
She said, “God loves you and your baby.”
I have had people shout worse things to me from rolled-down car windows.
Today I learned if you soak your TiVo remote in salad dressing it don’t work good after.
We saw “A Complete Unknown” tonight. It paints a portrait of Dylan as a magnificently talented and charismatic asshole.
Sam Keen, Philosopher of the Men’s Movement, Is Dead at 93
Trip Gabriel / The New York Times
I did not read Keen‘s book. I had not even heard of it or him until I read this obituary. I did, however, read “Iron John,” by Robert Bly, which was published about the same time and was another touchstone of the men’s movement of the 90s.
I think there are many, many ways of being a man and I am not the type of man that the men’s movement of the 90s spoke to. And if the “manosphere” of the 2020s is anything like how I’ve seen it described, I certainly don’t want to be involved in that.
"Students Yelled at Me. I’m Fine."
Xochitl Gonzalez at The Atlantic:
… these were students in America doing what students in America should do: questioning authority (in this case, me) and using their rights to free speech and free assembly to engage with issues they are passionate about.
Also, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University grad student, was surrounded by “hooded and masked plainclothes [ICE] officers” near her Somerville, Mass., home. She was “seized in the street, handcuffed like a criminal, and put inside the back of an unmarked car in what looked, to passersby, like “a kidnapping.”
She is a Turkish citizen legally in the U.S. who did nothing other than write a civil editorial urging her university to “take more seriously a vote from the student senate calling on the university to divest from Israel.” She broke no law.
Marco Rubio’s interpretation of law to justify Öztürk’s arrest is “just one more example of the Trump administration’s attempts to change America from a nation of rights to a nation of privileges that can at any moment be revoked.”
The good trouble checklist: keep all your shenanigans in one place (Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg / Life Is a Sacred Text) and Some actions that are not protesting or voting..
Walking Xi’an (China) (Chris Arnade Walks the World) “A human city of inhuman scale.”