I tried to draw a turkey in spray cheese for the dog’s Thanksgiving dinner last night.
Spray cheese is not my medium.
However, the dog was not unhappy with the outcome.
AI developers have turned science fiction stories about godlike supercomputers into a religion, leading to the current infighting at OpenAI. “The field of AI … is profoundly shaped by cultish debates among people with some very strange beliefs.” Crooked Timber: What OpenAI shares with Scientology
OpenAI’s alignment problem. The company’s board failed the institution. But did it have a point?
Casey Newton defends – or at least explains – the OpenAI board’s position. The company was supposed to be moving slowly and avoiding the harms of AI while harnessing good for humanity. Altman was running the company as a fast-track start up.
Whenever I see an Econoline van, I think of a short story that Joe Haldeman wrote about a man who sets off a series of nuclear bombs in cities. Econoline vans play a role in the conspiracy. I read that story 50 years ago, but I still think of that story every time I see one of those vans.
“Doctor Who” showrunner Russell Davies says he grew up twice-closeted, hiding that he was gay and that he was a Doctor Who fan. For him, the two are tied together. “I’d walk home from school wishing I could turn the corner and see that blue box and run inside to escape everything. I don’t think that wish has quite gone.”
Recent college graduates are drinking less. It’s even a movement with a name, NoLo—no-alcohol, low-alcohol.
I’ve never been a heavy drinker, and over time I drink less and less. I rarely like the effect alcohol has on me.
But I do sometimes like a drink. I expect I’ll have one or two on Thanksgiving.
Search Engine: Why don't we eat people?
Today I learned that on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, he encountered a friendly tribe, the Arawaks—“fitted to be ruled and to be set to work to cultivate the land and do all else that may be necessary”—that warned him about another tribe, the Caribs, that were vicious and ate their enemies. We get the word “cannibalism” from their name. Queen Isabella of Spain said it was OK to treat the Caribs harshly because of their vile barbaric practices.
Search Engine podcast host PJ Vogt and his guest, writer Kelefa Sanneh, note that the Spaniards themselves were practicing something vile and barbaric—slavery. Finding slaves was a primary purpose of Columbus’s mission.
Also, the Europeans were big hypocrites because they themselves practiced cannibalism—grinding up mummies and consuming the powder as medicine. When mummies from Egypt became hard to procure, Europeans figured out how to accelerate mummification in fresh human corpses.
Search Engine: Why don’t we eat people?
Why the Senate is increasingly skewed on race, parties and policy The Senate overrepresents Republicans and disenfranches people of color and people who live in large states. The Washington Post, by the numbers:
If you are a resident of California, with 68 times the population of Wyoming, your influence in the Senate is paltry.
The likely GOP nominee is forgetting where he is, stumbling over words, and waxing full fascist…. the armchair gerontologists parsing every utterance from President Joe Biden, trying to distinguish his congenital stutter from his natural aging, should look at Trump, whose behavior has gone from bad to weird to bizarre.
“The antisemitic left hates Biden. The antisemitic right loves Trump.” — Jonathan Chait. Republicans Have an Antisemitism Problem. Democrats Don’t.
Trump says he wanted to participate in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but the Secret Service would not allow it.
Reprehensible on two levels: He wanted to participate in a violent, criminal attempt to overthrow a legitimate election, and he was too chickenshit to do it.
CNN Airs New Tape of Trump Discussing Capitol Trip on Jan. 6
No, there isn’t a wave of TikTok teens supporting Osama bin Laden.
… everything we see about TikTok is just being filtered through a media and political apparatus that doesn’t know how it works and has no issue cherry-picking random nonsense out of the app to fit whatever agenda they subscribe to.
— Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day. TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden