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NYC’s AI chatbot was caught telling businesses to break the law. The city isn’t taking it down [apnews.com] — “Asked if a restaurant could serve cheese nibbled on by a rodent, [the bot] responded: ‘Yes, you can still serve the cheese to customers if it has rat bites,’ before adding that it was important to assess the ‘the extent of the damage caused by the rat’ and to ‘inform customers about the situation.’”

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Icon of the Seas [theatlantic.com] — Curmudgeonly travel writer Gary Shteyngart takes a luxury cruise on the world’s largest cruise ship:

The maiden voyage of the Titanic (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise….

📷 Something I saw while walking the dog: This osprey, on a platform on a pole about 50 feet above a footpath around Lake Murray. I shot the photo on the 5x setting on the iPhone and then cropped it heavily, which is why it’s pixelated.

Hawk-like bird standing with wings folded on a pole sticking out from a platform, with the bird's next on the platform. Plumage is dark gray from this distance, with a white head and chest.

Anyone who fears that we may be wiped out by artificial intelligence should just buy a robot vacuum cleaner and watch the unshakable determination with which it returns, over and over again, to the one corner of the room where it gets stuck every time.

A realistic “Terminator" movie would consist of two hours of well-meaning humans patiently disentangling the T-800 from the rug or dragging it out from under the bookshelf while it beeps pathetically for assistance.

Star Trek: Future Astronauts Having Feelings

I want to like “Star Trek: Discovery” more than I do. The characters all seem to be having big emotions and I’m supposed to share those big emotions, but I do not. The show is about Future Astronauts Having Feelings. The show seems to be popular among Millennial and Gen Z LGBTQ+ people, and that’s fine.

In general, the entire Trek franchise seems to be a warm nostalgia bath. And I don’t mean that in a good way. They’ve got a whole Galaxy to play with and they keep coming back to the same characters, races, species and tropes. It’s 1,000 years in the future and hey look there’s a shout-out to Jean-Luc Picard.

Also, why doesn’t the franchise bring back Shatner and Takei? They barely used Walter Koenig and Wil Wheaton. What’s up with that?