Mitch's Blog

What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?. “One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage.” (Via @sjvn@mastodon.social. Thanks!)

White Lotus season one: I don’t know if it would be right to say we liked it. This is a show about essentially likable characters who chronically self-sabotage due to their acute cranial-rectal inversion. The show featured brilliant, subtle performances by Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett as Armond, the put-upon resort manager. Just kidding: They weren’t subtle — they were outrageous and ridiculous and delicious. We will watch season two.

We liked Superman. But it was too long and it made me miss Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.

Krypto stole the movie.

The supporting characters were better than the main action: Nathan Fillion as the Green Lantern, Hawk Girl, Mr. Terrific, Drunk Party Supergirl.

Wendell Pierce was terribly underutilized. I’m going to start walking around with a big cigar in my mouth.

If this is the start of a DC Cinematic Universe, I’m there for it.

I was planning to see this in the theater — our first theater movie in at least five years. But I changed my mind. And I’m glad I did. It’s more comfortable to see it at home, where we can take breaks and enjoy our own snacks.

I have only a half-dozen phone numbers in my iPhone tagged as favorites. I actually looked at all of them for the first time in a long time this week. How long? One of the numbers was for voicemail for a job I left more than five years ago.

The next items on my to-do list are filling out expense reports and dropping stool samples at the vet. Gosh — hard to choose what to do next!

What Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100B agreement means for telcos. OpenAI just inked a $100B “memorandum of understanding” with NVIDIA, which could lead to a tectonic industry shift for telcos. Or it could all be vaporware — a “memorandum of understanding” is not a signed contract. By me on Fierce Network, earlier this week.

My latest on Fierce Network: Telcos tackle AI’s impact at Fierce Network Research event. At the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, a bunch of telco execs got together to figure out what the heck to do about AI.

Here’s Minnie one evening this week, letting me know it’s time to quit fooling around and put out her food. Priorities, man!

The Advocate: “The man Meta has appointed to help address ‘ideological and political bias’ in artificial intelligence is a conservative influencer who believes that pesticide turns children LGBTQ+ and that the COVID-19 vaccine caused Matthew Perry’s death.” Crazy as a hatful of snakes.

The Week America Woke Up to Oligarchy. By Matt Stoller. “Americans, broadly speaking, hate both parties, because [Americans] subscribe to an entirely different vision of what it means to be free. That version means freedom from coercion and a basic equality before the law.”

Brandon Vigliorolo at The Register:

Grok’s racist, conspiracy-riddled responses led public advocacy groups last month to send a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) demanding it declare Grok unfit for government use due to its “clear ideological judgement,” which it said is in violation of Trump’s own executive order that aimed to prevent “woke AI” from infiltrating federal agencies.

It might not be woke, signatories argued, but Grok is definitely aligned with a political point of view. As the letter pointed out, Grok has called holocaust statistics into question, allowed itself to be used to generate non-consensual deepfakes, advanced unfounded claims of white genocide in South Africa, and even declared itself “MechaHitler.”

“This goes beyond disappointing - it’s reckless, a safety issue - it’s very concerning,” J.B. Branch, a Public Citizen big tech accountabilty advocate, told The Register.

… the White House’s own science advisor, Michael Kratsios, said in a Senate hearing earlier this month that Grok’s antisemitic and conspiratorial outputs are exactly the kind of behavior Trump’s EO was meant to prevent.

When asked whether antisemitism, hate speech, and conspiracy theories complied with Trump’s EO, Kratsios described such statements as exactly the type of behavior the EO was designed to avoid

“Today’s announcement is yet another example of the president’s actual AI action plan: handing the keys to the federal government to his Big Tech patrons,” Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress, said.

Rick Moranis is returning for the Spaceballs sequel, his first screen outing since 1997. Tangentially related: I saw a fan theory recently that the 99-year-old Mel Brooks is aware he’s got a good chance of dying before Spaceballs 2 finishes, and he has worked his death into the movie as a gag.

Dave Pell: “Trump promised to bring manufacturing back to America. And he has. The Justice Department is actively manufacturing cases against the president’s enemies…. Case in point: The targeting of James Comey.”

I use Grammarly for all my online writing, to check grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation and to find typos. I got a notification that my Grammarly annual plan expires in a month, and I started thinking about whether to renew it, and whether to ask my manager if I can expense it.

Then I reviewed the free plan, which I think turns out to have everything I use and turns off the annoying bits.

I value Grammarly’s suggestions to tighten up language, but I’m told that the free plan offers that too. And if that doesn’t work, I bet ChatGPT will do the job.

Another thing I rely on Grammarly for: Commas. I have only a vague idea of how to use commas.

Language pet peeve: Writers who say “may be” when they mean “is.”

Lucinda Price, a writer and comedian, writes about the “reply guys” who slide into her DMs, making casual conversation but never following through:

Unlike more traditional cases of being “led on”, true reply guys aren’t hanging around hoping for casual sex. This fact frustrates many of the women I spoke to – they’d actually prefer transactional intimacy over taking care of a Tamagotchi with limited conversational skills

The West Is In A Far Worse Position than the Warsaw Pact Was At The Start Of the Cold War

A Brief History of The Flatiron Building

Trump’s imperial court includes a gay evangelical Christian and a Jewish Nazi. I never thought the end times would be so ridiculous.

Peter Thiel Wants Everyone to Think More About the Antichrist. This guy is the kingmaker who lined up J.D. Vance to be the next President and he’s crazy as a soup sandwich. Meanwhile, Trump is ranting about Tylenol and antifa. But I’m sure everything will work out fine.