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Hubris. One would think that a married man smart enough to start up and operate his own tech company was also smart enough to know that you don't take your girlfriend to a public concert where the equipment includes a jumbotron -- unless you want to get caught on the big camera with your arms around said girlfriend. Ah, but for Andy Bryon, CEO of A company called Astronomer, and also maybe his wife, Wednesday was a night that will live in infamy. New York Times link. ~~~

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts.

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

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Monday

Aug202018

Another Home Run

By Akhilleus

This weekend I chatted with an old friend who got into a bit of "Remember when?" He and I have been friends for many years and at one time we played together in a very competitive amateur baseball league. The "remember when" bit coincides with a thought about the Trump Bed Making Medal [discussed in yesterday's Comments] and also his many claims to be the smartest man around and having graduated first in his class from Wharton (a claim he now says he never made, but, as usual with Trump, a quick internet search makes a liar out of him once again).

He's the best at everything. In fact, according to the little dictator, he was the best sportsman he's ever seen. He could have been a superb major league baseball player if he had decided to go that route. Likewise, even today, if he decided to go out on the PGA tour, he'd be among the best golfers in the world. I'm not sure they allow cheating on the PGA circuit though, which could be a problem for Trump, a well known cheater at golf.

So, lo those many years ago, I was pitching in a game and up to bat comes a guy we all had heard about. He had had a cup of coffee in the pros, the Pittsburgh Pirates, if I remember correctly. So I decided to go right at him. I was no Sandy Koufax, by any stretch, but I had thrown a couple of no hitters and the year before won a championship game with a one hitter. The guy hit my best pitch so hard the right fielder didn't even bother to move. He just looked over his shoulder as the ball rocketed into the ether. We still laugh about that today.

Around about the same time, my brother was playing in a ferociously competitive city basketball league. The guys in this league were crazy good, most were gym rats who ate, drank, and slept basketball. One night another team showed up with a ringer, a guy who had been a backup center for an NBA team for a few years. He wasn't much in the pros but he swatted these guys around like mosquitoes. He wiped the court with the biggest hot shots in that league.

The point here is that the best people you've ever played with, no matter how good, are light years beneath mediocre players at the pro level. The worst guy in major league baseball is so much better than anyone playing amateur ball, it isn't even funny.

Which brings me to the smartest, best, most competent man on the planet, by his own reckoning. When Trump goes up against guys like Putin and Kim, it's not even funny. These guys are pros. Trump throws them his best pitch and they clobber it. But here's the thing. It's one thing to have your opponent crush your best pitch, it's another thing to later claim that you struck the guy out, or at worst, battled him to a draw. Especially when everyone on the field and sitting in the stands watched that ball disappear over the fence. But Trump does this time and again.

And to extend the analogy a bit further, here's another difference. My brother and I and our teammates were all deeply entrenched in our sports. We were serious about it and we knew all the ins and outs. We knew what we had to do and how to do it, so when we got beat badly by someone of a much higher caliber, it wasn't because we were bumbling jamokes. We were just outclassed. And that's the thing. Trump IS a bumbling jamoke. He doesn't even come up to beginner level and yet he puts himself in a class with experienced, canny characters who eat and drink this stuff. On one hand it's funny and ridiculous, but it's also dangerous.

We have a guy who claims he was first in his class at Wharton, or at least, among the smartest there. But no one remembers him. My college didn't have a valedictorian, but I knew half a dozen people who graduated Summa and if you mentioned a few more I'm sure I would probably at least recognize the names. But Trump? At a relatively small class like the Wharton School, it seems highly unlikely that no one would recognize him as among the best or THE best.

But it's a waste of time to play that game. He's a bully, a liar, and a braggart. Which was fine as long as he was pretending to be a big shot on a reality TV show produced to make him look good. Who cares what he says? But when that bully and braggart is the president of the United States, it's much different.

So here we are, the US team, going up against other nations and our pitcher is a guy who doesn't even know the basics of the game, and doesn't care. And worse? He thinks he's the best player on the field.

Oh look, there goes another ball over the fence. Good hit, Bob!