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To keep the Conversation going, please help me by linking news articles, opinion pieces and other political content in today's Comments section.

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OR here's a link generator. The one I had posted died, then Akhilleus found one, but it too bit the dust. He found yet another, which I've linked here, and as of September 23, 2024, it's working.

OR you can always just block, copy and paste to your comment the URL (Web address) of the page you want to link.

Note for Readers. It is not possible for commenters to "throw" their highlighted links to another window. But you can do that yourself. Right-click on the link and a drop-down box will give you choices as to where you want to open the link: in a new tab, new window or new private window.

Thank you to everyone who has been contributing links to articles & other content in the Comments section of each day's "Conversation." If you're missing the comments, you're missing some vital links.

INAUGURATION 2029

Marie: I don't know why this video came up on my YouTube recommendations, but it did. I watched it on a large-ish teevee, and I found it fascinating. ~~~

 

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. ~~~

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

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.”

 

Contact Marie

Email Marie at constantweader@gmail.com

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Monday
Jan092012

Comments on the Commentariat

As some of you know, I have eliminated the comments page Off Times Square. I will leave it up for several weeks or a month to allow any of you who want to save your previous comments to retrieve them.

First, I am extremely grateful for the kind notes so many of you wrote over the past few days. As I indicated, I'm not certain how much longer I will maintain Reality Chex. After all, my original intention was to take it down in November 2008!

Quite a few people wrote to ask if they could help financially. I thank them for that, but my out-of-pocket expenses are minimal. They come due in September, so I will have to decide by then whether or not I want to invest in this effort for another year. Right now I cannot see that happening, but circumstances can change.

In the meantime, because of demands made by some commenters, Off Times Square was just too time-consuming -- and sometimes too annoying -- for me to maintain, even until such time as I might wind down Reality Chex altogether. However, in the past week, at least two different individuals (perhaps more) made attempts to hijack or sabotage Off Times Square. And that rather irritated me.

So -- as a bit of an in-your-face response to the would-be hijackers -- we'll try another experiment. I've opened up the Commentariat to comments. The usual rules apply: disagree with the commenter; do not disparage her or him personally. Make your comments substantive. ("Newt Gingrich makes me sick" may be accurate, but it is not particularly substantive. Do not describe the contents of your vomit, interesting as they seem to you. We want to know why you barfed, not what you barfed.)

I will not spend much of my own time or energy on the comments, but I will read them from time to time and check them for ad hominem attacks or spam. Both will go. I also will delete comments that are blatantly fact-challenged. (If you argue that Mitt Romney created 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital, cite the evidence. Despite his jobs-creation claims, Mitt can't seem to find that evidence, so you'd be a big help to him.) I will no longer respond to requests from commenters that I do their "homework" for them; that is, answer questions commenters are just as capable of researching as am I.

I'd like to see more readers participate. Quite a number of people wrote over the past few days that they read the comments but have never commented. Those readers sound darned articulate, so I'd like to hear from them -- and others -- in the new comments section. It makes most sense to discuss the issues of the day, but you need not limit yourself to what's on the Commentariat menu on a particular day. Just click on the day's (blue) header or on the words "Post a Comment" or "# Comments" at the bottom of the post.

We'll see how this goes. It is entirely up to you. Entirely.

Comments Off