The Wires
powered by Surfing Waves
Help!

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

Link Code:   <a href="URL">text</a>

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

Page Links
Monday
Aug072023

How to Link a Story in the Comments Section

The easy -- and perfectly fine -- way to create a link is to CLICK, COPY and PASTE the URL of the story you want to share. That is, while in the window of the page you want to share, highlight the address bar, which is likely at the top of your screen. So,

(1) CLICK on the URL -- let's say it's    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/us/politics/biden-economy-bidenomics.html    -- which will highlight (i.e., block) the entire URL.

(2) COPY the URL. You may have a "copy" function on your toolbar; if you don't, simultaneously type CONTROL + C. That saves the URL.

(3) Open the Reality Chex window and go to the "Create Comment" box as you usually do to write a comment. PASTE the URL into the box. Use either the paste function on your toolbal or simultaneously type CONTROL + V.

Also let us know what the story is about. So your entire comment might read,

This NYT story makes the case that today's economy is really good; that should help Joe Biden's re-election prospects:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/us/politics/biden-economy-bidenomics.html

(Of course you can add your own commentary before and/or after the URL. But let the URL stand alone on its own line.)

That's it. Couldn't be easier. CLICK, COPY, PASTE.


The fancy way is more time-consuming, but becomes easy after you do it a few times.

(1) Type your comment in Reality Chex' "Create Comment" box, as you normally would. Let's say your comment is

This NYT story makes the case that today's economy is really good; that should help Joe Biden's re-election prospects.

(2) Now, decide what words in your comment you want to use to create your link. Let's say they're

This NYT story

In front of the text you want to highlight, type <a herf="">   Exactly like that: Open-caret a Space href=Quotation mark Quotation mark Close-caret    Make sure you use "regular" quotation marks. The curlique ones won't work. The only space is between a and href.

(3) Go to the page you want to share/link. CLICK on (i.e., highlight or block) the URL, and COPY the URL.

(4) Go back to the Reality Chex Create Comments box and PASTE the URL between the two sets of quotation marks. 

(5) At the end of the text you want to highlight, type </a>   That is Open-caret Forward-slash a Close-caret   No spaces.

So your entire comment will look like this:

<a href="This NYT story">This NYT story</a> makes the case that today's economy is really good; that should help Joe Biden's re-election prospects.

You can preview your comment to see if the link worked the way you meant it to. (If not, you made some kind of typo or omission.) Your highlighted (that is, linked) text will show up the way it will appear to the reader.

I've put the code in the header, so that once you've figured out how to make a link, the code is easily accessible.



Comments Off

Reader Comments (4)

I tried to email this info to myself for future reference and this
came up on my screen:

403 FORBIDDEN

Does anyone know what this means?

August 7, 2023 | Unregistered CommenterForrestMorris

@Forrest Morris: Translation: Everyone is out to get you, even your friends.

August 7, 2023 | Registered CommenterMarie Burns

Or take the easy route. Bookmark the following site and go there any time you need a link:

Link Generator

All you do is paste in the URL and supply the text to highlight. Then hit "Get Code." There's even a button you can click to copy the result. Return to RealityChex and paste it in. Genius!

You're welcome.

August 8, 2023 | Unregistered CommenterMonoloco

@Monoloco: Thanks. I tried it and it works.

August 8, 2023 | Registered CommenterMarie Burns
Comments for this entry have been disabled. Additional comments may not be added to this entry at this time.