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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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Friday
Sep102010

Japanese Model Beats U.S. Rube Goldberg Mock-up

Paul Krugman: "Japan’s performance has been disappointing but not disastrous. And given the policy agenda of America’s right, that’s a performance we may wish we’d managed to match."

What the Japanese didn't have was John Boehner, Mitch McConnell & Jim DeMint. They've never had to look forward to Sen. Rand Paul or possibly even Sen. Sharron Angle.

Surely the main reason our own government did too little in early 2008 was the fault of Republicans. We all remember those closed-door sessions in which, presumably, President Obama tried to explain prudent fiscal policy to Sens. Collins & Snowe. We all remember the Party of No, with the exception of the somewhat confused Ladies of Maine (& then-Republican Sen. Specter), standing firm against sensible economic policy.

Ezra Klein wrote a good post the other day on how much better the stimulus package (& the healthcare bill) would have been if not for the filibuster. He used the apt term "legislating to the lowest common denominator," & there he referred to the Democratic leadership's having to kowtow to ConservaDems' every whim.

As for the handful of House Republicans who voted for the stimulus package, their party's membership rewarded them with threats of primary defeats in 2010.*

I'm surely happy to see that somebody in the Obama Administration figured out Democrats shouldn't be running against Bush, but against Boehner, McConnell, Ryan, Cantor, & the rest of the current crop of economic knuckleheads. Let's hope the Democrats can act like an organized political party for the next two months (okay, fat chance!) & show disengaged American voters the horrors and hardship they will bring down upon themselves if they reward the Party of No -- who brought on, then exascerbated the economic crisis -- with their votes.


* CW: Oops! Exactly zero Republican House members voted for the stimulus bill. It was the eight Republican House votes for a climate bill that engendered the backlash & threats:

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