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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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Tuesday
Feb062024

Of Weasels and Weasel Words

By Akhilleus

(*sigh*) Here we go again.

The NY Times has a headline today:

GOP Backlash to Border Deal Reflects Vanishing Ground for Compromise

Okay, that’s true as far as it goes, but a low information voter could be forgiven if their understanding of that weasely worded headline is “GOP hoped for more but rejects Democratic plans as not showing enough compromise.”

In fact, the headline should be “GOP gets everything it has been screaming for and now rejects it because Trump needs chaos to win.”

Full stop. The body of the text gets around to something like that but Trump isn’t mentioned until the third paragraph.

I’m so fucking tired of this namby-pamby, vanilla, high school type school paper journalism. Can’t piss off the principal by saying what’s really going on, so Mr. Johnson, the gym teacher, feeling up kids in the locker room becomes “PE classes restructured”.

Over on the opinion pages we get serial bug-eyed liar Kellyanne Conway allowed to describe her boss, the traitor Trump, as having had a successful and robust America First program, who is now looking for a running mate. Conway pats herself on the back for coming up with little mikey pence the first time around. Oh, you mean the guy Trump wanted to hang? That mike pence? Great pick.

She says flat out that loyalty to Trump never means obsequiousness. What? That’s exactly what it means!

She discounts women as not being tough enough on abortion, oh but we don’t want to be THAT tough, cuz Trump is a compassionate guy.

The pretzel twisting is amazing.

JD Vance is put forward as a wonderful person. Vivek Ramaswamy is described as an “energetic businessman full of policy prescriptions”. Sure. If one of those prescriptions is street fentanyl laced with cyanide.

She decides that what’s needed is a person of color. Oh, but not as a token, like those cynical Democrat liars. Trump wants someone to help him govern. Right. Like the half pence did. Does “bobble head doll” count as helping? And the idea that Fatty would allow any person of color to help with something besides shining his shoes or saying “yasuh Missa Trump” is a knee slapper to end all knee slappers.

Oh, but let’s go out of our way to continue being fair to traitors, liars, and gaslighters.

Because Both Sides.

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Reader Comments (1)

It is really sad how these big time media outlets twist things in order to improve their marketability, at least in their own minds. In that sense, they are no different than the Republicans who are standing in the way of immigration reform.

If you read the comments following most of the articles in the WaPo or NYT, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people only superficially care about the underlying topic. Instead, it's all about feeding their own egos and what might be called "winning."

February 6, 2024 | Unregistered CommenterBKDad
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