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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
Jan282011

On Roger Ailes

Roger Ailes. Art for Esquire by Thomas Porostocky.Tom Junod has a profile of Fox "News" CEO Roger Ailes titled "Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?" Junod has some of the transcripts of his interview of Ailes here. Ben Smith recommended the Junod story yesterday [January 25]. AND the upshot of Smith's recommendation is pathetic/ hilarious & certainly supports Junod's suggestion that Ailes is a paranoid freak who runs a tight ship. ...

 ... CW Update: CW: I linked to the Junod piece several days ago & linked it again today for the character study of Ailes a reader drew from it:

This truly louche, sanguinary, malefic mountebank is an even worse, more churlish misanthrope than I had imagined. I knew that he was an unscrupulous liar and mendacious manipulator, but from the sound of it, he's proud of being an accomplished traitor and self-important macher. And it appears that the constant, consistent whining from the right about their status as victims no matter how rich, rapacious, and powerful they are, comes directly from this paranoid piece of shit.
-- A. Reader

In a subsequent e-mail, the reader adds this bit of history:

Ailes' former partner in lies and dirty tricks, that evil racist pig Lee Atwater, a co-architect of the Willie Horton ad, claimed to have seen the error of his ways when he was diagnosed with a life-ending disease (I think it was terminal assholeism) and apologized profusely to the victims of his foul play. He stated that a Bible he had been given had shown him the way. Ed Rollins (yet another asshole) told Atwater's wife that he hoped ol' Lee had found peace at last. She pointed out that Atwater was spinning right to the end. After he died, she found that Bible. Still wrapped in cellophane.

No lies are too big for such as these.

No doubt the crying about how sorry he was to have reamed out all his political targets was like Ailes importuning the Esquire writer to treat him kindly 'cause he's just a regular guy trying his best. Another scam for sympathy. The sympathy that none of those pigs would have granted anyone else. Least of all an 'enemy.'

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