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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
Jun242016

Trumpathetic

By Akhilleus

How tone deaf is Donald Trump? Pools of blood were still coagulating on the Pulse nightclub dance floor and all Trump could do was congratulate himself for being right about Muslims. Not a word of kindness or concern for the dead; it's all about Trump.

Then yesterday, as Britain voted for the modern nation-state version of suicide and markets across Europe collapsed, all he could do, while halting his presidential campaign to fly off to Scotland to oversee the pitiful grand opening (a tiny crowd of paid staff and hundreds of protesters screaming at him from afar) of his latest ego project, was to rub his hands in glee about all the money he'll make now that the pound had fallen off a cliff.

He did take a moment to congratulate himself again on being right about Brexit, a term he didn't even recognize a couple of weeks ago (news that doesn't have the word TRUMP attached to it, doesn't make his morning "briefing", prepared by his cute 27 year old press secretary), tweeting that people were going crazy in Scotland to be free of the EU so they could "take back their country!". Well, er....no. They weren't. Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. Wrong again, Donald, but no matter, in TrumpWorld, it's all good.

Like Dick Cheney's ludicrous prediction that the Iraqis would welcome an invading force with flowers and open arms (still waiting for those flowers 13 years later, Dick...), Trump still maintains that the Scots love him! They can't get enough of Trump. But, er...no. That's wrong too. The Scotsman, "Scotland's National Newspaper" declared that "It’s hard to think of a less sympathetic character in the eyes of most Scots. Despite all his tartanry and trumpeting of heritage, The Donald is almost the anti-Scot personified. Left and right, unionist and nationalist, man and woman, young and old – it takes quite a lot to unite the people of this notoriously fractious little country in a collective shudder. But Donald Trump effortlessly manages to strike the wrong note in just about everything he does."

But in Donald's eyes, as always, he's a hero.

And so far, we've seen what to expect should he win in November, a president whose only concern during a time of crisis is "How can I benefit from this? How much money can I make during this terrible time?"

Very presidential.

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Reader Comments (1)

When one looks back––and it's always good to do that––we have from April, 2014, a portrait of a man who would be King that was giving us the impression that "tone deaf" wasn't the only thing that was playing havoc in the mind of a man that today in Scotland paid for bagpipes to sound out his music of discontent along with great flourishes of pure asininity given while standing on a golf course that nobody wants.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/23/1294078/-Donald-Trump-Complains-Abo

Walk like a man, my ass.

June 24, 2016 | Unregistered CommenterPD Pepe
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