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Nurses Protest “Deeply Troubling” Use of AI in Hospitals [404media.co]

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The specific process by which Google enshittified its search [pluralistic.net] — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla’s fleet into AWS for AI — would it work?

Andrew J. Hawkins [theverge.com]:

During last night’s earnings call with investors, Elon Musk threw out an all-time late-night dorm room bong sesh of an idea: what if AWS, but for Tesla?

Musk, who loves to riff on earnings calls, compared the unused compute power of millions of idle Tesla vehicles to Amazon’s cloud service business. If they’re just sitting there, he mused, why not put them to good use to run AI models? (Also, have you ever really looked at your hands? No, I mean really looked?)

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A sign with a humorous comparison between cigarettes and squirrels, stating that both are harmless unless put in the mouth and set on fire, accompanied by an image of a squirrel and a ‘No Smoking’ symbol.

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Cover of Analog magazine featuring a giant sandworm from “The Prophet of Dune” by Frank Herbert, with a desert landscape and small figures near the creature.

Cover of Frank Herbert’s novel “Dune,” featuring large sand dunes and a group of figures in a desert landscape, with text announcing it as the winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for best science fiction novel of the year.

Cover of the book “Dune” by Frank Herbert, featuring the title in ornate script over an abstract rendering of dunes or a mountainous landscape in shades of violet and blue.

Cover of “Analog Science Fiction and Fact” magazine from April 1974, featuring an illustration of a futuristic vehicle flying over a rugged, volcanic landscape. The magazine’s logo and the title “HOT SPOT” by Brenda Pearce are visible

Cover of “Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact” magazine, August 1974 issue, featuring a knight in futuristic armor with a lance riding a large alien mammal, with two humanoid figures in distress in the background, under an orange sky

Cover of July 1965 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, featuring an illustration for “Trader Team” by Poul Anderson. The artwork depicts a large, blue anthropomorphic reptilian creature sitting with a dog-like creature on its shoulder

Various cover illustrations by John Schoenherr [reddit.com]

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📷 Things I saw while walking the dog

A field covered with yellow wildflowers, with a large tree and a chain-link fence in the background under a cloudy sky.

A wooden plank footbridge leads through a natural area with green shrubs, yellow wildflowers, and cacti under a cloudy sky.

A dirt path surrounded by wild yellow flowers with overcast skies above and palm trees in the distance.

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Something I wrote: Blue Planet OSS lets you BYO AI fierce-network.com — Telcos can beef up back-office operations by bringing their favorite AI to Blue Planet’s Cloud Native Platform for OSS.

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📷 Things I saw walking the dog this morning

A small front porch of a house with a white door, white railings, and steps. There is an outdoor table with chairs and a folded green umbrella, decorative signs including one for Route 66, and some potted plants.

Home with a front porch displaying an American flag, a pride flag, and large blue planters. A Buddha statue sits by the steps, and various plants are visible.

Sweatshirts hung carefully on a chain-link fence.

I walked by Maryland Avenue Elementary School, La Mesa, just as kids were being dropped off, and saw these sweatshirts hung carefully from the fence. Why was that done?

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I walked past a school this morning and saw a couple of dozen sweatshirts. neatly pinned spread-eagled on a chain link fence. What’s up with that?

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“I’m a major hypochondriac. I won’t even masturbate anymore. I’m afraid I might give myself something.”—Richard Lewis

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We watched the first episode of Shogun. I don’t understand a lot of what’s going on, but I think I like it.

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Things I saw while walking the dog

A sticker on a glass surface with a skull design and the text “FIX IT IN PRE!” displayed above, with “VIENNAPITS” written at the bottom.

A single-story L-shaped house with a yellow and green exterior, white garage door, driveway, lawn, and a tall tree in the background under a clear sky.

A green Volkswagen Beetle parked on a driveway beside some greenery, with visible wear and some rust on the body.

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Vintage sepia-toned photograph of a pretty woman in a ruffled tutu and headdress, posing with one leg lifted, against a decorative folding screen.

Dolores Costello, Ziegfeld girl, by Alfred Cheney Johnston (1923) [reddit.com]

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Vintage advertisement featuring a man demonstrating the steps to make pizza using a boxed pizza mix: holding the product, spreading dough, adding sauce, sprinkling cheese, and the cooked pizza, with the tagline “Dere’s nuttin' to it!

Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza mix ad w/Joe E. Ross (1968) [reddit.com]

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Vintage catalog page for cheesy 70s fashion including leisure suits

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Please enjoy this Instagram reel of five classic Hollywood accents. [instagram.com]

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Screenshot of (apparently) a tweet: "I find it hard to believe that bears made porridge and the only thing wrong with it was the temperature." By "Adam" @YSylon
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How Meta is paving the way for synthetic social networks

Casey Newton [platformer.news]:

The first era of Facebook was for talking with friends and family. The second, TikTok-influenced era of the company is more focused on content from creators and other people you don’t know.

This week, we got a glimpse of the era yet to come: one where we interact regularly with both people and bots – perhaps not even always knowing, or caring, which one we are talking to.

I started on social media just to talk with other people. Some of these were actual friends and family; others came to be friends through long interactions online. We were all at the same level.

Then I started following celebrities. We occasionally interacted, but mostly I just consumed what they produced. And that’s cool. Like everybody reading this, I grew up having what’s come to be called “parasocial relationships” with fictional characters and the actors who played them.

Now I’m supposedly going to have parasocial relationships with AIs? I’m skeptical.

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Some ways I find ChatGPT and generative AI useful today

  • Generating questions for interviews. ChatGPT is surprisingly great at that.
  • Generating images.
  • Occasionally writing draft introductions to articles, as well as conclusions, descriptions and summaries. I’ve always had trouble writing that kind of thing. I don’t use the version ChatGPT generates—I tear that up and write my own—but ChatGPT gets me started. I don’t do this often, but I’m grateful when I do.
  • Casual low-stakes queries, when I remember to use ChatGPT for that. “What was the name of the movie that was set in a boarding house for actresses that starred Katherine Hepburn?” “Stage Door.” “Was Lucille Ball in that one too?” “Yes.” “Was that Katherine Hepburn’s first movie?” “No.” And ChatGPT provided some additional information. I probably could have gotten that information from Google, but ChatGPT was faster.
  • I find otter.ai extremely useful for transcriptions, likewise Grammarly for proofreading. Those applications use AI, but do they use GenAI? I don’t know.

My big problem, and the reason I don’t us ChatGPT more, is that ChatGPT lies. Not only that, but it lies convincingly. A convincing liar is even worse than a liar. I don’t have much use for an information source that I can’t trust. I don’t see an obvious way to solve this problem.

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Tempest in a teapot And by “teapot” I mean massage parlor

Lloyd Evans, theater critic for the British magazine The Spectator, writes about how he attended a lecture by a woman political philosopher and found her so attractive that he was distracted, so he went to a business that we in the US would call a “rub and tug” and had sexual relations with a prostitute.

“My (surprisingly) decent proposal” The Spectator

I’ve seen a few disparaging comments on social media about Evans’ article, so I found it and read it, and it was … fine. It was a certain type of humor that isn’t for everyone. I enjoyed it, though I would not say I enjoyed it a lot. The author makes himself look like a pathetic loser, but that is the point of that type of humor.

My only quibble with the article was that the author should not have named the lecturer. But the lecturer herself seems to be taking the incident in good humor so there was possibly no harm there either.

“Spectator Writer Faces Backlash Over ‘Grotesque’ Article As Named Lecturer Speaks Out” mediaite.com

The Spectator is apparently a conservative magazine, so this has become a minor football in the culture wars. Focus, people! Don’t get worked up about a slight, ephemeral article. There is far more important work to be done.