I’ve been listening to the Age of Napoleon podcast for months now, which covers Napoleon’s life, career and world in exhaustive detail. I am coming away a great admirer of Napoleon, while also acknowledging that Napoleon did terrible things. (Haiti.) That is one thing I have in common with Musk.

I also love Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast.

So that’s two things I have in common with Elon.

Also, like Musk, I have not and never will fight in a cage match with Mark Zuckerberg.

Gary Marcus:

… we are building our entire global and national policy on the premise that generative AI will be world-changing in ways that may in hindsight turn out to have been unrealistic.

I have found generative AI uses to be limited at best.

I use it to generate illustrations for articles. In the past, I used public domain and Creative Commons images, and those were just as good as AI imagery.

AI produces mediocre writing that’s filled with errors. In the time it would take me to bring AI writing up to standard, I can just do the writing myself. And that’s what I do.

So yeah maybe generative AI will be the biggest thing since the invention of electricity or fire, but I don’t see evidence that will happen.

The most promising application for generative AI is to deliver voice-activated Star Trek like computers. That would be a big deal—but we’re not there, and may never get there.

Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires support racist Richard Hanania, who advocated eugenics, forced sterilization, and opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing,” Bouie writes.

Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.”

Racists are the natural ally of plutocrats, Bouie says. By supporting an argument that some people are naturally inferior, the plutocrats support the argument that other people are natural elites.

Occasionally I like to not dress like a person who works from home and dribbles food down the front of their shirt. When I’d Google for fashion advice, I’d end often up on r/malefashionadvice. Morgan Sung reports on TechCrunch that Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators.

If you follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon, you know that I like to share memes and vintage ads and photos, and I used to often find them on Reddit. I’m just not finding those images and videos there as much anymore, and I’m starting to check Reddit less often.

“The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company.

Techdirt: Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It:

These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.