Mitch W

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

Things I saw while walking the dog

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

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

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

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.

• 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.

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.

via

A member of Delta’s Diamond top-tier frequent flyer program is getting backlash for habitual snitching on flight attendants who violate company policy by using their personal smartphones during flights. Ironically, the snitch is herself violating company policy. [onemileatatime.com]

Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now [theverge.com] —  Meta is putting its AI assistant across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook and the company’s next major AI model, Llama 3, is here.

The US Air Force confirmed its first successful AI dogfight [theverge.com]

Good to see Grace Slick/Michael Burnham again.

Something I saw while walking the dog that put me in a good mood.

I just set it up yesterday between two Macs located about three feet from each other, and find it’s flaky. I can move my mouse pointer and keyboard control between Macs about half the time. Other times, the mouse pointer stops at the screen edge.

The Macs are on Wi-Fi. Maybe it’d work better if I connected them with a USB-C cable?

They are a 2024 MacBook Air and 2024 MacBook Pro.

“The bill would tighten standards for reusable bags and require stores to provide 100% recycled paper bags or let consumers use reusable bags.” [nbcsandiego.com]

If I’m reading this right, the plastic bag ban actually increased plastic bag waste, as grocery stores started charging customers nominally for heavier so-called “reusable” bags.

We buy those bags and reuse them once or twice until they get too dirty. We haven’t gone in on cloth bags.

USC Jewish groups pointed to a five-year-old social media post by her calling for “one Palestinian state” and the “complete abolishment of the state of Israel,” and called that anti-Semitism. The student, Asna Tabassum, questioned the college’s motives. [timesofsandiego.com]