Define Your Despot 0
At the Des Moines Register, Steve Corbin offers a taxonomy of tyrants.
Go read it and ask yourself whether any one of them sounds familiar.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
A good listener? Could you repeat that once more all over again, please?
“History Does Not Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”* 0
Kansas resident Dion Lefler listens to Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and hears a big ugly rhyme from Kansas’s recent past.
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*Mark Twain.
The Rule of Lawless 0
The Arizona Republic reports that right leaning Arizona State Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick is worried. Here’s a bit of the story, which refers to the Trump maladministration’s arresting and detaining immigrants (and some American citizens thought to immigrants, likely because of the color of their skin), often without cause and with observing due process:
Bolick said Miller’s comment about potentially suspending habeas corpus if the courts didn’t do the right thing could be seen as a way “to intimidate the courts to reach decisions that they favor.”
The entire report is worthy of your attention.
Facebook Frolics in the Surveillance Economy 0
The EFF explores the Zuckerborg’s latest scheme for assimilating you and suggests some steps you can take to protect yourself from assimulation. (Audio only. Pretend you are listening to a radio show. Remember radio shows? If you don’t, see the OTR category on the sidebar, over there ——>.)
You can read the synopsis here.
Truth in Labelling 0
Methinks my old Philly DL friend Noz raises a relevant point.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
A glutton? Gobble gobble gobble.
At Psychology Today Blogs, Nigel R. Bairstow reports. Here’s a bit:
(snip)
It feels paradoxical. In our personal lives, AI helps us become more efficient, more informed, and even more productive. But zooming out, this same efficiency comes at an environmental cost that’s anything but efficient for the collective. The irony is stark: In the name of productivity, we may be undermining the very ecosystems that sustain our long-term prosperity.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Brotherly politeness:
The man was sitting across from his teen brother and handling a gun, trying to fix it, police said.
He raised the gun and pulled the trigger, fatally shooting his brother in the head on accident, police said.
Guns and stupid, guns and stupid.
They go together like love and Cupid.
Let me tell you brother,
You can’t have one without the other.
A Tune for the Times 0
(Syntax error fixed.)
Patriot Gamers 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, psychology professor Noam Shpancer argues that feeling too much patriotism can be harmful. Methinks we evidence that he is onto something every day, as illustrated by the two posts in today’s bloggery. Here’s a tiny bit (emphasis added):
Yet at the extremes, group loyalty may become harmful. We are capable of overdosing on our group identity, a process by which our loyalty becomes blind, our devotion rigid, and our relations with outsiders hostile. This is true in the local sense, regarding our proximal groups, such as, say, the local college football team. It is also true in the broader sense.
Methinks this a quite timely read.
The Crypto Con 0
David Shuster discusses how the Trump maladministration is going all in on the ultimate fiat currency, which is based on nothing and guaranteed by no one.
A Notion of Immigrants 0
The editorial board of the Miami Herald finds itself–er–somewhat taken aback at the delight that members of today’s Republican Party seem to be taking in Ron DeSantis’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and in the sheer mean for the sake of mean. Here’s a tiny bit from their piece:
Amid all of this hilarity, there’s rarely a mention of the detainees as human beings who have been plucked from their lives, sometimes without cause. There’s not even a whiff of compassion or nuance about how all cases are not the same.
Afterthought:
Uncouth injustice, the new American way.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
Courting disaster? Why, on bended knee.
Above the Law reports on a “hallucinated” A. I. precedent that, had it not been caught by an appeals court, would have led to a wrong outcome. Here’s a bit:
And, in more news of our wandering blithely and stupidly into a singularity of our own making . . . .
Where is Neo now that we need him?