2024 archive
A Notion of Immigrants 0
Thom debunks the Muskrat lies.
Aside:
Remember, Elon Musk is an immigrant to America.
Perhaps that is ipso facto evidence that we need to erect higher barriers to entr–oh, never mind.
The Wedding Industrial Complex 0
Seth salutes a couple who defied the wedding industrial complex.
The Greene New Spiel 0
David dissects the dissimulation. (Warning: Short commercial at the end.)
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society’ 0
Yet another “responsible gun owner” demonstrates that “responsible gun owner” is an oxymoron.
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.
Deep Uncovered 0
So much for attorney-client privilege.
Establishmentarians 0
Peter Montgomery reports on efforts by right-wing they-call-themselves Christians to keep the spotlight off their efforts to piggy-back on Donald Trump and turn the United States into a theocracy. Here’s a tiny bit:
Much, much more at the link.
The Open Doorbell Fallacy 0
Consumer Reports has an appalling report on how insecure video “security” doorbells are.
Here’s how it starts; follow the link for the appalling part.
If the message came from a complete stranger, it would have been alarming. Instead, it was sent by Steve Blair, a CR privacy and security test engineer who had hacked into the doorbell from 2,923 miles away.
Blair had pulled similar images from connected doorbells at other CR employees’ homes and from a device in our Yonkers, N.Y., testing lab. While we expected him to gain access to these devices, it was still a bit shocking to see photos of the journalist’s deck and backyard. After all, video doorbells are supposed to help you keep an eye on strangers at the door, not let other people watch you.
H/T Bruce Schneier.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
Under the pretext of a quibble over terminology, psychology professor Gregg Henriques takes a deep dive into why and how AI Chatbots and LLMs get so much so wrong so often. Here’s a tiny bit from his article (emphasis added):
Where do hallucinations like these come from? LLMs like ChatGPT are a type of artificial intelligence that run algorithms that decode content on massive data sets to make predictions about text to generate content. Although the results are often remarkable, it also is the case that LLMs do not really understand the material, at least not like a normal person understand things. This should not surprise us. After all, it is not a person, but a computer that is running a complicated statistical program.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
In a compilation of clips, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skewers Onnald Trump’s racist hate-mongering.
It is a sad and depressing truth that hate sells, for it finds an eager market.
Reason is hard.
Hate is easy.
Courting Disaster 0
Methinks my old Phlly DL friend Noz, who happens to work in the legal profession, makes some good points about the recent Supreme Supremacist Court decision holding that states do not have jurisdiction over candidates in federal elections.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness is a family value.
Republican Thought Police 0
In the course of a longer article about the Republican Thought Police in Alabama, Dr. Robert O. White II reminds us something George Orwell once wrote:
Follow the link for the rest of White’s article.