“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Yet another “responsible gun owner” discharges his responsibility in yet another random act of politeness.
Recommended Viewing 0
I’m currently watching it at tubitv.com, a free streaming service with surprisingly unannoying commercials.
Vampire Capitalists 0
Rebecca Watson warns that hedge funds are coming for your medical care.
Or you can read the transcript.
Indoctrination Nation, American Taliban Dept. 0
An Alabama Establishmentarian defends his choice to use the power of the state to foist his creed on others..
The Graham Cracker 0
His name is Graham, and he’s a cracker.
You can’t argue with facts (unless, of course, you are a Republican).
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Yet another family chose to celebrate Christmas by sharing politeness with a child.
We are a broken society.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
Michael Cohen hoists himself on the “AI” petard.
(snip)
Cohen wrote in a sworn declaration unsealed Friday that he has not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks)” in legal technology and was not aware that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could create citations and descriptions that “looked real but actually were not.” He instead believed the service to be a “supercharged search engine.”
Just because you see (or hear) it on a computer screen, it ain’t necessarily so.
See Foot, Shoot Foot, Nikki Foot 0
I linked earlier to PoliticalProf’s post regarding Nikki Halley’s white-washing the reason for the American Civil War.
Halley has since conceded that, yeah, maybe slavery did have a little bit to do with it.
Over at No More Mister Nice Blog, Steve M argues that said concession is not likely to help Halley with the Republican Party’s secessionist base. A snippet:
But Haley can’t do any of that, because her brand is “reasonable-seeming Republican.” She’s polling best in New Hampshire, where members of any party (or no party) can vote in the Republican primary, and where the Republicans are, on average, more moderate than they are in most of the country. Angry wingnuttery might alienate these voters, so she’s ruled it out.
A Notion of Immigrants 0
Aside:
Natch, Donald Trump is descended from immigrants. If I remember correctly, he’s second-generation.
For that matter, so are all of us descended from immigrants whose families arrived after, say, just to pick a date, 1492.
None Dare Call It Reason 0
False equivalence and weasel words.
Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0
Eric Smalley, science and technology editor of The Conversation, debunks four myths about “AI.” Here’s a bit of one debunking (first emphasis in the original, second added); follow the link for the rest.
1. They’re bodiless know-nothings
Large language model-based chatbots seem to know a lot. You can ask them questions and they more often than not answer correctly. Despite the occasional comically incorrect answer, the chatbots can interact with you in a similar manner as people – who share your experiences of being a living, breathing human being – do.
But these chatbots are sophisticated statistical machines that are extremely good at predicting the best sequence of words to respond with. Their “knowledge” of the world is actually human knowledge as reflected through the massive amount of human-generated text the chatbots’ underlying models are trained on.