“If we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like Joe Biden represents. We have to persuade people to go out and vote to guarantee that [Trump] is forever ousted.”
- Angela Davis, Democracy Now Interview
Reworked
Main Hall II: Santiago Calatrava’s The Oculus. NYC, 02-26-22. (Reworked 02-02-24. See the original here.)
Apple throwing shade.
Today’s “AI” chatbots are no smarter than Siri. They only seem smarter because they’re not doing anything useful. We notice when Siri fails because we ask it to do meaningful tasks. When we ask it to turn off the lights, for example, and it doesn’t, we notice.
But we ask comparatively little of other chatbots, and they give us even less in return. This makes it easy for them to fail without us noticing or even caring. We don’t notice because they don’t matter.
I love this bit 👆 from Apple’s Craig Federighi where he’s kind of disgusted by the idea of having meandering conversations with a chatbot in order to get something done.
The “AI” should be doing the work for you. I think Apple knows how hard that actually is, because they’ve been working at it for a long time with very limited success. They know how hard it is to do because they’re trying to use the tech to do meaningful things that actually serve people.
The difference is Apple taking on the burden of trying to make this tech do something, versus basically everyone else putting the burden on us. We’re meant to contort to the inconsistent ramblings of their raw tech because if it was a real product that people depended on, we would ridicule it.
Just like we ridicule Siri.
I propose that Ween’s Jonny On The Spot is about porta-potties.
I've become absolutely obsessed with Ween's The Stallion Pt. 3. I've been listening to every version I can find, including random people covering it on YouTube. It was the last thing I listened to last night before bed and the first thing I listened to this morning. I've listened to it dozens of times over the last few days.
Yes. This.
Kudos to Queen for remastering this video. It's impossibly bad, but we don't usually get to see videos from this era with such clarity. Somebody actually spent some real time cleaning this up.
Incredulous, I asked myself how I had never heard this song before. But given how terrible it is, I suppose that makes sense.
ALT
'Giving up out of fear without being asked' is how MAGA took over the Republican Party.
Transdermal Celebration (Live in Chicago, 2003) 👆
Ween
Transdermal Celebration (Fan Video Turned Official, 2023) 👇
“Being the lead writer for the New York Time’s signature On Politics newsletter is one of the most influential jobs in the industry these days, and the email that popped up in my inbox announcing the latest hire for that job – a Boston Globe reporter named Jess Bidgood who had previously worked for the Times — made it painfully clear that she is absolutely clueless about the topic she is now covering, and intentionally so.
Offered an opportunity to explain what she found particularly compelling about the coming election, Bidgood didn’t talk about how the Republican Party has succumbed to the extreme Christian far-right. She didn’t talk about how Trump was a hateful, dangerous demagogue. She didn’t even mention the fate of democracy or the rule of law.
Instead of a probing analysis of the stakes, what [Jess] Bidgood gave us in her welcoming remarks was just more of the generic political-journalist pablum about finding interesting stories and covering both sides and — yes — having fun.”
Dan Froomkin, The Washington press corps doesn’t have a freaking clue