Saturday, May 04, 2024

Saturday Night

Rock on.

Is That So

 Amazing stuff.



Saturday Evening

Skip univerity and become an HVAC repair person.

Just Leaving It Here

Not that anyone will process it.
Another Israeli official told Haaretz that, contrary to reports, "Israel will, under no circumstances, agree to end the war as part of a deal to release the hostages" and is determined to enter Rafah "either if the cease-fire will be temporary or not."

America's Finest News Source

Much more accurate than that fucking newspaper.



St. McCain

It is federal law that the wisdom of the McCain family must always be deferred to.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A top U.N. official said Friday that hard-hit northern Gaza was now in “full-blown famine” after more than six months of war between Israel and Hamas and severe Israeli restrictions on food deliveries to the Palestinian territory.

 

Cindy McCain, the American director of the U.N. World Food Program, became the most prominent international official so far to declare that trapped civilians in the most cut-off part of Gaza had gone over the brink into famine.

Morning

Slacker Saturday

Friday, May 03, 2024

Happy Hour

Get happy

Wife Guy

The linked article stated that he kept mentioning his wife and the reporter didn't know why. Cuellar's wife has also been indicted.

Shams

I guess good for the SEC but it doesn't do too much to amelioriate the feeling that everything is trending towards being scams.
BF Borgers, Trump Media & Technology Group’s independent accounting firm, was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday with widespread fraud and accused of operating a “sham audit mill.”

The SEC made no allegation of wrongdoing against Truth Social owner Trump Media (DJT), which is not mentioned in the charges from the regulator.

Lunch

eat

The Wanker Cuellar

Been trying to get rid of this guy for years, over the very active support of his colleagues (yes, of course, they defend incumbents, but they went above and beyond many times).
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is expected to announce the indictment of longtime Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, on Friday, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

Cuellar’s home and campaign office in Laredo, Texas, were raided in January 2022 as part of a federal investigation into Azerbaijan and a group of U.S. businessmen who have ties to the country, law enforcement said at the time. His office had pledged to cooperate with the investigation. In April, Cuellar's lawyer, Joshua Berman, told some news outlets that federal authorities informed him he was not the target of the investigation.

Cuellar is a one-time co-chair of the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus.

Shot/Chaser

Shot:
A bipartisan group of senators held a virtual meeting on Wednesday with senior officials at the International Criminal Court to express their concern about possible arrest warrants being issued for Israeli leaders over the war in Gaza, according to three sources who were in the meeting or briefed about it.
Chaser:

It's Always 5 Years Away

I'd missed that that chtatbot grifter Sam Altman is also pushing fusion, and of course bundling them together.
Backed by renowned entrepreneur Sam Altman, Helion Energy Inc. is garnering attention for its ambitious endeavors in nuclear fusion power. With Altman’s substantial investment of $375 million, the company is spearheading a groundbreaking initiative to revolutionize the renewable energy sector.
Amazing stuff.
DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 16 (Reuters) - OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said an energy breakthrough is necessary for future artificial intelligence, which will consume vastly more power than people have expected.

Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.
Imagine thinking "we need the holy grail of energy breakthroughs to power spicy Alexa."

Just years of the "tech" industry lighting money on fire for nonsense.

Morning

Finally Friday.

Thursday, May 02, 2024

Thursday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy

Ouch

It's actually rare that our great newspapers do a scathing review of a conservative, so a little treat.
What is the function of this genre, the conservative memoir of political awakening? And can it vindicate the contention that progressivism is simply a rite of passage, rather than a seriously considered platform? For my part, I suspect that maturation is not always a boon. “Morning After the Revolution” demonstrates that, if leftism is a hazard of adolescence, conservatism is all too often an unfortunate symptom of aging, not unlike senility.

Now that Bowles is employed by the Free Press, a bastion of free thought, what free thoughts is she thinking? Very few, as it turns out. In fact, it can be difficult to discern any at all in her book.

...

Some of the anecdotes Bowles shares are indeed about movements, albeit distinct ones: In a chapter titled “Whose Tents? Our Tents!,” she scoffs at the anti-homelessness movement in Los Angeles, and Black Lives Matter is a recurrent fixation. But some of her reporting treats isolated incidents that are not plausibly cast as part of any broader campaign. Is an irritating podcast about asexuality with fewer than 300 ratings on the App Store “remaking our institutions from the inside”? Are the three professors who pretended to be people of color for academic clout really “transforming the country”? (Given that there are 1.5 million college faculty members in America, the tendency these outliers represent appears to be less common than the rarest forms of cancer.) And what, if anything, do diversity, equity and inclusion workshops have in common with doctors who treat trans children? “Morning After the Revolution” is, at best, a grab bag of Bowles’s pet peeves.

The Book Of Face

I left facebook of awhile and then rejoined mostly because certain things "required" it. I really cannot believe how bad it is at everything it is supposed to do. I'm not referring to the generally problems of social media (which they have addressed poorly, too), I just mean the basic interface, tools, the way to post or comment or really everything!!! 

And now they've added "AI" which, you know, whatever else it is, AI is bots! It's exploding the bot problem!
While writing this article, I created another Facebook account with the intention of trying to find out if anyone would try to hack my account if I interacted with AI spam. The first image I saw on Facebook after creating this account was an AI-generated log cabin. Six of the first 10 posts I saw were AI-generated spam, which included an entire page full of AI-altered images of Justin Bieber and Hailey Bieber. One image was of an AI-generated starving, mutilated child asking for birthday wishes. When I clicked through to the page that posted the image, I saw dozens of AI-generated children, some of whom were seemingly dead, drowning, starving, had amputations, or were some combination of all of those. (Facebook deleted these accounts after I wrote an article about them but did not respond to my email requesting comment and an interview about how it tracks and takes action on this type of content). Another image I saw within seconds of joining Facebook was an AI-generated image of Jesus with an amputated leg, wearing an Uncle Sam hat, sitting in a wheelchair and holding a birthday cake while sitting next to an American soldier holding a machine gun in a war zone.

          ...


It is reductive to call Facebook the “Dead Internet.” There are real people on Facebook, and real people are being fed this content. The images themselves are being made by AI at the direction of real humans who have learned that spam can be monetized. Real humans at Facebook the company are choosing not to or are not equipped to take action on these accounts or this type of content, which now makes up an unknown but significant portion of content on the site. AI spam, as well as the specter of AI content, is impacting how real people use Facebook and perceive reality more broadly. Facebook itself is shoving its own AI features down people’s throats, and has made clear that it is going to continue spending billions of dollars on AI features that it intends to make core to its products and business model.

But If You Kill Just One Puppy

Kristi this is your political adviser and I recommend you never stop talking about this.