Discuss anything Huey Lewis related in this thread.
The News
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Harry should have done the American thing – pull out a gun and start shooting.
I have no idea how Americans have gotten this reputation…oh, wait….
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Harry should have done the American thing – pull out a gun and start shooting.
That only works if the paparazzi are black and unarmed.
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I have no love for paparazzi, but I also grow tired of Megan and Harry’s whole “We want to be famous … no not that famous” thing.
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DeSantis released a really weird capaign ad which features a lot of Elon Musk for some reason. These two linking up in this way is creepy.
It didn’t go well for DeSantis; late start, technical issues, and Musk, of course. Donald Trump had a field day ragging on his rival.
It’s worrying. DeSantis worries me but Musk flirting with politics even more so. I have a suspicion Musk’s beliefs are in that weird neo-reactionary bubble people like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land are in. Tech fash.
THis, combined with neuralink starting human experimentation, and brain scanning techniques being able to read minds, put me in a very dystopian mood.
https://news.utexas.edu/2023/05/01/brain-activity-decoder-can-reveal-stories-in-peoples-minds/
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DeSantis released a really weird capaign ad which features a lot of Elon Musk for some reason. These two linking up in this way is creepy.
It didn’t go well for DeSantis; late start, technical issues, and Musk, of course. Donald Trump had a field day ragging on his rival.
It’s worrying. DeSantis worries me but Musk flirting with politics even more so. I have a suspicion Musk’s beliefs are in that weird neo-reactionary bubble people like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land are in. Tech fash.
THis, combined with neuralink starting human experimentation, and brain scanning techniques being able to read minds, put me in a very dystopian mood.
https://news.utexas.edu/2023/05/01/brain-activity-decoder-can-reveal-stories-in-peoples-minds/
Which is hilarious given the last few years:
Dodgy, ultra right wing business dude;
5G will mind control you! The covid vaccine is a covert microchip process heralding the end times!
Same dodgy dude now:
Buy my mind controlling microchip!
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That was always the case though, wasn’t it? The same people who were yelling about government surveillance happily giving away their personal data to facebook, tictoc, google… whoever was asking.
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It is another sign of how weird and polarised we become on social media but I think it also misses that most people don’t give a shit. Musk has spent a lot of money because he wants to control Twitter but it is one of the least used platforms. My ‘for you’ tab is 40% trans and terf arguments, while I strongly lean to the trans side this really is one of the most unimportant debates in most people’s lives.
Food and fuel prices are up dramatically, that affects everyone and it isn’t in my feed. There’s no debate about ‘greedflation’ where a variety of companies that supply these things, from Exxon/BP to supermarkets are reporting astonishing profits and dividends.
The biggest issue we really have is the stock market model, it doesn’t reward running a good business, it only rewards ever increasing profit and speculation, neither of which are really sustainable. I worked for a combined 20 years for 2 blue chip companies everyone knows and they posted a profit every year or quarter in all that time. They were under constant pressure by shareholders to offload staff and cut costs to make more and more, even though they were operating fine.
Twitter isn’t worth $44bn, it has never made any money. It’s a bullshit system too many buy into.
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It is another sign of how weird and polarised we become on social media but I think it also misses that most people don’t give a shit. Musk has spent a lot of money because he wants to control Twitter but it is one of the least used platforms. My ‘for you’ tab is 40% trans and terf arguments, while I strongly lean to the trans side this really is one of the most unimportant debates in most people’s lives.
Food and fuel prices are up dramatically, that affects everyone and it isn’t in my feed. There’s no debate about ‘greedflation’ where a variety of companies that supply these things, from Exxon/BP to supermarkets are reporting astonishing profits and dividends.
The biggest issue we really have is the stock market model, it doesn’t reward running a good business, it only rewards ever increasing profit and speculation, neither of which are really sustainable. I worked for a combined 20 years for 2 blue chip companies everyone knows and they posted a profit every year or quarter in all that time. They were under constant pressure by shareholders to offload staff and cut costs to make more and more, even though they were operating fine.
Twitter isn’t worth $44bn, it has never made any money. It’s a bullshit system too many buy into.
Good summation. And it feels like this has become more and more obvious in recent years, but… there still aren’t enough people willing to do something about it.
I’ll get to that post-capitalism vid later, Todd. I think this is still the rub, and today more so than ever. I mean, for several reasons. Capitalism (or the “free economy”) as it is right now isn’t sustainable, nor is it going to be, and we’re moving so much closer to the point of no return every year now. At the same time, this new generation of AIs is going to transform our world inside the next decade or so, in ways we can’t even predict right now but that clearly will revolutionise every aspect of our lives faster than we imagine. But one thing is for sure, this will have a massive impact on our economic system, and quite possibly one the current model can’t really deal with.
That’s what you get for reading all those cyberpunk novels. Suddenly we’re there.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nkS8CguQG1s/Tt4GUKz2rzI/AAAAAAAAAkU/KlaBofMQVnw/s1600/From+Hell+4.png
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Well, yes, but there comes a point when that differentiation becomes academic. You know, the Turing Test: does it matter if it is “truly” intelligent if you really can’t tell the difference anymore?
I loved that in Peter Watts’ “Blindsight” – there are aliens there that the crew of a spaceship in a first encounter scenario think they are truly communicating with until they realise they’re talking to a Chinese Room kind of thing, basically this kind of predictive text algorithm.
Either way – these AIs are good enough at what they do that they will be an incredibly efficient tool in many, many areas.
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I’ve actually likened Chat GPT to the alien communication system in Blindsight myself in the past, because it’s very much the same thing. Of course, it couldn’t actually communicate, just fool people for a short amount of time, and the aliens themselves had divested themselves of many of their higher mental processes to deal with the psychological issues of starflight.
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Tools like ChatGPT can be good but they need a conductor to guide their use. Ask it to write you an Excel macro for a specific purpose and the output will probably be good. Ask it to write a review of Forspoken and it’ll probably say it’s available on Xbox.
The biggest error being made right now is the belief, again, that technology just magically works. It doesn’t, you need people with the skills and creativity to make it work.
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Tools like ChatGPT can be good but they need a conductor to guide their use. Ask it to write you an Excel macro for a specific purpose and the output will probably be good. Ask it to write a review of Forspoken and it’ll probably say it’s available on Xbox.
The biggest error being made right now is the belief, again, that technology just magically works. It doesn’t, you need people with the skills and creativity to make it work.
Add to the fact that you still have to check it’s output because it still may have errors.
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Yep, which is what the Forspoken example is about. Someone actually did that and got that output.
Used badly and thoughtlessly? It’ll send inefficiency way up.
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There’s been a few instances of Lawyers using ChatGPT to source precedent for suits they’re filing, only for the bot to create the cases out of thin air. For example:
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Now Arjan, do use proper terminology, we call that “alternative facts”.
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There’s been a few instances of Lawyers using ChatGPT to source precedent for suits they’re filing, only for the bot to create the cases out of thin air. For example:
Goddamn AI taking a job I could do.
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I can buy that translation software is good to a degree but perfect? I doubt it,
I was working with translation software 15 years ago for a major website. Back then while very far from perfect it is true that it was far quicker for us to get a human to check and correct than translate the whole thing from scratch.
The tech is still very flawed, just before the coronation the palace website put up a version of the oath swearing in Welsh (like anyone ever used it but I digress..). The problem was that the the word ‘swear’ has a double meaning which is split into two other words in Welsh ‘rhegi’ which means curse words and ‘tyngi’ which means to swear an oath. The computer picked the wrong to amusing effect but despite that flaw it takes seconds to correct instead of several minutes to draft from the original English text.
A frequent issue now though, as that example shows, is a lot of places can’t even be arsed to implement the checking phase before publishing.
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That is where I’m seeing far more compelling problems with this tech:
– Unchecked info being published because too much trust has been placed in the tech
– Wholescale image work theft and replication.
– Articles that are total crap.
– Concentration of the tech into a handful companies, granting a practical monopoly. Strangely, guess which companies are arguing for AI regulation.
Separate to all of this, I’ve seen some good arguments on Twitter for how AI can be used to support and enable creators, instead of ripping them off.
Another argument I’ve seen is the understanding of AI being publicised is from engineers who have a tendency to see A to B to C. Where an arts-based view of AI is more likely to see it as A may lead to B and to C. Which might be more useful as the problem is less the tech and more its human users.
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Changing tack, this is a big deal in Oz:
Includes work by Chris Masters, ex-MW Tim’s dad. And the story? It is bad, bad stuff but a great example of what journalism can be.
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Regarding DeSantis:
According to other reports, a LOT of Hispanics and others have left and did not show up for work. It is practically crippling the Florida agriculture, the construction sites, hotel service etc. all across the state.
The ones hired to replace them are just not working out.
Wow.
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Oh yeah, the Telegraph, the paper that has just started a campaign vilifying those on disability benefits.
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It’s the usual I suspect. Short term profit motive
It’s more complex than that. After apartheid, the coal mines were transferred largely to black ownership. So there’s been a vested interest in buying from them to generate power for wealth redistribution reasons. But now you’ve got Western powers coming in saying “coal is bad, you should go to solar. Don’t worry, we’ll give you loans.” So it’s seen as colonial imperialism by stealth.
Also after Apartheid, the electricity supply was extended to (poorer) black areas that previously had no supply. These municipalities are still quite poor though, so keep defaulting on payment, which puts a strain on the supplier. This is exacerbated by mass criminality: coal supplies are intercepted by gangs and replaced with lower quality stuff filled out with stones and dirt that damage the coal processors. The gangs are also paying off power station staff to damage things, forcing maintenance call outs that are fixed at high rates, which the gangs are in on. And there’s general political corruption with various members of the ANC skimming off the funds. So they can’t afford to do any major infrastructure improvements.It’s a total clusterfuck, hence why they’re playing nice with Putin to try and get coal imports again.
Really worth listening to that podcast if you have time.
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Naomi Klein writes some interesting stuff about South Africa. That as part of the deal to end apartheid, the ANC who were wedded to socialist principles were forced to accept a constitution that essentially made it impossible and kept a large degree of wealth in the previous administration’s private hands.
Now that is not to gloss over corruption in the ANC, there’s plenty of it post Mandela, but to a degree it was driven as part of the deal.
It’s interesting because we generally view constitutions as good thing and generally they are but are also hugely open to abuse. When post 2003 Iraq was established the US appointed head imposed very radical libertarian aspects to their constitution, the guarantee of allowing complete foreign ownership of any industries is enshrined in it.
They cannot use any protectionist controls while the US itself does them all the time. They’ve blocked Arab countries buying ports, in 2008 the company I worked for was saved from any losses by a federal agreement that government could only buy US made computers. State authorities placed caveats that they would only sign contracts if all support calls were answered in the US and not overseas. They have steel tariffs to make the foreign imports too expensive.
The UK to me are actually the biggest mugs, they’ve embraced that philosophy more evangelically to the degree we own next to fuck all. It’s all a philosophy to sell for short term gain. Our only steel production is run by an Indian firm, if a world war happened again we’d have no control over building arms as we did in the 1940s. While Biden is promoting semi-conductor production in the USA with his CHIPS act the UK had the dominant mobile chip company in the world in ARM, which powers every smartphone and now every Apple product after they ditched Intel and just sold it to the Japanese.
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Trans-friendly counter-protesters stand up to activist outside Ottawa schools
Have the news on in the background, and I think they’re talking about hard core right wing shit in the U.S.
Nope. Right here. An anti-trans rally “Education over Indoctrination” (don’t want gender identity taught in schools, and outlaw puberty blockers) shows how far some will go. They brought their own kids and watching them stomp on Pride flags for the cameras absolutely sickened me.
You would teach a child that? How to hate? Just wrong on so many levels, and pathetic.Then it goes into a story about the province of New Brunswick trying to make changes in their education system (you go by the name on your birth certificate, plus more, etc.)
Again with schools? So no barriers to decency?Nice to see Trudeau say “Trans kids don’t need to ask for permission for who they are. Trans kids need to feel safe and know we have their backs, not targeted by politicians.”
Sad (but expected) to see Poilievre (leader of Federal right Progressive Conservatives) sidestep the question (“we’ll let the provinces decide their own education system”)
How horrible for some that are in a vulnerable state to be the target of so much hate.Maybe it was just naive of me to think we’re constantly moving forward when proof very much exists that many want to move backwards.
Not trying to be overly negative here, but this shit in the world needs to be stood up to. We can’t get lackadaisical about it, especially not at election time.2 users thanked author for this post.
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For every concussion suffered by an NHL player, there are… – CBC.ca
For every concussion incurred by an NHL player, approximately 7,000 women and girls in Canada are concussed because of intimate partner and domestic violence, according to a new estimate from YWCA Metro Vancouver and researchers at the University of British Columbia.
Approximately four in 10 women and girls in Canada will face violence from a current or former partner, according to a 2021 report by Statistics Canada, or about 290,000 every year. As many as 92 per cent of them will suffer a traumatic brain injury due to blows to their head or strangulation.
And that number has been on the rise in British Columbia since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to 2022 report from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
Transgender, disabled or racialized people also face higher rates of intimate partner violence.
More in link…
Those are some sickeningly shocking stats, and I honestly had no idea.
Former Vancouver Canuck Trevor Linden was on TV talking about it and I was blown away. Canadian data only, no idea on the U.S. or elsewhere.
This behavior has been around long before the pandemic, so we can’t blame that. I do think it made things worse though.Sorry if it seems like I have my weekend beers and bring horror stories.
But like it says in the article:
Linden called on men and boys to educate themselves on violence and to call out one another for perpetrating or dismissing abusive behaviour of any kind. “Men have to start to understand that [women’s] equality and fairness and protection has to be talked about”
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I found myself wondering… if I knew I was down to an hour of oxygen and would die slowly and horribly, would I trigger a pressure breach instead?
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Musk vs Zuckerbot cage fight! What timeline is this?
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This whole affair has been fairly grim and I’ve found it pretty disturbing to think about. Hopefully in future it leads to better safety oversight for these kinds of operations.
Seems unlikely that any significant safety measures can be added for a vehicle that goes to places that are inherently dangerous, such as outer space and the depths of the ocean. Apparently the OceanGate Expeditions waiver forms, which customers must sign before joining the ride, mention the potential for death THREE TIMES on the first page alone. I imagine Elon Musk’s SpaceX ride must have similar hold-harmless clauses in their application forms.
From what I’ve read, this sub was basically a disaster waiting to happen. No redundant systems, apparently they lost comms with the surface almost every single dive (edit to add: and they never got around to adding a deployable emergency beacon), they refused to get it safety certified, cut costs, fired staff who raised safety concerns and hired a lot of inexperienced people… It’s less what went wrong this time and more how did it not go wrong before this.
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Yeah, I’m not suggesting that you can make these trips entirely risk-free but there is a sliding scale of risk, and I’m not sure operations like this should be allowed to put paying customers in that kind of danger regardless of how they word their waiver.
Based on the public criticisms of this company that predate the accident I’m surprised that they were allowed to operate. I’m guessing that similar operators will be under more scrutiny in future.
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Based on the public criticisms of this company that predate the accident I’m surprised that they were allowed to operate. I’m guessing that similar operators will be under more scrutiny in future.
After reading more about this today, I gather that part of the reason they were able to operate without much (any?) oversight is because the dives took place in international waters. So I’m not sure how easy it would be to enforce additional regulation for this kind of thing.
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Thing is firing whistleblowers who flagged serious risks, operating in international waters to evade regulations, refusing to comply with certification and requiring liability waivers all adds up to one very dodgy operation.
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I know this is a banal thing to say, but it’s still depressing how quickly the deaths of a handful of rich people replaced a ship disaster in which 700 migrants died from the headlines, and how much more global attention this caught.
And I can understand the reason why this grabs so much more attention, even apart from the one death is a tragedy, a million etc. thing. The disappearance of the Titan made for a fascinating story and it was something completely unexpected, whereas we unfortunately have gotten all too used to poor people drowning in the Mediterrenean. But still, and I know this is callous, but I find it weird how much more empathy a couple of rich guys on a pleasure trip experience compared to hundreds of desperate people looking for a better life. And I also realise that that is unfair and that I am the one pitting two disasters against each other now and that empathising with one doesn’t mean you can’t feel for the other, but still. It’s just, with those two happening so quickly after each other, it does invite contrasting them.
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operating in international waters to evade regulations
In fairness, it’s not like you can dive to the wreck of the Titanic anywhere else.
Not inclined to be fair to be a bunch of cost-cutting bastards.
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I know this is a banal thing to say, but it’s still depressing how quickly the deaths of a handful of rich people replaced a ship disaster in which 700 migrants died from the headlines, and how much more global attention this caught.
Agreed; I’m disgusted by how much attention was focused on this rescue/recovery mission, while actual tragedies are occurring elsewhere around the world. If a bunch of billionaires (and one reluctant son) want to risk their lives (not to mention a quarter of a million dollars each) on a pointless and dangerous sightseeing tour, that’s their business; but their deaths shouldn’t get any more news coverage than that of a guy who tries to cross a busy highway and gets mowed down by a truck.
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The disappearance of the Titan made for a fascinating story and it was something completely unexpected, whereas we unfortunately have gotten all too used to poor people drowning in the Mediterrenean.
It’s interesting. I listened to the News Agents podcast discuss it today and they noted that the Chilean miners and the kids Thai football team did get the same level of saturation coverage. So it maybe isn’t the wealth of those involved so much as the narrative.
News really being treated as entertainment, one studio had a huge graphic counting down the air left inside (which we now know was irrelevant, the sub imploded days ago).
I do know I go back to this often but I was still very taken by a talk Alain De Botton gave on this, that news is massively driven by both narrative and images. You cannot get a story more driven by both than 9/11 for example but tens of thousands more Americans died of Covid. When the news agencies had that photo of that little toddler that drowned a few years back and was picked up on the beach by the police attitudes to refugees shifted hugely because it’s a human narrative.
I honestly don’t know what the situation is in Syria right now because every major news source got bored of reporting it. It was top story, then after years it became the status quo.
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This whole affair has been fairly grim and I’ve found it pretty disturbing to think about. Hopefully in future it leads to better safety oversight for these kinds of operations.
Seems unlikely that any significant safety measures can be added for a vehicle that goes to places that are inherently dangerous, such as outer space and the depths of the ocean. Apparently the OceanGate Expeditions waiver forms, which customers must sign before joining the ride, mention the potential for death THREE TIMES on the first page alone. I imagine Elon Musk’s SpaceX ride must have similar hold-harmless clauses in their application forms.
From what I’ve read, this sub was basically a disaster waiting to happen. No redundant systems, apparently they lost comms with the surface almost every single dive (edit to add: and they never got around to adding a deployable emergency beacon), they refused to get it safety certified, cut costs, fired staff who raised safety concerns and hired a lot of inexperienced people… It’s less what went wrong this time and more how did it not go wrong before this.
After watching this video, you can see that a disaster was inevitable.
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Following the news from Russia is so frustrating. As the pioneers of post-truth it’s so hard to know what to believe, everything is just hearsay from Telegram or propaganda TV channels.
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Hikers find human remains in area where Julian Sands went missing in January
Does not sound good.
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Based on the public criticisms of this company that predate the accident I’m surprised that they were allowed to operate. I’m guessing that similar operators will be under more scrutiny in future.
After reading more about this today, I gather that part of the reason they were able to operate without much (any?) oversight is because the dives took place in international waters. So I’m not sure how easy it would be to enforce additional regulation for this kind of thing.
They operate in international waters, but they sell tickets and bank their profits in the United States (or wherever). It should be fairly easy to shut down their business, if there is any political will for it.
If I row out into international waters with another British citizen and shoot him, I’m pretty sure I’m still going to be arrested when I row back to shore.
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If I row out into international waters with another British citizen and shoot him, I’m pretty sure I’m still going to be arrested when I row back to shore.
You might be but there is quite a dark story about how many deaths happen on cruises and other international waters vessels that aren’t properly investigated because of juristiction issues. This is from an NPR podcast I listened to about it.
Prosecuting crimes committed at sea is extremely difficult. Only 16 percent of all murders and 7 percent of sexual assaults led to convictions or plea bargains, according to F.B.I. statistics. There are a number of reasons why. Crime scenes are often contaminated, since no police are onboard the ships. Who has jurisdiction depends on where the ship happens to be located when the alleged crime is committed.
And if it’s in international waters, something called admiralty law applies. It’s up to the captain of the ship, for instance, to decide whether to incarcerate someone suspected of committing a crime. If a U.S. citizen is involved, then the F.B.I. does investigate. But many victims say, often too late.
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I would have thought all murder victims think their cases have been investigated too late.
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Twitter is broken again yes. Musk really has made everything worse on that platform in the interests really of promoting things he likes on there.
Whether you agree with his worldview or not it’s a terrible model to spend so much money and I strongly suspect as soon as someone has a platform basically doing the same thing to the same scale it’ll die. He started with an agenda for eradicating bots and it is crawling with them, since 2010 the very few things I have posted have largely been ignored, now I get daily likes from sexbots on every inane thing I respond to.
What he’s essentially done is buy a very popular nightclub and demanded the DJ play only the songs he likes, regardless of how popular they are with the crowd. I feel sorry for the CEO he installed, I mean she will get a huge salary so I won’t cry too hard, but I am pretty sure her day will be looking at making more money and Musk preventing it with his commands.
It’s an absolute binfire and I don’t think anyone has the balls to tell him, he’s been posting in the last few days that his ‘verification’ is reducing spam, it done the exact opposite and his harsh layoffs have meant loads more downtime (and Twitter didn’t have that many people working for it anyway, apps are pretty staff-lite as a business model).
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The latest news is that he’s rationed usage and limited the number of tweets users can see per day:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66077195
Seems like a pretty good way to quickly kill a social media platform.
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So part of the problem is that Musk was a mediocre software engineer 25 years ago who thinks he’s a genius, and he has no idea of how modern technology works. Part of it is that he’s surrounded himself with yes-men and notably fired anyone who pointed out his stupid decisions at Twitter, and part of it is that his mass layoffs at the company mean there’s no slack to properly test changes or to think through the implications of his latest idea to fix the problems with the site – most of which are the results of his own decisions.
To illustrate, it seems today’s problems are caused by two of his decisions.
1: Apparently they’ve been stiffing Google on their cloud bill and the contract was up at the end of June so they’ve been cut off.
2: The tweet view limit means that once you hit the limit the site keeps trying to serve you new content even though the account settings mean you can’t see it and it effectively becomes a self-inflicted DDOS attack. -
The upside of this is, maybe Graham Linehan will finally calm the fuck down.
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Unlikely.
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Yeah, he was banned from Twitter for ages and it didn’t help him any
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Oh right I forgot that, lots of those people were banned and then Musk let them back on, even complete nazis, like BAP and those idiots.
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That’s Musk when the share price finally tanks terminally.
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Government here might fall tonight over refugee troubles and how to deal with that stuff. Honestly I don’t see any good political options if it comes to new elections, all the politicians are idiots. Might do a protest vote for one of the wacky parties.
Just becareful if a Mr. Hilter is running:
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I saw this come by on twitter, seems there might be some truth to this. I think for some twitter got too influential
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