A lot of ink has been spilled about how Trump told a crowd at Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit “In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.” Given his history it’s understandable when people worry this was a not-so-subtle hint that […]
“You won’t have to vote again” Read More »
On Tuesday Trump threatened to imprison Zuckerberg personally if Meta doesn’t play ball, posting “All I can say is that if I’m elected President, we will pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time. We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT!
Over the past three years we’ve seen a flood of disastrous 6-3 decisions come out of the Supreme Court, upending centuries of established law. While most of us have concentrated on the real-world impact, from women forced to bear non-viable fetuses to public schools engaging in religions indoctrination to Donald Trump being granted what amounts
A few years ago there was an article about a Western Union employee whose job was to talk people out of wiring their life savings to scammers. At one point they describe a woman clearly in panic. In one hand she held her own cell phone with the scammer still on the line and insisting
A tale of two universes Read More »
Wired has posted a nice interview with Kagen Sound, a mathematician by training and self-taught woodworker who has been designing wooden puzzle boxes for over two decades. His woodworking technique is fun to watch (and I would kill for a workshop even half as organized as his) but what I really liked was the little
Wired interview with puzzle-box maker Kagen Sound Read More »
A recent study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior is starting to get some attention in the political blogosphere. The authors used data from a large longitudinal survey of 2229 adolescents from North of the Netherlands over the course of 15 years (ages 10-25), looking specifically at how they answered the question “I wish to
New study says nothing about gender dysphoria Read More »
A few years ago my brother was giving a talk to new graduates going out to do research in digital media and asked if I had any axioms, mottos, or stories from the MIT Media Lab in the late 90s that I might give. Here are the four I sent him. Does it make toast?
Advice to new researchers Read More »
The Author’s Guild just added their own class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that using their copyrighted works to train ChatGPT violated their respective copyrights. This is essentially the same argument made in two other lawsuits filed a few months ago and in the class-action lawsuit filed by artists against Stability AI. As I said with
Laundering Copyright At Scale Read More »
People talk about ChatGPT and similar large language models as being “trained on the Internet as a whole”, which makes it seem even more magical when it manages to do something ridiculous like knock out a rap battle between George Carlin and Julius Caesar, or explain quantum physics in haiku. These are essentially party tricks,
Party tricks are a bad way to evaluate ChatGPT Read More »
Kokichi Sugihara (of ambiguous cylinder fame) has a new illusion out called “One Way Flight”. As usual, it’s both gorgeous in its simplicity and mind-bending at the same time. Check it out below (h/t BoingBoing).
Sugihara’s latest illusion Read More »