Josh H. Ellis

@JaredSandler Seattle SuperSonics and the Shreveport Captains

QOTD Which sports franchise that relocated do you wish were still in its previous location?

@SportsSturm How long until a P1 photoshops this image with Gordo in the middle reading The Brothers Karamazov?

This picture is magical. (Could use some people looking at their phones and maybe someone trying to get a selfie, but it will have to do.)

@TomSteyer Don’t know about the substance of this tweet, but everything about its form screams “AI.” The clipped comparisons are a give away.

Four corporations control 90% of California's refining capacity. That's not a market — that's a monopoly. I'll attack their grip on gas pricing and force an investigation into why Californians pay more than anyone else in the country.

@landofthe80s John Voigt the dentist?

On this date in 1997, “Anaconda” starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voigt & Eric Stolz premiered in theaters. BITE-SIZED FACT | Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future! #90s

@Evan_P_Grant I’ve never liked the Rangers in red. Maybe it’s because I associate the red with the division rival Angels. I also realize City Connect uniforms aren’t marketed to my age demo.

Here are the City Connects. Act shocked like you haven't already seen them. Also send me your thoughts. My take: I like 'em a lot. The Mexican-theme detailing is spectacular. dallasnews.com/sports/rangers…

@heynavtoor @rheyduck Ironically, this post reads like it was generated by AI.

🚨SHOCKING: Apple just proved that AI models cannot do math. Not advanced math. Grade school math. The kind a 10-year-old solves. And the way they proved it is devastating. Apple researchers took the most popular math benchmark in AI — GSM8K, a set of grade-school math problems — and made one change. They swapped the numbers. Same problem. Same logic. Same steps. Different numbers. Every model's performance dropped. Every single one. 25 state-of-the-art models tested. But that wasn't the real experiment. The real experiment broke everything. They added one sentence to a math problem. One sentence that is completely irrelevant to the answer. It has nothing to do with the math. A human would read it and ignore it instantly. Here's the actual example from the paper: "Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?" The correct answer is 190. The size of the kiwis has nothing to do with the count. A 10-year-old would ignore "five of them were a bit smaller" because it's obviously irrelevant. It doesn't change how many kiwis there are. But o1-mini, OpenAI's reasoning model, subtracted 5. It got 185. Llama did the same thing. Subtracted 5. Got 185. They didn't reason through the problem. They saw the number 5, saw a sentence that sounded like it mattered, and blindly turned it into a subtraction. The models do not understand what subtraction means. They see a pattern that looks like subtraction and apply it. That is all. Apple tested this across all models. They call the dataset "GSM-NoOp" — as in, the added clause is a no-operation. It does nothing. It changes nothing. The results are catastrophic. Phi-3-mini dropped over 65%. More than half of its "math ability" vanished from one irrelevant sentence. GPT-4o dropped from 94.9% to 63.1%. o1-mini dropped from 94.5% to 66.0%. o1-preview, OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model at the time, dropped from 92.7% to 77.4%. Even giving the models 8 examples of the exact same question beforehand, with the correct solution shown each time, barely helped. The models still fell for the irrelevant clause. This means it's not a prompting problem. It's not a context problem. It's structural. The Apple researchers also found that models convert words into math operations without understanding what those words mean. They see the word "discount" and multiply. They see a number near the word "smaller" and subtract. Regardless of whether it makes any sense. The paper's exact words: "current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data." And: "LLMs likely perform a form of probabilistic pattern-matching and searching to find closest seen data during training without proper understanding of concepts." They also tested what happens when you increase the number of steps in a problem. Performance didn't just decrease. The rate of decrease accelerated. Adding two extra clauses to a problem dropped Gemma2-9b from 84.4% to 41.8%. Phi-3.5-mini from 87.6% to 44.8%. The more thinking required, the more the models collapse. A real reasoner would slow down and work through it. These models don't slow down. They pattern-match. And when the pattern becomes complex enough, they crash. This paper was published at ICLR 2025, one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world. You are using AI to help you make financial decisions. To check legal documents. To solve problems at work. To help your children with homework. And Apple just proved that the AI is not thinking about any of it. It is pattern matching. And the moment something unexpected shows up in your question, it breaks. It does not tell you it broke. It just quietly gives you the wrong answer with full confidence.

@Brett_McMurphy The SEC won the natty in volleyball. There’s a great chance the SEC will win both the Men’s and Women’s College World Series. I believe Texas just won a national championship in swimming & diving. The SEC schools will simply spend more $$ on football and basketball.

NEW: The mighty SEC's historic dynasty has officially crumbled. For the first time in nearly a decade, college sports' most dominant conference faces an unprecedented reality that has coaches & ADs scrambling on3.com/news/the-sec-d…

“The empty tomb was not like any other hole in the ground; it was more like a doorway into another world.” Oliver O’Donovan #easter

Sometimes I think we just value the wrong things as sports fans. Willie McGee hit 79 homers in 18 years and he was more fun and exciting than a clown car full of 30-homer steroid freaks.

French filmmaker François Ozon offers a charged and rewarding adaptation of the classic book about a man in Algeria seemingly indifferent to his life and fate. on.wsj.com/41JmmuV

@JaredSandler I have an old Mavs t-shirt I bought back in 2005. I wear the same Mavs t-shirt for every Mavs playoff game. It's the only time I wear it. It's ragged now, no sleeves, so I wear under other shirts.

QOTD What's your weirdest sports-watching superstition?

@markdtooley The progressive female youth pastor (also candidate for ministry) at my UMC recently took to social media to suggest that Jesus was Palestianian, which was clearly meant to be a political statement. I don't think she is anti-Semitic, but just blind to her insensitivities.

Antisemitism among young Christian men is becoming a real problem. Why? A young evangelical Methodist in Las Vegas recently described this new antisemitism he is seeing, and he explained: “It’s essentially the woke mind virus on the Right.” These young men with whom he talks feel economically “disenfranchised,” they “look for an oppressor,” or in these right-wing circles, a “subversive group (i.e., Jews/Israel),” and they “blame them for foreign policy which leads to lack of prosperity.” Many quickly respond that criticism of Israel does not equal antisemitism, which can be true. But the new antisemitism targets Israel and Jews more widely, obsessively critiquing Israel without interest in problems by other nations, while faulting Jews domestically for their own personal struggles or for what they see as larger economic or social problems. The Iran War almost certainly will exacerbate this trend. There are several possible explanations, the chief of which is likely the online nature of young lives, especially young men. For obsessive young internet consumers, without the maturity or experience to be skeptical, and especially prone to what is outrageous, antisemitism is a natural attraction. Online provocateurs can pretend to be brave and naughty by attacking and weaving outlandish yarns about Jews. The young male viewer in front of his screen, unfiltered by a wider physical community, absorbs the outrageousness without filters, the wisdom of community, or the judgement of older, wiser heads. Young male Christians may physically attend church but they, as many older Christians, find their main authorities online, which they self-collate, often from dark corners that would be unknown to their grandparents (although many older online viewers find their own disturbing online outlets). Pastors and traditional Christian gatekeepers are often inconsequential to young male Christians, who have their own independent spiritual ecosystem. Denominations are irrelevant. It’s also true that young male Christians want their religion, with their other beliefs, to be very high octane, with clear boundaries, and uncompromising, which ostensibly evinces masculinity and boldness. For many of them, any collegiality with Jews implies a softening of Christianity. Some are hostile to the idea of “Judeo-Christian,” which supposedly dilutes Christianity. Christian leaders who highlight their ties to Jews appear to them weak and compromised. Strong Christians “stand up” to Jews, and their fellow travelers from this perspective. Another trend enabling hostility to Jews by young Christians is the decline of Dispensationalism and philo Semitism that once were paramount among American evangelicals. The 19th century theological system that placed Jews and Israel at the center of the final events leading to Christ’s return has been in decline for at least twenty years and is increasingly uncommon among young Christians. Young anti-Jewish Catholics now identify “Christian Zionism,” which they conflate with Dispensationalism, as a “heresy,” intrinsically at odds with Catholic teaching. Even the old adage about God blessing those who bless Abraham’s descendants has faded from favor. For many perhaps most young Christians, Jews have no further role in God’s plans. This perspective has sometimes been derided as “Replacement Theology,” but probably few young Christiani men are even familiar with this phrase or theologically thought through their reasons. Reliance on TikTok videos does not foster deep theological reflection. Many young Christian men are attracted to their brand of Christianity for political reasons. To be Christian is to be anti-woke. From this view, Christian faith becomes a political and tribal marker as much as or even more important than personal faith. The church, as they define it, chiefly through self-selected online sources, is the shelter against wokeness that will affirm their manhood and succor if not platform their grievances. Some young male Christians politicize their faith further by embracing premodern theories of Christendom. Catholic Integralists want a society where Roman Catholicism is legally dominant. Calvinist Christian Nationalists want a confessional state that bans or restricts other religious expressions. Neither project is plausible in America, or anywhere else. But both projects aspire to confine Jews to their own spheres and make them second class citizens, which amplifies anti-Jewish sentiment. Jews are only two percent of the U.S. population and a much smaller percentage of the world population. But antisemitism is an enduring ideology that appeals to conspiracy, fear, resentment, and grievance. In this mindset, Jews are successful and have power at the expense of everybody else. They are always convenient scapegoats. Antisemitism is not just a threat to Jews themselves but to democracy and ordered liberty for all people. It denies the core Christian and Jewish insight that all are equally created in the image of God and in civil society should have equal rights and dignity. The new antisemitism is part of the new authoritarianism that is impatient of democracy and rights and prefers a bracing vision of control and coercion by the “right” people. Many young Christians are drawn to this ostensibly masculine society where enemies are repressed and imprisoned, perhaps even tortured are killed. It’s the same sadism that motivates extremist young men at their worst everywhere, whether in Iran in 1979, Germany in the early 1930s, or Moscow in 1917, or China in 1949, among many other times and places. In contrast, democracy and human rights require self-restraint, patience, forbearance, and respect even for adversaries. How can the new antisemitism and new authoritarianism popular among some Christian young men be countered? There are no silver bullets. These trends appeal to the darker impulses always present throughout humanity. Democracy and mutual respect appeal to higher aspirations, ultimately based on God’s goodness, mercy, and grace, while also admitting our limited capacities as finite and sinful humans. If God is God, and we are only human, only He can judge and condemn. In our humility, we treat others as we hope they will treat us. Articulating these principles might be more of a vocation for laity than clergy, especially for online laity who are effective and entertaining communicators. So there are no easy remedies for Christian antisemitism or authoritarianism. We can only appeal to the common grace that covers our fallen world, pointing out that all humans ultimately benefit from controlling our resentments and living peaceably together. Even zealous young men by God’s grace can listen and understand.

@jonmachota I might just be getting old, but I started checking out on the NFL about 5 years ago. I watch less and less each year. The two past seasons I haven’t watched a game after Thanksgiving. Last season, I didn’t watch a single game that didn’t involve the Cowboys.

Former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to ESPN in 2014 on the NFL expanding to have games on more days of the week: "I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion. I'm just telling you: Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they're getting hoggy." Cowboys owner Jerry Jones on Tuesday when asked about "hogs getting slaughtered" with the NFL's continued expansion of games: “When the ducks quack, feed them. And we have that demand for our games because of the hard work and great players that we have. We have great demand. We should address it, respond to it and feed it.”

@JaredSandler I remember a brief moment in 1989 thinking that Steve Walsh would be a better quarterback for the Cowboys than Troy Aikman.

QOTD What is your most foolish sports opinion ever?

asaaand in a game that seems won, once again here’s Clocks sparing us to death…

On Maundy Thursday, Jesus took a basin of water & washed the disciples' feet. The next day, Pilate took a basin of water & washed his hands to distance himself from Jesus. Each day, we have a basin before us. Will we serve like Jesus or distance ourselves from Him? -@philipnation

One thing I’ll never understand about college basketball is all of the hate for Duke. I always root for the Methodists and Methodist-adjacent schools.

The Rangers are on Peacock. I subscribe to Peacock Premium Plus, yet I can't watch the game because it's blacked out. Does @MLB and/or the @Rangers think this is a good thing? I shouldn't have to purchase a @victoryplustv subscription to watch the Rangers.

@TimCowlishaw I applaud him for this. Most working people can't make day games. I would argue there needs to be far fewer day games, if you want to maximize attendance, especailly in places like the Dallas market where it's days journey to get to the ballpark frmo most locations.

Feels like MLB’s Rob Manfred has gone for the soft opening this season. One game Wednesday on Netflix. Eleven games Thursday. Only eight on Friday and the earliest start time is 430 Eastern. Where are the day games, the 15-game slates that feel like the season is underway?

Not a great start for the Rangers.