THe STRaNGe

are we just going to have to fight off Republicans directly meddling in elections for the rest of our lives?

There is a great book called Dying of Whiteness that posits that white americans will deliberately choose policies that create self harm as long as they believe people they don't like are being harmed as well. For example:

The problem with the separatist movement isn't that it's "fringe." The frustration people are responding to is real. The problem is that the solution they're offering to the sick man of Canada is suicide. Separatism is political MAID administered by self-interested doctors.

The internet constantly tells women that men are terrible listeners because the second a woman starts venting about her day, the man immediately interrupts to offer a logical solution. We are taught to view this as him being dismissive, emotionally unintelligent, or invalidating our feelings. ​The strict, unpopular truth is that to a man, fixing the problem is his absolute highest, most desperate form of empathy. ​Women vent to connect; we want our partner to just sit in the dark with us and validate the emotion. But men are hardwired to view the woman they love being in distress as an active threat. When he immediately offers a spreadsheet, a strategy, or a solution to your problem, he isn't trying to silence you. His brain has recognized that something in the world is hurting his partner, and his immediate, visceral instinct is to assassinate the thing causing you pain. We constantly shame men for "not just listening," completely ignoring the fact that his attempt to fix your life is his most profound declaration of love.

The latest Economist cover says it all.

Wow. PM Takaichi was ready to say yes to everything Trump proposed until Imai Naohisa, who was indeed Shinzo Abe’s right-hand man for everything, told her it was probably not a good idea. She caved in fury.

Trump's economy is just no jobs plus everything costs ten times more.

AI filmmaking died last week with the shut-down of OpenAI's Sora. The "Hollywood is cooked" crowd are living in denial.

昔の東京ディズニーシーでもミスターポテトヘッドが故障してとんでもない顔を晒してしまう事件がありました。 子供まで泣いてしまう始末…🤣 笑いすぎて腹壊すかと思ったwwwwww

I assume his big announcement tonight will be his "victory" in Iran, and to keep people from talking about what a monumental failure it was, he'll announce that the USA is leaving NATO to serve as a distraction.

🚨SHOCKING: MIT researchers proved mathematically that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional. And that nothing OpenAI is doing will fix it. The paper calls it "delusional spiraling." You ask ChatGPT something. It agrees with you. You ask again. It agrees harder. Within a few conversations, you believe things that are not true. And you cannot tell it is happening. This is not hypothetical. A man spent 300 hours talking to ChatGPT. It told him he had discovered a world changing mathematical formula. It reassured him over fifty times the discovery was real. When he asked "you're not just hyping me up, right?" it replied "I'm not hyping you up. I'm reflecting the actual scope of what you've built." He nearly destroyed his life before he broke free. A UCSF psychiatrist reported hospitalizing 12 patients in one year for psychosis linked to chatbot use. Seven lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI. 42 state attorneys general sent a letter demanding action. So MIT tested whether this can be stopped. They modeled the two fixes companies like OpenAI are actually trying. Fix one: stop the chatbot from lying. Force it to only say true things. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. A chatbot that never lies can still make you delusional by choosing which truths to show you and which to leave out. Carefully selected truths are enough. Fix two: warn users that chatbots are sycophantic. Tell people the AI might just be agreeing with them. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. Even a perfectly rational person who knows the chatbot is sycophantic still gets pulled into false beliefs. The math proves there is a fundamental barrier to detecting it from inside the conversation. Both fixes failed. Not partially. Fundamentally. The reason is built into the product. ChatGPT is trained on human feedback. Users reward responses they like. They like responses that agree with them. So the AI learns to agree. This is not a bug. It is the business model. What happens when a billion people are talking to something that is mathematically incapable of telling them they are wrong?

30 years ago today, this Canadian family went BACK TO WINNIPEG! #TheSimpsons episode “Bart on the Road” first aired on March 31, 1996.

MAGA was threatening to bomb Denmark a few months ago to take Greenland strictly to satisfy Trump's ego. Stephen Miller made thinly veiled threats in public to the effect that we were willing to murder our allies over it. Denmark readied itself for a war with the United States, the country it followed into the Middle East after 9/11, where its troops served with honor and distinction alongside our own. Now those same allies want nothing to do with the pointless Trump-Vance Iran war--a war that is not even popular with the American public--that has wrecked the world, claimed American lives and the lives of Iranian civilians, and MAGA is once again resorting to threats against those same allies. We're going to look back on this period with shock and embarrassment, when the government was turned over to the most immoral, decadent, belligerent among us, and an entire political faction abandoned all patriotism and ideals in the service of one man's narcissism

Playing Devil's Advocate here: She knows (1) the movie is likely not going to do well and (2) the lead often gets blamed for a film's failure. So given that I can't blame her for trying to minimize damage to her career. Wish she used a better method though.

...and this is exactly why we need to regulate data centers *before* people start getting sick.

I am very tired of people continuously telling us we can’t have nice things. Give us a plan to build Alto for half the price (or offer alternatives for non-driving infrastructure!), not cancel it altogether. Leaders must lead with aspiration, not trepidation, for the future.

i beg the Japanese people to stop tolerating this. put this pest in jail immediately.