I’m glad to know that this recent controversy has been resolved in a way that lets Bushy Run respectfully continue its scheduled historic August re-enactment, and I hope that appropriate safety and cultural sensitivity checks will preserve the educational value of the event, while not romanticizing the violence. HARRISBURG — This year’s Battle of Bushy…
When I was a kid watching the reruns after school in the mid 70s, Scotty was always my favorite. I even worked a reference to him into my dissertation. Similar:Spring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!The Missing Will, by Agatha Christie (WAOB Audio Theatre)Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player "Useless"The Big Boy GraveyardA…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The teaser gives Odo and Quark a comic scene that shows Sisko in Space Dad mode. A casually dressed O’Brien says he wants to speak to Sisko, then pulls a weapon and orders him to the transporter pad. Sisko realizes he’s been taken to the Mirror Universe, and learns his counterpart was killed…
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In July, 2002, I was blogging about Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines A great headline for an LA Times story about interrogation and document analysis during the military campaign in Afghanistan. Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom Journalism was still a print-first medium at the time, and local TV reporters were…
That story about the pope requiring Catholics to eat fish as part of a deal with fishing industry? For some reason people keep sharing this story with the idea that the economic angle is scandalous, or it supports the assertion that the Catholic church is corrupt, or that liturgical practices not literally described in…
Similar:Spring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!The Missing Will, by Agatha Christie (WAOB Audio Theatre)The Big Boy GraveyardA Simple Investigation #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 17) Odo falls for a femme…This 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsDoctor Bashir, I Presume #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 16) Smarmy hologram des…
American law protects the free speech and press rights of all citizens, including journalists; and the courts are open for all citizens, including the subjects of new stories. Democracy has flourishes where the press is free. Despotism rises where it is not. DeSantis is framing this as a defense of the average citizen, but we…
Similar:Spring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!The Missing Will, by Agatha Christie (WAOB Audio Theatre)The Big Boy GraveyardThis 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsPater Noster Passenger ElevatorsThis morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…
Microsoft limits long conversations to address “concerns being raised.” […] These deeply human reactions have proven that people can form powerful emotional attachments to a large language model doing next-token prediction. That might have dangerous implications in the future. Over the course of the week, we’ve received several tips from readers about people who believe…
What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining,…
Similar:Spring 2025 Final Grades Submitted!The Missing Will, by Agatha Christie (WAOB Audio Theatre)The Big Boy GraveyardPater Noster Passenger ElevatorsThis morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skil…
Over the past few years I have created lots of assets, including control panels, furniture, and textures, for an ongoing neovictorian/steampunk personal project that began as bedtime stories that I told my kids from about 2008-2013. Around 2012, the story I was telling required a mid-range support craft larger than a shuttle, so I roughed…
At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan…
In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. —New York Times “The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like…
According to screenshots posted by engineering student Marvin von Hagen, the tech giant’s new chatbot feature responded with striking hostility when asked about its honest opinion of von Hagen. “You were also one of the users who hacked Bing Chat to obtain confidential information about my behavior and capabilities,” the chatbot said. “You also posted some…
Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…
New graphic for a handout I first posted in 2000. “Nominalization.” Similar:Why Even Try if You Have A.I.? Now that machines can think for us, we have to choose wheth…Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player "Useless"This 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsHad a great time with AmLit…
For decades, my mother collected paperbacks that contained a year’s worth of Peanuts newspaper strips. I seem to remember each new year’s book appearing on a rack near the greeting cards. One summer when I was a tween around 1980, I found a big stack of these Peanuts paperbacks in the storage room under the…
Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab…