Graham Westerson

01. Kind of a Night Person

Happy Batman Day - I remain proud of this dive into the character. Winston Duke made a great Bruce Wayne, and I think we had some great takes on some Rogues Gallery personal favorites like Cornelius Stirk, and Hugo Strange.

open.spotify.com/episode/5dEd...

a man with gray hair and a beard is standing in front of a rock wall Alt: Gif of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode IV saying “he’s me.”

Hey, I know that guy

the cast of Hackers (1995) posing in a series of adjacent phone booths

Today is the 30th anniversary of Hackers

“I visited Atropus, The World Born Dead, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”

Simpsons screenshot of the in-universe tv show Rock Bottom with the disclaimer: “Dramatization: May Not Have Happened”

If only.

God damn dude (laudatory)

Turns out Razor and Blade weren’t freaks at all

Screenshot from The Simpsons. Mr. Burns says “I’d be happier with the dollar.”

In the commentary tracks for ‘90s Simpsons episodes, they say the censors won’t let them show bare asses like they used to.

Those commentaries were recorded twenty years ago

100%, 200%, 1500%

Neither ever shuts up, so

A screenshot from The Simpsons, in which Mr. Burns admonishes Don Mattingly to shave his sideburns, despite his head already being shaved. The caption has been changed to "Mattingly! I thought I told you to lower those drug costs!"

And Pink’s is like a half mile from the Tesla diner

It’s both a problem and the reason it works

Put another way, you don’t get Lower Decks without Lower Decks

I hope you’ve watched and enjoyed Lower Decks, because there’s an episode where we learn the Ferengi have a tv show called “Cop Landlords”

I think a lot about Kira’s line “Yeah Damar, what kind of people give those orders?”

His delivery of the speech about how space will kill you won me over completely

“What happened to the constitution?”

“Philippe is standing on it.”

“Ted Bundy’s treatment of women is once again under scrutiny”

Between the fires and these protests, I hope this year teaches everyone that most of the shit talking you hear about California and more specifically, LA, comes from racists and gentrifying transplants. Most people love living here and would do anything to protect it.

Any time I see a fellow millennial make fun of broccoli hair I’m like “dude no, don’t you remember emo and scene hair, we don’t have a leg to stand on”

And, of course, in Canada the whole thing’s flip-flopped

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.

So you’re now accusing Alex Reisner of libel in this article?

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Per The Atlantic, there’s strong evidence that OpenAI’s models were at least partially trained on millions of illegally acquired ebooks. So the work you do is reliant on the uncompensated work by authors, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, correct?

Understood. So through which platforms did you or other LLM teams purchase or rent these copyrighted materials for use in training? How many works did you buy or rent, and how much did it cost?

Reminds me of when microsoft launched bing with “club bing,” a bunch of simple games that would generate a bing query every time you put in an answer. It was obviously just to juice stats, but at least the points you got for playing could be redeemed for actual prizes

Still waiting to hear if these language models “learned” using copyrighted materials

Did copilot or other llms “learn” from copyrighted materials?