Patrick Luck

It's getting pretty dark out there, folks.

Free speech around Israel has been under attack for years at this point, but, for most people, it was something they probably were, at best, dimly aware of b/c it didn't really affect them.

This seems of a different sort.

I don't want to predict the future, but stuff like this seems like a way to speed run collapsing public support for Israel.

One of the biggest problems in America is how many people are convinced the country is essentially unbreakable.

I suspect that a lot of American heterosexual men do this stuff and are then shocked to discover that their lives are empty, and they are deeply unhappy, but they probably can't really identify why, so they buy a big truck and some more guns.

On further reflection, calling them "ideas" is also probably mistaken.

On reflection, calling them "bad" is probably giving them too much credit as there is so almost too little content to even judge them.

The most interesting thing about Thomas Chatterton Williams is how a mediocre writer with bad ideas who has lived in a foreign country for ~15 years is somehow employed to write full time for one of this country's most prestigious outlets.

LOL. My god, man, visit a bookstore, library, or just look at the books section on amazon.

The thing about people like the ones quoted (pundits of everything) is that they have predicted 200 of the last 2 major shifts in our society.

Part of the problem for Thomas Chatterton Williams is that he styles himself as an American cultural critic despite having lived in France since Obama's first term.

He has no connection to contemporary American culture outside of Online. He is simply Ian Miles Cheong with better PR.

Still from the 1941 film "Love on the Dole", with the unfortunate subtitle "She's a strange lassie's arsehole".

Catastrophic subtitling on the 1941 movie "Love on the Dole".

(It should read "She's a strange lass, is our Sal"...)

Also, I don't know how you can publish a sentence like this and consider yourself a good writer.

Williams may be one of the few professional writers who SHOULD use AI.

It is a brutal review, but I still found the necessary throat clearing paragraph about Williams being well-placed to write a book like this annoying.

He's terribly placed! Everything about his history suggests him writing a book like this would be a disaster.

One like, one Presses universitaires de France book cover from the 1990s

the free press is completely unhinged. this is about the NYT initially omitting from its story about starvation in Gaza that one of the profiled children has a pre-existing medical condition. what is the "damage" what was done by that omission, exactly?

Now, what's fascinating about today's chatbots, which vastly outperform Deep Blue, is that they work in a completely different manner.

this is referring to deep blue, the computer that beat Kasparov in chess in the 90s. it is absolutely not true that chatbots are better at chess than deep blue. Chess (and games generally) are in fact a very widely known weakness of LLMs. writing on AI without knowing this is wild.

Some recent garden pictures. All the plants are Florida natives except for the plumbago.

We had a couple of monarchs hanging around the last week. No caterpillars on the milkweed so far this year.

This is one on a starry rosinweed .

As a huge AI skeptic, I regret to inform you tthat I agree with this.

They literally don’t care. Thinking of them as capitalists rather than the racist racketeers that they are fails to make sense of the current moment.

LBJ:

If you see this, quote this post with one of your favourite movie characters 🎥
#filmsky #promosky #movies
I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again:

I subscribe to the NY Review of Books (you should too), and I've got to say reading reviews by AI experts of books written by AI experts gives a very different view of AI than you get from the pundits of everything like Mounk.

Oblique to this, someone said that the Pirro confirmation means we're no longer a serious country, and it's like, buddy, that ship sailed by at least January 2017 if not much earlier.

Likely black swallowtail on the plumbago.

A green beetle on the tea bush (not any relation to the drink, not sure why it's called that).

An unidentified moth on the chapman's goldenrod next to a spotted bee balm.

A couple of miscellaneous pollinators on the starry rosinweed.

Some recent garden pictures. All the plants are Florida natives except for the plumbago.

We had a couple of monarchs hanging around the last week. No caterpillars on the milkweed so far this year.

This is one on a starry rosinweed .

This and headline news when it was really just 30 minutes of news. I loved that shit as a teenager.