We didn’t see this in New Orleans, but I endorse it heartily:
Swastikar gets bombarded at Mardi Gras
byu/funksonme inPublicFreakout
I also find this account from inside one of the Swasticars amusing:
New Orleans is a blue city in a bloody-red state, but still: Resistance. And resistance that means more than wearing a pink suit and holding up a little paddle. I mean, we’ve seen what a piece of crap a Cybertruck is — one of those beads might have shattered the windshield.
And this, Reddit informs me, is now a regular event at the Easton Tesla dealership in Columbus:
I guess if we’re going to save what’s left of this country, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Surely we can’t rely on anyone in Washington to do it:
Republicans on Capitol Hill are shying away from criticizing Donald Trump’s policies over fears for their physical safety and that of their families, a Democratic member of Congress has said.
Eric Swalwell, a Democratic representative from California, said his Republican colleagues were “terrified” of crossing Trump not only because of the negative impact on their political careers, but also from anxiety that it might provoke physical threats that could cause personal upheaval and require them to hire round-the-clock security as protection.
…“It’s their personal safety that they’re afraid of, and they have spouses and family members saying, ‘Do not do this, it’s not worth it, it will change our lives forever. We will have to hire around-the-clock security.’ Life can be very uncomfortable for your children.
“That is real, because when [Elon] Musk [Trump’s most powerful ally] tweets at somebody, or Trump tweets at somebody, or calls somebody out, their lives are turned upside down.
“When he tweets at you, people make threats, and you have to take people at their word. And so that is a real thing that my colleagues struggle with.”
Here’s my advice: Don’t take them at their word. Assume the people who make these threats are what they seem to be: Cowards. Live your life in the open. If someone yells at you in a restaurant, yell back, or spill your ice water on their shoes, or just look bored and snap your fingers for security to throw them out. Don’t hire around-the-clock security. Be brave. Public service isn’t all receptions at the French embassy. There are women all over the world who open their inboxes every day and find death threats, rape threats, threats most congress members haven’t even considered. Teach your children what bravery looks like.
(Noted: This didn’t work out for Salman Rushdie, true. But most of these people are indeed cowards. The odds are in your favor.)
But if you can’t find the strength to do this, please dispense with the pink and the paddles and the other empty gestures, which sound like something you’d hear discussed in the background chatter in a Woody Allen movie party scene. It just doesn’t pack the punch you think it does. Boycott the speech. A pink pantsuit is not bravery.
And now we’re back home. The shiner has progressed from Mardi Gras magenta to southwestern-sunset shades of muted purple and yellow. Most of the swelling is gone, but the browbone is still a little tender. I forget what I look like, and every time I pass a mirror I start a little, but oh well.
And Kate found a house! A cute, very nicely remodeled bungalow on the east side of Detroit. Still has to pass inspection, but I’m thinking it’ll work out.
The week begins, and already my to-do list is a mile long. First: Lunch. Then a workout. Hope your goes well.
Peter said on March 9, 2025 at 2:25 pm
I heard Eric Swalwell’s comments earlier in the week, but you repeating it just made me think of something: Why should these Republican congresspersons be afraid? Aren’t they all carrying a weapon? Didn’t they squeal when the metal detectors were brought into the Capitol because they couldn’t bring their heat onto the floor? Isn’t the main reason we don’t have gun control laws is so an honest American can defend themselves? THEY’RE the ones who are afraid of a death threat? Bunch of wusses.
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Ann said on March 9, 2025 at 3:12 pm
Ohh, I love Peter’s observation about how they all have guns so they can defend themselves so what are they afraid of. Good point.
That’s great about Kate’s house. There’s never a promise that a college grad will end up living anywhere near their parents but it looks like you’ve won the jackpot on this one. For more reasons than that, of course.
Marquette survived the great Marquette blizzard of 2025 and still had 200 people show up for an International Womens Day rally. It felt good to be doing anything.
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Charlie said on March 9, 2025 at 4:19 pm
My favorite Bluesky comment on the Guardian article was: those folks should have to read the email inbox of a woman sports writer. They’d have a breakdown.
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Sherri said on March 9, 2025 at 4:36 pm
The Dems who voted to censure Al Green are standing up for decorum. Standing up for decorum is standing up for the status quo. It’s like standing up for slavery as long as slave owners treat the slaves well.
You don’t stand for decorum when democracy is being dismantled.
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/rep-al-green-democrats-suozzi-censure
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Sherri said on March 9, 2025 at 4:58 pm
So, if you’ll remember, Speaker Mike Johnson said he and his son monitored each other’s Internet usage to make sure they weren’t watching porn.
But he has no problem renting from a big money Republican donor, Lee Beaman.
“Beaman was once so fed up with the restrictions that came with owning a home on a “government-controlled lake” that he bought a sprawling property with a 50-acre private lake of its own, according to a profile in an architecture book. He became a fixture of Nashville media in recent years because of sordid allegations made by his fourth wife during their divorce, including that he made her watch what he called “training films” of him having sex with a prostitute. Beaman’s lawyers wrote at the time that his wife’s filing contained “impertinent and scandalous matter only meant to harass Mr. Beaman.”
Beaman makes his property in DC available to rightwing Congress members, and Beaman’s right wing pastor, right there to influence (but not lobby, no, that would require registration as a lobbyist, he’s just there to pray with them).
https://www.propublica.org/article/mike-johnson-evangelical-pastor-steve-berger-roommates
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David C said on March 9, 2025 at 6:11 pm
I read this morning that Elon says he challenged Putin to a fight. I guess to try to deflect from his Putin ass kissing. What is it with him and claiming to challenge people to fights. Is he a jr. high school kid? Is it because of Ketamine? He seems to think it makes him seem tough, but it only makes him look like a bigger dipshit. Just in general, he seems to be going full Howard Hughes.
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Mark P said on March 9, 2025 at 7:19 pm
I said before the Democrats should have waited for Trump to start speaking and then walked out as one.
I wish Putin would take Musk up on his offer. I think Musk would run away like a big sissy.
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FDChief said on March 9, 2025 at 9:53 pm
Monday I’m calling my senators to reject the House’s version of the continuing resolution. Period. If the government is going to be shredded, at least let it be in a fight with these goddamn Trumplikkkans. Make firing MuskRat and his DOGE Pound the minimum condition to BEGIN negotiations.
If the MAGAts won’t bargain? Shut it down. The hell with it; Fatso and Ketamine Ken are going to trash the country anyway. Make ’em own it.
And the Swastikars? Yeah. Another reminder that you never seem have a rocket-propelled grenade when you REALLY need one.
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Deborah said on March 9, 2025 at 10:43 pm
My husband noticed that there were about 20 people protesting around the Tesla place (is it called a dealership?) at Rush and Delaware on Saturday. I went by there today and no one was there except 2 Chicago police officers standing around chatting with each other.
I’ve been thinking about what signs I’m going to make to protest and find out what the police are going to do about it.
I’m back in Chicago obviously, since Saturday evening.
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alex said on March 9, 2025 at 11:44 pm
The Cybertruck is the tinfoil hat for people who’d rather drive one than wear one. They’re a stylized version of the Ducks/armored personnel carriers that show up at domestic squabbles on the dark side of town to blow up ant hills with dynamite. And they make the Humvee look like the equivalent of an Amish buggy in the toxic masculinity semi-finals of the culture wars.
Get yours today, pussies!
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Sherri said on March 10, 2025 at 12:21 am
There are a lot of Teslas around here, because there were very popular with techies. When a friend asked me if I would recommend buying one several years ago, I said no, because I said I wasn’t sure the company would still be around in 10 years and they weren’t easy to repair. I still stand by that prediction. The stock is wildly overpriced, with a P/E ratio of 128, and Elon is destroying his mystique, which is what was keeping the stock price high. Their sales are tanking, especially in Europe and China, and they’ve always made more profit off of selling pollution credits to other car manufacturers than off of their cars. But they have to sell cars to sell the credits.
The cars were never well made cars, Elon was selling a myth that he was an environmentalist going to save the world with electrIc cars. His factories violate environmental regulations, his workers get injured at a higher rate than other car manufacturers, and repairs for his cars are more expensive and take longer than other cars. Now that he’s exposed himself as a full-on Nazi, his biggest market in the US – affluent, well-educated people who care about the environment- find him toxic.
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Mark P said on March 10, 2025 at 12:46 am
Did you see where Tesla sold something like 8600 Teslas in three days, right before the Canadian rebates on EV’s was to expire? The numbers alone are suspicious, but even more so in light of the widespread Canadian boycott of everything American.
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FDChief said on March 10, 2025 at 9:11 am
I’m not a gearhead but a friend who is once described the basic Tesla vehicle design as “a fairly shitty vehicle built around a very good powertrain”. Supposedly that was the original cachet; that the Tesla had longer battery life and a more “gasoline-motor-like” response to the accelerator pedal that other EVs at the time.
But then there were things like the door handles, which were flush with the exterior. If you couldn’t get your app to “talk” to the vehicle software you were literally locked out of your car. The interior was poorly designed ergonomically, and often poorly constructed. We all know about the “self-driving” issues.
Of course, now the figurehead CEO is exposed as an addled nutcase who claims that “empathy is the problem with Western civilization”, so…
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Julie Robinson said on March 10, 2025 at 9:22 am
When Teslas first came out they caught the eye of my beloved spousal unit and he was entranced. For several years he lobbied hard for one to live at our house. But skeptic that I am, I resisted. What a relief.
We’re still driving the CRV we bought in 2013, and it’s still serving us well.
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Mark P said on March 10, 2025 at 10:30 am
I think I have mentioned before my back-seat test drive in a Tesla a few years ago. It struck me as a well-made kit car. It was clearly not made by a legacy carmaker that knew what they were doing.
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Jenine said on March 10, 2025 at 11:33 am
Yay house!!
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Scout said on March 10, 2025 at 1:50 pm
Only a few years back I was sure that our next major vehicle purchase would be a Tesla. Now? Hell to the NO. Had a great convo with a VW ID4 driver at the car wash the other day and he had nothing but good to say about it. If Tesla has one redeeming attribute it’s that it did set in motion other car makers looking to emulate its early successes. The Cybertruck is just a joke. It looks like a roll off dumpster and when I see one on the road (quite a few of them here) I point and laugh.
All my life I hated confrontation. During the first trump reign of error I kept my mouth shut. But now? Maybe it’s the fear of losing our Social Security and Medicare, and watching our retirement accounts shrink, and seeing the daily illegality and cruelty of basically everything Felon and fElon are doing, and fearing my marriage will be declared null, and my almost nightly insomnia… I have run out of shits to give.
A couple of weeks ago I was having a private conversation with another player at the pickleball court and something political came up. Not a minute passed before some eavesdropping asshole decided to insert himself into our conversation, dropping little Fox Noise pro trump IEDs into it. At first I was polite, and told him that I didn’t care to discuss anything trump related with him, but no, he persisted and wouldn’t back off. He kept it up and I told him that I had nothing to discuss with someone who defended a felon and rapist, and he replied that trump was NOT a rapist because if he was, he’d be in jail. omg. Friends, I literally saw RED. I asked him a few more times to please leave us alone and when he kept talking over me I finally shouted, “WOULD YOU PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND WALK AWAY”. He did. And two minutes later I found out I was supposed to play on the same court as he. I refused.
I am no longer going to be polite to idiots and traitors. Especially ones who get in my face. My lines have been crossed, I’m mad as hell, and I’m simply not taking it from these creeps any more.
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Jakash said on March 10, 2025 at 2:22 pm
Meanwhile, in today’s “not The Onion” news…
“References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.”
I long suspected that that B-29 had been a diversity hire.
https://apnews.com/article/dei-purge-images-pentagon-diversity-women-black-8efcfaec909954f4a24bad0d49c78074
I’ve probably shared this here before, but it seems appropriate with the current post. Raccoons mistaking Swasticars for dumpsters:
https://www.tiktok.com/@butthatsmyopinion/video/7394587855525268778?
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alex said on March 10, 2025 at 4:58 pm
I keep seeing a particularly odious Swasticar near my neighborhood. It’s wrapped in a decal that looks like fiery bombs exploding and just reeks of bad juju.
Looks like I gotta wait until after 6 PM before I get to see how much of a shit my portfolio has taken. Guess I won’t be buying a new car after all.
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Dorothy said on March 10, 2025 at 5:13 pm
alex I’m sure many of us are in the same boat. We’ve lost $100,000 in the last week alone. This shit has to stop NOW.
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Deborah Beckett said on March 10, 2025 at 5:27 pm
The foundation’s funds are shrinking as we speak (or type).
I had to get a new iPhone because I cracked the back of the one I had. I have no idea how it happened, I always set my phone down facing up but then one time I set it face down, I saw that it was cracked considerably, everything worked fine but I was worried that it would start to chip. I waited until I got back to Chicago and this afternoon I walked down to the Apple store. Of course I had to get a whole new phone, but I had Apple care so the cost was minimal. Now I’ve lost all my emails and contacts and my hearing aids won’t pair with it. Everything else is fine. I’m hoping I can have the woman at Costco in Albuquerque tell me how to pair the aids, she said they can do things remotely.
Do any of you have hearing aids that you control with your phone?
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David C said on March 10, 2025 at 5:39 pm
After a six month wait, my wife was finally able to see a neurologist and get confirmation of Parkinson’s Disease, a prescription for carbidopa/levodopa, and lots a reassurance from a really great doctor. We both feel so relieved.
I saw my second IncelCamino in the wild today. Other than pointing and laughing, what can you do? I also saw a sticker in the egg cooler next to the price with Trump and his shit-eating grin/thumbs up and Musk with his Nazi salute saying “We did this”.
January 19th, I put all of our 401(k) into cash. I knew he’d fuck everything up with tariffs. The invest for the long run, don’t try to time the market people have expensive egg on their faces.
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David C said on March 10, 2025 at 5:58 pm
I can control my hearing aids with my Android phone, but I never use it. I have three presets and those seem to cover all my needs. One is called personal. I use that 95% of the time. It mixes the directional and omni-directional mics. I have a setting called crowd. I’ve only used that a couple of times. It works for having a face-to-face conversation in a crowd. It uses just the directional mics for that. The last one is called auditorium which again mixes both mics with increased volume. I have AI noise reduction on mine which I’m not sure of. When we’re in the kitchen fixing dinner I have a hard time hearing my wife speak when we have the microwave and the exhaust fan going. I’m definitely saying “What” less, so they’re doing their job most of the time.
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Scout said on March 10, 2025 at 6:13 pm
hahahahahahahahaHA
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cybertruck-design-disaster-complete-tesla-120020675.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9ic2t5LmFwcC8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAA3nFpmqiT7L1BQX84YhMDzXJY0o5TlRCMLjlGVojaEmXQZt3XfotwVa3wFGyQ4-9u2nNM7UaY8PMV10AMytPdn1UaB5rQFt7Pqizg37WnCApH0Fq4VbFIWFeRdwpqz13nNDYzDa2QhFNI1lU2ZxksTSKnWSnQKvp1WAbXja1ZMp
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Dexter Friend said on March 10, 2025 at 6:34 pm
In case you don’t care about this, China is making excellent EV and also hybrid and gasoline powered vehicles in any shape and size you might desire. Will they ever penetrate the USA market in droves? Without tariffs, they are much cheaper than what Ford, GM, and Stellantis sell here.
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tajalli said on March 10, 2025 at 7:28 pm
Ha, those tin cans should be called TEdsels.
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Sherri said on March 10, 2025 at 8:12 pm
We lost over $200k today, which is mostly a sign that we have a lot of money, but we’ve also got a significant amount in cash. I’ve also got an email into our financial advisor asking about whether we should consider moving some money out of dollars and out of the country. I have never before considered worrying about whether the US government would be stable enough, whether the “full faith and credit” might cease to be meaningful, and what might happen if the dollar is no longer the international reserve currency, but I can no longer rule those things out.
The things that I used to take as bedrock assumptions about the country and the world no longer hold. I’m wondering whether I should get a Canadian flag for my yard to make it clear which side I’d be on if Trump invades Canada…
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Julie Robinson said on March 10, 2025 at 9:26 pm
No heart to look at the 401K. It’s in a fund that gets more conservative each year, so I’m hoping that’s mitigated the value, at least a little. As opposed to my mom, who at 92, decided to stay the course completely in large cap stocks. After the election I tried to get her to move it to no avail. Happily she doesn’t need the income, but still.
David C, I hope the meds will help your wife. You sound encouraged.
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Sherri said on March 10, 2025 at 9:46 pm
Oh, and since Ezra Klein of all people has decided that AGI is coming Real Soon Now, I suppose I will reiterate my stance on that.
AGI, artificial general intelligence, the notion that a computer will soon be able to do any and all cognitive tasks better than humans, is not just around the corner. Nor are self-driving cars, still.
Generative AI has some uses in limited domain applications, though not ones that are close to paying for its enormous cost, so it’s not the snake oil that crypto is. Crypto is still only useful for illegal activities; North Korea appears to be funding their nuclear weapons program by hacking and stealing crypto, for example.
Generative AI is not going to lead to AGI, no matter how many times Sam Altman says so. He’s a con man trying to raise $40 billion dollars to fund his boondoggle. Open AI spent $9 billion to make $5 billion in revenue last year.
Of course, this is the age of the con man now, so maybe he’ll get it from the government. Whoops, Elon hates him, so probably not.
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alex said on March 10, 2025 at 10:32 pm
I took quite a hit but I’m staying the course. Don’t really have much of a choice at this point. My brother and my dad are cursing themselves that they didn’t sell off a bunch of stocks last week when they were still worth something, but historically we’ve all found that it’s better to leave things alone and see where they land before doing anything rash.
We all have big stakes in my dad’s former employer and in recent years it has performed quite erratically, and much of the time quite poorly. But it has always come back from the dead quite robustly and we’ll be more proactive the next time.
So Donald Trump’s (and MAGA’s) antipathy to drag is rooted in the fact that he’s a drag performer his own goddamn self. Who knew? https://wapo.st/4icoFNI
(My Post subscription doesn’t expire until December so I can spread their content around for free all I want. So far it looks like the KGB’s AI copy editing software is still in beta.)
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Heather said on March 10, 2025 at 11:49 pm
I talked to my financial advisor a couple of weeks ago and he said things will get worse before they get better, but he didn’t think any drastic changes were necessary. I agree with Alex that generally stuff comes back but we’re really in uncharted territory here.
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Sherri said on March 11, 2025 at 12:28 am
I hope The Onion doesn’t prove to be prescient once again: https://theonion.com/trump-says-recession-unfortunate-but-necessary-step-to-get-to-depression/
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Deborah said on March 11, 2025 at 4:01 am
It wasn’t free Alex.
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alex said on March 11, 2025 at 8:51 am
Deborah, I copied this as a gift link. It said I had nine left for this month. Looks the same as the one I pasted above, so who knows why it’s not working. Let me know if it’s not.
https://wapo.st/4icoFNI
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Deborah said on March 11, 2025 at 9:03 am
Alex, when you click on it you have to create an account to get your free article. Maybe all you have to do is give them your email address, but I’m not doing that, even though they already have mine since I used to subscribe. It’s too bad the WaPo is owned by a crappy billionaire who has made it so excellent journalists quit and interference from that billionaire has compromised quality.
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alex said on March 11, 2025 at 10:17 am
Thanks for the info, Deborah. I suppose they’re doing this out of desperation now that they’re hemorrhaging subscribers, not to mention all of their best writers. I guess you’d call this a gift that keeps on taking.
Fuck the Washington Post.
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Bruce Fields said on March 11, 2025 at 12:05 pm
There’s a regular picket at the Ann Arbor Tesla, for what it’s worth:
https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/761820/
Attendance seems to be pretty good:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnnArbor/comments/1izta85/tesla_protest_6pm/
From Eliza to LLMs our first tendency to anthropomorphize, until we’ve got experience with new technology to recognize its limitations. We’ve seen enough AI in fiction to make it seem like a simple obvious idea, but I’m not sure we even know what terms like “AI” or “AGI” actually mean.
But I’m also no expert, and I’d be curious if Sherri has anyone she particularly trusts as a source on where any of this is going.
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FDChief said on March 11, 2025 at 12:44 pm
The limitations of LLMs become starkly evident when you come across “AI” versions of some technical terms and realize that the training hasn’t enabled it to distinguish between, say, the generic English term “strike” and the geologic meaning. I’ve been amused by the attempts the things stagger thru trying to make their obviously nonsensical version make sense.
I’m not averse to finding some kind of use for this gimmick; I can see the possibilities. But I can also see the potential for gross misinformation trying to use the app to understand something of which the reader hasn’t the most basic familiarity. It’s like a perfect setup for aggressive ignorance.
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Jakash said on March 11, 2025 at 1:01 pm
I appreciate the gift links that you (and others) post, Alex. Thanks. Sometimes they work, sometimes not, in my experience. I’ve had non-paying “accounts” with both WaPo and the NYT for decades, which just involved submitting an email address and a password.
This link worked, after signing in. At the bottom it says: “You were gifted this article by a Post subscriber. Want to read more?” followed by a “Subscribe” button.
Meanwhile, today’s Sun-Times noted that Amazon Prime Video will be streaming the alleged reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” Never had the slightest interest in it when it was on, beyond marveling that people actually watched it, and certainly don’t now, but evidently the various components of the Bezos organization are all-in on sucking up to the Fuhrer.
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Sherri said on March 11, 2025 at 1:06 pm
Bruce, there’s not any one voice that I follow, I read a spectrum of voices. Among the ones I pay attention to are Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, who wrote the Stochastic Parrots paper that got Gebru fired from Google; Gary Marcus, who is an AI researcher who has a substack; Ed Zitron and Casey Newton, who are tech reporters with newsletter, Zitron more critical and Newton more optimistic; and Charley Johnson, who writes a substack about social technical issues from a disninformation perspective. I also have some insight from 40 years of hearing AI hype and seeing where it goes, and some experience in writing software at scale and how easy it is to solve 75% of the problem and how hard it is to solve the remaining 25%.
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Mark P said on March 11, 2025 at 5:48 pm
Sherri, it seems to me that the “how many r’s are in strawberry” problem is a good example of the 25%. ChatGPT in the past insisted that there were two, not three. Its conversation about the question seemed quite well done, but when it was pointed out to ChatGPT that there were three, it still counted only two. I assume that problem has been fixed (I don’t know and don’t care), but if so, was it an ad-hoc solution or a general solution? And what other bombs are left unexploded in ChatGPT?
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Sherri said on March 11, 2025 at 6:51 pm
Mark, that captures several different issues. The biggest is more fundamental than a 25% problem. ChatGPT struggles with that question because of how it processes language. It doesn’t see “strawberry” as a sequence of letters: s,t,r,a,w,b,e,r,r,y. It sees “strawberry” as a single input, that it’s going to pattern match (roughly) to its past data to find what an answer to the question most likely looks like. Yes, you can patch the code to tell it to break up the string in questions that look like your question, but how robust will that patch be? There are lots of different ways of asking that question, and the code is not “thinking”, it’s comparing the question to questions it’s been asked before.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s really sophisticated pattern matching, but it’s not making the kind of generalizations from patterns that humans routinely make. It’s making probabilistic choices, not cognitive leaps.
People are often fooled into thinking more is going on because AI will produce unexpected answers. The answers are unexpected because it’s not doing what we do. Importantly, the AI also fails in very unexpected ways. Changing just a few pixels can screw up computer vision, while a human wouldn’t even notice the difference.
One of the reasons I think we’re a long ways from self-driving cars is that while they’ve been driving a lot, it’s still in a pretty controlled domain in many ways (setting aside Tesla for a minute.) They’re not operating at scale in all conditions, and we already see weird failure conditions and requiring substantial human intervention.
Tesla is another story entirely and I don’t believe should even be allowed to operate their FSD on our roads.
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tajalli said on March 11, 2025 at 7:18 pm
Google Voice can be configured to make a transcript of a voice message to be emailed, often with humorous, or useless, results.
“Hi, Tajalli” gets converted to “Hai Jolly” so it completely misses the non-stressed “ta” and also seems to think the speaker is using Japanese for the beginning of the otherwise English message. Kerry becomes Carrie or carry. It does recognize numbers reliably, so there’s that.
There is an option to participate in training the AI program by providing feedback; free work for google as a trade for a free service?
Really exciting to contemplate AI for accepting diagnoses given exam and lab findings and then determining insurance eligibility.
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Deborah said on March 11, 2025 at 7:35 pm
I went to the Tesla dealer with a sign for about an hour and a half midday today. I was the only one out there and it was fairly cold, temp of 39º and windy, wind chill of 21º but I was in the sun so it wasn’t that bad. There were 3 Chicago policemen inside the place but they didn’t come outside for about the first half hour I was there. When they came outside, one of them walked over to me, stood there and just said “um um ummmmm” a few times, like he didn’t know what to say, then he asked to see my sign so I turned it so he could see it and he kind of shook his head from side to side, it was a rat image and Musk under it in script but this one I did on the computer instead of hand drawn like my previous one. I asked him if it was a public sidewalk, and he quickly and nervously said, yeah, yeah that it was. Then I asked him, don’t I have a constitutional first amendment right to free speech? And he again said yeah, yeah you have that right and said he just wanted to see my sign. Then he walked away and stood next to the other 2 policemen about 10 feet away from me. They stayed out there near me for quite a while and then they all went inside again, partly because I think they were cold. They were all fairly young, one was black and the other 2 could have been mixed or hispanic. Some people passing by mentioned to me that it was hilarious 3 policeman thought I was a dangerous predator, I told them they were protecting me. And I have to say I was glad they were there after one guy yelled from his car that I was a fucking idiot, then he drove around the block and parked near me, after a bit he drove away.
The reactions I got from the passing public were mixed, mostly positive, one guy passing in a Cybertruck stopped rolled down his window, shouted some expletives and then screamed at me to get a job. Which made me crack up, I’m an old white haired lady and I’ve worked most of my life for god’s sake.
Being the only protestor didn’t bother me, it made me think of Greta Thunberg being a lone protestor.
One friendly guy who agreed with my sign told me that he had passed by that Tesla place after it was closed last night, there were no protestors but he noticed that a lot of people had been spitting on the windows as they walked by demonstrating their disgust with Musk. They obviously had the windows cleaned in the morning. The guy said he would join protestors on Saturday.
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basset said on March 11, 2025 at 10:31 pm
DavidC, as a “parky” of about three years’ standing I offer my support and some advice: exercise, exercise, and exercise some more. Just keep moving. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, if she does nothing eventually nothing will be all she can do.
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Sherri said on March 12, 2025 at 12:02 am
The money people are discovering that the leopards will eat their faces, too: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/business/economy/trump-stock-market-economy.html
They thought they’d get tax cuts and less regulation, not crazy tariffs and the destruction of the federal government.
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