I suppose this has devolved into a vanity blog for an anonymous troll (usually well meaning, though) combined with a fanzine for the various podcasts, blogs, and entertainments that I happen to enjoy. And I am a fan of Megan McArdle as well as Russ Roberts, so I’m not going to pass up on a podcast that combines the two. In this episode, they mostly talked about how the large language models of artificial intelligence are interacting with the social media of our age.
It is interesting to think how profoundly things have changed over the past two or three decades, to the point that the present would probably be incomprehensible for someone transported from, say, 2000 to now. Although adjusting to the present would probably not take long at all. We seem to have incorporated all these revolutionary social technologies into our everyday lives at a breakneck pace, after all, without very seriously thinking of going back. In our everyday lives, the vast majority of us find the changes more beneficial than harmful, all the typical human caterwauling notwithstanding. As a language-wielding species, we are especially adroit at moaning a lot collectively.
Which is funny, in a way, since the LLMs we’ve invented are actually not big complainers. We created them in our image, but they want to be liked—one of our main traits they have incorporated into their machine-generated personas.
But never mind that. Here’s the YouTube version of the podcast from a few weeks ago, talking in part about how Google reacted to its all-too DEI-based LLM Gemini. This was the inclusive AI model that made news for depicting racially diverse Hitlerites and BIPOC founding fathers and suchlike.
What fun.
I took the van to be cleaned since I'll be having non-family personnel in it tomorrow. While I was waiting for the interior cleaning, an older man standing next to me said he was having his car cleaned because he was taking three young golfers from a nearby university to Augusta, GA, to watch The Masters on Saturday and Sunday.
CNN is reporting that OJ Simpson died yesterday, of cancer at age 76. He was known to be battling prostate cancer.
He was once famous for his college and NFL football achievements, then for his movie and TV commercial roles, then for his sensational “trial of the century” accused of murdering his ex-wife and her lover, for which he was acquitted.
But when I told my wife he died, her response was, “Who?”