A story with a happy ending

Hollywood Writers Reached an AI Deal That Will Rewrite History

In short, the contract stipulates that AI can’t be used to write or rewrite any scripts or treatments, ensures that studios will disclose if any material given to writers is AI-generated, and protects writers from having their scripts used to train AI without their say-so. Provisions in the contract also stipulate that script scribes can use AI for themselves.

 But there are still more stories to come. Also from Wired:

ChatGPT inches closer to feature parity with the seductive AI assistant from Her, thanks to an upgrade that adds voice and image recognition to the chatbot.

When the inmates run the asylum

Amid GOP confusion, U.S. braces for ‘first-ever shutdown about nothing’

“We are truly heading for the first-ever shutdown about nothing,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Strain has started referring to the current GOP House-led impasse as “the ‘Seinfeld’ shutdown,” a reference to the popular sitcom widely known as “a show about nothing.” “The weirdest thing about it is that the Republicans don’t have any demands. What do they want? What is it that they’re going to shut the government down for? We simply don’t know.”

–By Jeff Stein in The Washington Post.  It's paywalled…sorry…but the quote pretty much says it all.

File under Writing on the Wall

2024 NFL Mock Draft: Bears pick QB Caleb Williams with No. 1 pick

And so soon!

A relevant quote…

… from the book, The Dark Net, by Jamie Bartlett:

Transformative technologies have always been accompanied by optimistic and pessimistic visions of how they will change humanity and society. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worried that the recent invention of writing would have a deleterious effect on the memories of young Greeks who, he predicted, would become “the hearers of many things and will have learned nothing.” When books began to roll off Johannes Gutenberg’s press, many suspected they would be “confusing and harmful,” overwhelming young people with information. Although Marconi believed his radio was helping humanity win “the struggle with space and time,” as his invention became popular, others feared that children’s impressionable minds would be polluted by dangerous ideas and families rendered obsolete as they sat around listening to entertainment programs. We don’t know if early Homo sapiens argued whether fire burns or warms, but you can hazard a guess that they did.

Be an optimist.

Sometimes, amazingly…

 …reading the instructions actually works.

I just spent half an hour vainly attempting to set up a Chromecast device, pushing buttons and flipping switches and muttering nasty words to myself and getting nowhere, and I was about to give it up for the evening and sleep on it (which inevitably means no sleep at all) when I suddenly had this strange idea:

Why not try reading the instructions why?

Who knew?

Slow

 Whoever decided that playing solitaire should be a race against time?

That's too much like work. I play solitaire to avoid work. I want to get points for doing it slow, not fast.

Is that too much to ask?

Wink, wink

"Nearly every aspect of Donald J. Trump’s life and career has been under scrutiny from the justice system over the past several years…", begins a story in the NYTimes this morning (for the record, it's here) referring to what must be one of the most convenient coincidences of all time.

The story goes on to describe a New York court's finding that The Donald's guilty of fraudulent business practices. 

Personally, I don't care if he cheated his bank — that's the bank's problem, not mine — I care that he cheated me.

And thee. And us all.

The (only) good news for the Chicago Bears…

…is that Taylor Swift was a prominent spectator at the game in Kansas City yesterday so a lot of people probably didn't even notice the Bears were there.

Or weren't.

Dropping off, going on

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission: Asteroid sample lands on Earth

Back in September 2016, the federal space agency launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on a daring mission to snare a batch of rocks from the asteroid Bennu, located about 200 million miles away.…

The rocks were delivered to a desert in Utah yesterday (Sunday). The spacecraft is off again, on new mission already, to visit another asteroid.

It's not grammar, it's logic

The Supreme Court will hear a case with a lot of ‘buts’ & ‘ifs’ over the meaning of ‘and’

Federal courts across the country disagree about whether the word, as it is used in a bipartisan 2018 criminal justice overhaul, indeed means “and” or whether it means “or.” Even an appellate panel that upheld a longer sentence called the structure of the provision “perplexing.”

 It's also why we probably don't want Congress writing laws about computers just yet. (Or maybe about anything, come to think about it.)

Everybody who's ever written a database query for a mail merge should know this:

If I say I want to mail a letter to all the people who live in Easthampton and Westhampton what I mean is or, because nobody lives in both towns, which would be and. But I would get away with saying and because you would know what I mean.

Unless you're a lawyer. Or, it would seem, a Congresscritter. We will see what the learned Supremes have to say.