“Through mutual understanding and good will the policy set forth by Richard Rush and Charles Bagot in this treaty has resulted in an unfortified boundary between Canada and the United States”
At Old Fort Niagara, with Toronto in the distance.
A good observation from Christopher Butler: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown. I would also, as Charlie Munger suggested, invert: you can be well-known without being great at what you do.
Fame and skill do not correlate — unless the skill in question is being famous — and by “famous” here I mean famous in the field and not necessarily a widely recognized celebrity. In fact, I can think of reasons for there to be an inverse correlation, of the pick a surgeon who doesn’t look like a surgeon variety. (ᔥMatt Birchler)
Six times out of 10 someone who tells me they “live in DC” are actually from Northern Virginia. The other four times they do live in DC proper. On the other hand, no one from Maryland ever says they are “from DC”, even if they live inside the beltway. Even the tiny sliver of Chevy Chase inside the district considers itself Chevy Chase, not DC.
Why are people territorial about Bethesda, Silver Spring and PG county, but not Clarendon, Vienna and Fairfax?
The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall is my second-favorite video game of all time and I love the entire series so the news yesterday that TES IV: Oblivion was out as a remaster for PS5 (and others) was very good news indeed. Now to find the time…
🍿 Flow (2024) was an odd movie. The animation was no better than a video game — the most excellent Stray comes to mind — which is not to detract from its beauty but to highlight how far gaming has come. The story is a bigger mystery. Was there a deeper meaning to the almost-human but not anthropomorphic animals behaving the way they did, or did the animators go with it for as long as time and finances allowed and then just stopped? An anonymous person on Reddit has a good explanation.
Христос васкрсе! Happy Easter to all who celebrate.
Tyler Cowen on ChatGPT’s o3 model being Artificial General Intelligence:
I don’t mind if you don’t want to call it AGI. And no it doesn’t get everything right, and there are some ways to trick it, typically with quite simple (for humans) questions. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is going on here. On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans. It is time to just fess up and admit that.
Jacob Silverman on internet slop:
The influx of hallucinating chatbots is just the latest sign of the wider internet’s descent into hostility. The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily.
Cowen is interested in peak performance, and good for him. He showed the same trait in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt, where all he cared about was that the really smart young people can do wonders with social media, externalities be damned.
Meanwhile, the median Internet user is exposed to reams of crap made by humans and AIs alike (Silverman’s article goes into more detail on the burgeoning field of paranoid schizophrenics boosting their own X posts for no particular purpose and the paragraph describing it is the closest I have seen real life come to an M. John Harrison novel which, if you know his prose, is somewhat concerning… and this is not the first time Harrison came to mind).
Note that for all the stories of the Internet’s demise it is still fairly easy to find good things. Look at micro.blog. Look at indieblog.page. Heck, look at reddit. You may have a website or two you visit out of habit — one you likely acquired before 2016 — which have since become chumbox-laden garbage. Delete those bookmarks: people who thought having clickbait adds was a good idea will have other ideas just as good.
The Department of Justice is just asking questions:
A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”
Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.
MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.
The Clinton administration bombed Yugoslavia under the thinnest of pretenses; his successor one-upped him. The Obama campaign used “Big Data” to target individual voters; his successor one-upped him. The Biden administration cloaked their attempts at censoring social media under the guise of “misinformation”; and, well, see above.
For every hair-raising breakdown of values and norms there is a precedent, and time and again the precedent has been set by the same side, with remarkable shortsightedness.
“Through mutual understanding and good will the policy set forth by Richard Rush and Charles Bagot in this treaty has resulted in an unfortified boundary between Canada and the United States”
At Old Fort Niagara, with Toronto in the distance.
A few links for what will be a rainy weekend:
After getting an unexpected upgrade to United’s first class on a red-eye trip from San Diego to DC, I can report that a 4-and-a-half-hour flight is too short to get any meaningful rest no matter where you sit. The only bonus was the blanket.