I wrote about Sean Keilen’s wonderful new book Shakespeare’s Scholars. Now it’s time for me to go back and re-read the plays he writes about.
Subscribe
- Public lists
- Manton Reece - Blogroll
- Fetched
Guy writes a book that “explains how seemingly objective technologies known as Artificial Intelligence are poised to take hold of the concept of Truth and replace human complexity with potentially catastrophic robotic certainty.” Guy’s book turns out to be full of AI-fabricated quotations. Guy says that if his fabrication “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.” Friends: This is not chutzpah, this is megachutzpah, this is summa cum chutzpah. I want to shake that guy’s hand.
I love these photos.
This is the world I grew up in. But just a few years later, my elementary-school classroom was integrated. A few years after that, my high school was thoroughly integrated, and though there were still racial tensions, blacks and whites could openly be friends. Then came the white flight from Birmingham: the city’s public schools are now 99% black. Dark forces that seem invincible aren’t; but no victories are permanent either.
Well duh — have you ever seen a more obvious handball?
A CONSTELLATION — a remarkable short film by Miriam Hitchcock.
A Surveillance ‘Cat-and-Mouse’ Game With AI:
In 2023, a team led by Ming Gao, now a researcher at Nanjing University, used human voices to defeat speech-recovery algorithms in a different way. Its jammer, called MicFrozen, is worn by a speaker who doesn’t want to be recorded. It listens as they talk and then generates a real-time stream of ultrasonic “anti-speech” tuned to the speaker’s voice, much like the noise-cancellation technology in your headphones. The device then sends out another layer of counterfeit speech-shaped sound to mislead any algorithm that tries to reconstruct what was lost.
Note that the “answer” to digital technologies we hate is always MOAR DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES. For previous entries on this point, see this and this.
Via Peter Atwood, a map made by Paramount Studios in 1927 to show directors and producers that they didn’t need to film in exotic locations: California and Nevada offered all the necessary exoticism! (I’d like to get a closer look, though, at the parts of southeastern California that are supposed to stand in for Sherwood Forest. And at a number of other things, if I’m being honest.)
Everybody, including me, is shouting VAR MUST GO! (And if it does, then the first time a ref flubs a big call everybody will be shouting BRING BACK VAR! But I solemnly pledge that I will not join that chorus.)
There is no handball rule in European football. Anything might or might not be a handball in any given circumstances. Whenever there’s a possible handball the ref should just flip a coin.
So much going on in the garden right now I can’t keep it all in focus.
Wow, more than a third of the 100 best novels of all time were written in my lifetime, almost all of them in English. I guess we’re just a lot better at writing novels than non-Anglos all those mediocrities who preceded us.
Many people have already written about the chatbot-generated phishing scams directed at writers: We love your writing and can’t wait to promote your book etc. But what surprises me is how many of them there are. I get them almost every day now. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for spam filters to figure them out … which is interesting in itself. Such messages are unlike typical spam in most respects, so what gives them away?
Frank Hughes, A Somerset Farm (c. 1930)
Currently listening: The Danish String Quartet, Keel Road. Healing music. ♫
Speaking of being ahead of the curve: there’s a new book on what’s wrong with the whole “cultural Marxism” discourse, but I showed what’s wrong with it in this 2018 blog post.
in Breaking Bread with the Dead I have a riff on R. A. Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” — which, in light of this report by Charlie Warzel puts me ahead of the curve and puts Lafferty waaaaaay ahead of the curve.
The Unofficial Angus Fan Club has been vocal lately, so here you go, guys.
If you happen to see me this week and I am muttering to myself or laughing maniacally, this is why.
Halfway through one of my lectures [at the Kyiv School of Economics], the air-raid siren went off. We relocated to this old Soviet-era building and went two or three stories underground into a bomb shelter with huge blast doors. We continued the class. And the students were beaming. It lifted me up to see their enthusiasm, their commitment. It also reinforced something very deep about our common humanity, which is that we humans like to learn, even in a time of war.
I also couldn’t help but notice that these students had a very different understanding of safety than American students. When American students want a safe space, it’s because they don’t want to hear threatening ideas. For Ukrainian students, safety means learning without bombs falling.
Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype:
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 19, 1870, a young compositor named George Arensberg astonished the printing world when he achieved a feat few thought possible: setting more than two thousand “ems” of solid minion type in a single hour (about 760 words, or 13 words a minute).
My son is my biggest fan.
‘The digital colonization of flyover states’: how datacenters are tearing small-town America apart. We’re dealing with our own version of the situation here in the Waco area. The first common thread is the contempt the techbros have for any resistance. They make no attempt to win hearts and minds; they just try to trample everyone in their path. The second common thread is their ceaseless lying about water use: a new data center about 30 miles from me denies that it will be using any water from Lake Whitney. It is, we are told, pure coincidence that the data center happens to be located on the lakeshore.
Our Monterey oak is 10 years old — seems like it was a baby just yesterday.
