Consider this:
Swish those facts around in my head, and then put this before my eyes.
There is a reason my wife does all the shopping for gifts, I guess.
Oh well, there’s still my grandson’s birthday in November. He’d love this.
A lot of people think I’m batshit crazy,
says Justin Harrison of Grieftech.
I don’t. I think he’s a delusional ghoul.
Harrison has cobbled together a chatbot that uses an imitation of his late mother’s voice and predictive text built from her online communications, and he thinks that it is a cure for grief, because it enables him to talk to his “mother”. It doesn’t. There is no person there. It’s a kind of selfish version of grief, where he can deny her death and pretend it’s OK because his superficial, fake emulation of his mother can pay attention to him. It’s gross and creepy.
In the last few years, I’ve lost my mother and a brother; in years gone by, I’ve lost my father and a sister. They’re dead. The grief comes from the loss of living, human, thinking, behaving human beings who can’t be resurrected by some fraud with a collection of words they may have uttered. But this shallow idiot thinks a chatbot is a substitute.
Harrison is being interviewed, and he thinks he’s being clever by throwing some publicly recorded videos of his interviewer into the chatbot’s database, and then conversing with the computer. The interviewer is not impressed. So Harrison and some other team member argue with him to say that the computer used a spot-on turn turn of phrase
. I guess if all we are is a series of turns of phrases, then the simulacrum is perfect. Except we aren’t. There’s no person, no thinking mind, behind the chatbot.
Then the interviewer goes off to talk to a series of people: one who imagined seeing a dead person after taking drugs, another who dreamed that they were visited by the ghost of their father, a medium who claims, with many weird jerky expressions, that they can communicate psychically with a friend. They’re all the same thing: frauds, liars, or deluded people who have convinced themselves that their loved ones are nothing but superficial reflections of their own minds. Justin Harrison is just more of the same, a phony like all the other phonies who have leeched off other people’s honest grief for profit.
After I’m dead, at least I’m reassured that no ghoul is going to be tormenting me with banalities; I’ll be gone. Don’t be fooled that my chatbot copy’s banalities are coming from me, though.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, promoter of Project 2025, and generally evil dude, murdered a neighbor’s dog. Just flat out killed it with a shovel.
Speaking to the Guardian, then-chair of the history department Kenneth Hammond, along with other witnesses, described the story as unsettling but noted that they did not press Roberts for further details at the time.
Hammond told the newspaper: “He was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem.”
Marsha Weisiger, another professor at the university, recalled Roberts sharing the story at a dinner: “My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it.”
She added that Roberts also mentioned considering killing the dog’s puppies.
He wanted to kill the puppies?
OK, now the story about Haitian immigrants makes a little more sense. It didn’t happen, it’s just projection and fantasies of a gang of animal-hating monsters.
I have noticed something terrible about my semester so far. My weekends have disappeared. Yeah, I actually know what they are — I’m supposed to get some time to rest, but instead I find myself sucked into a terrible time.
The scene outside my house on Saturday night, as I imagine it. (Probably not to scale.)
These are minor disruptions. The bigger issue right now is that I’m teaching a new class this year, and my weekends are consumed with composing new lectures, which I can do in the time I have available, except that my brain doesn’t stop at 10pm to let me sleep. I go over and over these lectures all night long, spiced up with cars honking and chattering passers-by. Here it is, Monday morning, and I’m worn out. I go to work to let my brain relax into a routine…but not to sleep, unfortunately.
Now I have to go to class and somehow talk to them about the contrast between Bacon’s confidence in induction and Hume’s doubts about the same. Good thing I’ve been rehearsing it all night long!
I went for a walk this morning. I see that we’re in that transitional phase between deep summer and inescapable Fall. We’re not quite into Fall yet, but the signs are clear.
The trees are still green, but here and there we see blotches of yellow.
If you ask me, the weather is nearly perfect: sunny, warm, but not unpleasantly so, with cool breezes (although we do occasionally see fierce thunderstorms). I wouldn’t mind if the weather were like this year around, but the trees know better, and they know what’s coming. They’re making preparations.
I’m also seeing brown leaves piling up curbside, blown there by the wind, so I know some trees are shedding leaves already.
The more fragile forbs are taking it even further. The flowers are losing their petals already. The milkweed we planted in our yard to feed the monarchs are reduced to brown, rustling stalks.
Get ready. October is almost here.
Uh-oh. I just learned that Grave of the Fireflies is streaming on Netflix. It’s a magnificent movie, but I don’t know if I could cope with the painful catharsis of seeing it again.
I took my daughter to see it years ago; I should ask her if she considers that a horrific instance of child abuse, or an opening of her emotional experiences. Or if she’d take her daughter to see it.
Here’s someone arguing that You Should Show Grave of the Fireflies to Your Kids. They make a good case.
It is okay for children to experience sad and even scary stories. In fact, doing so in safe environments is extremely healthy! Feeling sad allows us to learn empathy so we know how ourselves and others should be treated. The need to healthily experience sadness is literally the entire point of the movie Inside Out — a movie made with child audiences in mind — which will probably get its importance across better than any short paragraph I could write here. Sadness is an inevitable part of life, why would we want to leave children ill prepared to deal with it?
If the continued relevance of fairy tales and Goosebumps Books didn’t make it clear, stories that safely scare kids as part of consensual fear experiences are healthy for their development too. As psychologist Emma Kenny explained, “when you are reading a scary story to a child, or they’re reading to themselves, the child has got a level of control — they can put it down, or ask you to stop. And the story can raise a discussion, in which they can explore and explain the way they feel about a situation.”
I suspect that the kids could cope with the experience better than many parents, including myself.
My granddaughter told me I should watch this anime she’s been watching, titled Delicious in Dungeon. I’m not normally a fan of anime (why must the characters always react with such extreme expressions and noises?), but OK, I half-watched a few episodes.
The premise is straight-forward old-school D&D — a mixed-class party of adventurers march through the levels of a dungeon, murdering monsters as they go. What makes it different is that the focus of each episode is the adventure of cooking and eating what they kill, producing fabulous meals from slimes and parasites and giant bats.
I can see how it might be a good show for picky eaters. One character, Marcille (?) is always horrified at what gross, horrible thing they plan to eat, and always comes to the conclusion, after taking a bite, that it was delicious. I can’t relate to her — I’ve always been an omnivore with a weird palate — but I can appreciate the presentation of exotic meals in every episode.
She even looks a bit like Iliana.
Another obsessed jerk-off tried to take a shot at Trump. He didn’t get one. Ryan Routh has been arrested.
Apparently, he was a former Trump voter who was disappointed over Ukraine policy; he’d flown to Ukraine and attempted to organize a military unit to support them, and failed. He had an arrest record for some over-the-top stunt with a machine gun.
He also was charged in December of that year [2002], when, according to an account from the News & Record newspaper, Routh, armed with a machine gun, barricaded himself in a United Roofing building in Greensboro for three hours. Authorities say the incident began after he was pulled over for a traffic stop. Police ultimately arrested him without incident.
He is just a loser who achieved a measure of notoriety by virtue of cheap, easy access to lethal weapons, a forgettable nobody.
It’s morning, I’m hungry, let’s whip up some eggs with expert advice from an AI!
OK.
Y’all got that? Ready, set, go…first person to get something edible report back in the comments.
I got up early today, because I was giving a new lecture today, and while I got most of it done last night, I was plumb wore out then and told myself I’d finish it in the morning…which I did. Then I had to give the lecture, and immediately afterwards run over to the hospital for an echocardiogram.
This was routine, my doctor just wanted to check that I have a heart, or that it kinda sorta works. I do, and it does, but there was a little accident. They put in an intravenous line so they could inject me with some kind of contrast agent, and when they punched in, it sprayed out — a little jet of blood splattering me, the bed, and the doctor (sorry, doc). It was much messier than it needed to be, and made everything a bit splatterific. I didn’t mind, but it was just that kind of day.
Then I had to teach a lab for a few hours: this lab was all math, basic unit conversions, volume calculations, etc. Most of our bio students aren’t comfortable with calculations and managed to twist their brains around multiple times, so I had to explain why yeast cells probably don’t have a volume measured in liters and how a lake a kilometer across probably has more than 100 microorganisms floating in it.
Now I’m all wrung out, and am counting the minutes to bedtime.
