Spring of deception // What's Good: Mar. 1, 2024
Libraries, eggs, and stupid robots.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. It was 70 degrees in Chicago on Tuesday, which, even for late February, is insane for February in Chicago. I do not trust it. I am away from home this week - just spending some time with friends, nothing exciting - but I did want to try to get the newsletter out on time.
Bookworm
The internet librarian is Good, Actually:
Mychal Threets has always been proud to be a library kid. The Fairfield, California native was homeschooled by his mother and spent so much time in the Solano County Library that he genuinely can’t remember the first time he walked through its doors. But he does say that most of his core memories happen between those walls, like the time he brought his cat in for a pet parade.
Butthead
Fuck this guy for appropriating indigenous culture, but also for everything else:
Jacob Chansley, more commonly known as the QAnon Shaman, was a guest of Glendale Republican Anthony Kern at the Arizona Capitol this week, allowing Chansley access to areas where the public is generally prohibited.
Chansley is known for being one of the most recognizable members of the crowd that breached the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 while wearing a horned hat, face paint and no shirt. His actions that day led to a 41-month prison sentence, a portion of which he served at the Federal Correctional Institute in Safford. He was released early in March to a half-way house, and returned to his home in the Valley on probation in May 2023. Chansley sought to vacate the ruling, citing dubious reporting by former Fox anchor Tucker Carlson.
To the moon
I think the AI stuff is generally very overblown, but what a cool interview opportunity:
TALKING TO JENSEN Huang should come with a warning label. The Nvidia CEO is so invested in where AI is headed that, after nearly 90 minutes of spirited conversation, I came away convinced the future will be a neural net nirvana. I could see it all: a robot renaissance, medical godsends, self-driving cars, chatbots that remember. The buildings on the company’s Santa Clara campus weren’t helping. Wherever my eyes landed I saw triangles within triangles, the shape that helped make Nvidia its first fortunes. No wonder I got sucked into a fractal vortex. I had been Jensen-pilled.
Please don’t forget about consumer video game cards. We still need those. Thank you.
Impure imagination
Maybe we shouldn’t let the machines decide:
It’s the story that has captured the internet’s attention, giving birth to millions of memes: the disastrous “Willy Wonka experience” that took place in Glasgow, Scotland, last month and left children in tears.
The exhibit went viral after photos and testimony emerged suggesting a huge gulf between how the experience was marketed (with glitzy, larger-than-life imagery) and the reality (an empty warehouse, offering as snacks just a handful of jelly beans and a half-cup of lemonade).
Elsewhere in AI
The world is not enough:
Last week, users noticed that Google’s chatbot, Gemini, was pretty insistent about generating racially diverse images of people. Insistent enough, in fact, that it seemed unable to generate an image of a white pope and replied to a prompt about Nazis with figures of various races in SS uniforms. Soon, screenshots proving Gemini’s “wokeness” were going viral: “It is not possible to say who definitively impacted society more, Elon tweeting memes or Hitler,” one Gemini response read. It was a peripheral skirmish in a preexisting culture war promoted by people who have been making similar ideological claims about Google and “big tech” for a long time. But it was also genuinely funny and a part of the even longer tradition of making chatbots produce weird, funny, or terrible outputs. Asked for help with an ad campaign promoting meat, a concerned-sounding Gemini suggested people should eat ethical beans instead. Pretty good.
In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. He clicked, and read. The story was garbled and devoid of useful information—and so were all the other finance-themed posts filling the site, which had absolutely nothing to do with northeastern Iowa. “I knew right away there was something off,” he says. There’s plenty of junk on the internet, but this struck Eastin as strange: Why would a small Midwestern paper churn out crappy blog posts about retail investing?
The decline of eggscellence
Truly, the shells are cracking apart on this story:
Lately, I've noticed something strange in the kitchen.
Over the past few months, more and more often when I went to crack an egg, I'd get a piece of shell into the bowl or pan, forcing me to try to fish it out with my finger (one of the worst tasks in cooking —maybe even worse than doing dishes).
Even worse: A few times lately, I've had that dreaded bite where you chomp down on a piece of shell in your egg and cheese sandwich [shudder].
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1763753613732573486
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1763749175051559345
https://twitter.com/weirdlilguys/status/1763650575751676401
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1763730972527256016
https://twitter.com/NationalZoo/status/1763691157928775911
https://twitter.com/twaniimals/status/1763687644117024887
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1763706426931703984
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1763750094338195796
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
“I Want to Make Sure I’m Not Just That Guy.” Inside a Brooklyn Sweatshop That Processes Tobacco for Bodegas. Meet the Hot Young Tradwife Making Everyone on the Internet Mad. British politicians think they have a plan to combat Andrew Tate's influence in schools. It's doomed to fail. Panera Is Not Exempted From California’s Fast Food Minimum Wage Law After All. AI IS TAKING WATER FROM THE DESERT. Just Asking Questions About Kate Middleton.