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Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, November 1, 2024
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8 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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This is the month we find out the answer to Franklin’s “if you can keep it.”
Wall Street Journal twisting itself into rhetorical knots to avoid praising Biden or Obama by name.
The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy (WSJ)
We might feel better about the economy if our feudal lords and titans of capital stopped gouging back the piddly wages they pay us. We might feel better about Biden if the Very Serious People could acknowledge this socially-and-fiscally irresponsible greed. Instead I’ve mostly heard “Inflation! And Crime!” and “Recession is Coming!”
The WSJ can’t figure out who did it.
Anyway, some swing state polling now shows Harris running about even with Trump on economic trust. So thank you, again, big spending socialist Joe Biden. (And Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen, et al.)
I wonder if the media will cover this as they’ve covered Biden’s garbage comment.
“Trump on Liz Cheney: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1852209432878342308?s=46
Generative AI (Chat GPT and its ilk) can be used for lots of things but I tend to focus on how well it answers basic questions. The answer as of the latest versions? Terribly. For basic simple fact questions (What are the names of Barack Obama’s children?”) they are right about 40% of the time. This doesn’t even take into account the times they are technically not wrong but the information is misleading or useless. For instance, a while back I googled “What is a slider pitch in baseball” and happened to glance at the AI answer it now puts at the top. It started, “A slider is a pitch that breaks towards the batter…”, which is absolutely true. But all pitches break towards the batter, that’s more or less the definition of a pitch. If the pitcher throws away from the batter he’s trying to get a baserunner out and it’s not called a pitch.
I think Apple is hitting the right zone with it’s use of AI. It’s suggesting changes to something you’ve written to make it sound more professional or to correct syntax. It’s using it to better predict what word you mean to type next (I already notice the improvement and use the suggestions much more often than I used to). It’s using it to summarize various things, like text messages. So if my wife texts me “Leaving now” it simply pops that up as a notification. But if I get a receipt from the electric company it will summarize that in the notifications “Payment receipt from BG&E”. If someone texts a picture of themselves holding a beer, the summary might be “Keith sent a picture of himself holding a glass in a restaurant”. Very useful when driving.
@Mikey:
Indeed.
@Min: Good question.
I’m guessing nah, that’s just Trump being Trump, the dual standard persists.
@Jen:
There’s no low when it comes to Trump. And still, the MSM lets him get away with it all.
A bit more on the “vibe” shift discussion from a couple of days ago: Trump’s lead on the polimarket has begun its collapse. That whole gambling site is the very definition of vibe-based prognostication, and the vibes there have gone from “Trump probably has this” to “ope!”