Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, August 17, 2024
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32 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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Also posted yesterday very late.
“LGM“
Ex-senator and university president’s spending is under state scrutiny
Yeah, sure they are.
And plenty more.
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t know wtf happened here, but if you click on the “And plenty more.” it will take you to the article.
Beach battle in Malibu as billionaire accused of stealing sand for $30m home
Rich people’s problems.
@OzarkHillbilly: Not anything I’ve not seen before in the college/uni business. With Sasse a former politician, the hires all being political cronies is a different wrinkle, and the economic scale is a little different, but the flagship uni status of UF probably accounts for some of that difference.
While I am happy that Harris is doing well, this whole scenario of “Biden’s poll numbers dropping/launch of Harris/poll numbers going up” completely legitimizes the argument that Democrats have to fall in love with their candidate, while Republicans fall in line.
This year in particular, it should not have mattered WHO the Democratic candidate was–the threat of a repeat Trump presidency is very, very real. The Democrat in the race literally could have been a ball of lint and Dems should have been saying “yep, that’s my guy/gal, Ball of Lint 2024.”
It’s frustrating to see clear evidence that no matter the threat, Dems still need to feel excited or whatever.
Requestion: If you’re one of the commenters whose comments always go to moderation (like SKI and reid) can you post a comment today?
Yes, it will still go into moderation (today). I’m going to try updating our whitelist (skip moderation list) this weekend and I’d love to get as many people as I can sorted.
Also we are continuing to work on the edit button.
WRT to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, this little blurb from ISW made me laugh (darkly):
Kind of reminds me of a story (perhaps apochryphal) that when a Russian fighter jet crashes, the entire maintenance crew is arrested until they are proven innocent of any kind of neglect or error.
Pretty sure that is ineffective for behavior modification.
Joe Chambers 82
RIP
His Soul has Been Psychedelicized
Time Has Come Today
@Matt Bernius: Mine always go to moderation whether I am signed in or not.
@Matt Bernius: Thanx for all your efforts, Matt.
You might thought that a man with so much money could find better ways to waste what little time he has on this planet instead of seeking instant gratification 24/7, but his insecurities won’t let him.
On the AI front, non generative, I usually turn on captions in Youtube videos. These are generated automatically, not by a person. I presume AI is involved.
It’s generally ok, though it butchers lots of names, as well as some uncommon words, and has a very hard time with accents (at least in English).
Sometimes, though, it comes with hilarious whoppers.
Take a cockpit video of an Airbus on landing. Close to touchdown, the synthetic voice in the cockpit counts down altitude and gives reminders of actions. So you may hear it say “50… 40 … 30… retard.” The last means pull the engine power to idle.
The AI captions came out thus: “50… 40 … 30… guitar.”
It gets better (or worse). On a Colbert monologue, he said El Felón on the Xitter chat with Xlon sounded like Sylvester the cat. Mocking the Felon, he used the catchphrase “suffering succotash”.
AI captions rendered it as “suffering suck your ass.”
What an age to live in. NSFW AI captions.
@Jen: Yeah, I’ve been having similar thoughts. My counter-thought is that how people respond to a poll and what people do on election day aren’t quite the same. Right now, they respond with “meh” to a pollster, because they don’t like Biden’s age. If it were Nov 1, though, they would probably sigh and think, “well, there’s definitely a lesser evil here”.
Maybe.
@OzarkHillbilly:
And Tesla stockholders are paying him how many billions?
He should pay attention.
@OzarkHillbilly: “Rich people’s problems.’
It’s actually the opposite of rich people’s problems. It’s yet another case of a rich person having a problem and coming up with a solution that entails stealing from everyone else because billionaires deserve all the country’s resources, and the little folk deserve only the opportunity to be grateful.
Digging up a public beach rather than, say, using a few of your billions of dollars to buy sand, is a perfect example of the billionaire’s ethos.
I just watched the video that mentions “white people tacos” and black pepper. This thing is so good. So good. And a radical departure from how one even does campaigning, although I think AOC is already doing stuff like this.
I can easily see why the Trump campaign wants to discourage people from seeing it.
@Kathy: Speech-to-text is legitimately in the province of AI, from the point of view of a computer science taxonomy.
However, it is a lot older than neural nets (though it probably uses them now), and not all that closely related to LLMs such as ChatGPT. It would probably benefit a bit from more of that. At the same time, what we humans do with our hearing presents similar ambiguities in what we hear (“excuse me, while I kiss this guy”), which we correct with cognitive cues – mostly.
Putting more AI on this is inevitably imposing a set of world assumptions that will amount to a point of view. And the last thing you want in a translator is for them to inject their own point of view.
So there’s kind of a big problem there.
@just nutha: When I was an undergrad at UF, our President was a former chief justice of the FL Supreme Court (but also a UF alum). We figured he was hired because he had clout at the state level, not because of any Washington links.
@wr:
It’s worth reminding people that in California the beaches do not belong to the nearest property owner, they are property of the people of California who have a legally-protected right to access those beaches. So it is exactly a rich asshole stealing from the little people.
I’m giving up on a book series, something I almost never do. I will finish a stinker of a series just to see if it will redeem itself in the end, and, more importantly, to figure out why I don’t like it. But this series has bested me and after 3 books, and a few chapters into book 4, I am done. I will never know if the Stormlight Archive series actually delivers anything beyond earnest repetition of the word “storm”.
@Dutchgirl:
Go to Goodreads. A well-written series will see scores rise as the series continues. My Gone series opens at 3.9 stars, concludes on 4.4 stars. My Front Lines series starts at 4.1 and ends at 4.5. Another well-known YA series (Not HP) by a former stable mate at Harper, started at 4.1 and ended at 3.6. Yet another YA series started very strong at 4.5 and ended on 4.0.
By the halfway point in a series you mostly have converted fans, so if they are disappointed by later books, well. . . Watch the direction, is it rising or falling?
@Scott:
ISW at the beginning of the war was very professionally neutral, I suspect Kagan was letting that fine team of analysts Kagan had assembled do their thing, but bit by bit cheerleading creeped in. Kagan, it should be remembered, is one of those people who still believe Iraq II was a great idea badly executed.
They’ve gotten to the point of sometimes publishing unsubstantiated rumors, and I suspect this is one because so many have reported that for both sides the limiting factor is not drones, which can be made by the thousands, but the number of operators. “Some Russian mil-bloggers”? As if the information from those sites has been reliable enough to worthy of repeating without corroboration?
It’s still a great source, not trying to say otherwise, they do good work, but sometimes…
@Jay L Gischer:
So far, the captions are near literal transcripts of the spoken material. They get words wrong sometimes, but they don’t add interpretation. Not yet.
I just thought the examples I used were funny.
@wr: I was referring to the stupidity of building on a beach for the beautiful sunsets.
@Michael Reynolds: That is very good advice. But I’m also very stubborn and tend to see series through before looking at reviews and criticism. I’m often as satisfied by realizing what aspects of a book I disliked/ didn’t resonate with/ find problematic, as having a book totally conform to my idea of great writing. I found this series exasperating, so many good elements in isolation that I usually like, but in a package that turns me off: but why? Why do I hate it? The fact I can’t argue my case for hating it is too frustrating.
@Jay L Gischer: it’s probably best that the auto transcription and auto translation have periodic obvious errors, to warn people about the less obvious errors.
@Kathy: Youtube seems to be using the auto CC system to police videos. There’s been several youtubers who have gotten in trouble/demonetized for nonexistent foul language, racism, hate speech, etc. I’ve seen the auto CC system use the N word when clearly the speaker didn’t. One video I watched was demonetized for cursing but there wasn’t a single curse word in the entire video.
@Matt:
It does seem the tech companies think AI is far more capable than it is. Or maybe it’s just good enough for them, while it’s clearly not good enough.
@Dutchgirl:
I understand. I’m rewatching GOT with my wife to try and spot the moment when I knew it had gone off the rails. The Bran plotline end of season 4 was jarring, but starting Season 5 I don’t think I’ve reached my ‘oh, fuck,’ moment. I feel like it was Season 6, but I’ll see when we get there. It’s intangible and hard to explain. I believe myself to be a creature of reason, but so much of my working life is hard to explain.
@Michael Reynolds: Thanks for the responses. Seriously, this has been on my mind far too long and no one really wants to talk about it. Ideally, I’d monologue about it to someone for a while but alas, I can only do so to myself. (My kiddo is actually quite good at discussing literature with me, but prefers to talk about book we’ve both read, which is fair). GOT got out of pocket for me quite early on, though I’d also struggle to pinpoint the moment.
@Michael Reynolds: Season 5 is when they ran out of book material to adapt. Season 6 is also when things noticeably started going down hill. The pacing started having issues. The smart characters started acting dumber (littlefinger, Tyrion etc). Arya starts becoming super human with her ability to take being stabbed multiple times and falling multiple stories better than I take a splinter. Then there’s the absolute travesty of a “battle of the bastards”. Nearly everything leading up to and including the battle itself was fucking stupid and divorced from reality. That episode is when it became clear to me that DnD had no idea about how medieval style battles were fought. Prior to this the individual fight scenes were bad enough that it would embarrass a HEMA practitioner. I didn’t harp on it much because I was trying really hard to suspend my disbelief. Regardless watching “professional soldiers” act like kids pretend fighting on the weekend annoyed me. I’m going to end the critique here because if I don’t I’m going to write out a treatise and I doubt anyone has even made it to this point as is.
There were some great moments though as they wrapped up stuff setup in prior seasons.