Is Grok’s new image-generating AI willing to produce scenes including Xi Jinping?
I recall Midjourney chose to prevent this, while leaving most Western political figures fair game. I wonder whether Elon, with his strong economic dependencies on China, wouldn’t make the same choice.
(i’d test it out but hell no i don’t pay musk for any premium features.)
Nausea.
Screenshot of tweet by Steven Walker @swalker_7: DEVELOPING: New College of Florida dumped hundreds of library books this afternoon. The school also emptied the college's Gender and Diversity Center, tossing hundreds of their books. Working to file a story now.
The right to seek justice in public courts should never have been treated as alienable. It’s long past time to undo the mistake. ht @mav https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/nx-s1-5074830/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit-disney
( i’ve written about the idea here https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9416.html )
( thanks @brendan for pointing out the duplicate link in the version of this that i first posted! edited. )
“Eight months after a federal jury unanimously decided that Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly in Epic v. Google, [Federal District Judge James] Donato held his final hearing on remedies today… ‘We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,’ said Donato. ‘The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.’” @seanhollister https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220491/epic-google-android-app-store-monopoly-remedies-hearing ht @manton
who really owns Congress?
a package of napkins, branded in giant letters “Big Napkin”
Great reading on the Robinson-Patman Act, a law passed by Congress that Presidential administrations since Reagan and US courts just… stopped enforcing:
From @pluralistic “The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street” ¹
From @maxmmiller #BryceTuttle “Stopping Excessive Market Power Before It Grows Into Monopoly” ²
(trying again with your cool footnotes @marick!)
¹ https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities
² https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-13-stopping-excessive-market-power-monopoly/
@Jonathanglick Suggests some avenues for reform! Perhaps they can be for-profit divisions or oligopolistic, but not both. Perhaps big in media must, as in pretty much every other sphere, imply some degree of public control.
(“Regulation” is, after all, a usurpation of control rights despite notional private ownership, creating hybrid ownership from a control perspective.)
@Jonathanglick The press has gotten (I know, sounding like a Trumpist again) very bad. They've twisted their role of holding accountable political figures to mean ginning up any kind of scandal. Embarrassing the politician or candidate stands in for "asking the tough question", regardless how unimportant from a public-interest perspective the source of embarrassment might be.)
@Jonathanglick (I haven’t thought it out enough to be sure that I agree. I’m certainly not sure I disagree! Even when conditions aren’t propitious, I think it useful to keep track of what we want. Conditions change, and we might have some influence when we change them.)
@Jonathanglick Would it be better to have a more regulated “big media”, like we de facto did during the pre-cable, network television era, such that some nonpartisan definition of meritorious would translate to coverage?
(Putting aside questions of whether / how such a regime could survive Constitutional challenge.)
I think an understated change in US politics is how completely Trump won the war over process and civility. Maybe “won the war” isn’t the right characterization, maybe defected and so pushed us all towards a defect/defect equilibrium rather then cooperate/cooperate in a stag-hunt style game. 1/
Democratic partisans, when pushed for policy specifics or unscripted, skeptical interviews call the press self-interested and untrustworthy.
It’s more polite than dismissing traditional press as “fake news”, but its implications are similar.
(Editing not to steal @marick’s footnoting style after all, when only one item is linked in this bit of the thread!) 2/
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/08/it-is-good-for-candidates-to-try-to-win-the-election
@marick The “when they go low we go high” rhetoric is just gone. Instead of clutching pearls when the other campaign insults, Democrats are reveling in being mean, even a bit dishonestly mean (cf Vance and the couch) to people who thoroughly deserve it. It feels liberatory to stop apologizing, to even go for mean. 3/
https://itself.blog/2024/08/12/weird-conservatives-and-the-end-of-whiny-self-righteousness/
@marick I have no view as to whether this is good or bad. I tend to be a bit of a pearl-clutcher myself, but that might just speak poorly of me. But I do think it interesting, it’s quite a vibe shift, and I think it’s fair to say that we’ve reset our norms (or our normlessness) around practices of Trump and his partisans that once we criticized. 4/
@marick I’m not accusing anyone of hypocrisy!
In a fight, I’d criticize you if you reached for a knife, but once you had one in your hand and were lunging with it at me, I’d pick one up too! /fin
Perhaps the “Great Awokening” is ending after all, just not in the way anti-woke reactionaries like #RonDeSantis and #ChrisRufo had hoped.
It has not, historically, been right-wing traditionalists who have owned a “mind your own damned business” ethos. Au contraire. It looks like the not-right-wing-traditionalists are taking it back now.
Maybe we're also taking back incautious expression, telling it like we see it, chips fall where they may.
See e.g. #AdamKotso https://itself.blog/2024/08/12/weird-conservatives-and-the-end-of-whiny-self-righteousness/
[new draft post] China as a model https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/08/13/china-as-a-model/index.html
There’s a genre of public affairs writing I call “Taking out the trash.” It becomes necessary when prominent, respected people say, as they very often do, tendentious and ill-considered stuff. Suddenly there’s garbage that might rot in the ears of people in power. A taking-out-the-trash piece debunks it.
It’s thankless work. Countering bullshit-in-a-fancy-suit is no one's idea of a good time. But it’s God’s work.
#MaxMoran and #HenryBurke respond to #MattYglesias https://prospect.org/power/2024-08-13-what-we-talk-about-revolving-door/
“Late cycle financial innovation: Are private credit funds the new MBS CDOs?” by @csissoko https://syntheticassets.wordpress.com/2024/08/13/late-cycle-financial-innovation-are-private-credit-funds-the-new-mbs-cdos/
// This is a challenging piece, but the basic idea is that private equity funds are foreseeably at risk, like housing was in the mid aughts. That inspired “innovations” to sell off future losses to less sophisticated bagholders. @csissoko considers techniques PE fund managers might use to pass off or share future losses with other parties.
Great UAW ad. via @Green_Footballs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ubJFPJgL3Y&t=114s
dickishness is contagious, so it’s hard not to be a dick.
