No politics today. For instance, in this Bizarro (KFS), the judge has gray hair and Aileen Cannon has black hair. Also, Jack Smith hasn’t asked to move the trial out of West Palm Beach.
Jack Smith, rather, seems to be relying on the same principle demonstrated by Samuel in this Pros and Cons (KFS).
But no politics today, so never mind.
As noted in Speed Bump (Creators), any hint of politics today is purely coincidental.
Though, as Dan Froomkin points out, you never know what is going to appear on the editorial page of the Washington Post any more. It’s entirely possible that a fish gag might pop up there.
Banx is semi-sorta political to the extent of stepping into the quarrel between Musk and Zuck. As noted yesterday, I’m a non-combatant on this one, since I’m purely a desktop guy and Threads is for phone people only.
And as also noted yesterday, I’ve long since tamed Twitter by simply blocking trolls and nitwits, including the one who owns the place. It’s still a pretty good platform if you take control a bit.
If you’re not willing to take control, whatever happens is on you.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Most things turn out to be God’s fault and, as McCoy and Parisi point out, this has been the case from the very start. These ran five days apart, which means that, if Gary McCoy saw Parisi’s gag when it ran, he had several days to pound his head on his drawing board while waiting for his own to cycle onto the page.
Elsewhere on the same topic, John Darkow did offer a political commentary on the fact that, while fireworks are at least semi-seasonal (if you don’t live near a ballpark), gunfire goes on all year long.
We were talking about fireworks and dogs at the park the other day, and I used the term “gun-shy” because the person I was talking to was country, so it didn’t make for a pause in the conversation. Hunters who work with dogs have to worry about a dog who is gun-shy. Some can be trained out of it and some simply can’t.
But dogs are mostly off the hook for the next 11 months. I don’t think random gun shots should really get much more than a momentary “What was that?” response.
Though if you live near a ball park, I can’t help you, Fido.
Meanwhile, Darkow is right that fireworks are the least of our worries, but we’re not talking politics today.
Still on the topic of dog reactions, The Other Coast (Creators) touches on an issue that comes up at our park, which is that a dog on a leash in an unleashed crowd is often more than embarrassed. Being set upon even by friendly greetings is scary if you are tied up and can’t establish your own distance.
Shy, frightened responses are sad to see, but a more serious issue is leash aggression, where an otherwise friendly dog reacts to being constrained by trying to attack other dogs when they approach. It can mostly be trained out of a dog, the advantage being that most dogs prefer not to be frightened and would welcome help in overcoming the issue.
But, of course, like most canine problems, the dogs who need the most training seem to be the ones least likely to get it.
Feel free to expand on that concept as much as you wish. I’m not doing politics OR parenting today.
Baby Blues (AMS) had a good arc this past week on drive-in theaters, though the first strip gave me the collywobbles, because the continued existence of drive-ins is a frequent feature story assigned to rookie reporters.
However, it also gave me what used to be called “warm fuzzies,” because, back in the days when we had very small children, the drive-in was a chance to see first-run movies in an enclosed shell where babies could screech and toddlers could raise hell. You only have to leave a movie theater in mid-film once to recognize the benefit.
But Zoe and Hammie are not toddlers, as was learned, and now that films are being released as streamers while they are still fresh, there’s little reason to head for the drive-in. You can try to watch the movie while your kids raise hell right in the comfort of your own home!
That initial panel, showing their minivan in back of a VW bug, raises a separate issue, because drive-ins used to make tall cars like pick-ups with camper shells use the last rows in order to avoid blocking the view of people in normal cars.
It seems these days that “normal cars” have become so bulbous and oversized that I don’t know how drive-ins can work at all.
If I were still an editor, I’d assign some rookie reporter to go do a story about it.
Amid the growing paranoia over AI, Brewster Rockit (Tribune) raises a frightening image that I find somewhat comforting.
We’ve long since proven that people like misinformation and, as Ukiah Heaph famously said, “Knowledge for the people! Give them a light and they’ll follow it anywhere!”
On the other hand, there must be some limits, and Brewster suggests a world in which the misinformation feeds on itself, shrinking and contracting like a dwarf star until even the most gullible nitwits will surely abandon it.
Though I guess that would be right at the point where it becomes a supernova and destroys us all anyway.
Coffee Break
Our reliance on this beverage is getting out of control. Here’s a selection from the past week and a half:
That’s not Jack Smith – his client is the federal government, not some defendant – but there might be a judge in Manhattan with white hair.
Jack Smith is prosecuting Donald Trump in South Florida, and if he were to request a change of venue, it would be in his role as a prosecutor, assuming the area to be dominantly friendly towards Trump. Aileen Cannon’s hair is black.
And if you can’t blame God, you can usually blame a squirrel.
Some researchers have already looked into what happens when you train these chatbots on a corpus that includes the output of other chatbots it leads to model collapse – all the interesting nuance is lost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2
Given how many places are already using these things to generate articles, emails, & comments, I’ve wondered if we have already reached peak A.I. as all future “cheap” training data will be tainted.
Fwiw, you can lurk/view content on threads on a desktop, provided you know the handle of the threadist. So far at least, it’s been easier to focus on the specific content that I want to see by using a web browser, rather than trying to pick the grain from the chaff that the phone app spews out (that’s how I viewed most of the blue bird’s content as well, until ElNo turned that off).
Example: https://www.threads.net/@michael_de_adder
Drive-ins lost some of their charm when the back seats of cars went from bench seats to semi-bucket seats. Still, they were fun when you got a bunch of friends together, bought some bags of snacks, and a couple of 8-packs of Little Kings.