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@Bernard Corporations avoid a lot. Trying to place accountability will draw the opposition of corporations. That is a lot of money. Makes forcing universal healthcare against the health insurance companies look easy.

@AndyD Image Size: Approx. 26.5 × 34.5 cm (10.4 × 13.6 in)

@daniel I lived in Merritt Island between the ages of 8 and 14 @mary-anna International Relations

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@Steve-Miller Alpenglow Have bitten my tongues too many times when working at the resort to let this go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpenglow

Good news. Even though I was the only one signed up, there were three of us for the first class on Tuesday. The woman who voiced hesitation about returning decided to come after all, and there is a new classmate as well. Pros: We hear a larger variety of music; we get feedback from more perspectives; since there is not enough time for all three of us to play each week, we may get an extra week of practice to work on feedback. Cons: We probably won't get to play every week. This semester the teacher is starting off the class with about 20 minutes of theory discussion which I really love. I'm working on the c# minor Polonnaise, Op. 26, No. 1 in class.

He asked for $5,000. I laughed in his face.

Ok, I bought a Bells Systems type handset, without an actual phone, that connects to where you plug the power cord into a cellphone. $17 Whimsical! It might be broken out of the box. It might be a gimmick. Well see.

Clusterfuck

One more. I promise. Link to video This generation gap (specifically) is a cultural phenomenon at this. What made some of the younger ones so clueless, ignorant, self-righteous, arrogant and entitled? I don't know.

Bump Edited. BTW- This is a great example of the destruction of US education. New College was a public school by the time I went there. It's defacto privatized by now. The money generating potential of New College made it stand out like a lighthouse. The US public education system is generally wing starved of resources. There are charter schools (de facto private) being aggressively supported by policy makers. Then there is home schooling. I only know about home schooling in Florida. The toddler stage of home schooled kids in Florida seems to end between 5 and 6. "Is our children learning?"- George W Bush

As well you should.

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@jon-nyc I've started taking Jane Friedman's newsletter, because I trust her reporting. Today's newsletter spoke to your question about whether other big AI companies trained on pirated work: OpenAI’s piracy looks to be worse than Anthropic’s piracy One of the key AI lawsuits I’ve been following is this one in the Southern District of New York—a different district from the one where the Anthropic case was settled, and the home of New York publishers and landmark copyright cases. It involves both the Authors Guild and the New York Times, since the court consolidated the cases. Over the last couple of weeks, a lot of information has come to light from unsealed documents. The New York Times is probably taking great pleasure in publishing articles about what’s in these documents, revealing things like: A Microsoft director calling AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT writing that AI posed an “existential threat” to publishers OpenAI developing a hack to get around the New York Times paywall The disclosures related to books are equally bad. OpenAI, like Anthropic, created an internal library of books from the pirate website LibGen and even shared those works with outsiders. One of OpenAI’s employees testified, “The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon.” And an OpenAI researcher described his mission as creating a machine to supplant human authors."

Is it a 'safe space'? (Sort of kidding) I don't think so myself unless you're traveling in a pack. @jodi I remember your posts about Costco. Yikes. Btw, speaking of warehouse stores, I have an acquaintance who got crushed and mangled by a loading door at Publix. He couldn't work after this. I just want a 'human scale'. My house is a huge, heavy, structure with a cathedral ceiling. This means my bedroom ceiling is 12'. This is 4' higher than my bedroom in my old place. I feel very comfortable with it, but it's talking to get used to... My favorite Martha Stewart quote (during one of her K Mart adds)- "Think of your back your backyard as a living room with a very high ceiling".

Yes, the bittern. And the sage grouse. And the frogmouth!