414 Comments

More like voyeurism than journalism.

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Even T. Swift, E. Musk, M. Cuban, and D. Trump have a right to privacy. These are not my favorite people (to say the least). However, they should still be left alone to the extent they choose to be.

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It’s so sad simple civility is in short supply online but my pleasure. As to content, I can’t speak to Vance’s behavior as I’m just an educated outsider who is highly skeptical of MSM characterizations as much as I am the politicians themselves, but I do know I took a class at UT Austin in the 80s titled Nuclear Warfare where we read about Russia’s historically justified fear of invasion and how it affects their behavior (and my first vote was for Reagan in 84 fyi) so I seriously doubt they’re planning a European invasion within 5 years but more likely their military build up is reactive to their perceived threat from US. Of course, the Europeans could defend themselves if they were that concerned as I am fundamentally opposed to the monstrosity that is our unable to be audited Military Industrial Complex so any of its expansionist tendencies pushed by its paid for apologists bring to mind Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket and I’d rather we all just score it Love-Love. Peace ☮️

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I never believed The Free Press was so gullible, most of us support Israel so we’re definitely not Nazis but this bullshit!

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Bari follows him on twitter?

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Item #5 on Oliver’s list of readings is exceptionally good. “Ukraine needs total Western support—and so does Israel, argues Niall Ferguson. (Bloomberg)”

Niall Ferguson is a Hoover Institution Fellow, and a founder/board member of University of Austin (the new university that Bari started). As a Hoover Institution Fellow at Stanford, Ferguson is one of the group on GoodFellows, a bi-monthly debate program that also includes H. R. McMaster and economist John Cochrane, who has written for TFP in the past. I highly recommend the most recent episode of GoodFellows from February 21, 2024, where H. R. McMaster was replaced by Dan Senor, the host of the “Call Me Back” podcast and the author of two books on Israel. Both Senor and Ferguson had been in Ukraine and Israel in the weeks before, and well as Ferguson having just been at the Munich Security Conference. Both of them make the point that Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan are intertwined as an almost unitary effort to destabilize the West in general and the US in particular. Well worth a listen.

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Hi Ann I respect your perspective but I watched the Munich Conference on C Span (so I haven’t read Ferguson’s article yet); however, to link those disparate and very different conflicts as “an almost unitary effort to destabilize the West…and the US” not only strikes me as “Paranoia will destroy you” but also the same tired justification for increased military spending. I watched J. D. Vance make a crowd and panel squirm when he rightly pointed out that the US currently lacks the industrial capacity to support a two front war, which has been our policy for most of the past half century. Policy makers will have to choose and Vance thinks we will pivot towards Asia (Israel appears to be taking care of the Hamas menace by itself basically). And honestly, if you live in the US and follow current events, we are destabilizing ourselves quite nicely on our own, thank you

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Thanks for the civil reply. You owe it to yourself to watch the GoodFellows episode I mentioned. It’s actually more informative than Ferguson’s Bloomberg essay, and they make a compelling case for the unified effort of Russia, Iran, and China working together to destroy the western alliances. They also have nothing good to say about J. D. Vance, who has been ridiculed across the media, and not the “MSM” in the pejorative sense, but by those I respect such as the GoodFellows, the WSJ, and The Bulwark writers. It may be true that we don’t have manufacturing capacity NOW for a two front war, but we had better start ramping up NOW, because the Europeans anticipate a Russian invasion of the NATO countries in the next approximately 5 years, especially since Russia is now on a war footing and has redirected their entire economy to upgrading and producing weapons capacity to something like 10 times where it was two years ago. Vance didn’t even attend the most important meetings in Munich, and he has been ridiculed because of it. He launched a few verbal bombs and then went back to his hotel to research dolphins or something equally stupid on his laptop. I have no respect at all for Vance, but I have tons for Ferguson, Cochrane, and Senor. They are the experts. Vance is a politician.

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The key to understanding "AI" is that LLMs are giant bullcrap machines. Think of it as cutting up everything, categorizing what the pieces came from as it goes and the relationship of the pieces to each other. Then statistical analysis is done and it is prompted to produce something.

Based on the weighting of relationships Ina huge amount of stuff, it barfs something at you.

Training is when you tell it, "I don't like that barf. I like this barf." But make no mistake. It is all 100% barf. And it cannot ever get to the point where it is "right" all the time.

Performance of LLMs is variable. A lot variable. It doesn't just improve. In tests of hard targets like deciding if something is a prime number, it's documented to get worse, better, worse...

And LLMs are vulnerable to what amount to Harry Potter world incantations. All of them are. Put the right gobbledygook in and it will do what it should not. What are those? Hard to predict, but they're nonsense to humans.

This basic architecture of "AI" needs to be understood by journalists. This is not intelligence. If you must use the word intelligence with it, then call it "Erzats," or "Fake," or "Mock," Intelligence.

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Nice to see Nicole Gelinas get a shoutout here! A fellow Tulane grad. I've been reading her work in the NYPost since I was a kid.

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I'm pretty much a free speech absolutist too, but what is the journalistic value of real-time posting of celebrities private jets? And does that value outweigh the threat potential? Personally, that seems like an easy call, and this kid could solve his problems instantly by just agreeing to delay the posting of the information for 4 or 8 or 24 hours. In short, this has an easy solution.

Would we allow this kid to post the real time location of cabinet officials? Congressmen? If he tried to do it for the President the SS would have a talk with him. Do we really think Elon Musk and Taylor Swift don't face threats at least as numerous as the Congressman from Bozeman, Montana?

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The top 10 stories they are reading ignores the story of the CIA spying on Trump since 2015 and the whole Russiagate story was made up out of thin air!! Amazing. How is this even possible? Bari does the CIA own you too????

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Is it really about journalism if he is ending the accounts for celebs who provide him something of value? There’s no obvious journalistic good being achieved by making celebrities/politicians easier to track/target. The environmental aspect is BS

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I swore I just read a thread between a Lynne with an E and some sexist named Burning Running Man about the proper spelling of Judgment. Now it’s disappeared so I’ll reply here as I happen to be at my desk and am a Texas licensed attorney who makes around 3 court appearances a week. I grabbed some recent Judgments at random from Bastrop, Gonzales, Lavaca, and Fayette Counties and RBM was correct in regards to current usage in Texas courts. But that’s no excuse to sink to calling someone “Missy” during an intellectual debate.

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The whole "Neo-Nazis" everywhere just completely baffles me. I live in Mississippi. I have lived on the coast, near the capital, in the northeast and the northwest of the State. My sister-in-law has been to prison. Some of my junior high friends have been killed or put in prison for gang activity. I hang out with the upperclassmen and the lowerclassmen and the middle-class. You'd think if anyone in the whole United States would be able to find a Neo-Nazi, it would be somewhere here. Anywhere here. I know there's sorting in prison, but that's just prison politics and safety. Where are these Nazis? I think they are a minority of a minority of a minority unless being classified as a Nazi just means a white Trump voter. The biggest threat in America???? Not a chance in hell that's true.

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It's that, the thing you said at the end. If you are a white male and you voted for Trump and you voice your opinion against the awful leftist policies of the Biden admin you are a suspected Nazi.

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Solana thinks the images from AI "probably show the rot runs deep." Are you f***ing kidding me? What would it take for him to decide unequivocally? Jesus h Christ when liberals are confronted with something obviously true they still have to use wiggle words. Can't make a definitive judgement on something.

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And why are we bringing even more attention to this troll in Florida tracking people's planes? He's going to cause himself a problem if he continues to track both Musk and Swift. We are supposed to apparently hate Musk now, since he's angered the overlords, so we don't care if the troll has crazies follow Musk's son. But we are supposed to all love Swift, so are we supposed to hate the troll for stalking Taylor, but love him for stalking Elon? Very confusing. Probably best thought I can offer is to ask why exactly ANY journalistic undertaking would care about this little college dweeb?

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Mike Solana: we created AI capable of answering, in seconds, any question within the bounds of all recorded human knowledge, and the first thing we asked it was to lie. That’s the human condition, and there isn’t any solving for it. So we need to work around it.

Boom.

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