Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 15, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s Wednesday, a hump day (“puckel dag” in Swedish): March 15, 2023—and the Ides of March. It is my last full day in Poland, and the time has gone by very quickly! It’s also National Peanut Lover’s Day, and again I point out that the position of the apostrophe indicates that only a single peanut lover is being fêted. Who is this person?

It’s also National Pears Hélène Day, National Egg Cream Day (it contains neither eggs nor cream), as well as Joseph Jenkins Roberts’ Birthday (Liberia) and World Consumer Rights Day. 

Roberts (1809-1876) was a black American who migrated to Liberia and became its first–and seventh–president.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the March 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In the first direct military contact between U.S. and Russian forces in the Ukraine war, Russian jets brought down an American drone.  I doubt that this presages more serious fighting, but it’s still worrisome, as it was over international waters:

Russian fighter jets dumped fuel on and collided with an American surveillance drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday, U.S. military officials said, forcing it down and marking the first direct military clash between Russia and the United States since the beginning of the Ukraine war.

The incident, occurring around 7 a.m. local time, left Air Force personnel remotely operating the MQ-9 Reaper with no choice but to crash the aircraft in international waters, U.S. officials said. They characterized the encounter as part of a “pattern of dangerous actions by Russian pilots” while interacting with American and allied aircraft in international airspace, and warned that such provocations could lead to “miscalculation and unintended escalation” between the two powers.

Russia denied responsibility and faulted the American side for breaching what it called a “temporary” boundary.

What? What is a “temporary boundary”?

A Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, told reporters that the two Russian Su-27s were first seen in the vicinity of the MQ-9 about 30 to 40 minutes before American pilots brought it down. He declined to say whether the drone was armed, what its mission was or where in the Black Sea it splashed down. Video of the incident recorded by the MQ-9 must go through a declassification process before officials determine whether to release it publicly, he said. It’s unclear how long that will take.

And the Russian version:

In a statement, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that, “as a result of sharp maneuvering,” the drone was observed by Russian pilots in “uncontrolled flight” before losing altitude and crashing into the sea. Jets were scrambled, officials said, when the American aircraft was detected flying “in the direction of the state border of the Russian Federation” with its transponders turned off, what they characterized as a violation of “temporary”boundaries established by Moscow for its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

So now Putin gets to extend the air borders of Russia during the Ukraine war? Apparently. It would be nice if they told everyone where those borders were.

*According to CNN and other outlets, Jimmy Carter, now nearing the end of his life, asked Joe Biden to deliver his eulogy. But Biden wasn’t supposed to let that out.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who remains in hospice care, has asked Joe Biden to deliver his eulogy following his death, the president said Monday.

“He asked me to do his eulogy – excuse me, I shouldn’t say that,” Biden told supporters during remarks at a fundraiser in Rancho Santa Fe, California, according to a pool report.

“I spent time with Jimmy Carter, and it’s finally caught up with him. But they found a way to keep him going for a lot longer than they anticipated, because they found a breakthrough,” the president continued.

I presume they’re referring to keeping him going after the diagnosis but before Carter when into hospice care, because no breakthrough that I know of will keep him alive when he has metastasized cancer and only palliative care.

CNN reported last month that Biden had been advised of the former president’s declining health and his decision to seek hospice care. The fellow Democrat and longtime Carter admirer was staying in close contact with the Carter family and the former president’s close circle of advisers.

Biden last saw Carter during a visit to Plains in 2021.

Carter, who turned 98 last year, became the oldest living US president in history after the passing of George H.W. Bush, who died in late 2018 at 94. The nation’s 39th president has kept a low public profile in recent years due to the coronavirus pandemic but has continued to speak out about risks to democracy around the world, a longtime cause of his.

I hope Biden doesn’t commit one of his frequent gaffes and get Carter’s name wrong or anything. Barring that, he’s capable of giving a good eulogy.

*Oy vey! As if Chat-GPT didn’t cause enough trouble for colleges (but fun for web-surfers), the company that produced it has just released the technology underlying it, presumably for free. And it presages more trouble, since it’s reported to be better than Chat-GPT.

. . . . the company [OpenAI] is back with a new version of the technology that powers its chatbots. The system will up the ante in Silicon Valley’s race to embrace artificial intelligence and decide who will be the next generation of leaders in the technology industry.

OpenAI, which has around 375 employees but has been backed with billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft and industry celebrities, said on Tuesday that it had released a technology that it calls GPT-4. It was designed to be the underlying engine that powers chatbots and all sorts of other systems, from search engines to personal online tutors.

Most people will use this technology through a new version of the company’s ChatGPT chatbot, while businesses will incorporate it into a wide variety of systems, including business software and e-commerce websites. The technology already drives the chatbot available to a limited number of people using Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

GPT-4, which learns its skills by analyzing huge amounts of data culled from the internet, improves on what powered the original ChatGPT in several ways. It is more precise. It can, for example, ace the Uniform Bar Exam, instantly calculate someone’s tax liability and provide detailed descriptions of images.

But OpenAI’s new technology still has some of the strangely humanlike shortcomings that have vexed industry insiders and unnerved people who have worked with the newest chatbots. It is an expert on some subjects and a dilettante on others. It can do better on standardized tests than most people and offer precise medical advice to doctors, but it can also mess up basic arithmetic.

Well, we shall see. I predict that companies and even universities will use it to write official communications, further eroding the ability of human beings to write. But this of course will also lead to full-scale fraud among college students who have to write essays or DEI statements for college admissions, and since writing and interpreting reading is no longer necessary for applicants since standardized tests are being eliminated, everyone will revert to illiteracy save professional writers.

From Facebook; how the new bot scores on various standardized tests, along with the percentile of the score (I can’t vouch for this):

*The Stanford Law School (SLS) students who shut down the speech of conservative appellate Judge Kyle Duncan aren’t through yet. They apparently are making life hell for their own dean, Jenny Martinez, who apologized to the University for the disruption and, along with Stanford’s President, to Judge Duncan himself. Apologizing for student behavior was to much for the entitled students, who continued their protest—against Dean Martinez (h/r cesar):

Hundreds of Stanford student activists on Monday lined the hallways to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, whom the activists shouted down last week.

See below: the protestors were wearing black and also face masks.

The embattled dean arrived to the classroom where she teaches constitutional law to find a whiteboard covered inch to inch in fliers attacking Duncan and defending those who disrupted him, according to photos of the room and multiple eyewitness accounts. The fliers parroted the argument, made by student activists, that the heckler’s veto is a form of free speech.

“We, the students in your constitutional law class, are sorry for exercising our 1st Amendment rights,” some fliers read. As a private law school, Stanford is not bound by the First Amendment.

Here’s a picture of the whiteboard:

The protest followed a flurry of open letters from student activists, who spent much of the weekend berating Martinez after she and Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne issued a formal apology to Duncan condemning the students who disrupted his talk and the administrators who stood by silently and watched them do so.

. . .When Martinez’s class adjourned on Monday, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read “counter-speech is free speech,” stared silently at Martinez as she exited her first-year constitutional law class at 11:00 a.m., according to five students who witnessed the episode. The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school, the students told the Washington Free Beacon.

The majority of Martinez’s class—approximately 50 students out of the 60 enrolled—participated in the protest themselves, two students in the class said. The few who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame.

This protest was even larger than the one that disrupted Duncan’s talk, and came on the heels of statements from at least three student groups rebuking Martinez’s apology.

. . . The groups argued that the students who disrupted Duncan, in violation of Stanford’s free speech policies, were merely exercising their own free speech rights.

These privileged little brats are LAW STUDENTS, and apparently have no notion about what free speech really means, or how it’s supposed to be exercised. Stanford continues to pretty much ignore the juvenile behavior of its students, and if they don’t take serious action (Martinez said they would), this will just keep happening over and over again. There is no contrition on the students’ part—none at all. At the end, the article quotes a first-year student in Martinez’s class:

After Martinez left the building, Schumacher said, the protesters began to cheer, cry, and hug. “We are creating a hostile environment at this law school,” Schumacher said—”hostile for anyone who thinks an Article III judge should be able to speak without heckling.”

In other words, free speech for me but not for thee. How obscene.

And for those readers who blamed the disruption largely on the judge, I have a question: how do you explain this? Does it change your mind? Did Martinez set up the rebellion of the students against her, too?

Addendum: Dean Martinez has written a letter to SLS alumni, similar to the one she and the university President wrote to Judge Duncan, but vowing more strongly that similar incidents would never happen again.

*Did you know that most “boneless chicken wings” sold in restaurants or grocery stores aren’t wings at all? They’re cut-up chicken breasts trimmed and fried to look like wings, and are used because, due to the high demand for real wings, breast meat is cheaper than wings. So, as the Washington Post reports, this has led to the inevitable lawsuit, for America is a litigious land.  And it’s in my town!

A new lawsuit has a bone to pick with Buffalo Wild Wings: A Chicago man is suing the popular chain for false advertising, claiming its “boneless wings” aren’t really wings at all.

Aimen Halim says he purchased the “boneless wings” in January only to discover that they were, in fact, composed of chicken breast. “Unbeknown to Plaintiff and other consumers, the Products are not wings at all, but instead, slices of chicken breast meat deep-fried like wings,” says the lawsuit, which also names parent company Inspire Brands. “Indeed, the Products are more akin, in composition, to a chicken nugget rather than a chicken wing.”

The nomenclature of “boneless wings” has long irked poultry purists. In 2020, Ander Christensen of Lincoln, Neb., stirred the nation with an impassioned speech to his city council on the subject, pleading “that we as a city remove the name ‘boneless wings’ from our menus and from our hearts.”

An Associated Press story last month called the boneless wing a “culinary lie” and one example of a category of “gentle impostors” that includes imitation crab meat and baby carrots (which are actually adult carrots, whittled down to an adorable size). Cookbook author and TV personality Christopher Kimball told the news service that most consumers have “no idea where any of this stuff comes from.”

I hate that imitation crab (I believe it’s fish), always called “krab”.  The “wing” company responded thusly:

This is a class-action lawsuit, filed on behalf of hundreds of duped consumers, and if the company doesn’t say on the restaurant that “these are not real wings,” they’ll have to pay up, probably in the form of certificates good for free wings breasts at Buffalo Wild Wings. Here’s what the faux wings look like:

(From the WaPo): Boneless wings photographed at Buffalo Wild Wings in Arlington, Va., in Nov. 2017. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I appear with the Queen!

Jerry: Here you are.
Hili: Yes, I’m often hiding here.
(Photo: JAC)
In Polish:
Jerry: Tu jesteś?
Hili: Tak, ja się tu często chowam.
(Zdjęcie: J.A.C.)

********************

Down in Florida, Jango (whose staff is Divy and Ivan) is a happy cat because Hili has finally reciprocated his love. In the photo she’s saying, “Jango, my love!”. Look how gobsmacked he is!

A B. Kliban cartoon:

I can’t post the whole thing here, but go see this strip of Tom the Dancing Bug on Intelligent Design (h/t John).

From Anna via Our Kindred Cats, a Scott Metzger cartoon:

From Things with Faces:

From Titania, a woke letter from her niece:

From Masih, another hijab goes up in smoke. Google translation from the Farsi:

Received message and video: “I burn this log in memory of our beloved Nika.” Today, Nika is the daughter of all Iran. Zina, Hadith, Sarina are the daughters of this land. They inspire millions of young fighters. How simple and stupid were the mercenaries who listened to Khamenei’s orders when they imagined that they would kill Nika, Gina and Sarina and gather the mob. But the story will not end until Khamenei and his mercenaries are seen behind bars.

unitil that day #WomanLifeFreedom, #FireworksWednesday, #Mehsa Amini

From Barry, who says, “These two need to get a room. I can’t believe this happened in broad daylight!”

I can’t believe this: even I don’t get video calls!

From Malcolm, a mother cat cleans up after her kitten:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a whole family—mother, father, and six-year-old son—gassed upon arrival.

Tweets from Matthew. First, the Marathon Duck (note his athletic shoes). He didn’t run the whole thing, but he does get a refreshing drink at the end.

An eagle and four hapless cats (watch the videos in the second tweet):

A clever one:

46 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. On this day:
    44 BC – The assassination of Julius Caesar takes place on the Ides of March.

    1877 – First ever official cricket test match is played: Australia vs England at the MCG Stadium, in Melbourne, Australia. [Given that it’s cricket, the game is probably still going on…]

    1917 – Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates the Russian throne, ending the 304-year Romanov dynasty. [If only Tsar Vladimir would abdicate.]

    1919 – Ukrainian War of Independence: The Kontrrazvedka is established as the counterintelligence division of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine.

    1927 – The first Women’s Boat Race between the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge takes place on The Isis in Oxford.

    1939 – Germany occupies Czechoslovakia.

    1965 – President Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to the Selma crisis, tells U.S. Congress “We shall overcome” while advocating the Voting Rights Act.

    1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the first President of the Soviet Union.

    2011 – Beginning of the Syrian Civil War. [Twelve years already – I feel old…]

    2019 – Fifty-one people are killed in the Christchurch mosque shootings.

    2019 – Beginning of the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests.

    Births:
    1854 – Emil von Behring, German physiologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1917). [Received the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first one awarded in that field, for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin. He was widely known as a “saviour of children,” as diphtheria used to be a major cause of child death.]

    1858 – Liberty Hyde Bailey, American botanist and academic, co-founded the American Society for Horticultural Science (d. 1954).

    1912 – Lightnin’ Hopkins, American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1982).

    1933 – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, American lawyer and judge (d. 2020).

    1943 – David Cronenberg, Canadian actor, director, and screenwriter.

    1943 – Sly Stone, American musician and record producer.

    1947 – Ry Cooder, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    Took up playing the harp:
    1891 – Joseph Bazalgette, English engineer and academic (b. 1819).

    1898 – Henry Bessemer, English engineer and businessman (b. 1813). [Played a significant role in establishing the town of Sheffield, nicknamed ‘Steel City’, as a major industrial centre.]

    1937 – H. P. Lovecraft, American short story writer, editor, and novelist (b. 1890).

    1959 – Lester Young, American saxophonist and clarinet player (b. 1909).

    1983 – Rebecca West, English author and critic (b. 1892).

    1998 – Benjamin Spock, American pediatrician and author (b. 1903).

    2003 – Thora Hird, English actress (b. 1911).

    2014 – Scott Asheton, American drummer (b. 1949).

    2014 – Clarissa Dickson Wright, English chef, author, and television personality (b. 1947).

    2016 – Sylvia Anderson, English voice actress and television and film producer (b. 1927). [ “Thunderbirds are go!” ]

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  3. I hope Biden doesn’t commit one of his frequent gaffes and get Carter’s name wrong …

    That’s okay, I can remember the 1980 Democratic National Convention when ol’ Jimmy himself got the name of LBJ’s former vice-president (and the 1968 Democratic presidential candidate) wrong, calling him “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.”

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    2. An understandable and perfectly excusable mistake for a former naval officer to make. A tribute, even.

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  4. “College students who have to write DEI statements”
    Students have to do this too?! It’s bad enough that the faculty are subjected to this foolishness.

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  5. … everyone will revert to illiteracy save professional writers.

    And where will these professional writers find their readership? It’s already long been the case that, when I’m on a plane or other form of public transportation or otherwise in places where people sit around in public, I rarely see anyone else reading a book, just playing with their mobile phones.

    When I stop by the local public library, the staff (what’s left of it) is only too eager to help me find what I’m looking for, kinda like the Maytag repairman in the old tv commercials. 🙂

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    1. Indeed, Ken! I got my start as a reference librarian in the before times (pre-Internet) and have witnessed the steep decline of reference and research services over the past three decades. Nevertheless, we remnant reference librarians are standing by, ready to sink our teeth into some juicy research, as infrequently as it pop ups.

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    2. Maybe, in fairness to the next generations, Ken, some of them are using their mobiles to read as was called to my attention by my children and grand-children when, I made an observation similar to yours upon encountering 6-8 of them in our den immersed in their individual devices one afternoon as cocktail hour approached. No different than pop-pop sitting in my chair reading a book they said. Some of them were reading books; some were reading news and googling background info on the news stories, and yes, some were gaming, watching videos, or texting with friends. I marvel at what I can get from my phone that used to take me a physical trip to a library…and even then would not guarantee access or availability.

      That said, I am still partial to hard-copy print media in which I can handwrite notations, and must separately pick up my phone or tablet as a dictionary to look up definitions or to query the web for background information. And yes, in general, I still outline my original writings on a yellow legal pad!

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      1. They might be using their phones to read news articles (as I do), but I’ve rarely heard of folks reading anything longer, such as a novel, on a phone. That’s where Kindles and other e-readers come in handy, but like Ken I rarely see folks in public reading books in any form.

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        1. I’ve been reading books on my phone for quite a while now, and I find I prefer it to reading a physical book. It’s so convenient, and I don’t mind waiting in a doctor’s office or anywhere, I just pull out my phone and read. No need to carry extra books or Kindle around.

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    3. This weekend, we went into the city to have a birthday dinner for one of our kids. In the wait area, there were several teenage girls, sitting apart from each other. All but one were staring at their phones. The last was reading a book, which was unusual enough to note. On closer examination, she was reading, but also had some sort of video going on an ipad she carried, and was listening to it via headphones.
      It seems like a compulsion of sorts.
      Of course, I can’t just drive any more. I have to be listening to an audio book. And I am tapping away at my computer right now, because it is very cold outside, and I am trying to put off going out there to work.
      The old guys that I work with are content, before and after work, to sit around the fire and tell stories. When they take a break, they just sit down in the grass and look at the view.
      It is less frenetic than if they had to get their phones out all the time and scroll through feeds.

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  6. Those tests – with a significant number of multiple choice questions, and different student levels – are one thing.

    The Putnam competition is quite another :

    https://www.maa.org/math-competitions/putnam-competition

    The 2021 competition had, IIUC, six questions :

    https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/doc/AMC/2022-Putnam-problems-Session-A.pdf

    I think the fact that anyone would guess ChatGPT would fail (at the moment) tells us something about those exams – and ChatGPT.

    OTOH I know computers go through proofs now, so what do I know.

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  7. due to the high demand for real wings

    I don’t get this. Chicken wings are essentially bones wrapped in skin. Why does everybody think they are the tasty bit?

    It’s just a scam whereby the restaurant gets to sell you the bits they would otherwise have to throw away.

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    1. Agreed. I think the thing with wings is that they have a very high surface to volume ratio, so they are a good vehicle for seasoning and sauce, since that and the fatty skin are pretty much all you get.

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    2. They have the correct ratio of crispy skin and hot sauce to meat. Heck, on an animal like a pig, some people like the skin so much that they’ll fry and eat that on its own without any meat at all.

      For me, there’s a sweet spot for wings – too small of a wing and there’s not enough meat, but too big of a wing and all the flavor gets diluted.

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    3. Wings and feet are the best part of a chicken to make stock. Make sure you chop the wings to expose the marrow. They used to be cheap, so it was the best of both worlds. Now I wait for the whole wings to go on sale and it’s not so bad.

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  9. The Stanford Law School train wreck is awful to watch. I wonder how it will end. My guess is that there’s no definitive action that anyone can take to end this mess. Someone being fired or quitting will only reinforce the horrific behavior.

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      1. I think expelling them might be a good way to handle it. I’ve no doubt that there are plenty of other students eagerly waiting to fill any number of vacancies. No doubt Stanford is only able to accept a small fraction of the applicants they get.

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  10. The few [students] who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame.

    Screw that. The students who support free speech should have held their heads high and their chests out and asked the others why, if they’re so proud of having shut down Duncan’s speech, they have to hide behind masks.

    Some people may have misinterpreted my earlier comments on the fracas at Stanford. In those comments, I called the events at SLS “a national embarrassment” and wrote (in bold, if memory serves, so no one would miss the point) that protestors had absolutely no right to shut down Judge Duncan’s speech.

    Beyond that, the points I sought to make were twofold: first, that the ground rules for acceptable conduct inside the speaking hall (and the consequences for violating those ground rules) should have been made crystal clear in advance of the speech; second, that (as I’ve stated in numerous comments on this website over the years), inside a limited public forum, opponents of a speaker are entitled to make their views known to the exact same extent as a speaker’s supporters. What’s crucial for free-speech purposes is that the forum enforce absolute viewpoint neutrality. You can’t remove people for booing if you’re going to allow others to cheer.

    I’ll repeat it so there’s no ambiguity: No one should ever be allowed to silence a speaker by shouting him or her down.

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    1. Let me add an additional point: once the ground rules for acceptable conduct at a public speech have been set, it should be up to neutral administrators to enforce them (by, for example, removing disruptors). The speaker should not himself or herself have the right (nor be saddled with the obligation) to decide who stays and who goes.

      Hell, most speakers think that what they have to say is the greatest thing since sliced bread and that anyone who disagrees with them is all wet. A speaker should have no more right to decide who gets to remain in his or her audience than an officeholder has a right to pick his or her voters.

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  12. The problem with booing, Ken, (other than at the end of a performance) is that, unlike cheering, its express purpose is to intimidate the speaker into silence or even drown him out. Even prolonged sincere cheering stops by that peculiar crowd magic so that the speaker can be encouraged to continue. The speaker might smile and thank the audience for their support but would they mind holding their exclamations of adulation until the end so we can finish on time? The good-natured audience would surely comply. If they didn’t it would be a WTF moment, suggesting they were about to be incited to go trash the local shrine to George Floyd or burn down a Catholic Church or something. Even the chorus of “Lock her up!” settled down when bidden by The Great Man.

    Booing is another matter. Booing that prevents a speaker from being heard should be managed with ejection before it becomes a mass crowd thing that can’t be controlled. Cheering that, weirdly, did the same thing should be managed the same way. The crowd itself, though, will usually shush a overly exuberant (drunk?) fanboy who won’t quit it with the cheers and whistles.

    The guideline should be to enforce viewpoint neutrality on the crowd in that the speech must not be silenced. In the long run you will have to eject more booers than cheerers to accomplish this.

    Edit: but yes, as you say, the decision to eject should rest with the event sponsor, according to the rules of the venue, not with the speaker.

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  13. Surely the breasts of a chicken are integral parts of the wing–they provide the power. Is not the rotator cuff of humans part of the arm, at least arguably so? Also, breast meat is actually meat, whereas “Buffalo Wings” are just waste bone and skin that some enterprising person some time ago figured out that they could sell to drunk people as if they were food, and many other people–some of them not even drunk–got caught up in the delusion.

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    1. If you asked for breast meat of a turkey at Thanksgiving, and they gave you a wing, would you be happy? I don’t think most people are. Your brain decides when to kick your leg, but your brain is not part of the leg.

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      1. I tried to reply before but I don’t think it took. I just want to concede your point…you’re quite right, obviously. I have a pet peeve against wings, but it’s an unreasonable one. If people like them, they should enjoy! Who am I to say they’re wrong?

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    2. Is not the rotator cuff of humans part of the arm, at least arguably so?

      How long you been into the cannibal scene, Robert? 🙂

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        1. Ah, those pains in the ass — they may as well start showing up with a side a fava beans and a bottle of chianti.

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  14. About the raccoon/deer video. I wondered if the deer had rolled in something like catnip for raccoons, and so I Googled for raccoon nip. I learned more than I wanted about raccoon nipples, and now I feel awkward.

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  15. I have seen teh interwebz change from a multifarious, decentralised haven for everyone to a centralised, censored, virus-ridden revenue stream for a few mega-corporations.

    I cannot see these developments making the lot of the person in the street any better.

    “Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company, Platformer has learned.”

    https://www.platformer.news/p/microsoft-just-laid-off-one-of-its

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  16. Maybe GPT-4 can tell me who are dumber – those who pay the prices for wings v. drumsticks/thighs, or those who actually think that boneless wings actually come from wings.

    Hell, they used to basically give the damn things away. In the meat trade some at least (I think the small ones) were referred to as Gerber Wings because Gerber Baby Food shipped them off rather than waste their time trying to make baby food outta them. The status they now have started when bars had Wing Nights since they were basically getting them at no cost, and an aura around them developed.

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  17. I’ve long been annoyed by companies marketing chicken nuggets as boneless wings, but certainly not enough to sue over it. But Buffalo Wild Wings response is asinine. Hamburgers originated in Hamburg. Buffalo wings originated in Buffalo. Is there some city named Boneless that gave rise to boneless wings?

    And to the handful of other commenters wondering why some of us like wings – it’s the ratio of crispy fried skin and hot sauce to meat. Fried chicken skin tastes delicious. Other cuts of meat don’t have as much skin per meat or as much surface area to pick up hot sauce. And ‘boneless wings’ don’t have any skin at all – just breading.

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  18. The boneless wing lawsuit is frivolous and I hope the judge tosses (see what I did there?) it out. No self respecting wing aficionado is going to order boneless wings of any kind. Boneless wings are for folks like me that want glorified, no parts-is-parts, chicken nuggets with a tasty sauce. And I’m having a hard time believing that anyone is stupid enough to have believed that so called boneless wings are actually deboned wings, with the possible exception of their first time ordering them.

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  19. The ditched US drone.
    I guess we can be happy that it wasn’t a packed commercial aircraft going about it’s business as we have seen how the Russian military and it’s wannabes treat such aircraft.
    With a missile up it’s arse! bastards.

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  20. Pinker’s zoom sale is very entrepreneurial isn’t it? I’d consider it, actually. I’d consider paying for a private or small number zoom with the host here also. I have more money than access to smart people whose company I enjoy, albeit in one direction.

    A few years ago I was tempted to ask CFI how much it’d cost me for dinner with Dawkins but then I was going to be out of NYC when he came and I didn’t have the brass ones to ask.

    D.A
    NYC
    https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/

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  21. “He asked me to do his eulogy – excuse me, I shouldn’t say that . . . .”

    He did not say “I shouldn’t say that” when commenting on his intentions regarding the Nord Stream pipeline – prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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