A Bundle of Briefs

A tip of the PSACOT Hat to my long-time friend Joe Kashi; from now on, the AI subsection of This and That will be subtitled:


IDIOTS ON PARADE
Meat Proxy Turns Viral
Like most old guys, I am usually on the trailing edge of new terms. Not this time. A Meat Proxy is a person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.
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Bill Gates Gets With The Program. On His Own Website: An epochal shift. The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. We need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad. In the New York Times: Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit
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Scientists Found Evidence That Al Builds Internal Models of the World
There’s a fierce debate at the heart of Al: is a system trained only to predict the next word just a fancy autocomplete, shuffling surface patterns, or does it secretly build a model of reality inside itself?

=== end Idiots On Parade

Parton Tribute Planned
Let me add my weight to the idea that Sept. 25 should be Dolly Parton day. (9-two-five, get it?) Like May 4 (May the force be with you, Star Wars), and March 14  (π day). Shower down other such if you know them.
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Coyote V. Acme Deemed Not So Innocent
My friend and former editor Joe Brancatelli Finds  Coyote vs. Acme Problematical. Also How the Anvil Was Nearly Dropped on ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ New York Times: (Free from me to you) The live action-animation hybrid comedy fought a real-life studio battle to win its theatrical release
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Norm Sandler Fund Donations Required
My friend, my best man, a terrific and successful journalist, Norman D. Sandler died tragically at age 53. The best memorial for Norman is MIT’s Norman D. Sandler (1975) Memorial Scholarship Fund. Give generously, that MIT students from Iowa may receive financial support.
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Collective Nouns
I could swear I had done an item on collective nouns before, but the Internet says no. Nicky Mee just discussed them. They fascinate me. An ostentation of peacocks, an exaltation of larks. Turns out there are also collective nouns for professions: a sentence of judges, a doctrine of doctors, a melody of harpers, a superfluity of nuns and a prudence of vicars.
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A Gaggle Is Not What You Think
Along the same line, the spirit animal of my college paper, The Tech, is the turkey. A half century ago, it was widely believed that the annual headline on the board election story, Gaggle Cops The Tech Board used the collective noun for turkeys. Turns out gaggles are geese, Turkeys come in rafters, gangs, or posses.
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Original Thought
A tip of the PSACOT hat to Clark Smith, for reminding us, via a quotation, that LLMs are not the only unintelligent entities on this earth.
“Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.”
–Fran Lebowitz
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The Movies on TV
A Tip of the PSACOT hat to Daniel Dern for forwarding this from the Boston Globe: From “Network” to “Anchorman,” the movies don’t seem to have the most generous read on the small screen.
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Jingles Stuck In Your Head
I don’t know if you’re ashamed by how many of these you know, but I only missed one, the one about short-shorts. I guess I was just too far out of the target demo. And there’s one that generated a vile joke: “That’s the sound two babies make when you drop them in a vat of acid.” Proving once again that children are not yet real human beings.
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Fly Me To The Moon, Eagle Scout
Even some Eagle Scouts I know are unaware of the fact that every man who has set foot on the moon was an Eagle Scout.
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Quote Hunt: Who Doubted Paperless Office?
In the early 1980s, when Office Automation was a thing, an industry consultant (Gartner? Lecht? Baharin?) said “The paperless office is about as plausible as the paperless bathroom.” Did librarian Jesse Shera say it before his death in 1982? (using the word society rather than office)? Most likely the consultant was quoting Shera, or merely restating the obvious. Also: more paper is now used in offices than ever before.