I’m on the losing end of a discussion about whether Gucci (or Celine)  ads in a fashion magazine show an AI, a manikin, or a put-together model who looks like a male.  How can I ascertain which is true and/or of course a photo of a real live person?  If you cannot help me, what do you think? I can’t find a working e-mail address to get through to someone about this.   Total costume may be a bargain for someone for $5,310.00.

Another outfit for the 1%:  Jacket    $3,980.

Jumpsuit 3,700.

Shirt:  850.

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Total ensemble:  $7,430.

If it’s not a real person are they trying to avoid a model’s fee?  Talk to me.

UP:

I call this Nature’s Cathedrals and if I had a better camera and didn’t have essential tremor you would be moved, too.  Sometimes I forget that nature can  take one away from feeling down. I recall going through an entire blog on birds once and feeling tremendously energized.  When I found the recent photo of 3-week old aye aye I was cheered, and then this lovely series of plants just outside my condo and not planted by me pepped me up immeasurably.  I think there’s a pocket inside us that relates to the appreciation of beauty, and it’s something that one rarely acknowledges or is aware of.  Anyhow, I thought this cheerful note might help offset some of the following:

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DOWN

I can’t afford The Week magazine, although it is first class, but as fate would have it, the April  21, 2023 issue appeared on the free table in the public library, and I read about the following column by David Wallace Wells of The New York Times.  Titled The Growing Number of Child Deaths, I learned that in the U.S. life expectancy is rapidly declining not by deaths of despair among the middle-aged or even by Covid but by the deaths of children and teenagers.  Why? “The U.S. is a violent place and getting more violent.  Gun homicides and suicides account for half of the increase in youth mortality….”  Americans are dying younger than in any peer countries.

Nan says:  The emotional insistence by an apparent majority of men who “don’t want to lose their guns”  smacks–and I write this seriously–of castration anxiety.  Has women in the board rooms threatened them so much or is it a feeling of guilt and/or insecurity?  Or somehow are some dregs of earlier childrearing harshness catching up with us?  I shudder to think how the stunted intellectual and emotional development of young children may  continue to influence the last days of our planet.  Let’s face it:  what the heck are they learning about respect, honesty, ethics and their own bodies?  Who was it said “as we sow, so shall we reap?”  The destruction of learning in schools and universities is poison. How dare we trifle with such critical issues?

ANSWER, via Quora:

SNEAKILY, DEVIOUSLY, CLEVERLY

“What companies will send people money when they’re asked nicely?”

You can find the nice companies by clicking…

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NEVER GIVE THIS TO SOMEONE YOU CARE FOR:

…BUT YOU KNOW THAT, RIGHT?:  ANSWER: A ONE-YEAR FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO A MAGAZINE.  I WON’T INSULT YOU BY TELLING YOU WHY.

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Temper tantrum:

If you read my post of  April 7, 2023,   then you know that temper tantrums are spreading in our current culture. (Three members of the Nelsonville Ohio city council resigned in a huff, and when two of them wanted to rescind their hasty action they  were initially given a hard time, but there weren’t enough remaining council members left to make a quorum to accept or not accept their hasty actions).  I was reminded of this during the week when a female N.C state legislator  changed parties (from Democrat to Republican) in a huff after a barrage of criticism from other Democrats. When folks refer to the concept of Adulting these days, what do ya think they mean?

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OMG!

 Can ChatGPT predict stocks? Researchers from the University of Florida have found that the popular chatbot, ChatGPT, can predict whether a stock price will rise or fall based on news headlines. The AI outperformed traditional sentiment analysis methods and could lead to more efficient markets. From <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/WhctKKXwvqXJxmGcJKvsJsBlvPgMnSbWDWhqPKPfPKzkBHNsKRCFfkjZndpdJHhvKgxVpZV>

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INCIDENTAL:  I recently ran into my favorite early childhood book, from which I learned much of my vocabulary:  It was Freddy the Detective, with Freddy the Pig as protagonist. I see it advertised on Thriftbooks but for some reason can’t get it completely ordered.  Oh well, I know it was exciting; that should be enough.  Enjoy, if you can and want to and are able.

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As a fisherperson in my childhood there was always that moment when I wondered what was pulling at my line.  I’ve quit fishing due to having currently found out.  Worse even than dishonesty I abhor being manipulated.

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Corporations have grown so nefariously widespread, powerful and dishonest that if the Supreme Court reversed its 2010 decision I fear our whole caboodle would collapse, due to the disservice of our current playing book based on the pretense that corporations are people.   (But what kind of people, I ask you. Not my kind of people!)  If we keep turning our cheek for more we’ll be skeletonized. If you have a peaceful solution please SPEAK UP!

Looking for a pick-me-up, I Googled Bernie Sanders to see what was so bad about him.  I couldn’t find anything I disagreed with.  (Was it Barney Fife who said “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”?  According to Google:

Seems to me that we’re all a pack of lemmings heading off the cliff with eyes open but something in us diminished.

Was this stage of insanity buried within our evolutionary game plan?  When people finally become frantic is a bloodbath inevitable? Shut my mouth–or break my pen–or my keyboard, this isn’t being helpful, I fear.  But no, those who know better say that there’s no game plan, just something called emergence.  I wouldn’t mind emergence so much if it didn’t appear to be from down below (metaphorically speaking), where the fires are kept burning. Since science questions the existence of the Akashic Records, there’ll be no one to ever know.  Some say the cockroaches may survive–whoopee.  Giddyap, Archie!

NO JOKING MATTER, so why do I joke?  (You can’t see my tears.)

‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.

Just in case you didn’t visit this Zinger–a brief exerpt: (Click on the blue for the source)

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”  [Duh, ya think?]

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

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I think I’ve reached the bottom of my barrel.  I’m not singing if you see me coming better step aside, but maybe I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch…

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Henceforth I’m going to try and limit this blog to light trivialities.  Let’s see how long that (I) can last….