Friday, January 17, 2025
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Wikipedia Day: The Editors Weaves Wikipedia’s Volunteers Into a Global Suspense Tale
Yesterday was Wikipedia Day, celebrating the first edit made to the online encyclopedia on January 15, 2001. It's a tricky kind of celebration because, for many of us, every day is a Wikipedia Day. Scanning a new Wikipedia tab can feel like turning on a faucet, using a resource that has seemingly always been there and dispensed evenly, almost magically, from the Internet pipes.
But that's not where Wikipedia comes from. It comes from editors, who are volunteers that add missing topics, update pages when new things happen, and settle debates ranging from grammar ticks to deep philosophy. Author Stephen Harrison has written about these people for Slate, WIRED, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Now, he's exploring the distinctive lives, interests, and conflicts of this tribe in a fiction tome, The Editors.
The Editors follows Morgan Wentworth, a recently laid-off journalist who scopes out a freelance story at a global conference for the book's Wiki stand-in, Infopendium. Wentworth sees the breadth of ages, personalities, and motivations among the editors and comes to appreciate their dedication. Then, a hacker breaks in, posts a cryptic message, and triggers Wentworth's expanding investigation into a global struggle over truth and information.
I spoke with Harrison about his work writing about Wikipedia, his approach to fiction as a tool for exploring the humans behind the site, where he thinks Wikipedia is now, and where it might be headed. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Ars: Out of everything in Wikipedia that you've written about, what made you want to explore the people, The Editors?
Harrison: I was kind of reporting on what the editors are doing or deciding upon, the debates they're having. But there's something about fiction—one of the strengths is that you can get inside the characters' heads. And I just thought that fiction was the best vehicle for that. …
I also just always saw the Internet encyclopedia as being inherently suspenseful. You never know who the people are behind the information, right? It's like this great unmasking; you see the username, but then you actually meet the person, and you learn about them. So, I had that model in the back of my head, and it informed my writing of the book. (...)
Ars: You talked with Caitlin Dewey (of Links I Would Gchat You) about the different eras of Wikipedia. I'm wondering, since last summer, if you sense anything has changed about Wikipedia's direction, new challenges for the big ol' encyclopedia?
Harrison: I guess I would say it's [in] a little bit of an "existential threat phase." So, okay, if we have all this AI technology, do we even need Wikipedia anymore? I would argue that we do. One, because we need a data set, or a sort of central text, to train the LLMs. That's the way these LLMs work is they need a central text on which they learn, and Wikipedia is a big part of the training data, but it doesn't maintain itself; you do need people to write it.
Ars: Wikipedia is this perfect corpus of human-written text, full of human language about things that humans are interested in…
Harrison: And publicly licensed, too. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty clean data set in a lot of ways. And so I guess the existential threat is, if Wikipedia is not getting appropriately credited, will we forget about it and then stop maintaining it, and then will it no longer be as valuable a resource to both humans and AI?
Ars: You're writing about volunteer editors, their personalities, their pride, motivations. Do you think it affects the editors behind Wikipedia if they get a sense they're mostly writing for bots, for AI and Google to just summarize for searchers? Do you have any sense of whether editors care about the way they're feeding people information?
Harrison: It's a bit nuanced because Wikipedia editors aren't the most egotistical people. They're largely anonymous or writing behind pseudonyms. They're not like TikTok stars who are trying to get their name out there. So in a way, they were never trying to claim credit for their edits and contributions to Wikipedia. So you could make the argument that because they're relatively selfless, maybe it doesn't matter if the data is going to AI or LLMs.
On the other hand, just from having talked to a lot of Wikipedia editors, they are very thoughtful of the reader. They envision a reader, and a lot of them are thinking about: Does this serve the reader? And I also think just a lot of them are put off by the idea that their work is just a big gift to Google, a for-profit company.
… It's also a hard issue that I'm grappling with because what is the fix? Maybe it's like, okay, these Big Tech companies are getting so much value from Wikipedia, maybe they should just donate more money to the Wikimedia Foundation. On the other hand, you don't want the Big Tech companies to have any influence over the encyclopedia. So it's not just that we want the big companies to reciprocate and influence the whole thing. It's challenging.
Ars: It's always fascinating to me how, by and large, every page is so much better than I think it will be. Really high-energy, maybe "truth optional" pages for topics like cryptocurrencies. It's a small miracle that they're as orderly and reasonable as they end up being. Do you have any thoughts on how, 24 years from now, Wikipedia has been able to maintain that kind of stability?
Harrison: Well, there are a lot of dedicated volunteers. If a page is getting a lot of eyeballs, like cryptocurrency, for example, that's a page that people are going to be monitoring with some vigilance. With the mobile revolution, people are also watching edits on their phones and can run back to their laptops to revert incorrect edits.
(Harrison mentioned an article he wrote for The Outline about a Czech grandpa who largely oversaw the cryptocurrency page.)
Coming up on the 24th anniversary, I want to give a salute to the longtime contributors while also acknowledging that Wikipedia has been recruiting new people. And I hope that, even with AI and all these other potential threats, Wikipedia is still recruiting these people.
Because it really is a relatively small group of people. Everyone can edit, of course, but in English, it's been found that there are only about 1,500 core contributors—pretty small overall. So one of the things in the book is characters discovering, oh, it feels kind of like a small community. People tend to know each other by usernames. That's a little bit of art imitating life, because people start to see the same usernames on Wikipedia or come across each other on the same pages, and then develop a bit of a reputation. And that, obviously, inspired me.
The Editors follows Morgan Wentworth, a recently laid-off journalist who scopes out a freelance story at a global conference for the book's Wiki stand-in, Infopendium. Wentworth sees the breadth of ages, personalities, and motivations among the editors and comes to appreciate their dedication. Then, a hacker breaks in, posts a cryptic message, and triggers Wentworth's expanding investigation into a global struggle over truth and information.
I spoke with Harrison about his work writing about Wikipedia, his approach to fiction as a tool for exploring the humans behind the site, where he thinks Wikipedia is now, and where it might be headed. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Ars: Out of everything in Wikipedia that you've written about, what made you want to explore the people, The Editors?
Harrison: I was kind of reporting on what the editors are doing or deciding upon, the debates they're having. But there's something about fiction—one of the strengths is that you can get inside the characters' heads. And I just thought that fiction was the best vehicle for that. …
I also just always saw the Internet encyclopedia as being inherently suspenseful. You never know who the people are behind the information, right? It's like this great unmasking; you see the username, but then you actually meet the person, and you learn about them. So, I had that model in the back of my head, and it informed my writing of the book. (...)
Ars: You talked with Caitlin Dewey (of Links I Would Gchat You) about the different eras of Wikipedia. I'm wondering, since last summer, if you sense anything has changed about Wikipedia's direction, new challenges for the big ol' encyclopedia?
Harrison: I guess I would say it's [in] a little bit of an "existential threat phase." So, okay, if we have all this AI technology, do we even need Wikipedia anymore? I would argue that we do. One, because we need a data set, or a sort of central text, to train the LLMs. That's the way these LLMs work is they need a central text on which they learn, and Wikipedia is a big part of the training data, but it doesn't maintain itself; you do need people to write it.
Ars: Wikipedia is this perfect corpus of human-written text, full of human language about things that humans are interested in…
Harrison: And publicly licensed, too. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty clean data set in a lot of ways. And so I guess the existential threat is, if Wikipedia is not getting appropriately credited, will we forget about it and then stop maintaining it, and then will it no longer be as valuable a resource to both humans and AI?
Ars: You're writing about volunteer editors, their personalities, their pride, motivations. Do you think it affects the editors behind Wikipedia if they get a sense they're mostly writing for bots, for AI and Google to just summarize for searchers? Do you have any sense of whether editors care about the way they're feeding people information?
Harrison: It's a bit nuanced because Wikipedia editors aren't the most egotistical people. They're largely anonymous or writing behind pseudonyms. They're not like TikTok stars who are trying to get their name out there. So in a way, they were never trying to claim credit for their edits and contributions to Wikipedia. So you could make the argument that because they're relatively selfless, maybe it doesn't matter if the data is going to AI or LLMs.
On the other hand, just from having talked to a lot of Wikipedia editors, they are very thoughtful of the reader. They envision a reader, and a lot of them are thinking about: Does this serve the reader? And I also think just a lot of them are put off by the idea that their work is just a big gift to Google, a for-profit company.
… It's also a hard issue that I'm grappling with because what is the fix? Maybe it's like, okay, these Big Tech companies are getting so much value from Wikipedia, maybe they should just donate more money to the Wikimedia Foundation. On the other hand, you don't want the Big Tech companies to have any influence over the encyclopedia. So it's not just that we want the big companies to reciprocate and influence the whole thing. It's challenging.
Ars: It's always fascinating to me how, by and large, every page is so much better than I think it will be. Really high-energy, maybe "truth optional" pages for topics like cryptocurrencies. It's a small miracle that they're as orderly and reasonable as they end up being. Do you have any thoughts on how, 24 years from now, Wikipedia has been able to maintain that kind of stability?
Harrison: Well, there are a lot of dedicated volunteers. If a page is getting a lot of eyeballs, like cryptocurrency, for example, that's a page that people are going to be monitoring with some vigilance. With the mobile revolution, people are also watching edits on their phones and can run back to their laptops to revert incorrect edits.
(Harrison mentioned an article he wrote for The Outline about a Czech grandpa who largely oversaw the cryptocurrency page.)
Coming up on the 24th anniversary, I want to give a salute to the longtime contributors while also acknowledging that Wikipedia has been recruiting new people. And I hope that, even with AI and all these other potential threats, Wikipedia is still recruiting these people.
Because it really is a relatively small group of people. Everyone can edit, of course, but in English, it's been found that there are only about 1,500 core contributors—pretty small overall. So one of the things in the book is characters discovering, oh, it feels kind of like a small community. People tend to know each other by usernames. That's a little bit of art imitating life, because people start to see the same usernames on Wikipedia or come across each other on the same pages, and then develop a bit of a reputation. And that, obviously, inspired me.
by Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Inkshares
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
In Defense of Courtship
I devoted a decade, more or less, to researching a multidisciplinary book on love songs.
This forced me to learn the history of dating, marriage, and sexuality—going back thousands of years.
So I read all the experts on the subject—Stendhal’s Love, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Plato’s Symposium, Dante’s La Vita Nuova, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, José Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, and lots of others.
But all that history is beside the point. That’s because I want to talk about the state of romance today.
It must be in short supply, because I hear lots of complaints from singles. They tell me it’s not easy to find a good partner for a relationship. (...)
They hate dating apps, but they don’t know any better way of finding somebody.
And how do you break out of the app cycle? Some people are starting to take desperate measures.
I keep coming back to the paradox. Apps make things easier—so why are relationships getting harder?
As I mull this over, I’m reminded of something I studied while researching the history of love songs. But it’s never mentioned nowadays.
It’s called courtship.
When was the last time you heard somebody use that word?
Maybe you hear it in a movie about romances from the distant past. But you can watch a whole season of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and courtship won’t make a single appearance.
I bet the spellcheck on my iPhone won’t even recognize it.
Courtship? Did you mean to write Court-Issued Restraining Order?
It seems such a silly and old-fashioned concept. Why bother with courtship when it’s faster to do a hookup?
Hey, I’m no prude. I’m not doing abstinence training here. Nobody’s saying you can’t do what you’ve got to do.
But let’s give courtship its due.
The appeal of these tales is obvious.
I think we all crave a little more of this in our relationships.
Maybe this is just one more example of apps creating shortcuts, when we might be better off with a longer, more ceremonial process.
We all know that slow food tastes better than fast food. And that’s true in many other pursuits—good things take time. If you care about results, you don’t rush.
So why not try the same in relationships. (...)
This step-by-step process happened everywhere back then, not just in Europe. Consider this account of courtship among the Omaha tribe, from researcher Alice Fletcher:
A young man of the tribe watches his beloved from afar….
This forced me to learn the history of dating, marriage, and sexuality—going back thousands of years.
So I read all the experts on the subject—Stendhal’s Love, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Plato’s Symposium, Dante’s La Vita Nuova, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, José Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, and lots of others.
But all that history is beside the point. That’s because I want to talk about the state of romance today.
It must be in short supply, because I hear lots of complaints from singles. They tell me it’s not easy to find a good partner for a relationship. (...)
They hate dating apps, but they don’t know any better way of finding somebody.
And how do you break out of the app cycle? Some people are starting to take desperate measures.
As I mull this over, I’m reminded of something I studied while researching the history of love songs. But it’s never mentioned nowadays.
It’s called courtship.
When was the last time you heard somebody use that word?
Maybe you hear it in a movie about romances from the distant past. But you can watch a whole season of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and courtship won’t make a single appearance.
I bet the spellcheck on my iPhone won’t even recognize it.
Courtship? Did you mean to write Court-Issued Restraining Order?
It seems such a silly and old-fashioned concept. Why bother with courtship when it’s faster to do a hookup?
Hey, I’m no prude. I’m not doing abstinence training here. Nobody’s saying you can’t do what you’ve got to do.
But let’s give courtship its due.
- It brought couples together for more than a thousand years. We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for those courting couples.
- The rules of courtship embrace ritual and gracious behavior. These “rules of the game” provide guidance and impart structure (as well as add spice) in an otherwise unstable process.
- You become better and more attractive yourself by following these rules—because they impose a discipline and aura of courtliness on your own actions.
- They also provide a sense of safety for both participants.
- The notion behind courtship is that love is stronger when creating a relationship is harder. That’s true in other spheres of life—sports training, musicianship, education, etc. And it’s easy to understand why: We get stronger at anything by avoiding shortcuts and taking on challenges.
- Courtship moves step-by-step, and thus provides a chance for ongoing reflection and learning, as well as an easy exit path, before things get too complicated.
- But here’s the most important reason for courtship: It fosters an attitude of respect, appreciation, and courtesy between the two people.
There’s a good reason why this kind of idealized courtship still shows up in Hollywood movies. It’s because it creates an intense atmosphere of romance. (...)
Many contemporary romance novels are still working from this playbook.
Many contemporary romance novels are still working from this playbook.
The appeal of these tales is obvious.
I think we all crave a little more of this in our relationships.
Maybe this is just one more example of apps creating shortcuts, when we might be better off with a longer, more ceremonial process.
We all know that slow food tastes better than fast food. And that’s true in many other pursuits—good things take time. If you care about results, you don’t rush.
So why not try the same in relationships. (...)
This step-by-step process happened everywhere back then, not just in Europe. Consider this account of courtship among the Omaha tribe, from researcher Alice Fletcher:
A young man of the tribe watches his beloved from afar….
and at the dawn his love-song may be heard echoing over the hills. Sometimes he sings in the evening to let the maiden know of his presence. Girls find ways of learning who are the young men seeking them, and they also in their turn watch these lovers secretly and either flirt a little or entertain a serious regard for the young wooer. All this little drama takes place covertly, no elder is made a confidant.This sounds like it’s straight out of the Romeo and Juliet playbook.
by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker | Read more:
Images: uncredited
[ed. I'm not so sure this doesn't happen these days, but more in group situations where a bunch of folks just hang out together and subtle signals get passed in a low-risk environment. Plus, it gives the advantage of seeing how someone you might be interested in interacts in social situations, and around your friends. More data points. See also: The Guitar as the Instrument of Seducers (HB).]
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
No FAIR
Out of approximately 700 homes destroyed in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Lightning Complex Fire, only 95 have been rebuilt and occupied 4 years later, with only 158 more in construction. Nearly two-thirds are not being rebuilt.
We will need to firm this tidbit as more authoritative sources weigh in, but this informed-looking comment on Reddit suggests that most claims will not be paid out in full due to the State of California being the insurer and lacking the capacity to do so. From Reddit:
The issue isn’t insurance companies going bankrupt in California since, as you mentioned, there are virtually no homeowners insurance plans with wildfire coverage that are underwritten by anything other than the California FAIR Plan anymore. The California FAIR Plan is both the underwriter for virtually all of California’s wildfire insurance as well as the guarantee association that is owned/run by the state.So everything is like CalPERS.
The issue is that the price controls combined with the state pillaging the FAIR Plan’s funds for “other stuff” means that it only has $400 million to cover the losses. This is combined with the fact that California has a potentially >$60 billion budget deficit for 2025 that they don’t know how they’ll fund (the actual deficit isn’t actually known because the state is deliberately excluding certain items from its calculation of it, such as $20 billion that it needs to pay to the Federal Government this year. The deficit is not less than $38 billion with a middle estimate of ~$60 billion. The high estimate is “who knows?”).
The California Department of Insurance’s official plan on how to now “fund” the FAIR Plan’s multibillion dollar exposure is to prevent insurance companies from non-renewing existing plans as of January 9 and to threaten unspecified penalties for insurance companies that don’t retroactively renew policies that were non-renewed in the past few months. That wouldn’t necessarily do much even if it was able to be implemented, never mind that its unconstitutional and has a 0% chance of going through.
Because there’s very few policies written by insurance companies, their exposure is so low that there isn’t really a concern about any of them becoming insolvent. The real issue is that the FAIR Plan is very clearly insolvent, there is no viable mechanism to fund it, and the FAIR Plan itself is supposed to be the entity covering claims against insolvent insurers.
This isn’t a situation that has ever happened in the modern US and no one knows how it’s going to play out.
On top of the elephant-in-the-room “how meager will my insurance payout be?” another big impediment to reconstruction is shortages and inflation. If that’s in play from a major burn more than four years ago, imagine what will happen with the much greater pressure on building supplies with the unheard of scale of Los Angeles reconstruction when that gets going. (...)
The press is already starting to discuss hurdles homeowners whose houses were burnt out face, from insurance payouts being (legitimately) slow due to claims processing being overwhelmed to insurers trying to lowball payouts and policy-holders (and likely regulators and politicians) going to war with insurers, compounded by high odds of widespread underinsurance. High insurance costs would translate into conscious or accidental only-partial coverage.
Readers who are LA-knowledgeable mentioned other impediments to rebuilding. The wealthy Palisades is a family neighborhood. “There’s nothing to go back to: no schools, no grocery stores.” The implication is that families will be strongly inclined to move to functioning communities and may stay there due to not wanting to uproot their kids yet again.
By contrast, in Altadena, which is more middle class, many of the residents are multi-generational. They could not have afforded to buy the homes they lived in and cannot afford to rebuild. Nearly all will be underinsured, particularly in light of the way building costs will be sure to rise as a result of competition for materials and contractors.
Another potential stumbling point is pressure to rezone. For instance, there will be pressure to allow more multi-family housing, the arguments including climate change benefits (lower materials use, cheaper cooling and heating) and arguably faster restoration of housing for if nothing else, the benefit of businesses.
by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: Philip Cheung/NYT; Santa Cruz Planning Dept.; YouTube
Monday, January 13, 2025
Los Angeles Is Being Crushed Under the Weight of Inaction
We got the evacuation alert on Wednesday night. The fire came out of nowhere and threatened to sweep through Hollywood. I pulled our son out of the bathtub. We rushed into the car and drove north, past two other fires, through smoke and sirens, gridlock and chaos, flames on the horizon in all directions.
People keep saying the scenes out of Los Angeles look like something from a movie. Except they don’t, not really. Movies need a protagonist. Every on-screen apocalypse has a leader. So where is ours?
Fires have wiped out entire communities. Thousands have lost their homes. Many more are displaced and looters are taking the personal property of those lucky enough to have any. The steady stream of alerts from Watch Duty, a wildfire-tracking app, ding as I type this, new fires igniting, existing ones spreading, winds picking up again. Will the latest alert say that our neighborhood, our street or our school is next?
I would love a deus ex machina to change this story line or for the real-estate developer and would-be mayor Rick Caruso to divert the dancing fountain at his mall, the Grove. For now, I’d settle for some reassurance that there is a plan. That it’s going to be horrific, but that we will get through this. Los Angeles will endure and rebuild. Together. For someone to, you know, lead.
As any screenwriter will tell you, a protagonist does not need to be perfect. We actually prefer that they be flawed, as long as they are ours.
I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at ground zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?
In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin called General Honoré “a John Wayne dude” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”
In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.
It’s not that Los Angeles lacks heroism. The city has stepped up where elected officials have not. From firefighters and paramedics to everyone who has offered shelter, volunteered and pitched in on GoFundMe pages, I’ve never seen such unity. But if leadership is that Churchillian combination of confident words and decisive action, Los Angeles has seen neither.
When Mayor Karen Bass returned from a previously scheduled trip to Ghana, she held a brief, defensive news conference and told residents they could find emergency resources at “URL.” She had to quiet a public squabble with her fire chief, telling reporters at a joint news conference on Saturday that she and Chief Kristin M. Crowley are in “lock step.”
On Saturday, she said on X, “We will get through this crisis, together.” On Sunday, during a news conference, Ms. Bass vowed to “make sure that Los Angeles comes out of this a much better city.”
Will these efforts put Angelenos at ease? On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.
In a viral video, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, in aviator sunglasses, looked to me as if he couldn’t wait to get back in his idling S.U.V. as an anguished Angeleno told him her community had been destroyed and implored him for help. He did make time to do a lengthy interview with “Pod Save America,” in which he defended his record and response to the crisis, explaining that he “wasn’t getting straight answers” from local officials. How about we Pod Save Los Angeles first?
President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming Democratic policies for the devastation in Los Angeles.
Despite what X will have us think, history shows Americans are pretty forgiving in a crisis. We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose. Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows? (...)
Every day we watch our city, our communities, our livelihoods burn. At least 24 people have died and an estimated 12,000 structures have been destroyed. Without leadership, we try to find reliable information on WhatsApp chats and neighborhood Facebook pages. (I told you, it’s bleak.)
At the moment I do not care who did or did not cut funding for which water or fire services or whether the smelt is a thing or if the wind ate your homework. We are heartbroken, suffocating in toxic air and crushed under the weight of inaction.
by Amy Chozick, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jacob Ogden
People keep saying the scenes out of Los Angeles look like something from a movie. Except they don’t, not really. Movies need a protagonist. Every on-screen apocalypse has a leader. So where is ours?
I would love a deus ex machina to change this story line or for the real-estate developer and would-be mayor Rick Caruso to divert the dancing fountain at his mall, the Grove. For now, I’d settle for some reassurance that there is a plan. That it’s going to be horrific, but that we will get through this. Los Angeles will endure and rebuild. Together. For someone to, you know, lead.
As any screenwriter will tell you, a protagonist does not need to be perfect. We actually prefer that they be flawed, as long as they are ours.
I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at ground zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?
In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin called General Honoré “a John Wayne dude” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”
In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.
It’s not that Los Angeles lacks heroism. The city has stepped up where elected officials have not. From firefighters and paramedics to everyone who has offered shelter, volunteered and pitched in on GoFundMe pages, I’ve never seen such unity. But if leadership is that Churchillian combination of confident words and decisive action, Los Angeles has seen neither.
When Mayor Karen Bass returned from a previously scheduled trip to Ghana, she held a brief, defensive news conference and told residents they could find emergency resources at “URL.” She had to quiet a public squabble with her fire chief, telling reporters at a joint news conference on Saturday that she and Chief Kristin M. Crowley are in “lock step.”
On Saturday, she said on X, “We will get through this crisis, together.” On Sunday, during a news conference, Ms. Bass vowed to “make sure that Los Angeles comes out of this a much better city.”
Will these efforts put Angelenos at ease? On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.
In a viral video, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, in aviator sunglasses, looked to me as if he couldn’t wait to get back in his idling S.U.V. as an anguished Angeleno told him her community had been destroyed and implored him for help. He did make time to do a lengthy interview with “Pod Save America,” in which he defended his record and response to the crisis, explaining that he “wasn’t getting straight answers” from local officials. How about we Pod Save Los Angeles first?
President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming Democratic policies for the devastation in Los Angeles.
Despite what X will have us think, history shows Americans are pretty forgiving in a crisis. We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose. Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows? (...)
Every day we watch our city, our communities, our livelihoods burn. At least 24 people have died and an estimated 12,000 structures have been destroyed. Without leadership, we try to find reliable information on WhatsApp chats and neighborhood Facebook pages. (I told you, it’s bleak.)
At the moment I do not care who did or did not cut funding for which water or fire services or whether the smelt is a thing or if the wind ate your homework. We are heartbroken, suffocating in toxic air and crushed under the weight of inaction.
by Amy Chozick, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jacob Ogden
Bureaucracy Isn't Measured in Bureaucrats
I suspect the real reason this is a thing is that grifters like Trump and Musk and the Swamy just want enough short-term approvals (from their embedded political operatives) to clear enough regulatory hurdles to blast their future economic prospects to the moon (and beyond). It's not that faceless bureaucrats are to blame, it's that politicians pass laws that the administrative state are then obligated to put into regulations. If you want to go after government waste and inefficiency go after misguided laws and unecessary regulations, not the people that are burdened with writing, enforcing and defending them. Note: the size of the federal government workforce has barely budged over the last 20 years since 2000 (CRS), and is less than 4 percent of the total budget, excluding military personnel:]
Compensation (wages and benefits) for the 3.8 million federal defense and nondefense workers accounts for 8 percent of spending. Defense workers (uniformed and civilian) account for 56 percent of compensation and nondefense for 44 percent. (Cato Institute)
Compensation (wages and benefits) for the 3.8 million federal defense and nondefense workers accounts for 8 percent of spending. Defense workers (uniformed and civilian) account for 56 percent of compensation and nondefense for 44 percent. (Cato Institute)
See also: Bureaucracy Isn't Measured in Bureaucrats (ACX)
Image: X
Q&A: Kevin Kisner on the Ryder Cup, NBC and What He Wants From PGA Tour Stars
The PGA Tour’s resident trash-talker — the de-facto leader of the “tell it like it is” movement in pro golf — has a big year ahead of him. Kevin Kisner is not only set to be the lead NBC golf analyst this tour season, but on Wednesday he was announced as one of U.S. captain Keegan Bradley’s assistants for the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black.
Since he first earned his tour card in 2011, Kisner’s fiery game has been just as much of a fixture as his unfiltered charm. Now, the four-time PGA Tour winner has one more shot at continuing his playing career at 40 years old, while simultaneously diving more fully into the broadcast media realm. In 2025, Kisner, known as “Kiz” to everyone on the PGA Tour, will make use of the tour’s career money exemption for the top 50 all-time earners on tour. He’s exactly No. 50 on that list.
That schedule will allow the player-turned-analyst to be in the booth for some of the biggest tournaments of the year, including but not limited to: U.S. Open, Open Championship, Players Championship and FedEx Cup playoffs. He, however, won’t be a part of NBC’s broadcast of the Ryder Cup, choosing the team room over the booth. NBC supported that decision, Kisner said.
Kisner first spoke to The Athletic in December about this pivotal moment in his career, then agreed to answer two more questions on Wednesday about the Ryder Cup decision. Those answers begin this Q&A, followed by his thoughts on his playing career, the role broadcast partners have in golf and more. (...)
You’re going to be one of NBC’s lead golf analysts this year. When did you get that call?
As soon as we got done with the playoffs last year, (NBC golf head) Sam Flood and I talked a couple of times. He said he wanted to come to Aiken and see me with Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, and Tommy Roy the producer. We worked out a date and they came and spent three or four hours with my wife Brittany and I. We chatted about life and they basically asked if I had any interest in taking a job full-time. We discussed it for a while, and I told them I still wanted to play on my top-50 career money (exemption), but I loved the opportunity. I liked the team. I was grateful for it. And if they’re willing to work with me through 2025 — that if I wasn’t good on the golf course, I’d give them my all in 2026. And if I was good on the course, then they’d have to find somebody else in 2026. (...)
In 2025, what do you think the role of the color commentator is? Has it shifted over time?
Well, I think the role of TV and tour players is a partnership. I think that hasn’t been adequately displayed over the course of the last 30 years on the PGA Tour. The player’s biggest partner in money is their media obligations and their media rights — their persona or “aura.” I don’t know if that’s the right word, I’ve just been on a four-day hunting trip. Whatever you want to call it, the players should not be thinking that the media is out to get them anymore, especially the TV media guys. Because if you don’t have them, the next media deal is not going to be big. So that’s what I always talk to the guys about. I’m like, man, I will never do anything to disrespect you or to hurt your career or hurt your brand. But you have to give us some more access, and I think that’s going to be my kind of M.O. in this role. Try to bring the two together more often. (...)
What is something that you had no idea about broadcasting that you learned for the first time last year?
Just the flow of it. How little prep they gave me for going on. I thought I’d have to go to school or something. Obviously, I’m not a broadcaster. A 20-minute phone call led them to give me a mic on a national program, which is kind of scary. Tommy Roy gave me a 20-minute rundown of how it works and do’s and don’ts. Then I flew to Maui, and I sat in the truck the first day of The Sentry and watched. Then I went into the booth and watched for a couple of hours. The next day they were handing me a microphone.
What have you learned about golf since starting to commentate pro golf?
The best players every week are doing the same stuff. It’s just about who doesn’t make mistakes, and who makes the putts. If you watch from our point of view, they all hit it in the general area of the green on every hole. At the end of the day, I know exactly what a certain putt does because I’ve watched it 15 times from all these good players hitting the same spot. The really good players hit it in the same spot on the greens. When you’re playing really well, it’s like robotic golf.
Scottie (Scheffler), he had an incredible year. What did he make? $70 million? I got to spend a lot of time with him at the Presidents Cup. Him and Russell Henley were my guys. We had a ball together all week. I just love the way Scottie can focus. He can focus as well as any player I’ve ever seen, like Tiger. Tiger wore it all the time, but Scottie smiles more than Tiger used to. They have the same laser focus when it’s time to hit a golf shot.
As a player, what do you want from the guy talking about you in the booth? Do you emulate that when you’re up there?
I want my 12 handicap buddies sitting at home to say, “Yes, he’s right” or “I’m going to try that.” And I also want Scottie Scheffler to say, yeah, I did pull the heck out of that putt. Kiz is right. So if I can get both sides of the equation to understand and know that I’m right, then I’m doing my job.
by Gabby Herzig, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: uncredited via:
Kisner first spoke to The Athletic in December about this pivotal moment in his career, then agreed to answer two more questions on Wednesday about the Ryder Cup decision. Those answers begin this Q&A, followed by his thoughts on his playing career, the role broadcast partners have in golf and more. (...)
You’re going to be one of NBC’s lead golf analysts this year. When did you get that call?
As soon as we got done with the playoffs last year, (NBC golf head) Sam Flood and I talked a couple of times. He said he wanted to come to Aiken and see me with Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, and Tommy Roy the producer. We worked out a date and they came and spent three or four hours with my wife Brittany and I. We chatted about life and they basically asked if I had any interest in taking a job full-time. We discussed it for a while, and I told them I still wanted to play on my top-50 career money (exemption), but I loved the opportunity. I liked the team. I was grateful for it. And if they’re willing to work with me through 2025 — that if I wasn’t good on the golf course, I’d give them my all in 2026. And if I was good on the course, then they’d have to find somebody else in 2026. (...)
In 2025, what do you think the role of the color commentator is? Has it shifted over time?
Well, I think the role of TV and tour players is a partnership. I think that hasn’t been adequately displayed over the course of the last 30 years on the PGA Tour. The player’s biggest partner in money is their media obligations and their media rights — their persona or “aura.” I don’t know if that’s the right word, I’ve just been on a four-day hunting trip. Whatever you want to call it, the players should not be thinking that the media is out to get them anymore, especially the TV media guys. Because if you don’t have them, the next media deal is not going to be big. So that’s what I always talk to the guys about. I’m like, man, I will never do anything to disrespect you or to hurt your career or hurt your brand. But you have to give us some more access, and I think that’s going to be my kind of M.O. in this role. Try to bring the two together more often. (...)
What is something that you had no idea about broadcasting that you learned for the first time last year?
Just the flow of it. How little prep they gave me for going on. I thought I’d have to go to school or something. Obviously, I’m not a broadcaster. A 20-minute phone call led them to give me a mic on a national program, which is kind of scary. Tommy Roy gave me a 20-minute rundown of how it works and do’s and don’ts. Then I flew to Maui, and I sat in the truck the first day of The Sentry and watched. Then I went into the booth and watched for a couple of hours. The next day they were handing me a microphone.
What have you learned about golf since starting to commentate pro golf?
The best players every week are doing the same stuff. It’s just about who doesn’t make mistakes, and who makes the putts. If you watch from our point of view, they all hit it in the general area of the green on every hole. At the end of the day, I know exactly what a certain putt does because I’ve watched it 15 times from all these good players hitting the same spot. The really good players hit it in the same spot on the greens. When you’re playing really well, it’s like robotic golf.
Scottie (Scheffler), he had an incredible year. What did he make? $70 million? I got to spend a lot of time with him at the Presidents Cup. Him and Russell Henley were my guys. We had a ball together all week. I just love the way Scottie can focus. He can focus as well as any player I’ve ever seen, like Tiger. Tiger wore it all the time, but Scottie smiles more than Tiger used to. They have the same laser focus when it’s time to hit a golf shot.
As a player, what do you want from the guy talking about you in the booth? Do you emulate that when you’re up there?
I want my 12 handicap buddies sitting at home to say, “Yes, he’s right” or “I’m going to try that.” And I also want Scottie Scheffler to say, yeah, I did pull the heck out of that putt. Kiz is right. So if I can get both sides of the equation to understand and know that I’m right, then I’m doing my job.
by Gabby Herzig, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: uncredited via:
Dispatch: Benghazi. Beautiful Beaches and Nothing Else
[ed. Too funny. Who doesn't love a cliffhanger?]
via:
via:
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Tubi Hits 97M Monthly Users And 10B Annual Streaming Hours
Tubi continued to gain traction in 2024, surpassing 97 million monthly active users and 10 billion streaming hours.
Fox Corp. paid $440 million in 2020 to acquire the free, ad-supported streaming outlet and has recently projected it will bring in $1 billion in full-year revenue, up from $150 million at the time of the acquisition. The outlet has become a welcome bright spot for the company, whose linear network assets are under ongoing pressure from pay-TV cord-cutting.
The MAU metric is not a universally agreed-upon one and is a holdover from the self-reporting early days of the internet. A Fox rep did not respond to Deadline’s request for clarification of how the company calculates an MAU. For some streaming businesses, the threshold is considered to be reached if an individual viewer spends just 15 seconds watching their service. Even if the bar is higher than that, Tubi’s 97 million MAU figure includes duplication across devices and within households.
Regardless of how users are quantified, viewership is undeniably increasing. Tubi has continued to climb Nielsen’s monthly Gauge chart of total viewing via TV sets, outpacing Max, Peacock and Paramount+ and running neck and neck with the Roku Channel as the No. 2 free outlet after YouTube. (...)
The company’s report on 2024 also included some notable audience statistics. More than 34% of Tubi viewers are between the ages of 18-34, the company said, while more than half are Gen Z or Millennials and nearly half are multicultural. Fully 77% of viewers say they do not have cable, Tubi said, citing the November MRI Cord Evolution Study.
Unlike some streaming outlets like Paramount’s rival, Pluto TV, Tubi reports that 95% of its viewing is on demand rather than live.
Built a decade ago from library film and TV titles, Tubi has expanded its offering of originals, which are now watched by one in four viewers, according to the company. Young adult romance Sidelined: The QB and Me drew more viewers of any title in Tubi’s history in its first week last November and delivered the most new viewers for any Tubi title ever. In addition to the originals push, the streamer has also forged content partnerships with independent distributors and launched Stubios, a fan-driven studio aiming to harness the pot.
"Of course, even if a sports fan subscribes to Venu, it’s still likely they’ll need to subscribe to at least one or two other streaming services — Netflix, Peacock, Amazon Prime, and/or Apple TV+ — if they want to watch all the games hosted by a single pro league.
I'm not a consumer of sports content, but if I were I feel like I'd be extremely frustrated by how much the broadcast rights are sliced and diced across so many paid subscription platforms. Imagine if you had to subscribe to four streaming services just to watch all the seasons of a single TV show. (...)
If I were a sports fan, I'd wonder why a single league couldn't just sell one subscription fee through its streaming app so I could access the entire library of games — or at the very least why a league doesn't sell its entire package to a single streamer. The current ecosystem just seems so anti-consumer to me."
Fox Corp. paid $440 million in 2020 to acquire the free, ad-supported streaming outlet and has recently projected it will bring in $1 billion in full-year revenue, up from $150 million at the time of the acquisition. The outlet has become a welcome bright spot for the company, whose linear network assets are under ongoing pressure from pay-TV cord-cutting.
Regardless of how users are quantified, viewership is undeniably increasing. Tubi has continued to climb Nielsen’s monthly Gauge chart of total viewing via TV sets, outpacing Max, Peacock and Paramount+ and running neck and neck with the Roku Channel as the No. 2 free outlet after YouTube. (...)
The company’s report on 2024 also included some notable audience statistics. More than 34% of Tubi viewers are between the ages of 18-34, the company said, while more than half are Gen Z or Millennials and nearly half are multicultural. Fully 77% of viewers say they do not have cable, Tubi said, citing the November MRI Cord Evolution Study.
Unlike some streaming outlets like Paramount’s rival, Pluto TV, Tubi reports that 95% of its viewing is on demand rather than live.
Built a decade ago from library film and TV titles, Tubi has expanded its offering of originals, which are now watched by one in four viewers, according to the company. Young adult romance Sidelined: The QB and Me drew more viewers of any title in Tubi’s history in its first week last November and delivered the most new viewers for any Tubi title ever. In addition to the originals push, the streamer has also forged content partnerships with independent distributors and launched Stubios, a fan-driven studio aiming to harness the pot.
by Dade Hayes, Deadline | Read more:
Image: Tubi
[ed. YouTube TV was ok until they raised their price by $10 (for no good reason) to$83/mo. with ads. I'm done. That's why I quit cable in the first place. See also: Just how many ads are there on ad-supported streaming apps, really? (Sherwood): (hint: up to 18 ads per 50 min. show)]
"Of course, even if a sports fan subscribes to Venu, it’s still likely they’ll need to subscribe to at least one or two other streaming services — Netflix, Peacock, Amazon Prime, and/or Apple TV+ — if they want to watch all the games hosted by a single pro league.
I'm not a consumer of sports content, but if I were I feel like I'd be extremely frustrated by how much the broadcast rights are sliced and diced across so many paid subscription platforms. Imagine if you had to subscribe to four streaming services just to watch all the seasons of a single TV show. (...)
If I were a sports fan, I'd wonder why a single league couldn't just sell one subscription fee through its streaming app so I could access the entire library of games — or at the very least why a league doesn't sell its entire package to a single streamer. The current ecosystem just seems so anti-consumer to me."
‘Now Is the Time of Monsters’
Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era. I find myself returning to a famous translation of a line from Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”
Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.
To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world. Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.
Let’s begin with American politics. Trump is eight days from taking the oath of office for the second time, and America’s institutional storm walls are not, in 2025, what they were in 2017.
The Republican Party is meek, and Trump knows it. He would not have dared to send Senate Republicans names like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth for cabinet posts in his first term. Even beyond the party, he faces no mass resistance this time, nothing like the Women’s March that overwhelmed Washington in 2017. Democrats are dispirited and exhausted.
Trump is now flanked by an alliance of oligarchs led by Elon Musk. The billionaire owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times killed presidential endorsements of Kamala Harris, ABC News (owned by Disney) gave Trump’s “future presidential foundation and museum” $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump brought, Mark Zuckerberg is refocusing Meta platforms around “free expression” and his company against D.E.I., and Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for Melania Trump’s documentary about herself. Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and a slew of other chief executives have recently traveled to Mar-a-Lago to dine with Trump. This differs from 2017, when Trump was treated as an aberration to be endured or a malignancy to reject. The billionaires see that the rules have changed. They are signaling their willingness to abide by them. “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social after having dinner with Jeff Bezos. He isn’t wrong.
Democracy does not die in darkness. It degrades through deal-making — a procession of pragmatic transactions between those who have power and those who want it or fear it. We have seen this termitic corruption consume democracies elsewhere, including Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which Trump and his allies cite as a model. Money and media make peace with the regime because to do otherwise is too costly. Once proud political parties become vehicles for the individual ambition they were designed to replace. I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached.
As I was writing those paragraphs, I asked ChatGPT three or four questions. They were small queries of the sort I might once have asked Google. I have covered A.I. for years. I have never doubted its eventual possibilities. But year after year, I found no place for it in my daily routine. It was like an intern who demanded oversight when what I needed was insight. Over the past six months, though, the improvements in the models tipped that balance for me. A.I. has braided into my day in much the way that search engines did before it.
Behind the mundane gains in usefulness are startling gains in capacity. OpenAI debuted a quick succession of confusingly named models — GPT4 was followed by GPT-4o, and then the chain-of-thought reasoning model o1, and then, oddly, came o3 — that have posted blistering improvements on a range of tests.
The A.R.C.-A.G.I. test, for instance, was designed to compare the fluid intelligence of humans and A.I. systems, and proved hard for A.I. systems to mimic. By the middle of 2024, the highest score any A.I. model had posted was 5 percent. By the end of the year, the most powerful form of o3 scored 88 percent. It is solving mathematics problems that leading mathematicians thought would take years for an A.I. system to crack. It is better at writing computer code than all but the most celebrated human coders.
The rate of improvement is startling. “What we’re witnessing isn’t just about benchmark scores or cost curves — it’s about a fundamental shift in how quickly A.I. capabilities advance,” Azeem Azhar writes in Exponential View, a newsletter focused on technology. Inside the A.I. labs, engineers believe they are getting closer to the grail of general intelligence, perhaps even superintelligence.
There is much to be excited about in these advances. The purpose of A.I. is not to help me remember the proper proportions for overnight oats, it’s to make new discoveries in math and medicine and science; it’s the driverless taxis that now hum along the streets of some major cities; it’s the possibility that our children will have always-available tutors perfectly tuned to their personalities and learning styles. It is a world with something truly new pulsing within it.
But are we prepared for these intelligences that we are so intently summoning into our lives and beginning to entrust with our infrastructure and data and decision-making and war-making? Are we even really preparing for them?
Long before ChatGPT burst into view, I’d been following the work — and the fears — of the A.I. safety community: a tight-knit group of researchers and writers who believed that the pace of A.I. improvement was accelerating and the power of these systems would quickly grow beyond what we could control or even fully understand. For a brief period after ChatGPT was released in 2022, their fears were taken seriously, debated across the media and in Congress. Now that the introductory shock of these A.I. systems has worn off, so too has interest in their warnings. But it is hard for me to shake the feeling that they have been largely right about the shape of what has come so far — not just about how fast the technology has changed, but also about how poor our ability to understand it remains, and how unnerving its early behavior is.
The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”
Even if you believe we can get A.I. regulation right — and I’ve seen little that makes me optimistic — will we even know what the universe of models we need to regulate is if powerful systems can be built this cheaply and stored on personal computers? A Chinese A.I. firm recently released DeepSeek-V3, a model that appears to perform about as well as OpenAI’s 4o on some measures but was trained for under $6 million and is lightweight enough to be run locally on a computer.
That DeepSeek is made by a Chinese firm reveals another pressure to race forward with these systems: China’s A.I. capabilities are real, and the contest for geopolitical superiority will supersede calls for caution or prudence. A.I. is breaking through at the same moment the international system is breaking down. The United States and China have drifted from uneasy cooperation to grim competition, and both intend to be prepared for war. Attaining A.I. superiority has emerged as central to both sides of the conflict. (...)
We may not understand much that these A.I. models do, but we know what they need: chips and training data and energy. The first wave of A.I., Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic and a former policy director at OpenAI, writes, was about algorithmic dominance: “Did you have the ability to have enough smart people to help you train neural nets in clever ways?” Then came the need for computing dominance: “Did you have enough computers to do large-scale projects?” But the future, he says, will turn on power dominance: “Do you have access to enough electricity to power the data centers?”
A report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that U.S. data centers went from 1.9 percent of total electrical consumption in 2018 to 4.4 percent in 2023 and will consume 6.7 percent to 12 percent in 2028. Microsoft alone intends to spend $80 billion on A.I. data centers this year. This elephantine increase in the energy that will be needed not just by the United States but by every country seeking to deploy serious A.I. capabilities comes as the world is slipping further behind its climate goals and warming seems to be outpacing even our models.
Every month from June 2023 to September 2024 broke climate records. “It has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected,” Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather wrote in November. We are seeing, in the wildfires turning swaths of Los Angeles to ash, the precise kinds of extreme weather events that we’ve been warned about — and we are also seeing how unprepared we are to deal with them.
Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.
To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world. Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.
Let’s begin with American politics. Trump is eight days from taking the oath of office for the second time, and America’s institutional storm walls are not, in 2025, what they were in 2017.
Trump is now flanked by an alliance of oligarchs led by Elon Musk. The billionaire owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times killed presidential endorsements of Kamala Harris, ABC News (owned by Disney) gave Trump’s “future presidential foundation and museum” $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump brought, Mark Zuckerberg is refocusing Meta platforms around “free expression” and his company against D.E.I., and Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for Melania Trump’s documentary about herself. Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and a slew of other chief executives have recently traveled to Mar-a-Lago to dine with Trump. This differs from 2017, when Trump was treated as an aberration to be endured or a malignancy to reject. The billionaires see that the rules have changed. They are signaling their willingness to abide by them. “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social after having dinner with Jeff Bezos. He isn’t wrong.
Democracy does not die in darkness. It degrades through deal-making — a procession of pragmatic transactions between those who have power and those who want it or fear it. We have seen this termitic corruption consume democracies elsewhere, including Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which Trump and his allies cite as a model. Money and media make peace with the regime because to do otherwise is too costly. Once proud political parties become vehicles for the individual ambition they were designed to replace. I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached.
As I was writing those paragraphs, I asked ChatGPT three or four questions. They were small queries of the sort I might once have asked Google. I have covered A.I. for years. I have never doubted its eventual possibilities. But year after year, I found no place for it in my daily routine. It was like an intern who demanded oversight when what I needed was insight. Over the past six months, though, the improvements in the models tipped that balance for me. A.I. has braided into my day in much the way that search engines did before it.
Behind the mundane gains in usefulness are startling gains in capacity. OpenAI debuted a quick succession of confusingly named models — GPT4 was followed by GPT-4o, and then the chain-of-thought reasoning model o1, and then, oddly, came o3 — that have posted blistering improvements on a range of tests.
The A.R.C.-A.G.I. test, for instance, was designed to compare the fluid intelligence of humans and A.I. systems, and proved hard for A.I. systems to mimic. By the middle of 2024, the highest score any A.I. model had posted was 5 percent. By the end of the year, the most powerful form of o3 scored 88 percent. It is solving mathematics problems that leading mathematicians thought would take years for an A.I. system to crack. It is better at writing computer code than all but the most celebrated human coders.
The rate of improvement is startling. “What we’re witnessing isn’t just about benchmark scores or cost curves — it’s about a fundamental shift in how quickly A.I. capabilities advance,” Azeem Azhar writes in Exponential View, a newsletter focused on technology. Inside the A.I. labs, engineers believe they are getting closer to the grail of general intelligence, perhaps even superintelligence.
There is much to be excited about in these advances. The purpose of A.I. is not to help me remember the proper proportions for overnight oats, it’s to make new discoveries in math and medicine and science; it’s the driverless taxis that now hum along the streets of some major cities; it’s the possibility that our children will have always-available tutors perfectly tuned to their personalities and learning styles. It is a world with something truly new pulsing within it.
But are we prepared for these intelligences that we are so intently summoning into our lives and beginning to entrust with our infrastructure and data and decision-making and war-making? Are we even really preparing for them?
Long before ChatGPT burst into view, I’d been following the work — and the fears — of the A.I. safety community: a tight-knit group of researchers and writers who believed that the pace of A.I. improvement was accelerating and the power of these systems would quickly grow beyond what we could control or even fully understand. For a brief period after ChatGPT was released in 2022, their fears were taken seriously, debated across the media and in Congress. Now that the introductory shock of these A.I. systems has worn off, so too has interest in their warnings. But it is hard for me to shake the feeling that they have been largely right about the shape of what has come so far — not just about how fast the technology has changed, but also about how poor our ability to understand it remains, and how unnerving its early behavior is.
The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”
Even if you believe we can get A.I. regulation right — and I’ve seen little that makes me optimistic — will we even know what the universe of models we need to regulate is if powerful systems can be built this cheaply and stored on personal computers? A Chinese A.I. firm recently released DeepSeek-V3, a model that appears to perform about as well as OpenAI’s 4o on some measures but was trained for under $6 million and is lightweight enough to be run locally on a computer.
That DeepSeek is made by a Chinese firm reveals another pressure to race forward with these systems: China’s A.I. capabilities are real, and the contest for geopolitical superiority will supersede calls for caution or prudence. A.I. is breaking through at the same moment the international system is breaking down. The United States and China have drifted from uneasy cooperation to grim competition, and both intend to be prepared for war. Attaining A.I. superiority has emerged as central to both sides of the conflict. (...)
We may not understand much that these A.I. models do, but we know what they need: chips and training data and energy. The first wave of A.I., Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic and a former policy director at OpenAI, writes, was about algorithmic dominance: “Did you have the ability to have enough smart people to help you train neural nets in clever ways?” Then came the need for computing dominance: “Did you have enough computers to do large-scale projects?” But the future, he says, will turn on power dominance: “Do you have access to enough electricity to power the data centers?”
A report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that U.S. data centers went from 1.9 percent of total electrical consumption in 2018 to 4.4 percent in 2023 and will consume 6.7 percent to 12 percent in 2028. Microsoft alone intends to spend $80 billion on A.I. data centers this year. This elephantine increase in the energy that will be needed not just by the United States but by every country seeking to deploy serious A.I. capabilities comes as the world is slipping further behind its climate goals and warming seems to be outpacing even our models.
Every month from June 2023 to September 2024 broke climate records. “It has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected,” Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather wrote in November. We are seeing, in the wildfires turning swaths of Los Angeles to ash, the precise kinds of extreme weather events that we’ve been warned about — and we are also seeing how unprepared we are to deal with them.
[ed. Yeah, but who's gonna make it through the playoffs this year?]
Saturday, January 11, 2025
Friday, January 10, 2025
A Complete Unknown
Bob Dylan Is Having a Hollywood Moment. His No. 1 Hater Is Ready.
At a recent showing of “A Complete Unknown,” the new Bob Dylan biopic, a cheerful group of young women settled in to watch the delicately handsome Timothée Chalamet impersonate the singer.
They barely noticed the 80-year-old man sitting next to them, armored in a winter coat and hat that he never removed. Then, the film began.
And so A.J. Weberman’s full-throated annotation of the film continued for 2 hours and 20 minutes, replete with dark interpretations of lyrics and references to how Dylan and the film intersected with such things as communism, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the C.I.A. and Barry Goldwater.
The group of women exchanged confused glances, but said nothing.
For more than half a century, the lives of Weberman and Dylan have been intertwined — though it is Weberman who has done most of the intertwining.
He began as one of Dylan’s keenest observers and fans, so intent on digging into the singer’s life that he sifted through trash cans outside 94 MacDougal Street, where the singer once lived. But he became Dylan’s nemesis, calling him a hoaxer and sellout, attacking him with an obsession bordering on madness.
Now that Dylan is getting a Hollywood moment, Weberman sees a renewed opportunity to advance the anti-Dylan agenda that has sustained him for decades. He is writing a new book interpreting Dylan’s lyrics, and answering a cascade of emails and calls asking for his take on the film.
Though his garbage-sifting has waned, his vendetta is as strong as ever.
Weberman, who has supported himself since his teens by selling weed, grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in Riverdale. He briefly attended Michigan State University before being kicked out after a pot arrest, and then settled in the East Village and eventually fell in with countercultural Yippie figures like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
It was the 1960s, and he helped organize smoke-ins, marijuana marches and pranks on establishment figures. Dylan provided much of the soundtrack.
“I said, ‘Wow, this guy’s a real revolutionary,’” he said. “I was into the civil rights movement. I fell for it.”
He fell hard. Weberman began laboriously compiling all of Dylan’s lyrics to study.
While listening to Dylan songs on acid, Weberman became convinced that Dylan’s cryptic lyrics masked dark meanings. He heard references to himself. He played Dylan’s records backward and claimed to hear certain messages, like “Don’t expose me” concealed in the obscure song “Time Passes Slowly.”
Pop stars have long been figures of obsession, dating back at least to the Beatles. The affable Liverpudlians inspired morbid theories among fans as their hair grew longer and their songs stranger. Some people played their records backward for secret messages and scoured album covers for clues that Paul McCartney was dead. Charles Manson, the cult-leader killer, took inspiration from their words, which he thought predicted a race war. A deranged fan killed John Lennon.
As a shape-shifting rock poet — a prophet with a nasal yowl — Dylan and his opaque words were particularly attractive for theorists of the literary, musical and conspiratorial varieties.
Richard F. Thomas, who teaches a class on Dylan at Harvard University, said Weberman’s belief that certain lyrics refer to him are “pretty much fantasy and beyond self-obsession.”
“It’s hard to know how serious or grounded he is at times,” the professor said of Weberman, adding, “To be fair, he was always after what makes the songs tick — not that he was going to find the answers in the trash.”
Weberman said his growing perception that Dylan was abandoning his leftist political messages had fueled his drive to shame the artist into “getting a conscience back.”
He took issue with albums like Dylan’s 1969 country offering “Nashville Skyline.” The record’s cover showed the smiling singer benignly tipping his hat, and its songs lacked overt political and social commentary.
He began claiming publicly that Dylan had become strung out on drugs — which Dylan denied — and had “sold out the left” by abandoning the political music that had defined his rise. He helped found the Dylan Liberation Front to re-radicalize Dylan and “free Bob Dylan from himself.”
Weberman said he finally met Dylan around 1971 when he knocked on his door.
“He said, ‘You’re not going to get into my life,’ and he slammed the door, so I figured I’d look through his garbage.”
Amid dirty diapers and kitchen scraps, he found personal letters and family photographs from the household, where Dylan lived with his wife, Sara, and their young children.
“I said, ‘This isn’t a garbage can, this a gold mine,’” he said.
Weberman began stalking the singer, pestering him on the phone and in person and writing about him in the East Village Other, an underground paper where he published images of finds from Dylan’s trash. He even asked readers if anyone could obtain a sample of Dylan’s urine. He wanted to test it for drugs.
Aron Kay, a Yippie buddy known for throwing pies in the faces of establishment figures, said Weberman, more than academic scholars, developed a visceral understanding of the songwriter and was determined to coax Dylan back to taking political stands about issues like the Vietnam War.
“A.J. always said, ‘You are what you throw away,’ and with Dylan, he went to the root of the matter: his garbage,” said Kay. “Even if Bob may not acknowledge it, it was a psychic cultural bonding between them. There was like a love-hate thing.”
Or perhaps Dylan wanted no involvement at all. He eventually stopped putting out items of interest, and asked Weberman to leave him and his trash alone. (...)
Today, celebrities rarely handle obsessive fans themselves; the task often falls to law enforcement. A man who stalked Ariana Grande pleaded guilty to various crimes, including burglary, after breaking into her home more than 90 times. Last year, a 33-year-old man was arrested twice in three days outside the TriBeCa home of Taylor Swift, another singer whose words are regularly the subject of speculation and dissection.
But Weberman’s behavior occurred in an era when the police were anathema to the counterculture, and mystic obsession was more plausible than it is today. For his part, Weberman says he was not nuts. He said he had regular conversations with Dylan by phone and at his Houston Street music studio before Dylan finally got fed up with him.
“I wasn’t stalking him,” Weberman said. “It was a relationship, like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I was interested in his poetry. It was political, not about his celebrity.”
A spokesman for Dylan declined to comment.
Weberman made his mania into a program, and expanded it. He taught a Dylanology class at the Alternate U., a countercultural center in the Village. He brought groups of students, and later other Dylan followers, to the MacDougal building. He expanded his explorations into the jetsam of other famous people, including former President Richard M. Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“I moved on to other garbage cans,” he said.
They barely noticed the 80-year-old man sitting next to them, armored in a winter coat and hat that he never removed. Then, the film began.
“This is all made up,” the man brayed at the screen.
“It’s not what you think it is.”
“It’s not what you think it is.”
“You’re scum!”
The group of women exchanged confused glances, but said nothing.
For more than half a century, the lives of Weberman and Dylan have been intertwined — though it is Weberman who has done most of the intertwining.
He began as one of Dylan’s keenest observers and fans, so intent on digging into the singer’s life that he sifted through trash cans outside 94 MacDougal Street, where the singer once lived. But he became Dylan’s nemesis, calling him a hoaxer and sellout, attacking him with an obsession bordering on madness.
Now that Dylan is getting a Hollywood moment, Weberman sees a renewed opportunity to advance the anti-Dylan agenda that has sustained him for decades. He is writing a new book interpreting Dylan’s lyrics, and answering a cascade of emails and calls asking for his take on the film.
Though his garbage-sifting has waned, his vendetta is as strong as ever.
Weberman, who has supported himself since his teens by selling weed, grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in Riverdale. He briefly attended Michigan State University before being kicked out after a pot arrest, and then settled in the East Village and eventually fell in with countercultural Yippie figures like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
It was the 1960s, and he helped organize smoke-ins, marijuana marches and pranks on establishment figures. Dylan provided much of the soundtrack.
“I said, ‘Wow, this guy’s a real revolutionary,’” he said. “I was into the civil rights movement. I fell for it.”
He fell hard. Weberman began laboriously compiling all of Dylan’s lyrics to study.
While listening to Dylan songs on acid, Weberman became convinced that Dylan’s cryptic lyrics masked dark meanings. He heard references to himself. He played Dylan’s records backward and claimed to hear certain messages, like “Don’t expose me” concealed in the obscure song “Time Passes Slowly.”
Pop stars have long been figures of obsession, dating back at least to the Beatles. The affable Liverpudlians inspired morbid theories among fans as their hair grew longer and their songs stranger. Some people played their records backward for secret messages and scoured album covers for clues that Paul McCartney was dead. Charles Manson, the cult-leader killer, took inspiration from their words, which he thought predicted a race war. A deranged fan killed John Lennon.
As a shape-shifting rock poet — a prophet with a nasal yowl — Dylan and his opaque words were particularly attractive for theorists of the literary, musical and conspiratorial varieties.
Richard F. Thomas, who teaches a class on Dylan at Harvard University, said Weberman’s belief that certain lyrics refer to him are “pretty much fantasy and beyond self-obsession.”
“It’s hard to know how serious or grounded he is at times,” the professor said of Weberman, adding, “To be fair, he was always after what makes the songs tick — not that he was going to find the answers in the trash.”
Weberman said his growing perception that Dylan was abandoning his leftist political messages had fueled his drive to shame the artist into “getting a conscience back.”
He took issue with albums like Dylan’s 1969 country offering “Nashville Skyline.” The record’s cover showed the smiling singer benignly tipping his hat, and its songs lacked overt political and social commentary.
He began claiming publicly that Dylan had become strung out on drugs — which Dylan denied — and had “sold out the left” by abandoning the political music that had defined his rise. He helped found the Dylan Liberation Front to re-radicalize Dylan and “free Bob Dylan from himself.”
Weberman said he finally met Dylan around 1971 when he knocked on his door.
“He said, ‘You’re not going to get into my life,’ and he slammed the door, so I figured I’d look through his garbage.”
Amid dirty diapers and kitchen scraps, he found personal letters and family photographs from the household, where Dylan lived with his wife, Sara, and their young children.
“I said, ‘This isn’t a garbage can, this a gold mine,’” he said.
Weberman began stalking the singer, pestering him on the phone and in person and writing about him in the East Village Other, an underground paper where he published images of finds from Dylan’s trash. He even asked readers if anyone could obtain a sample of Dylan’s urine. He wanted to test it for drugs.
Aron Kay, a Yippie buddy known for throwing pies in the faces of establishment figures, said Weberman, more than academic scholars, developed a visceral understanding of the songwriter and was determined to coax Dylan back to taking political stands about issues like the Vietnam War.
“A.J. always said, ‘You are what you throw away,’ and with Dylan, he went to the root of the matter: his garbage,” said Kay. “Even if Bob may not acknowledge it, it was a psychic cultural bonding between them. There was like a love-hate thing.”
Or perhaps Dylan wanted no involvement at all. He eventually stopped putting out items of interest, and asked Weberman to leave him and his trash alone. (...)
Today, celebrities rarely handle obsessive fans themselves; the task often falls to law enforcement. A man who stalked Ariana Grande pleaded guilty to various crimes, including burglary, after breaking into her home more than 90 times. Last year, a 33-year-old man was arrested twice in three days outside the TriBeCa home of Taylor Swift, another singer whose words are regularly the subject of speculation and dissection.
But Weberman’s behavior occurred in an era when the police were anathema to the counterculture, and mystic obsession was more plausible than it is today. For his part, Weberman says he was not nuts. He said he had regular conversations with Dylan by phone and at his Houston Street music studio before Dylan finally got fed up with him.
“I wasn’t stalking him,” Weberman said. “It was a relationship, like Verlaine and Rimbaud. I was interested in his poetry. It was political, not about his celebrity.”
A spokesman for Dylan declined to comment.
Weberman made his mania into a program, and expanded it. He taught a Dylanology class at the Alternate U., a countercultural center in the Village. He brought groups of students, and later other Dylan followers, to the MacDougal building. He expanded his explorations into the jetsam of other famous people, including former President Richard M. Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“I moved on to other garbage cans,” he said.
by Corey Kilgannon, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)