Favorites March 18th 2023

Middle East Intrigue, Image Generators, and Bitcoin Fanatics

June 2022, San Diego

Ethan Mollick @emollick

I can't get over how many details Midjourney adds to images. Here are "sea otters reading a book" & "river otters reading a book." Not only does it get the species differences and environments & reflections right, but look how the sea otter is holding the book with its foot!

Oh, and apparently in Midjourney v5 they've mostly fixed the weird fingers problem.

M.G. Siegler @mgsiegler

The sound of inevitability…

M.G. Siegler @mgsiegler

Let’s be honest, this was always going to end with Trump, alone in his room, watching Fox News as they cut live to footage of Trump, alone in his room, getting arrested while watching Fox News.

When I first saw this post by Siegler, I thought he was crazy. Recent episode of Serious Trouble indicated that it was unlikely they were actually going to charge Trump over the case in question. But today Trump is stating that he expects to be arrested Tuesday.

southpaw @nycsouthpaw

NYT has the story of how surrogates for Reagan conspired to keep the American hostages in Tehran from being freed as an election stratagem.

nytimes.comA Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-electionA prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine agenda.

Kai Ryssdal points out this is similar to Nixon undermining LBJ. Another commenter goes further, "every republican president since eisenhower has been elected either with the explicit support of a foreign adversary or with a minority of the vote"

Neoliberal 🌐🇺🇦 @ne0liberal

Occupational licensing is bad.

Threads

• There was some drama about how Balaji, a wealthy crypto fanatic, bet an economist that one bitcoin would be worth over a million dollars within 90 days. This belief is a bit ridiculous to say the least. Amusingly, Matt Levine explains that if he really believes this, he's making the wrong bet, it's more likely he's trying to manipulate the bitcoin market.

• Short thread about how the massive progress in AI is likely to hit a wall because some industries have barely adopted computers. The possible fixes would be pretty weird.

• 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, a thread speculating as to why Bush chose to invade. TL;DR: to demonstrate to other countries, especially Iran, that the US was powerful and willing to use force.

• Thread with details on the experiment where GPT-4 pretended to be blind and used TaskRabbit to defeat a CAPTCHA. It's not that it was impossibly smart, just way more capable of operating towards a goal autonomously than the researchers expected.