I also think we're living through an 'economic model' change such that old indicators aren't the right metrics for anticipating what the 99% consider 'good'.
I posted this a week or two ago, and increasingly think that the 'Fissured' economy has decent explanatory power of why many macro metrics can look good, but we're not even getting the gold old Ford Trickle Down benefits.
“The fissured economy generated early returns, but its costs and contradictions have grown increasingly burdensome. Unlike the virtuous cycle of Fordism—in which high investment drives high wages which drive strong demand—the sequestration of corporate profits away from the most labor- and capital-intensive pieces of corporate value chains breeds financialization, stagnation, and heightened inequality. Despite ideological pretentions of fiscal rectitude, the neoliberal model relies upon debt to sustain consumption—whether private household borrowing, as in the run-up to the financial crisis, or large government budget and trade deficits, which have prevailed for most of the neoliberal period—exacerbating household precarity and systemic financial instability.”
Well... the real mistake you're making is that you should substitute 1lb 90% lean beef with nice fatty ground pork.
But yes, inflation is (mostly) forever... wages drive inflation, but they simultaneously lag inflation... so you never catch-up to inflation until inflation is mostly over... then you get back to where you were. So the ride sucks, but the silver lining is that all of your long-term fixed rate loans are both cheaper to pay and the underlying asset is worth more.
Those whom the late-70's inflation run did not kill were made stronger. Millennials in 20 yrs will be clogging Boca on their bloated asset sales. GenX? We had the pleasure of living through austerity.
Sure, I think election day should be a holiday anyway... I'd just as soon also end 'off-year' cycles while were at it -- make the party bigger every two years!
But there's also another remote path to consider. Recently I took a wine certification test (for fun), and had to download an app to monitor my desktop for foreign apps and take the test; and, I had to use my phone camera to document that it was I taking the test (alone) and uninterrupted. For a dinky certification.
The process was slightly clunky, but not nearly as clunky as I was afraid it was going to be. We could invest in making it much less clunky, more secure, and downright fun! Now, I sell software that could analyze the digital images and all the logs, so 'fraud' could be flagged digitally (I'm waving my hands here in typical Sales Rep fashion) to improve voter confidence. The actual vote log would be separate from the digital image 'spoil' log -- so you'd have a two step process to keep the privacy of the vote separate from the act of voting. Voila, remote, secure, private voting.
"I helped my wife navigate the absentee ballot process, but I didn’t change her vote or tell her who to vote for (although I certainly gave her my opinion!). Her vote reflected her own ideas about who should win the primary."
We did the same... besides my wife I also had 2/4 voting aged children around the table as we googled candidates and picked who we were voting for.
That said, I still think it's a blind spot for voting integrity that casting secret ballots at a neutral supervised polling place is specifically designed to solve. I mean, an argument against giving women the vote was that they'd just vote as their husbands told them -- the polling place gave her the ability to vote *without* her husband watching how she voted. Or the old precinct captain buying votes, etc.
Having the ballot extant and 'guaranteed' with a signature is, in fact, a lesser protection against overbearing influence, bribery, and coercion.
I've ironically commented as spokesman for the Patriarchy that I should have as many votes as I have family members; and now I do.
On the plus side, having a voting party in an upper middle-class household is hardly a fraudulent activity that will sway elections; It's just that having ballots cast and secured and monitored is more than a polite fiction that we correct-opinion-havers should feel free to jettison in the name of convenience.
"Like everywhere else, elections are nationalized, and the folks in Iowa are just as informed as everyone else. Iowa primary voters have the same curated social media and news media feeds everyone else does. These news media and social media feds are set up just the way they like them, just like everyone else does."
This is a good observation. Social media feels like it's been here forever, but it really hasn't been; we're still adapting to new political realities.
The horror of WW2 (or WW1 on the continent) is death to the youth.
What emerged, slowly at first, but conclusively relatively quickly is that the at risk population was overwhelmingly 65+. Overwhelmingly. 857k deaths out of the 1.1M (75%) you cite were in that bracket. If we drop one cohort down to 50-64 the number is 1M/1.1M or 93%.
It was precisely the eerie fact that young people were virtually unaffected that impacts the remembering of it. Which isn't to say we should be indifferent to a wickedly virulent and lethal virus that shortens the life expectancy of the elderly; its to say that public health responses should have prioritized the elderly even more than it did.
My 85 yo uncle died of pneumonia in Jan 2020 -- it was probably plain old pneumonia, given the date -- and we hope his life wasn't shortened by bad healthcare or a particularly bad strain of a virus. What we know after the fact is that the virus did accelerate death among the folks who were likely going to die of pneumonia. An horrific compression measured in a handful of years or at the oldest segment, seasons. By May 2021, according to the CDC, 79% of adults 65+ in the US were vaccinated; but statistically, the 65+ vaccination curve was completed in March 2021 (it mostly flattened after that). As of today, it is estimated that 90%+ of the 65+ cohort (51M/53M) is vaccinated.
If the deaths had been distributed any differently; if we swapped 50-64 and 65-74 with 0-17 and 18-29 putting 450k (40%) of the deaths in children/young adults? The psychic horror would be akin to WW2.
As it is, public policy for schools after March 2021 is likely they key demarcation point for analysis - bearing in mind as well that School Teachers were prioritized equally (sometimes more than, depending on the 'First Responders' categories) the elderly beginning in Jan 2021. And children and adults up to 50 were statistically not at risk.
[TT3] Bees... appropriately posted on the feast of St. Ambrose...whose symbol is bees. We tried a few seasons of keeping bees, but never had any success and gave it up. One thing about the beekeeping folks is that they will try/build anything. 3cm insulation boards (if it really helps) would likely be commercialized. The only tricky part would be wind/water proofing, access and top boards.
+1 on the Anker charger. And to +1 on that, consider the Travel Charger that is also a battery.
Basically you plug-in your travel charger to re-charge your phone at night, and whenever you are on the road, it's fully charged as a back-up. Powers a Mac just fine too. For me it replaced the laptop charger entirely... smaller than both PC and Mac chargers, but larger than a simple adapter. Net gain on the travel front.
It was very cozy; we had a nice corner deuce, the service was very good, and the food was extremely well prepared without 'trying too hard' for novelty (the besetting sin of places like this). The wine pairings, however, tried a little too hard for novelty and left me unimpressed for the price.
But YES, the Dabnog. I asked the waiter about the Dabnog because we were scheduled to have a Sauternes with dessert and I knew they would clash horribly. It was at this point he informed me that the Sauternes was scheduled for *second* dessert (some sort of Yam thingy) and that the Dabnog would go perfectly with the first dessert of apple crisp. So we popped for the Dabnog.
It was very boozy, too boozy, I'd say. A Boozy that added heat, but not a lot of flavor. So I was a little disappointed, but enjoyed trying it with first dessert. Back when we were milking goats, and getting raw milk/cream plus our pastured eggs we'd make a scratch eggnog that was sublimely airy and rich without being cloying and syrupy... so I was more focused on their promise of using fresh eggs/milk and hoping for a better base. Booze is easy to add, getting the milk/eggs right is the hard part. They got a B for the dairy aspect and B- for the booze.
But hey, we're weirdos who make their own eggnog from dairy/eggs we harvest on our own farm, so not necessarily a fair judge.
I'm pretty sure you'd be conflating unrelated issues with regard this particular situation regarding homeschoolers using a private school diploma loophole.
It's not solving for racism, it's solving for credentialism.
Sure, as I mentioned, each state has all sorts of variations... Virginia (for a while anyway) had a program where you could plop a kid in front of a screen for the requisite number of hours each week/month/year and as long as all the hours were accounted for and were equal to the number of hours required for being in a public school... you could get a Virginia 'homeschool' program that would keep you sort of in the Public System.
But I don't know anyone who ever did that -- for obvious reasons.
What seems to be happening is that there was an easier way to grant a diploma to your kid that was easy enough for 9,000 +/- families to go that route.
The reason I call it a loophole is that usually there's a pretty simple requirement to document the activity in the 'school' related to the child... which the article implies isn't happening. I mean, I have to keep records of my own children's education... so it's odd if I was granted the ability to confer a diploma without proof of any sort of educational activities.
But yeah, every state has different requirements... some better, some worse for homeschooling... but this issue doesn't strike me as a key problem --- more of an accident of not paying attention to shifting assumptions regarding HS diplomas.
Yes, it definitely goes in the opposite direction. I mean, I completely get the short term business aversion to the concept... but I'll see your Marvel saturation bet and raise it with an unfulfilled Master and Commander demand.
To mitigate the financial risk, I'd have given Sir Ridley money to do 'Napoleon Arises: Corsica to Italy" Or, maybe 'Napoleon and Josephine' with no Military History other than teasers. Just to manage the risk and see if there's an appetite for more.
Save Sir Ridley from himself.
I don't think Braveheart is the cure for what ails Hollywood, though; at least not for subject matter like this.
State regulations differ by state... so I can't exactly say what's going on in LA... but as a general rule, there isn't really a concept of a 'Homeschool Diploma' that you could sell. None of my kids have a (HS) diploma.
Here's what the article is specifically talking about:
"Unlike public schools, formal homeschooling programs or traditional private schools, nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana don’t need state approval to grant degrees. Nearly every one of those unapproved schools was created to serve a single homeschooling family, but some have buildings, classrooms, teachers and dozens of students."
It seems, rather, that some folks are creating Private Schools in order to grant a degree. It's a Private School loophole to deal with the fact that there isn't really a degree that is conferred for homeschooling.
For example, this is the VA Dept of Ed policy on granting diplomas:
"Typically, school boards do not award diplomas to students who are not enrolled in public schools under their supervision. Therefore, students taught at home may not receive diplomas unless those students are enrolled in a correspondence program or other program that awards a diploma or other exiting credential.
Neither VDOE nor public school divisions maintain any academic records, such as transcripts or diploma status, for students who have been home schooled. Thus VDOE cannot verify a home schooled student’s high school graduation status for military recruiters, colleges, universities, technical schools, employers, or any other entity."
Which is why we 'close the loop' by having our kids attend Community College and basically get a 5-yr High-School Associate's Degree... or just apply to College as a Home schooled student -- and the Colleges verify what information they want to accept or not.
There are better ways to open-up educational pathways ... I have lots of ideas that would re-invigorate public and communal education, if not the current broken institutions we have -- but I prefer incremental improvements with rational actors rather than radical 'smash them all and let the DOE sort them out' approaches.
I haven't seen it, but I can see where these are exactly the traps one would fall into with this material.
Obviously the cure is for Hollywood to promise more money to do it right in a 4-9 movie sequence... the Napoleonic Cinematic Universe. I mean, not that *I'd* pick Napoleon as my first choice... but if you do pick him, then lean in and do it right!
I'm only half joking... you can decide which half, though.
I'm not sure that's good news for us or the industry.
I'd like to see the board (or a good insider take) on what the real issue(s) was/were but having this emerging tech under a non-profit board who's primary charter was alignment is better than abandoning any (theoretical) notion of alignment ... and putting it in the hands of a hyperscaler? That's like 101 Supervillain plot twist.
Now, I'll admit that I was skeptical that functioning LLM's were going to survive contact with commerce, but if the board was indeed worried about #2 and (heaven forefend) #3 -- then losing those concerns to MSFT seems a bad play for the rest of us.
My other purely pragmatic question is this: what's the level of effort to replace the estimated 1.7 trillion parameters in ChatGPT 4? Just having the people who got you the working models with those parameters doesn't mean you've got a working system; and, in the 'rush' to recreate what was lost... what shortcuts on alignment are we taking? Finally, what if 'Alignment' itself is simply a lie.
Disclosure, I work on enabling tech that makes deploying AI possible within companies -- this is not an advanced space with people who know what they are doing. Not since Y2K have I seen board-level involvement in IT decisions being driven by a fear of being left behind and simply mandating that the CIO get the company an AI strategy. It's crazy out there...
Maybe? But I suspect it would be unpacking slightly different baggage. But yes, the financial restraints and artistic challenges of 'understanding' Napoleon (or any historical figure) weigh heavily against success.
The leading contenders for explanatory power that I've seen so far:
1. Material: Altman was building a for-profit empire of secondary industries to support OAI.
2. Greed: Alignment issues with regards the commercial interests of, well, the globe.
3. Technology: Recent breakthroughs point at possible Singularity pathways.
Board in any of the above is compelled to act in the best interests of the charter.
Result? TBD.
But, it appears that MSFT has basically just scooped up OpenAI team without the OpenAI platform... not sure if this sticks or what it means. But one simple takeaway is that Non-Profit was never going to survive the encounter with world changing wealth potential.
Tell me there aren't daddy issues as the primary motivator.
I was re-watching 'Bridge Over the River Kwai' recently, and it hit me that the primary drama centers on Colonel Nicholson's refusal over his and his officers' to engage in manual labor as justification for committing not just himself but his officers to suffer torture. The film was made in 1957 from a book published in 1952 describing events in 1942, which is to say it isn't really history but a fictitious reenactment of a fictitious event where the audience shares exactly the same moral end ethical code.
65 years later, as an historical artifact? It's starting to feel alien.
So here's where I point out that movies have as a primary objective to conform the material to their audience's framework... either to make us feel good, or feel bad, or feel conflicted. But the subject of every movie is us. Which is why a 'good' historical movie about Napoleon would feel weirdly alien in almost every respect and should dislocate ourselves as the subjects. And I'm just not sure that there's a single person enmeshed in the practical and artistic constraints of movie making who could now (or ever) make such a thing.
Mission accomplished, no steakums for us... got a medium sized 8-point buck. Probably a bachelor buck waiting to take down the lord of the forest... but not the king stag himself. That's par for our neck of the woods -- bachelor's hall we call it.
On “It’s The Economy, Stupid, But That Depends on Your Definition of “Economy””
I also think we're living through an 'economic model' change such that old indicators aren't the right metrics for anticipating what the 99% consider 'good'.
I posted this a week or two ago, and increasingly think that the 'Fissured' economy has decent explanatory power of why many macro metrics can look good, but we're not even getting the gold old Ford Trickle Down benefits.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/what-should-be-the-goal-of-us-industrial
“The fissured economy generated early returns, but its costs and contradictions have grown increasingly burdensome. Unlike the virtuous cycle of Fordism—in which high investment drives high wages which drive strong demand—the sequestration of corporate profits away from the most labor- and capital-intensive pieces of corporate value chains breeds financialization, stagnation, and heightened inequality. Despite ideological pretentions of fiscal rectitude, the neoliberal model relies upon debt to sustain consumption—whether private household borrowing, as in the run-up to the financial crisis, or large government budget and trade deficits, which have prevailed for most of the neoliberal period—exacerbating household precarity and systemic financial instability.”
"
Well... the real mistake you're making is that you should substitute 1lb 90% lean beef with nice fatty ground pork.
But yes, inflation is (mostly) forever... wages drive inflation, but they simultaneously lag inflation... so you never catch-up to inflation until inflation is mostly over... then you get back to where you were. So the ride sucks, but the silver lining is that all of your long-term fixed rate loans are both cheaper to pay and the underlying asset is worth more.
Those whom the late-70's inflation run did not kill were made stronger. Millennials in 20 yrs will be clogging Boca on their bloated asset sales. GenX? We had the pleasure of living through austerity.
On “Rasmussen’s Cheaters”
Sure, I think election day should be a holiday anyway... I'd just as soon also end 'off-year' cycles while were at it -- make the party bigger every two years!
But there's also another remote path to consider. Recently I took a wine certification test (for fun), and had to download an app to monitor my desktop for foreign apps and take the test; and, I had to use my phone camera to document that it was I taking the test (alone) and uninterrupted. For a dinky certification.
The process was slightly clunky, but not nearly as clunky as I was afraid it was going to be. We could invest in making it much less clunky, more secure, and downright fun! Now, I sell software that could analyze the digital images and all the logs, so 'fraud' could be flagged digitally (I'm waving my hands here in typical Sales Rep fashion) to improve voter confidence. The actual vote log would be separate from the digital image 'spoil' log -- so you'd have a two step process to keep the privacy of the vote separate from the act of voting. Voila, remote, secure, private voting.
"
Volume III, Anarchy in America.
"
That's not the issue; the issue is people voting under the scrutiny of someone else.
I'm talking less about outright fraud than what Tocqueville might have called 'soft-fraud'.
"
"I helped my wife navigate the absentee ballot process, but I didn’t change her vote or tell her who to vote for (although I certainly gave her my opinion!). Her vote reflected her own ideas about who should win the primary."
We did the same... besides my wife I also had 2/4 voting aged children around the table as we googled candidates and picked who we were voting for.
That said, I still think it's a blind spot for voting integrity that casting secret ballots at a neutral supervised polling place is specifically designed to solve. I mean, an argument against giving women the vote was that they'd just vote as their husbands told them -- the polling place gave her the ability to vote *without* her husband watching how she voted. Or the old precinct captain buying votes, etc.
Having the ballot extant and 'guaranteed' with a signature is, in fact, a lesser protection against overbearing influence, bribery, and coercion.
I've ironically commented as spokesman for the Patriarchy that I should have as many votes as I have family members; and now I do.
On the plus side, having a voting party in an upper middle-class household is hardly a fraudulent activity that will sway elections; It's just that having ballots cast and secured and monitored is more than a polite fiction that we correct-opinion-havers should feel free to jettison in the name of convenience.
On “Iowa, Where Political Narratives Go To Die, Gussies Up For Funerals”
"Like everywhere else, elections are nationalized, and the folks in Iowa are just as informed as everyone else. Iowa primary voters have the same curated social media and news media feeds everyone else does. These news media and social media feds are set up just the way they like them, just like everyone else does."
This is a good observation. Social media feels like it's been here forever, but it really hasn't been; we're still adapting to new political realities.
On “Thursday Throughput: Schooling Edition”
I don't think its memory holed the way you imply.
The horror of WW2 (or WW1 on the continent) is death to the youth.
What emerged, slowly at first, but conclusively relatively quickly is that the at risk population was overwhelmingly 65+. Overwhelmingly. 857k deaths out of the 1.1M (75%) you cite were in that bracket. If we drop one cohort down to 50-64 the number is 1M/1.1M or 93%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/
It was precisely the eerie fact that young people were virtually unaffected that impacts the remembering of it. Which isn't to say we should be indifferent to a wickedly virulent and lethal virus that shortens the life expectancy of the elderly; its to say that public health responses should have prioritized the elderly even more than it did.
My 85 yo uncle died of pneumonia in Jan 2020 -- it was probably plain old pneumonia, given the date -- and we hope his life wasn't shortened by bad healthcare or a particularly bad strain of a virus. What we know after the fact is that the virus did accelerate death among the folks who were likely going to die of pneumonia. An horrific compression measured in a handful of years or at the oldest segment, seasons. By May 2021, according to the CDC, 79% of adults 65+ in the US were vaccinated; but statistically, the 65+ vaccination curve was completed in March 2021 (it mostly flattened after that). As of today, it is estimated that 90%+ of the 65+ cohort (51M/53M) is vaccinated.
If the deaths had been distributed any differently; if we swapped 50-64 and 65-74 with 0-17 and 18-29 putting 450k (40%) of the deaths in children/young adults? The psychic horror would be akin to WW2.
As it is, public policy for schools after March 2021 is likely they key demarcation point for analysis - bearing in mind as well that School Teachers were prioritized equally (sometimes more than, depending on the 'First Responders' categories) the elderly beginning in Jan 2021. And children and adults up to 50 were statistically not at risk.
"
[TT3] Bees... appropriately posted on the feast of St. Ambrose...whose symbol is bees. We tried a few seasons of keeping bees, but never had any success and gave it up. One thing about the beekeeping folks is that they will try/build anything. 3cm insulation boards (if it really helps) would likely be commercialized. The only tricky part would be wind/water proofing, access and top boards.
On “The Thirteenth Annual Mindless Diversions Unsolicited Shopping Guide”
+1 on the Anker charger. And to +1 on that, consider the Travel Charger that is also a battery.
Basically you plug-in your travel charger to re-charge your phone at night, and whenever you are on the road, it's fully charged as a back-up. Powers a Mac just fine too. For me it replaced the laptop charger entirely... smaller than both PC and Mac chargers, but larger than a simple adapter. Net gain on the travel front.
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-GaNPrime-PowerCore-Charger-Portable/dp/B09W2H224F?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Last Few Normal Weeks of the Year”
It was very cozy; we had a nice corner deuce, the service was very good, and the food was extremely well prepared without 'trying too hard' for novelty (the besetting sin of places like this). The wine pairings, however, tried a little too hard for novelty and left me unimpressed for the price.
But YES, the Dabnog. I asked the waiter about the Dabnog because we were scheduled to have a Sauternes with dessert and I knew they would clash horribly. It was at this point he informed me that the Sauternes was scheduled for *second* dessert (some sort of Yam thingy) and that the Dabnog would go perfectly with the first dessert of apple crisp. So we popped for the Dabnog.
It was very boozy, too boozy, I'd say. A Boozy that added heat, but not a lot of flavor. So I was a little disappointed, but enjoyed trying it with first dessert. Back when we were milking goats, and getting raw milk/cream plus our pastured eggs we'd make a scratch eggnog that was sublimely airy and rich without being cloying and syrupy... so I was more focused on their promise of using fresh eggs/milk and hoping for a better base. Booze is easy to add, getting the milk/eggs right is the hard part. They got a B for the dairy aspect and B- for the booze.
But hey, we're weirdos who make their own eggnog from dairy/eggs we harvest on our own farm, so not necessarily a fair judge.
On “Napoleon And The Spasmodic Lamb Chop of Destiny”
Perfect baptism gift.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/27/2023”
I'm pretty sure you'd be conflating unrelated issues with regard this particular situation regarding homeschoolers using a private school diploma loophole.
It's not solving for racism, it's solving for credentialism.
"
Sure, as I mentioned, each state has all sorts of variations... Virginia (for a while anyway) had a program where you could plop a kid in front of a screen for the requisite number of hours each week/month/year and as long as all the hours were accounted for and were equal to the number of hours required for being in a public school... you could get a Virginia 'homeschool' program that would keep you sort of in the Public System.
But I don't know anyone who ever did that -- for obvious reasons.
What seems to be happening is that there was an easier way to grant a diploma to your kid that was easy enough for 9,000 +/- families to go that route.
The reason I call it a loophole is that usually there's a pretty simple requirement to document the activity in the 'school' related to the child... which the article implies isn't happening. I mean, I have to keep records of my own children's education... so it's odd if I was granted the ability to confer a diploma without proof of any sort of educational activities.
But yeah, every state has different requirements... some better, some worse for homeschooling... but this issue doesn't strike me as a key problem --- more of an accident of not paying attention to shifting assumptions regarding HS diplomas.
On “Napoleon And The Spasmodic Lamb Chop of Destiny”
Kubrick's A&E Napoleon!
One hour episode for each notecard.
"
Yes, it definitely goes in the opposite direction. I mean, I completely get the short term business aversion to the concept... but I'll see your Marvel saturation bet and raise it with an unfulfilled Master and Commander demand.
To mitigate the financial risk, I'd have given Sir Ridley money to do 'Napoleon Arises: Corsica to Italy" Or, maybe 'Napoleon and Josephine' with no Military History other than teasers. Just to manage the risk and see if there's an appetite for more.
Save Sir Ridley from himself.
I don't think Braveheart is the cure for what ails Hollywood, though; at least not for subject matter like this.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/27/2023”
State regulations differ by state... so I can't exactly say what's going on in LA... but as a general rule, there isn't really a concept of a 'Homeschool Diploma' that you could sell. None of my kids have a (HS) diploma.
Here's what the article is specifically talking about:
"Unlike public schools, formal homeschooling programs or traditional private schools, nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana don’t need state approval to grant degrees. Nearly every one of those unapproved schools was created to serve a single homeschooling family, but some have buildings, classrooms, teachers and dozens of students."
It seems, rather, that some folks are creating Private Schools in order to grant a degree. It's a Private School loophole to deal with the fact that there isn't really a degree that is conferred for homeschooling.
For example, this is the VA Dept of Ed policy on granting diplomas:
"Typically, school boards do not award diplomas to students who are not enrolled in public schools under their supervision. Therefore, students taught at home may not receive diplomas unless those students are enrolled in a correspondence program or other program that awards a diploma or other exiting credential.
Neither VDOE nor public school divisions maintain any academic records, such as transcripts or diploma status, for students who have been home schooled. Thus VDOE cannot verify a home schooled student’s high school graduation status for military recruiters, colleges, universities, technical schools, employers, or any other entity."
Which is why we 'close the loop' by having our kids attend Community College and basically get a 5-yr High-School Associate's Degree... or just apply to College as a Home schooled student -- and the Colleges verify what information they want to accept or not.
There are better ways to open-up educational pathways ... I have lots of ideas that would re-invigorate public and communal education, if not the current broken institutions we have -- but I prefer incremental improvements with rational actors rather than radical 'smash them all and let the DOE sort them out' approaches.
On “Napoleon And The Spasmodic Lamb Chop of Destiny”
I haven't seen it, but I can see where these are exactly the traps one would fall into with this material.
Obviously the cure is for Hollywood to promise more money to do it right in a 4-9 movie sequence... the Napoleonic Cinematic Universe. I mean, not that *I'd* pick Napoleon as my first choice... but if you do pick him, then lean in and do it right!
I'm only half joking... you can decide which half, though.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/20/2023”
I'm not sure that's good news for us or the industry.
I'd like to see the board (or a good insider take) on what the real issue(s) was/were but having this emerging tech under a non-profit board who's primary charter was alignment is better than abandoning any (theoretical) notion of alignment ... and putting it in the hands of a hyperscaler? That's like 101 Supervillain plot twist.
Now, I'll admit that I was skeptical that functioning LLM's were going to survive contact with commerce, but if the board was indeed worried about #2 and (heaven forefend) #3 -- then losing those concerns to MSFT seems a bad play for the rest of us.
My other purely pragmatic question is this: what's the level of effort to replace the estimated 1.7 trillion parameters in ChatGPT 4? Just having the people who got you the working models with those parameters doesn't mean you've got a working system; and, in the 'rush' to recreate what was lost... what shortcuts on alignment are we taking? Finally, what if 'Alignment' itself is simply a lie.
Disclosure, I work on enabling tech that makes deploying AI possible within companies -- this is not an advanced space with people who know what they are doing. Not since Y2K have I seen board-level involvement in IT decisions being driven by a fear of being left behind and simply mandating that the CIO get the company an AI strategy. It's crazy out there...
On “Sunday Morning! “Napoleon” by Ridley Scott”
Maybe? But I suspect it would be unpacking slightly different baggage. But yes, the financial restraints and artistic challenges of 'understanding' Napoleon (or any historical figure) weigh heavily against success.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/20/2023”
Soooo... the whole OpenAI thing.
The leading contenders for explanatory power that I've seen so far:
1. Material: Altman was building a for-profit empire of secondary industries to support OAI.
2. Greed: Alignment issues with regards the commercial interests of, well, the globe.
3. Technology: Recent breakthroughs point at possible Singularity pathways.
Board in any of the above is compelled to act in the best interests of the charter.
Result? TBD.
But, it appears that MSFT has basically just scooped up OpenAI team without the OpenAI platform... not sure if this sticks or what it means. But one simple takeaway is that Non-Profit was never going to survive the encounter with world changing wealth potential.
On “Sunday Morning! “Napoleon” by Ridley Scott”
Tell me there aren't daddy issues as the primary motivator.
I was re-watching 'Bridge Over the River Kwai' recently, and it hit me that the primary drama centers on Colonel Nicholson's refusal over his and his officers' to engage in manual labor as justification for committing not just himself but his officers to suffer torture. The film was made in 1957 from a book published in 1952 describing events in 1942, which is to say it isn't really history but a fictitious reenactment of a fictitious event where the audience shares exactly the same moral end ethical code.
65 years later, as an historical artifact? It's starting to feel alien.
So here's where I point out that movies have as a primary objective to conform the material to their audience's framework... either to make us feel good, or feel bad, or feel conflicted. But the subject of every movie is us. Which is why a 'good' historical movie about Napoleon would feel weirdly alien in almost every respect and should dislocate ourselves as the subjects. And I'm just not sure that there's a single person enmeshed in the practical and artistic constraints of movie making who could now (or ever) make such a thing.
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I got so bored I turned it off as it was building to the final thing. Struck me as a made for TV movie.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Getting Ready for Thanksgiving”
Personally never liked cooking in someone else's home; but I'm sure it will be fun for you though....
4 mos is towards the end of peak portability... so good move on your part.
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Mission accomplished, no steakums for us... got a medium sized 8-point buck. Probably a bachelor buck waiting to take down the lord of the forest... but not the king stag himself. That's par for our neck of the woods -- bachelor's hall we call it.