Made these carrots on the side and they were delicious though if I did it again I would brush the carrots with the olive oil and pour/brush on the marinade since it didn’t stick very well. But they were absolutely delicious. Carrots!
All around a superb meal and both went straight into Plan To Eat which is a superb meal planning web site and app. (If you like it and can wait until Black Friday, they always have a good deal. We’ve renewed it for years this way.)
Ted Lasso has been a fixture in my house for a long time. We watched the first two seasons all at once, once they were available in their entirety. Then we worked our way through the most recent (and final) season as it aired with the rest of the world.
As the weeks went on and the characters I knew and loved only matured more and more as their personal growth continued. No spoilers because many people may not have had time to complete their journeys and this show is too precious to take anything away from it.
This show has been a solution to the problem of the 2020s. It’s been a bright light and a relentlessly safe and positive place to dwell in a world that has been anything but.
We are now watching the series again from the beginning to reintroduce ourselves to our friends on the pitch for the second time. To meet them and see them as old friends, knowing where their lives would take them.
Ted Lasso is a salve. It’s not a cure, but a medication I look forward taking and hope to never develop an immunity.
It struck me tonight, as I was watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds why I love this franchise. I grew up as a The Next Generation kid so Captain Picard is my captain. I watched the show originally piecemeal as an episode would re-air on network television. I had never seen the entire series until Netflix got the rights and I could make my way through it. I binged it over the summer and fall of 2011 (which is somehow 12 years ago???)
Some of the episode didn’t hold up. I enjoyed the space jellyfish, found the Just Say No to drugs episode and didn’t care for the episode which revolved around the crew getting stuck in the holodeck for one reason or another.
But as I laid in bed tonight, watching the latest version of my beloved space show, I connected with my friends on the pitch. I love Star Trek because it’s positive. Because it’s a happy show where problems are solved and the world, while terrifying and deadly, is still full of good people trying to do their best.
Sure it has its problem. It’s not a perfect show but a reflection of the world. There’s still bigotry and hatred. There’s plenty of war and generational struggle to overcome. Just because our crew doesn’t need money to pay their bills doesn’t mean there isn’t inequality and class struggles.
As long as there are new treks to the stars, I will ride alongside my friends in space as I have my friends on the pitch.
The internet is user-generated content. We’re all making things and contributing whether publicly or “privately”. With our names or without. “AI” is years of our data being scraped, packaged and sold back to us.
ChatGPT and the other Large Language Models (LLMs) are little more than someone who is incredible well-read with perfect recall. They’re taken the internet’s data and packaged it and put a neat little plain language front-end on it for us to interact with.
The reason chatGPT can write such good fanfiction is because it scraped 32billion words from AO3. And that was in 2019. So there’s likely even more fanfic in the large language model today. If you look at this and say, “but it’s only fanfiction, who cares?” Would it be acceptable to other writers?
It’s abhorrent that a program which purports to support a community of writers has based at least 32 billion words of its program on the writing of a community that did consent to have their work used.
…
Writing fic is not stealing, but taking fic and using it to develop a dataset, and then offering that dataset to the public without having gotten permission from literally anyone is ethically gross.
What if your entire history of writing that you had publicly posted to the Internet was scooped up and used without your permission for another company to make money from?
Well, that it likely the cast as Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen and Nitasha Tiku writing for The Washington Post have researched and reported on.
To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter — the heart of the modern web — prohibit scraping, which means most data sets used to train AI cannot access them. Tech giants like Facebook and Google that are sitting on mammoth troves of conversational data have not been clear about how personal user information may be used to train AI models that are used internally or sold as products.
So while your posts to social media may not be in ChatGPT, it’s certainly going to be included in Meta/Facebook’s own product. And they’re long history of scooping up and and all data, it’s certainly far more extensive.
What about if you have ever written in a blog on powered by WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot and Live Journal? Then you’ve included too.
My own site is included in the data set at rank 1,953,276.
As with any story that talks about data, there’s a section at the end describing how the Post came to this data and the 15.1 million unique domains included in this dataset.
How do you feel about your writing being included in this gigantic data sets and being used to build products?