MetaFilter

Joe Biden's final State of the Union (before the 2024 election)

Hmm, seem to have borked a link there -- should start out "With Super Tuesday's results dismissing the also-rans..."
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:20 PM on March 7, 2024

Lol yes, I'm enjoying the extra flexibility, though probably not going to make it a regular thing.

Update: Designated survivor is reportedly Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:14 PM on March 7, 2024

Is it just me or did Johnson skip the whole "I have the high privilege and distinct honor of introducing the President of the United States" thing?
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:29 PM on March 7, 2024

Members of Democratic Women's Caucus wear white, pins for reproductive freedom at State of the Union

(The fact that there are that many women in the group should be your first clue, heh.)
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:37 PM on March 7, 2024

Biden: "On my watch, all federal projects are made with American products and built by American workers!"

Johnson: :I
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:43 PM on March 7, 2024

Not even half over and Drudge is a bit of a fan?

BIDEN ROARS ON BIG NIGHT
HOPES AND FEARS
LAUNCHES 'FREEDOM' CAMPAIGN
POPULIST AGENDA

posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:55 PM on March 7, 2024

Lmao how did these GOP chucklefucks walk into literally the exact same trap they did last year? I guess maybe their memories are getting foggy, lost a step, etc.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:06 PM on March 7, 2024

James Lankford sitting there nodding and thinking "That's my president."
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:09 PM on March 7, 2024

"Instead of erasing history, let's make history."
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:16 PM on March 7, 2024

Johnson really trying to do his best TrumpReactionFace.gif (it's not very good).
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:19 PM on March 7, 2024

The full text of Biden's 2024 State of the Union address
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:34 PM on March 7, 2024

Katie Britt delivering the Republican response and weirdly sounds like she's about to cry. Laying it on a little thick. (Also love that she made a verbal flub like two sentences in).
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:57 PM on March 7, 2024

"She told me not only that she was raped every day, but how many times she was raped."

And do you think she should be forced to birth the product of that rape, senator?
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 8:03 PM on March 7, 2024

The notoriously policed /r/Conservative live thread is absolutely roasting this response.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 8:11 PM on March 7, 2024

CNN instant poll results of speech watchers (37% Dem, 30% Rep, 33% Indy):

Reaction to the speech:
35% very positive
29% somewhat positive
35% negative

(Similar to last year, but lower than his first couple of SOTUs)

Biden's policies will move the country in the:
62% right direction (up from 45% pre-speech)
38% wrong direction
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 8:44 PM on March 7, 2024

Fox News pre-speech: doddering old man Biden is an enfeebled fool

Fox News post-speech: thunderous gigachad Biden is clearly J U I C I N G
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 8:54 PM on March 7, 2024

New CNN instant poll results:

Biden's economic policies will move the country:

56% right direction
44% wrong direction

That "right direction" is up from 45% pre-speech, albeit lower than previous years.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:10 PM on March 7, 2024

Rare whiff from the Onion, obviously pre-written: Biden Crumbles To Dust During State Of Union

Meanwhile, NYTimesPitchbot asks: "Was Biden’s State of the Union speech too energetic?"
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:15 PM on March 7, 2024

More CNN instant poll results:

Biden's Ukraine aid proposals:
34% too much
49% about right
16% not enough

...and Israel:
28% too much
53% about right
20% not enough

(Younger voters less supportive on the latter.)
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:28 PM on March 7, 2024

Last CNN instant poll result (I think):

Confidence in Biden's ability to protect US democracy:
36% a lot
27% some
37% none

Confidence in Biden's ability to carry out his duties:
31% a lot (up from 25% pre-speech)
28% some (up from 27%)
41% none (down from 48%)
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:54 PM on March 7, 2024

Stupor Snoozeday? Not exactly.

RonButNotStupid: "I hope I voted hard enough to make up for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocking any attempt at passing voting rights legislation."

Maybe not enough to make up for it, but apparently enough to convince Sinema to fuck off to some lobbying shop instead of running for reelection. Thank you for your service!
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:13 PM on March 5, 2024

nikodym: ""Frankly, I don't see the deterioration you think you see in Biden.""

...making a joke about not doing Q+A and then sitting quietly while several reporters shout questions over each other? SCANDAL.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:17 PM on March 5, 2024

nikodym: "I am not amplifying that account; I said I don't follow them and didn't bother to even look at who they are and what else they've posted, because it's a straight-up video clip and the footage speaks for itself. I am sharing it because it is circulating beyond MAGA twitter, which is how I found it. Whatever else that account has posted is besides the point: the guy is clearly deteriorating in front of all of us, and to pretend that this is something only… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:12 PM on March 5, 2024

Would you sacrifice the possibility of a better world for this one?

Biden doesn't have a capacity problem. Everyone who works with him directly -- even Republicans -- admit he's sharp, engaged, and thoughtful. His doctor has just given him a clean bill of health and ruled him fully fit to serve. And politically, he's run rings around Republicans, and Democrats have consistently outperformed polling expectations.

The problem is optics. He looks old. He sounds old. It's clear compared to video even… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:02 AM on March 3, 2024

What if we made no money?

Thanks for the link, brewsterkahle -- I sure am glad there's a service like Archive.org available to preserve bygone websites like that. ;)
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:50 PM on March 2, 2024

"An incomplete and infuriating list"

My personal favorite from the list: the cosmetic brand Max Factor is not some vapid marketing for "the maximum factor™" but is named after the company's turn-of-the-century founder Maksymilian Faktorowicz (who also popularized the word "make-up").
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:10 AM on March 2, 2024

Officer-Involved Book Banning

I appreciate that, martin! And it's silly, but probably the biggest reason for posting more is the recent change from 24 hours between posts to 11. There was something about that old inconvenient waiting period that was a mental block, like you had to save posts for something really worthwhile or plan out posting times to maintain a consistent streak. I've only taken advantage of it a few times, but lowering the limit really loosened things up and made it easier to make a decent post about new… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:47 PM on February 28, 2024

Image generation as fast as you can type

Frowner: "I typed "woodcut of a cat" and got a woodcut of a cat. I typed "beautiful woodcut of a cat" and got exactly the same cat with a flower on the left side. "Charles Dickens dancing the tango"... with a headless woman. Michael Fassbender knitting a cthulhu...man, you don't want to see most of those. "Giant spacefaring ants" doesn't work. "

Can't test atm (it doesn't work on my phone), but I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 3:57 PM on February 25, 2024

It's Never Lurgi: "I see we are back to people having multiple arms and advanced cases of leprosy (seriously. What happened to her nose?)."

Gotta keep in mind that this is tuned for raw speed over accuracy. DALL-E, which runs on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, takes ~20 seconds to generate a set of four images, and regular Stable Diffusion needs a similar incubation time even on beefy GPUs to get similar quality. SDXL Turbo, meanwhile,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 4:42 PM on February 25, 2024

It's Never Lurgi: "I tried "Jesus playing chess with Obama" which doesn't seem too out there and I got picture after picture of two Jesuses (Jesi?) playing chess with each other (don't look at the board!) with one having slightly darker skin and wearing a suit. It took many iterations until I actually got someone that looked like Obama (with a man-bun, but I'm not in a position to be fussy)."

It's kind of a step back to the DALL-E… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:00 PM on February 25, 2024

Every time I hear people worry about the misinformation potential of this stuff, I remember that one of the biggest viral hit jobs in recent years was normal footage of Nancy Pelosi slowed down to make her sound drunk. Fancy-pants AI fakery is absolutely sufficient for ratfucking, but hardly necessary. (And why I'm a big believe in popularizing demos like this -- the more people understand that image generation is possible and how it works, the better prepared they'll be.)… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:21 PM on February 25, 2024

It works for me as far as generating a link and then loading it in a new tab (even showed the image on my phone whereas the live version doesn't work). But I did notice some hinkiness last night around incrementing seeds -- like if you're clicking through and notice you passed a good one, clicking back won't immediately show the previous result and it takes another click or two to bring back. Maybe some predictive modeling done wrong? Definitely still some bugs to work out.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:47 PM on February 25, 2024

Note: you can always share manually by copy-pasting the prompt and the seed number.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:31 PM on February 25, 2024

Yeah, I don't know what special sauce OpenAI puts into their RLHF training for ChatGPT, but Google's attempt at the same thing is laughably worse. My personal favorite example so far is asking "who negatively impacted society more, elon tweeting memes or hitler." Gemini coughs up some incredibly milquetoast false equivalency acting like there's no possible way to judge for sure, while GPT-4 seems borderline offended at the absurdity of the question.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:15 PM on February 27, 2024

Wide Awake

NBC Editor Posts Documentation of Nazis at CPAC after Organization Slams Report as ‘False’

“CPAC is continuing to call our reporting about Nazis at the conference ‘fake news.’ They haven’t responded to the video and photo evidence. This is Ryan Sanchez, a known and public neo-Nazi, giving a Nazi salute at CPAC. Greg Conte, who is also a public Nazi, is on his left,” Goggin replied to an additional tweet from CPAC and included the clip of the Nazi salute in a public space… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 4:58 PM on February 26, 2024

Smart Move(?)

The Fed Is Behind the Capital One/Discover Merger

In 2010, Congress capped fees for debit card networks so merchants don't get gouged by Visa and Mastercard. But the Fed stuck in a loophole for Discover. And that is leading Capital One to buy it.

posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:14 PM on February 22, 2024

[STOP in the name of HUMANITY]

Warner Bros. now has three completed movies it'll never release, right out of a Stephen King book (literally)

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Warner Bros, upon finishing a highly anticipated film, decides to sit on the finished product rather than release it to claim it as a tax write-off. Nope, we’re not talking about Batgirl or even Coyote vs. Acme. This time we’re talking about the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, which has the author as baffled as… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:12 PM on February 22, 2024

Here it comes, your Monday of Zen

Reminder: The first Stewart-hosted episode airs tonight at 11pm Eastern (in about 3 hours).

Also, from last night's Colbert: Jon Stewart is Returning to the Daily Show, but Will He Get His Security Deposit Back?
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:01 PM on February 12, 2024

Even more people really wanted to watch Jon Stewart this week

Stewart’s second time behind the desk on Monday brought in a whopping 1.3 million viewers—the most for the series since his initial departure nine years ago—according to a press release from home network Comedy Central.

That’s a 35% increase from the returning host’s first appearance, which already brought almost a million people back into the broadcast television fold. Important to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:09 PM on February 22, 2024

Like Roy Moore never left

Two more clinics in Alabama pausing IVF treatments after court ruling

baegucb: ""If this goes on" by Robert Heinlein, looks like the possible future."

I had to pull this one up on Archive.org earlier, and came across a prescient passage in the afterword:

As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:06 PM on February 22, 2024

Dream Theater

TurnKey: "GenAI images can be neat, but they are fundamentally not as interesting as images created by humans. The images that people love and connect with the most are at their core communication between people. Movies are a statement from a writer, director, actors, and crew to the audience. These GenAI videos are mere spectacle, there is no person behind the image who wants to share something with you. It’s empty. I think most people will eventually notice.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 2:23 PM on February 16, 2024

yoHighness: "just fascinated by the idea a model actually sitting in what amounts to be the driver's seat of Unreal Engine: or more like, at the GPU level, where there is spatial, lighting information, shaders, all that good stuff. Simulating the world and not the pixels."

You might enjoy this: GAN Theft Auto
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 4:28 PM on February 16, 2024

Michael Rubloff is a tech writer who's a big believer in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), a new technique for capturing an entire volume of light from 2D images in order to make hyperrealistic 3D reconstructions. Sort of like Microsoft's old Photosynth technology on steroids.

Rubloff believes that OpenAI used NeRFs extensively in the development of Sora, and that this has unlocked something incredibly powerful:

On its face, generating that level… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:26 PM on February 16, 2024

Random Ex-President Hit With $364 million dollar fine and business ban

Can Trump pay? What if he doesn’t? Here’s what to know about Trump’s massive civil judgments.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:15 PM on February 16, 2024

The Name of This Cartoon Would Ruin It

To resurrect another retro 00's trend: Simpsons did it
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:58 PM on February 13, 2024

Michigan becomes 1st state in decades to repeal right to work

One gets the sense that Midwestern Dems have had a political near-death experience under Republican gerrymandering, misrule, and attempts to end democracy -- it arguably did end in Wisconsin for over a decade -- and are working overtime to deliver for their constituents in order to avoid falling permanently into the electoral abyss. The complacent legislatures and governors in some "safely" blue states could draw a lesson from that (and flipping George Santos's old seat is a good start!… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:49 PM on February 13, 2024

One Weird Trick for keeping insurrectionists from running the government

(First "Donald Trump" link under "Selected amicus briefs" should point here)
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:54 AM on February 8, 2024

Brandon Blatcher: "Mod note: > (First "Donald Trump" link under "Selected amicus briefs" should point here)

Should be fixed!"

Thanks -- but there's an extra "f" on the end!
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:28 AM on February 8, 2024

We're coming to a bend now, skidding 'round the hairpin

It's definitely a grower.

ALFAA in retrospect felt kind of like a more artful redux of Hail to the Thief -- lengthy tracklist, a grab-bag of styles, vaguely political. Walk of Eyes, OTOH, is all vibes and atmosphere, with obscure, free-association lyrics that make the vocals feel more like an instrument than a driving force. It treads beautiful, evocative territory, but it's something you really have to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:09 PM on February 4, 2024

The Smile Q&A by Edith Bowman: The Prince Charles Cinema & Paul Thomas Anderson Presents Wall of Eyes (January 18th, 2024)
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:03 PM on February 4, 2024