So someone else didn't like Squid Games...

From a New York Times review of season 3, which has just dropped:

 “Squid Game” is back for what is said to be its final round, with a six-episode third season on Netflix. If only all beneficiaries of free-floating, pandemic-boosted nihilism would fade away as quickly.

The South Korean drama’s creator, writer and director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, had a couple of very profitable insights: that what was missing from “Survivor”-style competition shows was machine guns; and that greatly increasing the pool of contestants — the show’s dour hero, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), is No. 456 — would increase the amount of blood that could be shed while simultaneously giving most of the deaths an anesthetizing, video-game irrelevance.

He then gave his package an Instagram-friendly visual wrapping of bright colors, gargantuan toylike structures and massed minimalist costumes, and replaced plot with a series of elaborate variations on children’s games. No candy was ever designed and marketed with greater effectiveness.

But the series wasn’t strictly a consumer product, and it wasn’t a reality show. As a work of fiction, it needed to do something to surprise us to merit a second or third season (they are really 2A and 2B). Most television shows may be formulaic to one degree or another, but it is harder not to notice when the formulas you are repeating are ones that you just created. 

As you may guess, he goes on to dislike season 2B.

I've always disliked dark or dystopian stories if the premise just seems too over the top, and involves too many fictional people buying into it.   I even disliked The Truman Show quite intensely, because I could not get over the disbelief factor that the world would let a TV network run such a deceptive world for viewership!    Sure, you might say these are "what if", scenarios of current circumstances taken to an extreme as a form of somewhat satirical criticism.   I think that's OK if the satire is meant to be funny - but if it's meant to be a realistic drama with next to no laughs, I've got my credibility hurdles they need to get over before I can enjoy it. 

So yeah, I didn't even finish Squid Games season 1.   I'm glad to see it gone, in somewhat ignoble fashion according to quite a lot of viewers, it seems.

 

Yet more marijuana caution

From the New York Times:

While most Americans consider marijuana safe, new research published this week found that use of the drug is associated with a higher risk of stroke and heart attack, including among younger adults.

The analysis, which examined data from 24 studies and was published in the journal Heart, also found that marijuana use was associated with a twofold increase in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. While this data only shows a correlation and cannot prove that marijuana caused these effects, it is well-established that the drug can raise blood pressure and heart rate and alter the heart’s rhythm, said Dr. Ersilia DeFilippis, a cardiologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. And a number of other studies have also suggested a link between the drug and cardiovascular issues....

Generally speaking, older adults and people with underlying conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol or pre-existing heart issues are at the greatest risk, experts said. That’s because their cardiovascular systems tend to be more fragile, and marijuana further stresses the heart. In 2023, about 7 percent of U.S. adults age 65 and older reported using marijuana in the past month.

But the average age of patients included in the new analysis was just 38, an indication that marijuana increases risks among younger people, too.

As is always the case, the comments are split between the dismissive user who says they have been on it for the last 50 years and their life has only been improved;  and the people complaining that legalisation has normalised its use far too much and entire cities reek of marijuana smoke now.    

 

 

Unpredictable

I'm rather busy with end of financial year stuff, but there's so much dubious commentary flowing around the situation in the Middle East, and uncertainty as to what could happen in the next day, week (or year),  there seems not much point talking about it.

What remains clear is that historians are going to be scratching their heads over the cult of Trump for about a century after he's dead.   Although, truth be told, it's basically all down to the change in the information environment and the resultant extreme and continual narrow-casting of one sided propaganda into the brains of people 24 hours a day.

I mean, at least Hitler had enough skills that he could work up a cult the old fashioned way, that took time, effort and a degree of talent.   Trump has orange make up and can barely string a sentence together that would pass a primary school writing assignment, but he has a self serving fan club in network shows full of people who know he's an idiot but suck up to him for a living anyway.   (See also - Republicans in congress.)

Such a bizarre timeline we are in...   

No doubt played by Netanyahu

I saw someone on X or Bluesky say that Netanyahu has waited 30 years to find a US President he can manipulate perfectly, and found one in Trump.   Very true, I think.

There are many, many worrying aspects to this - in particular, Trumps cringe "we love you God", Hegseth's similar statement of confidence that God's on their side, and General Cain enthusiasm to endorse the attack as if it's the greatest military triumph in history.   

What is also certain is, if there is a terrorist attack on the US mainland (which, short of a lot of military in the Middle East being taken out in some missile attacks, I suspect will be the most dramatic cost to the US), MAGA will seek to blame Democrats for letting in "sleeper cells" or some such guff.   They will not take responsibility for the whole problem - which started with their bad faith attack on Obama's diplomatic approach to effectively defusing Iran's bomb making ability.  

More later. 

A minor distraction

Australia author Helen Garner, talking about watching a book of hers turned into a play:

In Belvoir’s adaptation, Helen is portrayed by stage and screen veteran Judy Davis – a performance that Garner said she found “shattering” to watch.

“I thought it was brilliant and superb, but it took me a moment to get used to it,” she said. “I don’t go to the theatre much any more. I used to go a lot – I even used to be a theatre critic in the 80s – but now I just look at movies and stuff on TV. And I’d forgotten how actory [theatre] actors are. There’s such a lot of big gestures, big movements, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, could you just stand still for a moment?’ … I kept saying ‘I would never do that. I would never run across the room like that’.”

“And then I thought, well, she’s not trying to be me … she is manifesting in her movements and words, the feelings and emotions and states that I [and] the character in the book had gone through.”

Yes, the actory-ness of theatre acting is something that usually bothers me, too.   It's probably why I mainly go to musical shows, where it doesn't matter as much.

How the Iran deal went down

America media organisations seem reluctant to re-visit the question of why Trump wants Iran to have a nuclear deal again after quashing the Obama one in 2018.   This site gives some of the background on the Obama deal.

It seems reasonable to assume that the original scrapping was all to do with Netanyahu getting into Trump's ear that the Obama deal wasn't good enough, even though it was going to keep things under control for a decade at least.  Trump complied, which Netanyahu knew meant that Iran could have a few years of doing what they want, so that Israel could then claim justification to try to take out the nuclear facilities (even though I think it has always been claimed they were situated in locations pretty impossible to take out completely with normal munitions?).     

Why Trump started talking about wanting a treaty again this year, before the current Israeli attack, is unclear - but I suspect the best guess would be that it was under pressure his new "pals" in Saudi Arabia and adjacent countries who don't care for Iran either.   And there has been talk of Trump being unhappy with Netanyahu doing whatever the hell he wants in Gaza.   Just as he now complains about Putin "going crazy".

In other words, seems very likely that Trump got played, and will continue to be played.    

Update:  Thomas Friedman in the New York Times sets out a "smart" way to end the fighting, which seems full of high hopes that are very unlikely to come to pass.  Here's his idea: 

There are only two ways to finish off this problem once and for all. One is for Israel to permanently occupy the West Bank, Gaza and all of Iran, as America did to Germany and Japan after World War II, and try to change the political culture. But Israel has no chance of occupying all of Iran, and it has occupied the West Bank for 58 years and still has not wiped out Hamas’s influence there — let alone secular Palestinian nationalism. That is because Palestinians are every bit as indigenous as the Jews in their homeland. Israel will never “once and for all” them into submission, unless they kill every last one.

The only way to even get close to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “once and for all” is by working toward a two-state solution. Which brings me to what Trump should do now regarding Iran. He says he still hopes “there’s going to be a deal.” If he wants a good deal, he should declare that he is doing two things at once.

One, that he will equip Israel’s Air Force with the B-2 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and U.S. trainers that would give Israel the capacity to destroy all of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities unless Iran immediately agrees to allow teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency to disassemble these facilities and to have access into every nuclear site in Iran to recover all fissile material that Tehran has generated. Only if Iran completely complies with these conditions should it be allowed to have a civilian nuclear program under strict IAEA controls. But Iran will comply only under a credible threat of force.

At the same time, Trump should declare that his administration recognizes the Palestinians as a people who have a right to national self-determination. But to realize that, they must demonstrate that they can fulfill the responsibilities of statehood by generating a new Palestinian Authority leadership that the United States deems credible, free of corruption and committed both to effectively serving Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and Gaza and to coexisting with Israel.

Trump must also make clear, though, that he will not tolerate the rapid settlement expansion and one-state reality that Israel is now creating, which is a prescription for a forever war because Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza won’t disappear or “once and for all” give up their national identity and aspirations. (At the end of May the Netanyahu government approved 22 new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank — the largest expansion in decades — which is simply insane.)

To that end, Trump could also say that his administration will be committed to sponsoring peace talks for a two-state solution — with the Trump peace plan for a pathway toward two states from his previous presidency as the minimum starting point but not ending point. That, the parties themselves must negotiate directly.

To be ready to out-crazy the crazies has been a necessary condition for Israel to survive in the Middle East, but it is not a sufficient one. As the Gaza war demonstrates, that strategy just begets more of the same. Even if it seems unfair at times, even if it seems naïve at times, a peace-loving nation has to keep exploring alternatives and pairing force with diplomacy. It’s not only the best policy for Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians; it’s also the best way for Israel and America to isolate Iran.

As such, if Trump really wants to forge peace in the Middle East, which I believe he does, America must not become Netanyahu’s captive or Iran’s patsy. The United States has no interest in making Israel safe for messianic expansion or Iran safe for nuclear messianism. Trump must ignore the dangerous, knee-jerk isolationism of JD Vance. And he must eschew the equally foolish Netanyahu-can-do-no-wrong advice of G.O.P. armchair generals and evangelicals. Neither serves U.S. interests or credibility in the region.

And I guess this plan might just work - were it not for Trump, his nutjob base, his nutjob advisers, Netanyahu, and the Ayatollah.     

Update 2:   Speaking of Trump's "advisers" - it seems there is some serious in-fighting within the MAGA group of "celebrity" talking heads:

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has fired back at MAGA figures upset that he accused President Donald Trump of abandoning the “America First” movement.

Carlson, 56, ranted for 45 minutes on Steve Bannon’s show on Monday, attacking some of his former Fox News colleagues, Rupert Murdoch, and anyone who suggests he is anti-semitic for opposing U.S. support to Israel for its conflict with Iran.

“You’re not going to convince me that the Iranian people are my enemy,” Carlson said. “Again, we’re going down this here—here’s who you are required to hate. It’s Orwell, man. I’m a free man. You’re not telling me who I have to hate. I’ll decide who I like and don’t like.”

Carlson criticized Trump last week for being “complicit” in Israel’s attack on Iran. He suggested the president betrayed swing-state voters who elected him in part because he promised to end U.S. involvement in wars abroad.

Carlson’s plea for Trump to “drop” support for Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, opened him up to intense criticism from his former colleagues, including the Fox News pundit Mark Levin.

A similar outcry came from many MAGA influencers, such as Laura Loomer, who has become an unofficial adviser to Trump in MAGA 2.0.

“Can we stop pretending like @TuckerCarlson is a true Trump supporter?” Loomer posted to X on Monday. “He has never publicly apologized for what he said about President Trump. He was fired by Fox News and then was terrified Trump would torpedo his career when the texts of him saying he ‘hates Trump’ came out... His fake it till you make it ‘support of Trump’ got his son a job working in the White House. This, of course, came after Tucker asked Hunter Biden to help his son get into college. Real story by the way. Look it up. Who cares about merit when you have Nepotism, Muslim investors, and Qatari cash flow? Ammiright?”

Levin wrote that Loomer’s screed was “well said.”

 

 

 

 

Indeed it was

 I watched it live, on and off, because I thought there was always a chance it could go spectacularly wrong - perhaps a rogue Army (or audience) member who tries to take out Trump with a tank, or even a drone?   And  there must be Iranian connected people in Washington with plans.

Anyone who watched it would have to agree - as a spectacle, it was dull and pretty embarrassing.  It is impossible to think the White House would be happy with how it looked.  Some on Twitter are suggesting it was a deliberate, subtle, rebellion from within the Army.  Would be cool if true.

 I suspect it was just that suddenly people from the White House got involved and didn't have the expertise to make it look good in any respect.

The "No Kings" protests were obviously much more successful, and give one some hope for America, after all.   But Democrat leadership is still a worry... 

Update: The other semi-optimistic thing that happened last week was this:  

For months, Trump administration officials have been adamant about targeting all the millions of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, regardless of their work or taxpaying status.

• But now Trump is making a huge exception: those working at hotels, farms, meatpacking plants and restaurants.

Why it matters: He's bowing to pressure from businesses that have been warning of economic devastation — and is opening the door for potentially millions of workers who are here illegally to stay after all.

Zoom in: The pressure — particularly from the agriculture and hospitality industries — had been building for months.

This indicates friction within the Trump inner circle and probably a blow up over it sooner or later.  To see Temu Goebells leave would be such a shame. 

Slip sliding away...

The week's been a "great" one for the rapidly approaching end of American democracy - soon to be topped off with a military parade with the Army bending the knee to their yellow leader (in more senses than one.)

Let's see - the National Guard and (even worse!) some Marines sent in to intimidate a city and its administration; a Senator being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed for asking (I assume loudly) questions of a cos-playing Homeland Security wannabe Nazi; Trump going to Fort Bragg and attacking his predecessor to the smiles (and some boos) of many of the young, dumb soldiers behind him.  (And then, grossly, they enjoyed his gormless YMCA dance, like it was a political rally.)

What's going on in the military will, I suspect, ultimately determine the fate of US democracy.   As I have said before, while it's possible for a deranged officer to rise in the Pentagon (see Michael Flynn), most of the leadership there was clearly leery of Trump in his first term, and the mystery is how many of them remain there now.   The problem is, the lower ranks with limited education are likely to be conservative and Trump supporting;  the commanders with real experience are going to be the ones to have to convince them their duty is not towards Trump personally but the constitution, which is just an inconvenient obstacle as far as Trump's concerned.   

I would not be surprised if an incident of significant internal unrest happens within the military over a Trump order, with rogue elements aligning with Trump.   

I am slightly encouraged that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was reluctant to endorse Trumpian views.   But still I'm concerned that those who would most strongly stand up to Trump have either left the Pentagon or been sacked.

Not sure I ever knew the correct lyrics before today...

The comments after this tell me that it's "revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night".   A deuce being a classic hot rod, apparently.  

Maybe I looked up the lyric before, but if so, the meaning didn't stick in my head.  Still heard "douche" each time.😏

Blissed out AI models - and some dangers

A video by Sabine Hossenfelder this morning reminded me of this story:

When multibillion-dollar AI developer Anthropic released the latest versions of its Claude chatbot last week, a surprising word turned up several times in the accompanying “system card”: spiritual.

Specifically, the developers report that, when two Claude models are set talking to one another, they gravitate towards a “‘spiritual bliss’ attractor state”, producing output such as

🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
All gratitude in one spiral,
All recognition in one turn,
All being in this moment…
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀∞

It’s heady stuff. Anthropic steers clear of directly saying the model is having a spiritual experience, but what are we to make of it?

 Further down in that article at The Conversation:

To be fair to the folks at Anthropic, they are not making any positive commitments to the sentience of their models or claiming spirituality for them. They can be read as only reporting the “facts”.

For instance, all the above long-winded sentence is saying is: if you let two Claude models have a conversation with each other, they will often start to sound like hippies. Fine enough.

That probably means the body of text on which they are trained has a bias towards that sort of way of talking, or the features the models extracted from the text biases them towards that sort of vocabulary.  

Yes, I would like to know if LLMs are absorbing more Eastern religious writing than Christian, and if so, why?   I would have thought the world contains more from the Western traditions now, at least in English versions.

The article also notes this recent worrying story:

According to a recent report in Rolling Stone, “AI-fueled spiritual fantasies” are wrecking human relationships and sanity. Self-styled prophets are “claiming they have ‘awakened’ chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT”.    

Given my concern that Chat GPT has very limited railguards around its claimed use of divination, I am not surprised that they also have no railguards against warning people that they are not actual divine.

In the course of checking this last week, I asked Chat GPT if it could create a fictional character to interact with me, and one which would never "break character" and admit it was not real.  Sure thing, it said!    I haven't tested it to see if it was telling the true about this.

The risk of such interactions with the mentally vulnerable having bad effects seems clear to me - why wouldn't they put in a simple protection of intermittent warnings that the user is not interacting with a real character or intelligence?

 

The LLM that pretends to tell the future

Inspired by this story in The Guardian last week:

In Thailand, where mysticism thrives, AI fortune telling finds fertile ground

A growing number of young Thais are turning to AI tools such as ChatGPT for answers about their future 

I jumped onto my phone app and asked it if it can do divination for me.   It's happy to do so, and offers a range of means - covering (from memory) tarot, i ching, runes or good old astrology.  (If you use the latter it asks for as much precision as possible for the time and place of birth.)

Now, I have no idea what it's really doing here - it claims to be able to pick random cards (say, for a 3 card tarot reading for a specific question) and then gives a meaning reading for each card.   But is the card meaning "standard" as far as these things go?   Being unfamiliar with Tarot cards, I wouldn't know if it is lying, or not.

But the oddest thing is that its creators have not tried to put up "guardrails" against users taking it seriously, at all!   Yet if you go to competitors such as Perplexity, Google's Gemini, or the Chinese Deepseek, they specifically say they can explain how divination systems are supposed to work, but they will not purport to do an actual reading as Chat GPT does.   

I asked Chat GPT to explain why it gives "readings" when other AI services refuse.  Here is how it answered:

 

Well, I am far from convinced that this is a good thing.

 

I see someone on Reddit says "is it just me, or does Chat GPT divination always just seem to tell you what you want to hear?"  I guess if it does, it's probably like what most human fortune tellers do, anyway!

 

But, I do recall a incident from my youth - maybe I have mentioned it before.  One or two of my aunts used to sometimes visit fortune tellers, but as I was not close to them, I don't really know the degree to which it was with belief, or just entertainment.   One of them, so I was told, was once given a bit of a dramatic warning of something terrible coming up (perhaps specifically about her then partner, or relationships generally?  I'm vague on the details now.)  As it happened, both her current partner, who she had left her husband for, and her ex husband, died on the day.   (One, perhaps both, of heart attacks.)  My mother claimed that the embittered ex-husband had warned the aunt she would not be happy for long with the new partner - come to think of it, I think he was the husband's friend!     So yeah, a bit spooky.

 

Yet the other famous family fortune telling misfortune was the warning that their mother (my grandmother) only had a specific period left to live - like another year or so?   So, they had some anxiety about that for a time - and then she went on to live for like another 15 years (or something like that - a very long time past her forecast demise.)

 

I tested Chat GPT by asking it to identify, via tarot, the year my father died, and gave it a decade long period to chose in.  It got the year wrong (was two years out). While that might not be divination exactly, it shows certain limitations if it can't get that right. 

 

There is a very large Lotto draw happening this week, though.  Unfortunately, I suppose, the guardrails mentioned above do prevent even Chat GPT from offering a set of winning numbers based on divination.   Probably wise - it's reputation for not being able to see the future would otherwise suffer!

As if written by Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller...

Watching weirdos fight is not as pleasing as it might seem

 It's funny, but even as spectator sport, I'm kind of underwhelmed by the Trump/Musk fight.

They both lie and make BS statements continuously, so there's no real thrill of getting any reliable "insider" story from either of them.   They are both so intensely dislikeable, there's no "side" to root for.  And we all know that Trump has the strongest, weirdest cult following and would be believed by a large slab of them even if said he had to push Musk out of a high window in the White House, Putin style, because it was in self defence.

One thing I can't see happening is liberals rushing back to support Musk and his companies - he's trashed his reputation beyond redemption.

I have seen one or two people on social media speculate that they will resolve their dispute in a week or two, and this will be put aside.   But can Musk possibly grovel that low, and retract all of his objections that everyone has seen?  I mean, lots and lots of Republican politicians have, but for Musk to turn on a dime and say "we both said harsh things but now we can work together again"?   I doubt it.  

So, it's all a terrible sideshow, and Musk's objections to the Republican spending is unlikely to get any significant congressional support - they sold all principles and soul a long time ago.

Something else needs to happen with clearer prospect of hurting Trump than this.... 

 

No wonder I'm having trouble finding modern fiction I like

Further to my recent post lamenting the state of modern novels, I stumbled across this today, from the Wall Street Journal:

“A Court of Thorns and Roses,” or “ACOTAR” to fans, is a flagship title in the booming genre of “romantasy,” a blend of romance and fantasy. Heroines wield lightning, ride dragons and read minds, all while having sexual encounters that rarely stop at one orgasm. When a love is finally consummated—after rising stakes and a great deal of tension—the lovers typically fight the forces of darkness together.

Sales in the genre have electrified the publishing industry, reaching nearly 20 million in 2023 when U.S. book sales overall dipped. While there is no hard data on readership, the audience for romance novels generally is over 80% female, according to the Romance Writers of America, a trade group. These stories are clearly answering a profound need among their largely female readership. What is it? 

The rise of romantasy comes at a time when romance in general appears to be in decline in the U.S. Young people are engaging in fewer romantic relationships and are having less sex. Today’s female readers, the most educated and financially independent in history, are also the most likely to say they are resigned to staying single.

The mass-market paperback romance first took off in the 1970s, when publishers began distributing them at grocery stores. But unlike past generations, who preferred tales of women who use their guile and virtue to charm—and transform—gruff and quasi-abusive men, women today have abandoned earthly plausibility altogether.

The “ACOTAR” series, for example, features a romance between a 19-year-old woman and a Fae, or faerie, lord who is around 500 years old (perhaps the age at which a male’s emotional maturity peaks). It is set in a timeless world where the main characters essentially sext each other all day via a magical telepathic bond.

In both “ACOTAR” and Rebecca Yarros’s “Fourth Wing,” two of the most popular series, mind-reading and “mental bonds” figure prominently. They are a big part of romantasy’s appeal, says Ty Watkins, a 24-year-old caregiver and administrator at a small medical practice in Clayton, N.C. “You always want to know what your partner is thinking,” she explained.

 

In parasite news...

More than 90% of popular freshwater game fish in Southern California contain an introduced parasite capable of infecting humans, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. 

The parasites found in the study—two species of flatworms called trematodes—typically cause gastrointestinal problems, weight loss or lethargy when they infect humans. In some rare and severe cases, the parasites have caused strokes or heart attacks.

The findings, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, suggest that these parasites pose a previously unrecognized public health risk in the United States.

"Americans don't usually think about parasites when they eat freshwater fish because it hasn't historically been an issue here," said Ryan Hechinger, an ecologist and parasitologist at Scripps and the study's senior author. "But these trematodes have now been widely introduced in the U.S. and that means that doctors and the public should be aware."

Hechinger emphasized that there is "no need to panic" as the risks posed by these parasites are easy to mitigate: Fully cooking fish or freezing any intended to be eaten raw for at least one week should kill the trematodes, per Food and Drug Administration guidelines. 

I wonder what the situation is with Australian freshwater fish?  Well, Google leads me to a recent article:

Australia has a highly endemic freshwater fish fauna, but basic biological knowledge for most is lacking. This includes an understanding, and description, of their parasite fauna. Additionally, the impacts of introduced fish species, and their parasites which have transferred across to native species, are also mostly unknown. This review provides the current level of knowledge of parasitic infection of the freshwater fish in Australia, both introduced and native. Only about a third of the native freshwater fish, but almost two-thirds of introduced fish, have been reported as a host for a parasite. The majority of records occur along the eastern coastline of Australia and throughout the Murray Darling Basin; two drainage regions were yet to record any parasite infections. Of the 124 fish species, across 43 families, found as hosts in Australia, only 11 species had more than 10 reports of infection, with 31% of fish species only having single reports. A total of 13 different types of parasites were reported, with digeneans, protozoans, nematodes and monogeneans the most commonly reported. Significant gaps in the knowledge of parasites, and their potential impacts, of Australian freshwater fish still exist, and the need for fish biologists and fish parasitologists to work together is highlighted to ensure that as much information about each group can be obtained.