so preoccupied with whether or not they could

Hi, my name is Alex Goldman and I host the
@hyperfixedpod.bsky.social I used to host the Reply All podcast, and I have found that so many people who liked Reply All have no idea Hyperfixed exists. It's super frustrating because I have no idea how to reach those people.

Photo of stacked packages of Dr. Pepper flavored marshmallow Peeps.

What hath God wrought? 🤢

I’m just really glad I could help you connect with folks who have a greater sense of agency over all this than I do. I love hearing that we can fix this—find the perpetrators, regulate the space effectively. I may not personally feel that way, but God I wanna believe.

I was always excited to see what @agoldman.bsky.social's next big project would be, but never dreamed I'd find out about his new podcast by being interviewed for it. Really impressed with Hyperfixed, glad to have spoken with them, and thankful for their attention to this really pernicious problem.

Painting by Bob Eggleton of astronauts on the moon watching as a nuclear war unfolds on earth.

This old painting by Bob Eggleton came to mind involuntarily.

Buster Keaton The cameraman 1928 Trying To Change in Dressing Room YouTube video by Classics

Watching all four #Artemis II astronauts don their spacesuits simultaneously reminds me of the changing room scene from “The Cameraman.” 😂

youtu.be/4Tv8rG-3oq8

Fellow space nerd. 🖖 Did you catch the part the next day where they were talking for an extended time with Houston, sans context, about getting straws for the urine bags and a supply of syringes? I was relieved when it turned out they were just repurposing stuff to stow a back up supply of water.

I’d be morbidly fascinated to see a few scenes from old Buster Keaton films upscaled and brought to a higher frame rate. But mostly to appreciate his acrobatics. I wouldn’t consider it restoration and I wouldn’t want such things considered canonical in any way.

Wait, isn’t this from “Bringing Out the Dead?”

I mean I'm glad that I'm helping educate young people on TikTok and all that but also my 72 year old father just told me that he told all of his friends that he meets weekly at Waffle House in south Georgia to watch my Facebook videos about how large language models work.

I hope you’re aware of this podcast, Mols. www.ifbookspod.com

Still of the vampire from Nosferatu.

Guardian photo of the Andrew looking like the vampire from Nosferatu.

Nosferandrew, courtesy of @theguardian.com.

Sorry, lame attempt at a nerdy joke. Maybe you got it and it was just too bad to laugh. But if not: They’re both highly regarded independent documentary filmmakers…who would not actually be making this show.

Is that the season directed by Ross McElwee or the one by Chris Hegedus? 😂

Cc @oddletters.bsky.social ‘“CEO said a thing!” journalism’ sounds like something of your coinage. lol

At this point, I have neither the skills nor the time to learn them. But the idea is free for the taking. 😀

When I was younger, I always thought it'd be a blast to make an animated interview with the stick figure guy in the style of "Inside the Actor's Studio," using the most hilarious and confusing of these signs as B-roll.

10 Things to Know Before Using AI Chatbots for Therapy Here are 10 important things to know before you use an AI chatbot as your therapist.

Which is, you know, bad news for the significant number of people now treating chatbots as therapists or leaning on them for emotional support. 9/9

And, now that advertising is in the mix, the incentive is going to be to reduce our mental landscape to a whether we're in a buying mood or not (insert your own "retail therapy" pun here), so as to identify—or create—optimal moments to insert ads. 8/9

Rather, their version of parsing feelings is mostly going to revolve around reducing our complex emotional state to whether we're engaged enough to keep paying a subscription or visiting the client's website. 7/9

Blunt approximations are also less costly, so in some senses more attractive to businesses. McStay says, similarly, the designers of AI that's tuned to our emotions are unlikely to be ultimately worried about our true emotional state in the way a psychologist might be when they try to help us. 6/9

To throw in another relevant example, algorithms that show us ads don't have to capture our true intent in viewing webpages or clicking links to be valuable to brands—they just have to be right enough, often enough to improve on untargeted campaigns. Blunt approximations are commercially viable. 5/9

The catch is, much as Google Search is not a library, but ultimately a commercial product that serves us results based in no small part on either Google's interests or those of the companies paying for SEO, in the long run AI algorithms are likely also going to be attuned to business interests. 4/9

A classic Google Search lets you type "cameras" without any modifiers and intuits, through context and machine learning, whether you likely meant "how cameras work," "where to buy a camera," "camera reviews," etc. But with AI tools resolving ambiguity will also involve reading our tone. 3/9

I'm paraphrasing here, but the essence of McStay's argument is that AI interfaces are going to be increasingly designed to interpret our emotions and states of mind in order to give us the information for which we're looking. 2/9

Emotional AI The Rise of Empathic Media

Ever since Google and OpenAI announced the introduction of ads to their AI products, I can't stop thinking about an argument from @andrew-mcstay.bsky.social's 2018 book, "Emotional AI." 1/9

Will do!

De nada!

I know the feeling with other classes. Will send how along the syllabus when I’ve finished it. And in the meantime, I’ll think whether there’s anything that stands out that’s worth a standalone recommendation.