I’m hanging out in Auburn, Washington with my mother and sisters, and yesterday I go to see my son and daughter-in-law and grandson. Mom is looking pretty good, fortunately. I might get some opportunities to get around the area and explore.
As I anticipated, it’s cool, gray, and raining. Perfect weather!
Warning: Old Man Rant coming up.
My first flight on an airplane was in 1975. I was flying from Seattle to Indianapolis to start my first year of college. It was OK. My family went right out to the gate with me, I boarded by seat number, I happened to sit next to a schoolteacher from Brownsville, IN who told me all about Indiana — the weather, the history, geography, cool differences from Washington state to watch out for. I still remember his kindness.
The flight was only remarkable in hindsight, because the airlines now have fucked up a mundane form of transportation beyond recognition.
Security theater is ridiculous. Get in a long line, take off your shoes, pull out any personal electronics, go through a scanner, get patted down by a guy in a blue uniform. Today is a light traffic day, so I was amused that there were more security personnel than passengers in the terminal.
Boarding is a nightmare of privilege. Now we board in the order First Class, Diamond Medallion, Premium Select, Comfort+, Sky Priority, Main Cabin 1, 2, and 3, and Basic Economy (on Delta; every airline has their own series of ranks). You have to pay extra to go first on the plane. I’m afraid I’m a Basic Economy person, every time.
I’m flying on Sun Country today, which is one of those no-frills airlines, so maybe I’m something even lower than Basic Economy. You will pay extra for every piece of luggage you bring on, which is fair, I guess. I’ve pared everything down to the bare essentials — everything I need for 8 days away packed into one tight little backpack. I sorta fondly remember that first flight when I packed a year’s worth of clothes into an oversized cardboard suitcase held together with packing tape. No extra cost for the flight, but this was before wheelie bags and I blistered my hands dragging that thing across the university campus.
When you buy a ticket through Sun Country, you don’t actually buy a seat — you have to go through a map of the plane where each seat has a dollar value attached, depending on their desirability. I booked a $12 seat, the lowest, because I didn’t want to spend $50 for an aisle seat near the front. I assume standing in an aisle is not an option.
And then there’s the lack of reliability — you pay for a ticket, but that’s not a promise that they’ll deliver you to your destination. They can cancel your flight at any time, there’s no recompense. There are often delays. I’ve learned that if they announce a 15 minute departure delay, that actually means they’re going to nudge that time upwards while you wait. It’s going to be hours, at least, and often ends in cancellation.
It’s all about corporate greed anymore. They’ve taken a service that used to be routine and reliable, and turned it into a hellish gamble, with the only guarantee being that the airline will get its money, whether they deliver or not.
I’d rather stay home anymore. But I’ve put my money in the slot, pulled the handle, and I’m hoping what comes up is a safe arrival in reasonable time in Seattle. So far, I’m not enjoying myself.
It’ll get better once I’m out of an airport.
It’s just getting better and better.
Last week, Musk had said that “all” X Premium Plus subscribers would get access to “Grok,” a “rebellious” ChatGPT competitor with “fewer guardrails” that Musk has said was trained on Twitter’s own data, something that Microsoft once tried, creating the world’s most racist chatbot in less than 24 hours back in 2016.
Musk outright lied, saying Grok is “being opened up slowly to Premium+ users,” a statement he likely made because a popular account posted that Grok was a feature of Premium+ subscriptions, only to be met with a community note saying that “most users with X Premium+ still lack access to Grok,” despite Musk posting two days beforehand that you should “subscribe to Premium+ for no ads and access to our Grok AI.”
I am not at all interested in yet another chatbot, especially not one trained on Xitter content, and I’m not going to ever be a Premium+
subscriber, but I was entertained by this idea:
In the event that Grok is truly trained on Twitter’s posts (after all, this is an Elon Musk product), it will become what Jathan Sadowski calls a “habsburg AI,” a “system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”
I, for one, look forward to the hideous, inbred, mutant essays that will be unleashed on the internet by this development. They can’t be worse than what mere humans can generate.
Welcome to Stress City! Yesterday was exams and exams, all very traditional pen-and-paper things, and right now the ugly pile of pulp is festering in a bag, awaiting the kiss of my red pen. These have to be done by 1:00 tomorrow, because the cell bio students will want to know their standing so they can decide whether they should take the optional final or not. I stand between a decision to go home for the holidays right away, or stay in Morris through next week for another exam. There may be poundings on my office door escalating to deployment of Grond if I don’t get it done.
I cleared my desk yesterday by submitting the online exam for my intro course early. That one is due at 5pm on Saturday, which is cutting it close: I have to depart for the airport at 6am Sunday, so my Saturday night party is more grading. Also packing for a flight.
Oh, right, I also have a couple of term papers I have to finish grading today.
Between that 1pm deadline today, and 5pm due date tomorrow, I have to compose the two final exams that they’ll have to answer to next week, while I’m away in Seattle. That’s right, I’ll be grading exams while visiting my poor sick mother.
Normally, my end of semester work load isn’t this bad, but normally I don’t stack an urgent flight across the country on top of it.
After pointing out the excessive length of that otherwise praiseworthy hbomberguy video, I see that it is prompting some useful followups. For instance, here’s an academic explaining the academic perspective on plagiarism, in a mere 27 minutes.
That’s useful! I say a lot of similar things in my writing class, and I’ll probably assign this video for them to watch as homework. Plagiarism is an important problem that we try to hammer against with frequent reinforcing messages.
By the way, hbomberguy has put out a 20 minute video focused on just the Illuminaughtii plagiarism scandal. It’s amazing how this topic has caught fire on YouTube this week — some of those people who have been profiting mightily from ripping off other people’s writing had better watch out.
This is my scientific history in a series of short acronyms.
I know the author is thinking of recent events in space technology, but it’s also applicable to biology. I’ve had embryos undergo “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.
Although, actually, I’ve never felt a need to resort to euphemisms. “The experiment failed” is usually good enough.
You know I’m no fan of college football and think the whole institution is a perversion of the academic life, but there is an event coming up that makes me want to scream “GO DUCKS!”
The No. 8 Oregon Ducks (11-2) will play in the Fiesta Bowl against the No. 23 Liberty University Flames (13-0) on Jan. 1, the Bowl Season Committee announced on Sunday morning.
After a heartbreaking 34-31 loss to the No. 2 Washington Huskies (13-0) on Friday night in the Pac-12 Championship Game, the Ducks knew their playoff chances were gone, but still had a shot at making a New Year’s Six Bowl game.
As an alumnus of the University of Oregon, and as someone who utterly despises that bogus Christian sham of a “university”, Falwell’s Folly, I’d be tempted to watch the game so I could snarl my contempt of the jumped-up Bible college for a few hours. If it’s actually broadcast I might even put it on (but no, I don’t care enough to cough up cash for pay-per-view).
I didn’t even know about the playoff between my undergrad university, UW, and my grad school, UO, so I can’t get worked up about that game, either way. But hell yeah, stomp all over Liberty “University”. Make a Falwell cry. Although they probably don’t care either, Jerry (their ex-president) would probably be too busy having a ménage à trois with a poolboy.
It’s the worst time of the year. I have to review everything I’ve taught this semester, I have to give final exams and papers, I have to grade everything that comes pouring in, and I have to do it with a hard deadline — everyone disappears after Friday. I also have to do this damned debate on Friday. And then I fly away to Seattle this weekend.
Oh well. One last surge of effort, and then I’m off until mid-January.
Last night, I saw that hbomberguy had put out a new video, and I started to watch it. Couldn’t finish it. So I resumed this morning. Still haven’t finished it. It’s almost 4 hours long! This is like some epic fantasy movie!
But it’s really good, so I’ll link to it here, in case anyone has more stamina than I do. It’s all about plagiarism on the internet.
It’s incredibly thorough, giving multiple examples, going through the details, and explaining why they are plagiarized. I teach some writing classes here at UMM — one of them in the coming spring semester — and I hammer on plagiarism as one week’s topic. This video is so comprehensive that I wish I could assign it to the class, but I can hear the groans if I tried to do that (although I’m sure they’d find it entertaining). Maybe I should rip out 20 minutes of the video and present the words in my class as my own? Wait, no, that would be bad.
I’ll probably tell them that it’s an optional video they could watch if really interested, and use hbomberguy as a boogey man and let the students know that if they plagiarize, a guy with 1.3 million subscribers might feature them in a massive youtube video that gets over a million views and comprehensively drag them over the coals.
I got up at 4:30am, went straight to work and hammered out the exam & exam key for my students, and prepped my lecture for today. I was on fire, gettin’ stuff done, and then I made coffee and decided to whip up a breakfast burrito, as one does.
I am out of hot sauce.
What is the point of our existence anyway? Nothing matters. We come from the void, we go into the void. Why did I get out of bed? Why am I here? There is nothingness all around me.
