The Hugging Face episode reveals cult-like behavior of AI agents

Dire warnings about the dangers posed by AI have been around since it first burst into the news. But back in July, more serious alarms were raised when it was revealed that the company Hugging Face had been hacked by agents from the OpenAI system.

I did not quite understand what had happened or why this particular incident had raised alarms to a whole new level or even what the difference was between a ‘bot’ and an ‘agent’. So I was glad to come across this explainer as to why there was so much concern about this particular hack.


[Read more…]

TV review: Scammed (2026)

The investigative TV series Frontline that broadcasts on PBS has released a new documentary on the way that internet scams have exploded in recent years. It is now estimated to have swindled billions of dollars from people all over the world. The major scamming operations are huge with the people behind them creating small cities in the remote jungles of Cambodia and Myanmar where they build massive compounds that house ten of thousands of workers in barracks-like conditions to carry out the frauds.

These workers from all over Asia have been tricked into thinking that they were being hired to work in legitimate jobs, usually in the hospitality industry, but and upon arriving find their passports taken and made to work under horrendous conditions. They are given highly detailed fake profiles and scripts to follow when they contact a target victim, so that they can be induced into parting with their money. The workers often do not speak English but they work off scripts in their own language which are then translated into English. They are severely punished with beatings if they do not perform to expectations. The governments of Cambodia and Myanmar seem to turn a blind eye to these abuses unless there is a global outcry upon which they raid some facilities, release the prisoners, and destroy the compound. But the criminals then simply move to a different location and build new small cities within a short time, usually a couple of months.

[Read more…]

Widow’s Bay shows how out of touch I am (minor spoilers)

Yesterday was the annual Emmy’s awards event that honors TV shows and it provided yet more evidence that when it comes to popular culture, I am hopelessly out of the mainstream. Usually I have not even seen any of the nominees, let alone the winners, of such awards but in this case I had watched the series Widow’s Bay that won a slew of Emmys since my daughters recommended it to me and there was a massive amount of positive publicity about it. So I watched the entire 10-episode series.

To say that I was disappointed is putting it mildly. I thought it was pretty bad. While there were some funny bits, what the series lacked was a story that made any sense. It is not the fact that it involves the supernatural that I found problematic. What is hard to stomach is when people act in utterly irrational ways in response to it.

Take for example, the basic premise that there is a small island off the coast of Massachusetts which has suffered from a curse for over three hundred of years. What caused the curse was never made clear but it manifests itself in many ways that are disjointed and lack coherence. One effect of the curse is that any resident born on the island dies as soon as they leave it. You would think that such a situation would create considerable unhappiness and trigger a massive investigation into what causes the deaths and how to escape the curse. But nothing. Nobody even talks about it, seeming to accept it with a “What can you do?” equanimity.
[Read more…]

The value of public libraries

I am a big believer in public libraries, seeing them as one of the great egalitarian institutions, enabling anyone to gain access to the world of information and entertainment even if they have no money. But for precisely that reason, the rapacious capitalists in the US dislike them, since in their view the idea that something should be offered free to everyone is anathema. It is part of their effort to undermine access to what are clearly social goods, such as universal free health care and free public education.

So defenders of libraries need to have all the arguments to combat the capitalists who use social conservatives to attack libraries because they have offerings that do not conform to their personal prejudices.

Ashlie D. Stevens writes that the Chicago Public Library system has introduced a novel idea. At the bottom of each check out receipt, it tells the user how much money they saved by using the library and not buying the items.

One afternoon I came home with “Magic Is Dead: My Journey Into the World’s Most Secretive Society of Magicians,” “Village School” and “Cold Comfort Farm,” a stack suggesting either eclectic tastes or a person throwing darts at a bookshelf. Shortly afterward, I received the standard email from the library listing my new acquisitions and their due dates.

Then, underneath the administrative business, came a little piece of information I had somehow never noticed before: You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!

I stared at this. My first thought was not, “What a compelling demonstration of the economic value of municipal services.”

My first thought was: I want that number higher.

I took a screenshot and sent it to my sister, who lives in another state.

“Oh, that’s satisfying,” she replied. “I wish my library did that.”

She was right. Somewhere inside me, a tiny rewards-program customer had been activated.

After that, I started browsing the library website differently: less like a catalog, more like a streaming service with unusually eccentric licensing agreements. Did I need the complete box set of “Nip/Tuck”? Maybe. A Blu-ray collection of British noir? Quite possibly. What about both movies called “The Illusionist” — the bittersweet French animated one about an aging magician and the Edward Norton one in which he is also, confusingly, a magician?

If the library adds up all the savings of all its users, the number it arrives at would be a powerful and tangible demonstration of how important libraries are to people and communities. I am going to suggest this idea to the two local libraries that I frequent.

I own a lot of books. But many of them, including the one I am currently reading, were first borrowed from the library and then, while reading them, I decided that I wanted to own them for future reference or other reasons.

The live-streaming menace

I did not know anything about the person known as Perez Hilton but his name occupied the periphery of my consciousness because of its occasional appearance on the splash pages of the news sites I frequent. His real name was Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. but he adopted his pseudonym deliberately because of its similarity to the better known Paris Hilton, so that it would be catchy.

He suddenly vaulted into the mainstream news when a few days ago he live-streamed harming himself in what looked like a suicide attempt, that resulted in a rescue team being called in and him being taken to hospital.

So what was his claim to fame before this? Brady Brickner-Wood gives some background into what seems like an odious person who achieved celebrity status by viciously gossiping about other celebrities.

Before “troll” became commonplace in the internet lexicon, Hilton embodied the definition: a prurient, prolific shitposter who drew dicks and semen on paparazzi photos, called Adam Sandler’s two-year-old daughter “ugly,” and, after Heath Ledger’s accidental overdose, sold T-shirts with the slogan “Why couldn’t it be Britney?” On his website, which at its peak, around 2007, received as many as eight million hits a day, he outed celebrities, picked apart stars’ appearances, and mocked their addictions. He cloaked his cruelty in camp, suffusing his blog posts with exclamation points and cheap puns.

[Read more…]

Trump’s list of enemies gets even weirder

The TV channel C-Span is watched mainly by a small audience of wonky types who are interested in the details of government and public affairs.

Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN /ˈsiːˌspæn/ SEE-span) is an American cable and satellite television network, created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises proceedings of the United States federal government and other public affairs programming. C-SPAN is a private, nonprofit organization funded by its cable and satellite affiliates. It does not have advertisements on any of its television networks or radio stations. However their official website has banner advertisements, and streamed videos also have advertisements. The network operates independently; the cable industry and the U.S. Congress have no control over its programming content.

Since it mainly passively shows public events, it rarely creates any controversy. But at 9:25 a.m. ET Monday on its program Washington Journal, it had a representative from the Center for American Progress (an organization that supports Democrats) discuss an analysis that found that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to American cities, a move that was widely criticized, had no effect on crime rates in those cities.
[Read more…]

Film review: Nomadland (2020)

Back in 2014, I had a blog post about a community of migrant workers that are not what you first think of when you use the term. I will not repeat what I said there but it is about elderly people who have reached retirement age without sufficient resources to retire. Following the recession of 207-2009, they used what little money they had to buy a van and convert it into a home and then drive around the country doing low-level temporary jobs such as stocking retailer warehouses and cleaning workplaces and parks and the like. They park in campgrounds that are often provided by the companies who are happy to obtain the services of older people who will accept temporary, minimum-wage jobs under poor conditions without complaining. There is even a name for them: workampers. (Someone who had been a workamper commented on my post.)

The post was based on a long article The end of retirement: When you can’t afford to stop working by Jessica Bruder that appeared in Harper’s magazine , which was later expanded into a 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. In 2020, this was made into a film Nomadland that won three Academy Awards, for best picture, best director and best actor.
[Read more…]

The rightwing snit over the The Odyssey (2026)

It takes very little to set the rightwing nut jobs off into starting a new front in the culture wars, usually over things that are either non-existent or highly unlikely, such as fears that immigrants are eating their pets or that a drug cartels are taking over American city streets or that it was forbidden to say “Merry Christmas” any more.

I find it particularly amusing when right wingers get up in arms when some recounting of stories in films and TV do not conform to their weird ideas of authenticity. It becomes even more ludicrous when the stories are purely fictional so that appeals to history make no sense. Remember the insistence that Santa Claus is white? Or the flap over the live action remake of the Little Mermaid because the title character was a person of color?

The latest silliness involves Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey that has opened to rave reviews and massive box office sales. It is the latest retelling of the Homeric poem and it features actors of color in key roles such as Helen of Troy and a transgender actor in another role. Of course, the whole epic is an obvious myth (the fact that Helen was hatched from an egg that was the product of Zeus transforming himself into a swan and mating with Leda, the queen of Sparta, should have been a clue) but that did not deter these loonies.
[Read more…]

The skill of headline writers

I scan a lot of news sites and in the process come across items that are not newsworthy in the sense of being important but are amusing and quirky. But there are some items that keep appearing in the headlines so frequently and so prominently that they signify something important but that I never click on.

One of these is the dispute involving Harry and Megan Windsor and his family. Such intrafamily conflicts can be very unpleasant and I do not wish them on anyone but I do not really need breathless commentary on that particular soap opera. The other is the impending wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. While I am pleased for any happy couple taking such a decisive step, the details of this event have zero interest for me.

But given how these things constantly appear on the newsfeeds, clearly a lot of people must be interested in them. And it testifies to the skill of news headline writers that even though I don’t follow up on the links, I still know something about these two things just from the headlines.