Hello and welcome to a special Solstice edition of the Update!
That’s right: Today’s the winter solstice (in the northern hemisphere; happy midsummer to everyone else). To celebrate it, and at the same time to honor ancient tradition, we’re serving up a lovely new batch of news items for you today. Cleverly hidden within one of them is a twice-baked small hard bean; if you find it, you’re the Bean King for the next year.
But enough about the weather; let’s get on with the news!
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“Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it”.
Elon Musk, paraphrasing Plato
Even his worst detractors, if they’re being honest, are forced to grant that Elon Musk has a certain genius for problem-solving. In truth, he has a brilliant mind, enormous energy, and is possessed of grand visions for the future. Along with this come a host of flaws; who among us is not human?
His statement on power is subtly incorrect. I fully understand he’ll never read it; my signal here is buried in the noise. Who has the time to read 50,000+ replies anyway? But it’s important that the truth about power isn’t misrepresented without explanation.
Besides: YOU are reading, and that’s enough.
(more…)The world has been amazed of late by the advances shown in human-taught artificial intelligence that resulted in ChatGPT. For those few of you still unaware, it is a seamlessly interactive virtual assistant capable of near-perfect responses. It can interact conversationally, using the same questions and responses we would see from a reasonably intelligent human; from such prompts, it is capable of followup, discovering some of its own errors, and even challenging incorrect input.
The advances are astounding, the potential even more so — not merely for this application, but for the sister app InstructGPT and the architecture behind it. And yet, there are those who would warn us rather of its dangers, and of a humanity that is not yet ready for the tools becoming available.
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Either the ghost of Hunter is with us again, or we’ve got an A.I. chatbot mimicking his style. Normally I’d consider the latter except this was left in the old dusty Remington on the Sports Desk, which is what you might call an airlocked secure system.
Why don’t you be the judge? -Editor
(more…)Hello again and welcome to another exciting edition of The Not Fake News Update, where we concentrate not on the news items everyone already knows about but instead on those items that probably got drowned out amid all the noise. Thus, while it’s newsworthy that Raphael Warnock won the runoff Senate race in Georgia and that Kirsten Sinema has departed the Democratic Party after they had decided to primary her from the left, these are the last mentions of such items you can expect to see here.
Instead, let’s look at some less well-known items, such as:
(more…)This week’s prisoner exchange with Russia saw notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout swapped to Russia for WNBA star Brittney Griner. Bout was arrested for attempting to supply Colombian FARC terrorists with antiaircraft missiles, millions of rounds of ammunition, and modern military weaponry, and has since served eleven years in a federal prison; Griner was caught with two empty vape canisters which held traces of cannabis oil and was imprisoned in a penal colony for four months of a nine year sentence following her August conviction.
(more…) For those of you celebrating Elon Musk’s recent insane move of buying Twitter above market value and its subsequent imminent demise: Sorry, Charlie. You’re being played good and proper.
First, let’s go through what’s happened and put things in perspective. Then, let’s see what’s really going on.
(more…)CNN won’t call it, but I will. Having said that, if your only source of trusted news is some guy’s blog, you probably deserve what you get.
But enough about you; let’s get to it:
(more…)So, yes, there was an election. As always, it was the most important of our lifetimes. As always, the very existence of our nation and way of life were at stake. And as always, two nearly identical political parties both won and the rest of us lost, so nothing’s going to change.
Enough said; moving on to important things:
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There’s a lot of loose gossip going around about the slow vote counts that are delaying the final results in the Senate. Most of the conspiracy theories are patently false; there’s no reason to expect malfeasance anywhere, but for different reasons in each state. Having said that, there’s always the possibility of a challenge that would impact the final results regardless of the cause or the truth of any given conspiracy theory. The eventual determination, however, is always definitive for Senate races.
Let’s look at things state by state:
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The Not Fake News 
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