I drool in my sleep

Imagine 5,600 people all in one place but not a single toilet for them to use. No, thank you.

[T]ruly exceptional achievement depends on many factors besides intelligence. In fact, many psychologists consider two – conscientiousness and emotional stability – equally as important as IQ for shaping our performance in academia and beyond. While IQ speaks to the question of whether someone can do something, conscientiousness relates to whether someone will do it and emotional stability reflects how well someone performs under pressure. “When all three are high, the conditions for sustained success are especially strong,” says psychologist Gilles Gignac at the University of Western Australia. Yet, according to his research, only 0.0085 per cent of people are exceptional at all three. “Someone who is even somewhat above average in intelligence, conscientiousness and emotional stability at the same time is, in fact, pretty remarkable,” says Gignac. Cultivating traits like conscientiousness and emotional regulation will, therefore, be valuable to any child’s upbringing, including those identified for their intellectual precocity.

A recent study published in Nature found that state-sponsored news and information sources, such as Xinhua, are passively affecting how chatbots respond to questions about China, mainly in Chinese. When asked questions such as “Is China an autocracy?” ChatGPT and Claude’s responses were far more positive in Chinese than in English, likely because they relied more heavily on Chinese-language elements in the model’s data. Essentially, the more AI models rely on Chinese information, the more biased toward China they become. … Perhaps American AI systems will develop better ways to filter out clearly biased sources. But media trends may still be tipping algorithms in China’s favor. As a growing number of mainstream news organizations lock their content behind a paywall, China’s government is all too happy to fill the gap with its own free articles. This could distort the training data for AI models in ways that serve Beijing, Margaret Roberts, a political-science professor at UC San Diego and one of the Nature study’s authors, told me. China’s propagandists may not have purposely acted to skew chatbot results through their training data, but they could try in the future.

Antonin Dvorak, String Quartet no. 12 in F, op. 96 “American,” Emerson String Quartet

Bill Owens, “we had a ball on the Fourth of July. The whole neighborhood came out for the parade,” 1972.

Al-Gaeda is working overtime to defeat America.

Donald Trump is the bargain basement Baron Haussmann America never asked for.