Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E6: Desired and undesired pathways
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days (which is free) + extra content for paid subscribers. Read on for the free bit before the paywall arrives to conceal bonuses and unwise honesty.
6 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. ARTICLE / NEWSLETTER
Degenerative AI by Ed Zitron for his newsletter
There’s a very high chance you’ve read a lot about AI recently; Ed Zitron pulls together a lot of articles from the past couple of weeks and seasons them with his usual astringent and astute analysis:
Fun fact: Many European countries — notably France, Germany, Belgium, and Austria — criminalize both holocaust denial and the veneration of the Third Reich. With the horrors of Nazism still within living memory, they are unwilling to tolerate any form of revisionism or equivocation.
What does that have to do with AI? Well, in 2016 Microsoft launched a conversational chatbot called Tay, which pioneered many of the concepts found in today’s splashy generative AI products. Within one day of going live, Tay — who was engineered to replicate the writing patterns of a 19-year-old American girl. Nothing creepy about that — was loudly proclaiming the supremacy of Adolf Hitler and declaring vile anti-semitic views.
Although hugely embarrassing for Microsoft, Tay was a small-scale experiment designed to test AI concepts outside the laboratory. It was never a real product, and thus it didn’t attract attention from lawmakers or regulators. But it’s easy to imagine that if Bing AI or Bard suddenly start referring high school history students to the works of David Irving, the authorities in Berlin or Paris might take action.
2. ALBUM
Desire Pathway — Screaming Females
Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify
Thirty-three minutes of perfect (and surprising) rock from a band that has never let me down, Desire Pathway will make your week better.
3. ARTICLE
The Sleazy, Slimy Drama Behind the Redstone Succession Fight
by Lloyd Grove for The Daily Beast
If you’re looking forward to the next season of Succession, you’ll be fascinated and appalled by this piece about the battle to control Paramount following the death of Sumner Redstone — “an oversexed combination of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring His Children’. — in 2020:
Together, the two women leeched more than $150 million from Redstone’s bank accounts and stock holdings, and very nearly gained control of his empire. The tag team of Manuela Herzer and Sydney Holland (who had accepted the rabidly jealous Redstone’s offer to become his third wife) might have succeeded but for their bitter falling-out over Holland’s hanky-panky with a handsome fraudster, convicted felon and failed soap opera actor named George Pilgrim; the actor’s dangerous liaison with Redstone’s fiancée—once Herzer forced Holland to confess to the old man—ultimately torpedoed their carefully laid plans.
‘George Pilgrim’. The writers of America are really getting lazy with the names.
4. ARTICLE
What Was Kyrie Irving Thinking? by Simon van Zuylen-Wood for New York.
I’m fascinated by basketball so this profile of the quixotic Kyrie Irving was very much up my street but even if you don’t care about the game, it’s an interesting look at a figure who is very much of our times:
If Irving is a once-in-a-generation talent on the court, he’s also deeply of his generation off it — fed by algorithms, drawn to conspiracy, distrustful of a machine even as it makes him rich, more alienated than ever. Irving arrived in Brooklyn considered one of the most enigmatic figures in the NBA, with a mind so internet-pilled and recondite as to be unclassifiable. But he left as a familiar archetype: the loner, the dot-connecting freethinker, clicking around the internet. The kind of person who feels most comfortable when he’s talking to strangers online.
5. REVIEW
The Rest Is Politics: A Review
by
The moment the aggressively inoffensive jazzy theme music of The Rest Is Politics kicked in I wanted to listen to anything else in the world. I wanted to listen to a teenage Londoner rap about stabbing people. I wanted to listen to a depressed Norwegian man scream about burning churches. I wanted to listen to the howls of the damned. Anything to avoid the mud of mediocrity inching towards me. The Rest Is Politics is a podcast hosted by former spin doctor Alastair Campbell and veteran diplomat and Conservative politician Rory Stewart. “The podcast’s original premise,” states a profile in the Times, “Had been for two sides of the political divide to disagree agreeably — which they do, mostly.” Ah, yes, the two sides of the political divide. They couldn’t be more different, this pair! A real odd couple. One is an aggressively pro-EU cosmopolitan managerialist and the other is, er, an aggressively pro-EU cosmopolitan managerialist.
6. ALBUM
Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags by Hellripper
Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify
I was put on to this incredible one-man metal band from Scotland by my old friend Manish in the Discord (which you can also join by hitting that link).
It’s a thrilling, thrashy, speedy, black metal banquet that delivers its ludicrousness to perfection.
Beyond the paywall: This week’s list of newsletters that nearly got written, a micro-essay, the weekly playlist, and a special bonus recommendation…
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