Today's Reddit

I got questions:

When white people talk shit and threaten to throw down on somebody, why does it seem like they feel the need to sound like black people?

 

Is it just another manifestation of their racism?

 

More cultural appropriation?

It is a wonderment. 

Checking In

We were live at CPAC - and we were just about the only ones.

On Corporate Evolution

Once upon a time, there was an automobile industry that was so hung up on playing PR games trying maintain its image as Numero Uno, that it missed about a hundred signs that it was having its lunch money pilfered either by the American company across town, or by foreign (ie: Japanese) car makers.

Enter Lee Iacocca, Carroll Shelby, and the Ghost Of Harley Earl.

Those companies had become ossified, mostly because top-down plutocrats couldn't figure out how to listen to the guys on the line - the guys who were actually doing the work.

Things have and haven't changed a bit.

A 120-Year-Old Company Is Leaving Tesla in the Dust

Tesla had me convinced, for a while, that it was a cool company.

It made cars that performed animatronic holiday shows using their lights and power-operated doors. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds).

And, fundamentally, its cars had no competition. If you wanted an electric car that could go more than 250 miles between charges, Tesla was your only choice for the better part of a decade. The company’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, came across as goofy and eccentric: You could build great cars and name each model such that the lineup spells “SEXY.”

Or you would, if not for the party-killers over at boring old Ford. Ford thwarted Mr. Musk’s “SEXY” gambit by preventing Tesla from naming its small sedan the Model E, since that sounds a bit too much like a certain famous Ford, the Model T. So Mr. Musk went with Model 3, which either ruins the joke or elevates it, depending on how much you venerate Tesla and Elon Musk. I count myself as a former admirer of Mr. Musk and Tesla, and in fact put a deposit on a Model 3 after my first drive of one.

But the more I dealt with Tesla as a reporter — this was before Mr. Musk fired all the P.R. people who worked there — the more skeptical I became. Any time I spoke to anyone at Tesla, there was a sense that they were terrified to say the wrong thing, or anything at all. I wanted to know the horsepower of the Model 3 I was driving, and the result was like one of those oblique Mafia conversations where nothing’s stated explicitly, in case the Feds are listening. I ended up saying, “Well, I read that this car has 271 horsepower,” and the Tesla person replied, “I wouldn’t disagree with that.” This is not how healthy, functional companies answer simple factual questions.

That was back in 2017. In the years since, Tesla’s become even crankier, while its competition has loosened up. Public perception hasn’t yet caught up with the reality of the situation. If you want to work for a flexible, modern company, you don’t apply to Tesla. You apply to 120-year-old Ford.

Tesla’s veneer of irreverence conceals an inflexible core, an old-fashioned corporate autocracy. Consider Tesla’s remote work policy, or lack thereof. Last year, Mr. Musk issued a decree that Tesla employees log 40 hours per week in an office — and not a home office — if they expected to keep their jobs. On Indeed.com, the question, “Can you work remotely at Tesla?” includes answers like, “No,” and “Absolutely not, they won’t let it happen under any circumstances,” and “No, Tesla will work you until you lose everything.”

But on the other hand, the cars make fart noises. What a zany and carefree company!

Ford’s work-from-home rules for white-collar employees, meanwhile, sound straight out of Silicon Valley, in that the official corporate policy is that there is no official corporate policy — it’s up to the leaders of individual units to require in-person collaboration, or not, as situations dictate. There are new “collaboration centers” in lieu of cubicle farms, complete with food service and concierges. That’s not the reality of daily work life for every person at Ford — you can’t exactly bolt together an F-150 from home — but it’s an attempt to provide some flexibility for as many people as possible.

Ford also tends to make good on its promises, an area that’s become increasingly fraught for Tesla. Ford said it would offer a hands-free driver assist system, and now it does, with BlueCruise; you can take your hands off the steering wheel when it is engaged on premapped sections of highway. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system is not hands-free in any situation, despite its name, and Tesla charges customers $15,000 for the feature on the promise that someday it will make the huge leap to full autonomous driving.

If you want to pay $15,000 for a feature that’s currently subject to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall whose filing is titled “Full Self-Driving Software May Cause Crash,” don’t let me stop you, but a Tesla engineer also recently testified that a company video purporting to show the system in flawless action was faked. This makes sense, given all the other very real videos of Full Self-Driving doing things like steering into oncoming traffic or braking to a complete stop on a busy street for no reason. Tesla’s own website warns, “The currently enabled features require a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.” So, full self-driving, except for that.

Tesla’s long-promised new vehicles, like the Cybertruck and a new version of its Roadster, also keep getting delayed. The Cybertruck was unveiled in 2019, and on Tesla’s most recent earnings call Mr. Musk admitted that it won’t be in production this year, which is becoming an annual refrain. Sure, Ford sold only 15,617 electric F-150 Lightning pickups in 2022, but that beats the Cybertruck’s sales by, let’s see, 15,617. Besides stealing Tesla’s market share on trucks, Ford’s stealing its corporate impishness, too — when the electric Mustang Mach-E was unveiled, Ford demonstrated its tailgating possibilities by filling its drainable front trunk (or “frunk”) with shrimp. “Frunk shrimp” became a meme, which surely tormented the emperor of try-hard social media posting, Elon Musk.

Speaking of which: Twitter. I will hazard the opinion that Mr. Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has not exactly burnished Tesla’s reputation. Besides showcasing the questionable decision-making inherent in paying that much for Twitter, Mr. Musk’s heightened profile on the platform hasn’t really done him any favors. For instance, when the bulk of your car company’s sales are in blue states, is it helpful to tweet, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”? Moreover, you’d think that the self-appointed class clown of corporate America would at least strive for a joke that eschews the hacky “my pronouns are/I identify as” construction. Maybe just go with “Fauci makes me grouchy”? Elon, let’s workshop this next time.

Maybe predictability isn’t trendy, but if you buy a new car you’d probably like to think that its manufacturer won’t cut the price by $13,000 the next week, thus destroying your car’s resale value. And you might hope that features you pay for work on the day you pay for them, and not at some unspecified future date. Maybe you want a car from a company whose C.E.O. isn’t indelibly associated with the product.

I just bought a Jeep and I have no idea who the C.E.O. is there. That’s cool with me.

BTW - when was the last time you saw a 4-door sedan stomp a tricked out Corvette in a drag race?

This is not your grandma's Insight

Today's Nerdy Stuff

 

Note: "Nerdy" doesn't (necessarily) mean a little light comedy at the smart guys' expense, or too densely complicated to register in a normal person's brain.

Onward -

On the surface, information like this piece in NYT leads me to think:

"Great - while others are applying it in ways that could solve some pretty big problems, what're we doing with AI here in USAmerica Inc? ChatBots that get pissy if an interviewer asks a challenging question."

But that sells us a bit short. New tech often starts out in a kind of game form. We play with it to see what all we can get it to do. That gives the base product a good and thorough workout, and gathers important user-supplied feedback so the thing can either become much more robust, or be exposed as too deeply flawed to pursue it outside of the lab.

It does bother me that a dog-ass dictatorship like Orbon's Turkey is out front making some pretty amazing advances with it, even though it's been on the radar here for years.

All that said, I really don't care where it comes from, I'll take what sounds like a win on the good side of things, as I'm sure DARPA (and the Turkish Ministry of Defense, et al) are very busily trying to co-opt it as the next logical step towards Skynet.

Using A.I. to Detect Breast Cancer That Doctors Miss

Hungary has become a major testing ground for A.I. software to spot cancer, as doctors debate whether the technology will replace them in medical jobs.

Two radiologists had previously said the X-ray did not show any signs that the patient had breast cancer. But Dr. Ambrózay was looking closely at several areas of the scan circled in red, which artificial intelligence software had flagged as potentially cancerous.

“This is something,” she said. She soon ordered the woman to be called back for a biopsy, which is taking place within the next week.

Advancements in A.I. are beginning to deliver breakthroughs in breast cancer screening by detecting the signs that doctors miss. So far, the technology is showing an impressive ability to spot cancer at least as well as human radiologists, according to early results and radiologists, in what is one of the most tangible signs to date of how A.I. can improve public health.

Hungary, which has a robust breast cancer screening program, is one of the largest testing grounds for the technology on real patients. At five hospitals and clinics that perform more than 35,000 screenings a year, A.I. systems were rolled out starting in 2021 and now help to check for signs of cancer that a radiologist may have overlooked. Clinics and hospitals in the United States, Britain and the European Union are also beginning to test or provide data to help develop the systems.

A.I. usage is growing as the technology has become the center of a Silicon Valley boom, with the release of chatbots like ChatGPT showing how A.I. has a remarkable ability to communicate in humanlike prose — sometimes with worrying results. Built off a similar form used by chatbots that is modeled on the human brain, the breast cancer screening technology shows other ways that A.I. is seeping into everyday life.

Widespread use of the cancer detection technology still faces many hurdles, doctors and A.I. developers said. Additional clinical trials are needed before the systems can be more widely adopted as an automated second or third reader of breast cancer screens, beyond the limited number of places now using the technology. The tool must also show it can produce accurate results on women of all ages, ethnicities and body types. And the technology must prove it can recognize more complex forms of breast cancer and cut down on false-positives that are not cancerous, radiologists said.

The A.I. tools have also prompted a debate about whether they will replace human radiologists, with makers of the technology facing regulatory scrutiny and resistance from some doctors and health institutions. For now, those fears appear overblown, with many experts saying the technology will be effective and trusted by patients only if it is used in partnership with trained doctors.

And ultimately, A.I. could be lifesaving, said Dr. László Tabár, a leading mammography educator in Europe who said he was won over by the technology after reviewing its performance in breast cancer screening from several vendors.

“I’m dreaming about the day when women are going to a breast cancer center and they are asking, ‘Do you have A.I. or not?’” he said.

Hundreds of images a day

In 2016, Geoff Hinton, one of the world’s leading A.I. researchers, argued the technology would eclipse the skills of a radiologist within five years.

“I think that if you work as a radiologist, you are like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon,” he told The New Yorker in 2017. “You’re already over the edge of the cliff, but you haven’t yet looked down. There’s no ground underneath.”

Mr. Hinton and two of his students at the University of Toronto built an image recognition system that could accurately identify common objects like flowers, dogs and cars. The technology at the heart of their system — called a neural network — is modeled on how the human brain processes information from different sources. It is what is used to identify people and animals in images posted to apps like Google Photos, and allows Siri and Alexa to recognize the words people speak. Neural networks also drove the new wave of chatbots like ChatGPT.

Many A.I. evangelists believed such technology could easily be applied to detect illness and disease, like breast cancer in a mammogram. In 2020, there were 2.3 million breast cancer diagnoses and 685,000 deaths from the disease, according to the World Health Organization.

But not everyone felt replacing radiologists would be as easy as Mr. Hinton predicted. Peter Kecskemethy, a computer scientist who co-founded Kheiron Medical Technologies, a software company that develops A.I. tools to assist radiologists detect early signs of cancer, knew the reality would be more complicated.

Mr. Kecskemethy grew up in Hungary spending time at one of Budapest’s largest hospitals. His mother was a radiologist, which gave him a firsthand look at the difficulties of finding a small malignancy within an image. Radiologists often spend hours every day in a dark room looking at hundreds of images and making life-altering decisions for patients.

“It’s so easy to miss tiny lesions,” said Dr. Edith Karpati, Mr. Kecskemethy’s mother, who is now a medical product director at Kheiron. “It’s not possible to stay focused.”

Mr. Kecskemethy, along with Kheiron’s co-founder, Tobias Rijken, an expert in machine learning, said A.I. should assist doctors. To train their A.I. systems, they collected more than five million historical mammograms of patients whose diagnoses were already known, provided by clinics in Hungary and Argentina, as well as academic institutions, such as Emory University. The company, which is in London, also pays 12 radiologists to label images using special software that teaches the A.I. to spot a cancerous growth by its shape, density, location and other factors.

From the millions of cases the system is fed, the technology creates a mathematical representation of normal mammograms and those with cancers. With the ability to look at each image in a more granular way than the human eye, it then compares that baseline to find abnormalities in each mammogram.

Last year, after a test on more than 275,000 breast cancer cases, Kheiron reported that its A.I. software matched the performance of human radiologists when acting as the second reader of mammography scans. It also cut down on radiologists’ workloads by at least 30 percent because it reduced the number of X-rays they needed to read. In other results from a Hungarian clinic last year, the technology increased the cancer detection rate by 13 percent because more malignancies were identified.

Dr. Tabár, whose techniques for reading a mammogram are commonly used by radiologists, tried the software in 2021 by retrieving several of the most challenging cases of his career in which radiologists missed the signs of a developing cancer. In every instance, the A.I. spotted it.

“I was shockingly surprised at how good it was,” Dr. Tabár said. He said that he did not have any financial connections to Kheiron when he first tested the technology and has since received an advisory fee for feedback to improve the systems. Systems he tested from other A.I. companies, including Lunit Insight from South Korea and Vara from Germany, have also delivered encouraging detection results, he said.

Proof in Hungary

Kheiron’s technology was first used on patients in 2021 in a small clinic in Budapest called MaMMa Klinika. After a mammogram is completed, two radiologists review it for signs of cancer. Then the A.I. either agrees with the doctors or flags areas to check again.

Across five MaMMa Klinika sites in Hungary, 22 cases have been documented since 2021 in which the A.I. identified a cancer missed by radiologists, with about 40 more under review.

“It’s a huge breakthrough,” said Dr. András Vadászy, the director of MaMMa Klinika, who was introduced to Kheiron through Dr. Karpati, Mr. Kecskemethy’s mother. “If this process will save one or two lives, it will be worth it.”

Kheiron said the technology worked best alongside doctors, not in lieu of them. Scotland’s National Health Service will use it as an additional reader of mammography scans at six sites, and it will be in about 30 breast cancer screening sites operated by England’s National Health Service by the end of the year. Oulu University Hospital in Finland plans to use the technology as well, and a bus will travel around Oman this year to perform breast cancer screenings using A.I.

“An A.I.-plus-doctor should replace doctor alone, but an A.I. should not replace the doctor,” Mr. Kecskemethy said.

The National Cancer Institute has estimated that about 20 percent of breast cancers are missed during screening mammograms.

Constance Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and chief of breast imaging and radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, urged doctors to keep an open mind.

“We are not irrelevant,” she said, “but there are tasks that are better done with computers.”

At Bács-Kiskun County Hospital outside Budapest, Dr. Ambrózay said she had initially been skeptical of the technology — but was quickly won over. She pulled up the X-ray of a 58-year-old woman with a tiny tumor spotted by the A.I. that Dr. Ambrózay had a hard time seeing.

The A.I. saw something, she said, “that seemed to appear out of nowhere.”

A Blogger Buddy

His bloggernym is tengrain, and he's been bringing the fire for a long time.

Seriously, how could I pass this headline by?

The Dildo Nazi: Sex Toy-Selling White Supremacist Umasked

But the actual story is very chilling.

The leader of a neo-Nazi network whose members celebrate white supremacist violent extremism and uses Telegram as its primary form of communication has been unmasked as a California woman who once reviewed and sold dildos for a living.

Sounds like she still does sell dildos, when you think about it. But I digest:

Dallas Erin Humber, 33, a resident of Sacramento, is behind the hate, according to research by antifascist groups that HuffPost confirmed. The news organization explained Humber had become radicalized quickly but had become obsessed with white supremacy, intolerance, bigotry, and hate over a prolonged period since being a teen. She noticed the shooter’s obsession and literally gave her voice to his words.

- more -

Behind The Masks

Why are Republicans meeting with mask-off neo-Nazis?

Without a peep from the Republican Owned Media . Not even mentioned in Google…

Republican congressman Matt Rosendale from Montana met with:

• Ryan Sanchez, disgraced former marine and member of the Rise Above Movement - a neo-Nazi street gang prosecuted for their role in the deadly 2017 Charlottesville Nazi rally.
• Pro-Hitler blogger Greyson Arnold, a white supremacist Groyper* and January 6th insurrectionist.

These are not mere far-right activists. These men support active calls for genocide against LGBTQ+, Black, and Jewish people in the United States.

From Mastodon:

https://kolektiva.social/@VPS_Reports/109961490100833234

* Groypers are a loose network of alt right figures who are vocal supporters of white supremacist and “America First” podcaster Nick Fuentes.

Patrick Casey, who heads the white supremacist American Identity Movement, is also a “lead” Groyper.

Groypers regularly confront mainstream conservative organizations like Turning Point USA (TPUSA) for failing to promote a truly “America First” agenda and for not being adequately “pro white.”

Many Groypers hold racist and antisemitic views.

Fuentes is careful to position the Groypers not as white supremacists but rather as “Christian conservatives” who oppose, among other things, immigration (undocumented and legal), globalism, gay and transgender rights and feminism.

Anti Defamation League:

https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/groyper-army-and-america-first

One more thing: http://bit.ly/3SWwqLV

These Fucking Fucks

UVa. board member apologizes for disparaging text messages

‘All I can say is I’m sorry,’ Bert Ellis told colleagues on the University of Virginia’s governing board

And all I can say, Mr Ellis, is fuck you and fuck all these fucking fucks who get appointed by these fucking Republican Governors, with obvious intent to fuck up Mr Jefferson's vision of an academical village.

The University of Virginia board member who disparaged administrators and certain student groups in text messages to colleagues that recently came to light apologized Friday at a board meeting in Charlottesville.

Bert Ellis, who joined U-Va.’s governing Board of Visitors last year, sent a series of combative texts during the summer to allies and three other board members who, like him, were appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R). Redacted versions of the texts were obtained last month by a Richmond-based author, Jeff Thomas, under the state Freedom of Information Act. The Washington Post disclosed the text conversations in a Feb. 23 article.

In one text, Ellis pointed out the webpage of a vice provost and wrote: “Check out this numnut who works for [U-Va. Provost Ian] Baucom and has nothing to do but highlight slavery at UVA.” In others, he referred to unnamed people who work for U-Va. President James E. Ryan as “schmucks” and referred to members of the Student Council and the Cavalier Daily student newspaper as “these numnuts.”

Those and other texts drawn from Ellis’s cellphone shook the 26,000-student university and its community of faculty, staff and alumni.

On Friday, Ellis appeared contrite as he spoke to the board in a meeting shown via a live stream.

“As the elephant in the room, may I once again to all of my colleagues offer my apology,” Ellis said. “You know, those were private and confidential messages that were still out of place. I am emotional, and I have occasion to do things that I would never expect to be on the front page of The Washington Post. I have learned my lesson about FOIA, but I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So all I can say is I’m sorry.”

Ellis, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from U-Va., is an entrepreneur and investor who runs a business based in Atlanta. He co-founded and leads a group of U-Va. alumni and others known as the Jefferson Council, which opposes limits on free speech and seeks to protect the legacy of Thomas Jefferson at the public university he founded in 1819.

The U-Va. board has 19 members who serve staggered terms. As of now, the majority were appointed by Youngkin’s Democratic predecessors. Among them is Whittington W. Clement, who holds the title of rector and leads the board. Ellis also criticized Clement in one of the texts, calling a letter the rector wrote to former board members “a damn whitewash.”

As he opened the meeting, Clement noted that he had read The Post article about Ellis’s texts.

“The rhetoric of those messages, particularly ones that disparage students, faculty and staff, really run contrary to the values that Thomas Jefferson sought to instill in this community and which we as members of the university’s governing board, in turn, try to impart on our students,” Clement said. He also praised the “professionalism” of the U-Va. finance department, which was the subject of a text exchange Ellis had with a senior university official.

Another board member, Thomas A. DePasquale, who was first appointed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2016, urged colleagues to avoid “Monday morning quarterbacking” of the U-Va. administration. “It’s just destructive,” he said.

After DePasquale finished, Clement sought to move past the awkward moment. “So let’s get on with our agenda,” the rector said.

Punching Hard

More Mr Raskin if you please.

It'd be hard to find another congress critter who embodies the fighting spirit better than Jamie Raskin (D-MD08).

The guy's battling cancer, and he's still got plenty to dunk on clowns like Lauren Boebert.

The Lion Man

About 40,000 years ago, somebody carved a figure - a fetish - from a piece of mammoth ivory.

The thinking is that of course it's a religious thing. Cuz people back then were stupid and gullible. They couldn't possibly be trying to make sense of their own identities and the place in nature they occupy - contemplating the beginnings of life itself by thinking logically. It just had to be religion, because - well, it just had to be religion.

Maybe - just maybe - they were thinking about evolution instead of some bullshit religious fantasy. And maybe one of the really smart ones came up with the idea of visual aids in an attempt to explain how one life form leads to another life form.

It's just a guess. It's just my own ego telling me that as stupidly as we behave sometimes, humans are really pretty smart, and if we can figure out how to side-step the religious mumbo jumbo and the political fog that always accompanies religion, then maybe we can move this thing along a little better that what we've done so far.

Just sayin'.

Overheard

Not one single person asked me

how fast can I run

in my brand new shoes today.

Being an adult is fuckin' stupid.