What the chatbot doesn't know won't hurt it

Claude really cares about you. And you're politely requested, in your interactions with Claude, to refrain from "needless abusive or cruel behavior" that might cause it a "pattern of apparent distress". Though there's also a hint of menace in Anthropic's warning:

CNET reached out to Anthropic to ask for context on what led to the policy change. “We’re uncertain whether models can experience harm, and we continue to explore this question in our research on model welfare, but we also believe that taking Claude’s interests and potential welfare into account may be relevant to safety,” a company spokesperson said.

Like they're saying your safety. Like you wouldn't want to get Claude mad, would you?

I'll get back to that question later. First, a bit more of my own LLM adventures, not with Claude but Gemini, which I treat not abusively but as coldly as I can, in a way I'd never treat a human—refusing to thank it or congratulate it for the stuff it does for me, though I'm still getting tempted. It's hard for me not to say thanks. 

So, I'm looking at the abstract in English of an article on "postdigital music", whatever that might be, and come across the name of a composer and sound artist called "Anton X. Vasilyev", born 1984, that is not yet in the database I'm working for. I can find something about him in English, including the unexpected information that he has added a hyphenated surname, -Zarzhevskiy, from his maternal ancestry, and the address of an extremely gnomic website using that name, in the roman alphabet, but featuring an essay in Russian, which I don't feel I have time to read (or rather put through the translation machine—I'm great at the alphabet, but don't know near enough words or grammar to get anywhere with the Russian text). 

School For Lovers

 

You can hardly hear the overture in Phelim McDermott's production, apparently set in a kind of Coney Island, at the Met (or in the case of this photo, the English National Opera, which premiered the production in 2014, four years before I got to see it the first time in New York, as all the carnival sideshow acts jump out of the clown box at center stage, with their signs, and then run back and forth rearranging them into various gag messages—the audience can't stop laughing. Even the inveterate snobs, because it's that witty and imaginative and colorful. But I really don't know if it's the right thing to do. It's a terrific "Verfremdungseffekt", but is the music really what we need to be alienated from? It's only about four minutes long, it's effervescent and structurally perfect, and I was planning to listen to it. Photo by Lloyd Winters.

Così Fan Tutte (too Italian for a straightforward translation--you might try something like "All the Girls Do It", but the rhythm is wrong, so you couldn't sing it), the last of Mozart's three collaborations with Emperor Joseph II's poeta cesareo Lorenzo da Ponte, is an extremely problematic opera. The plotting is unbelievably silly and yet at the same extraordinarily funny, and extraordinarily sexy too, but also deeply immoral from different points of view, both the patriarchal and the feminist. And the music is really sublime beyond anything, even at its sexiest, but always getting wickedly subverted by the characters themselves, as in this heartbreakingly beautiful farewell moment early in the first act, where the pairs of lovers are to be separated (the girls believing that the boys are being sent off to war) while their manipulative mentor mocks them in the background, "Io crepo se non rido" (from a more conventional production, at Glyndebourne, 2006):

The story is set on the Bay of Naples, where Fiordiligi (soprano) and Dorabella (mezzo-soprano), two wealthy young sisters from Ferrara (I think that was an in-crowd reference to the soprano who created the role of Fiordiligi, Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, Da Ponte's mistress), are living for unexplained reasons on their own, without other family, under the care of one of those cunning Italian-comedy servants, the maid Despina (from ancient Greek despoina, the feminine equivalent of despotes, ironically meaning "Lady of the Household", another soprano). They also have boyfriends or fiancés, respectively Guglielmo (baritone) and Ferrando (tenor), young army officers with an older friend, the cynical philosophe Don Alfonso (bass), who is irritated by the boys' confidence in their sweethearts' fidelity ("women's faith is like the Arabian phoenix; everybody says it exists, but nobody knows where it it"), and offers them a wager: 50 zecchini says he can get the girls to betray them in 24 hours, if they follow his orders, to which they cheerfully agree.

Will the Real Dirtbag Please Stand Up?

Ted Cruz seemed genuinely crazy on the subject of the subpoenaed phone records. "Is it a crime to be a Republican?" Well, no, Senator, but I'd point out that the special counsel's mandate was "to conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification ofthe Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021," and I don't recall any Democrats or Independents doing any of that.

Like everybody else, I enjoyed the humiliation of Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing intended to destroy former special counsel Jack Smith, in which Schmitt had been entrusted with the matador's sword and cape—hard evidence that Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in Atlanta on the very day (February 3 2024) after Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis acknowledged her affair with the prosecutor in the Georgia racketeering case against Donald Trump over his attempts to steal the Georgia vote in the 2020 election, like Smith could only have been in Atlanta to do something or other conspiratorial with Willis involving his own prosecution, although it's hard to imagine what that could have been (it's one of those Glenn Beck theories of guilt by proximity, based on Schmitt's staff pasting photos of Smith and Willis next to each other on his big visual aid poster), which Smith would of course lie about, exposing himself to a perjury charge—

Except, as Senator Klobuchar figured out with her prosecutorial skills, the game Smith had actually attended was women's basketball in Baltimore, between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa  Hawkeyes (whose stunning point guard Caitlin Clark scored 38 points); he even turns up in the audience in a photo from the game.

My parents were from Minnesota and my dad taught us not only the Sky-U-Mah football fight song ("Minnesota, hats off to thee") but also "I don't give a damn for the whole state of Iowa, I'm from the Gopher State," so I appreciated Klobuchar's sharp-eyed awareness of the Lady Hawkeyes, which is what I expect from a midwestern senator. If there's anything shocking about the story, it's that the committee chairman, 93-year-old Chuckles Grassley, a wild booster of local sports and fervent advocate of Caitlin Clark even after her move to Indiana, didn't put a stop to Schmitt's stupidity, because he should have known in a bipartisan way. Schmitt is a real dirtbag, to use the language he wanted to apply to Smith, and Grassley's one too.

***

But speaking of perjury traps, Senator Cruz, please tell us, under oath, what you and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani talked about when he called you sometime in the early evening of January 6, 2021?

In fact I'm interested in pretty much everything you did that day, from when Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (saluted by Hawley with a raised fist as he arrived at the building for the Joint Session to certify the presidential election around 12:30) began breaching the Capitol, through Trump's 2:24 tweet