Only the chatter

One of approximately two known photographs depicting Donald Trump using a computer, from Motherboard. He seems to think one plays it by waving at it, like a theremin.

For the record, Donald J. Trump did not Google himself; he still doesn't know how to use a browser. This morning's terrifying tweets (which he entered at some incredible hour like 3 or 4 AM, and then deleted, redoing them, or having somebody else redo them, as a properly constituted threadlet, a little after 8:00)—

....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018

—are based on a piece by Paula Bolyard in PJ Media, datelined 25 August,  after she Googled "Trump" in the news tab, nominally showing that Google's algorithm is darkly influenced by Democratic math I should say a lot of sources suggested this, but none of them gave s link, so I'm not going to try to credit them):

Enough to make a difference

Ushguli, Upper Svaneti region, Georgia, via Travel Promotions Georgia.

Something else you can do with Google Translate—invite them to translate a particularly boring piece of Chinese text (from the magazine Renmin Yinyue/People's Music, April 2016). But don't tell them the text is in Chinese. Tell them it is, for instance, in Georgian. The results are exotic in the extreme:

And when he had taken the rest of the soul
into the lake of fire,
and set it in order upon the four winds,
for the sake of the rest of the world,
it is not enough to make a difference
in the quality of the arts.

The first three Chinese characters in this remarkable performance aren't in the Chinese text, and the rest are its last sentence. A more conventional English version would have no souls, lakes of fire, or making a difference; it might read,

I'd say: The Damore Memo

Image via Phawker.

David Brooks ("Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google's C.E.O.") picking villains:

There are many actors in the whole Google/diversity drama, but I’d say the one who’s behaved the worst is the C.E.O., Sundar Pichai.

Am I alone in thinking there's something weird about conducting an examination of this case around the question "who has behaved the worst?" There are many actors in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but I'd say the one who behaved the worst was Polonius. What a dick that guy is. I'm glad he's dead.

No, I'd say the job is to understand what happened and what, if anything, it means. I'm fond of worrying through the argument of who was the worst person in the George W. Bush administration (on the whole, I go for Wolfowitz, who was better intellectually equipped than Cheney or Rumsfeld to know what they were doing and thus has a greater responsibility than those two simple-minded sociopaths), but only in the context of a broader analysis of the story.

What happened at Google was that sometime in July a software engineer called James Damore attended a mandatory company diversity training session that made him really mad (he said it was "secretive" and "shaming"), so on a flight to China, to while the time away and assuage his hurt feelings, he wrote a lengthy note under the title "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber"

Two Katakana Poems

Ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Hiroshige, via.

Love Song

Let me tell you, my eyes are crowded.
Let's go out, I'm totally ok
Let me do it and I'm aware of what you are doing. Letting my eyes out.

Let me hurt and let's go out.

I'm Sorry I Do Not Care

I do not think that I am sure that you will not be able to take advantage of it.
I do not care, I do not care, I'm sorry I do not care.
Oooo I am an Illustrated Owon I Wanna Waiter I Wish I Was a Waiter I Wish I Was a Waiter I Wish I Wrath I Where I Want
I'm sorry I can not believe it. I'm sorry I do not care. I do not care.
You do not have to worry about it. I'm sorry I do not care. I do not care. I do not care.
You do not have to worry about it. Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh I Wanna Waiter Oh Oh
I do not know how to get it. I do not know how to get it. I do not care if I do not know how to get it.
I'm sorry I can not believe it. I'm sorry I do not care. I do not care.

Smut has been getting some lovely results with hiragana vowels (traditional Japanese phonemic characters). These use katakana (traditional Japanese phonemic characters for transliterating foreign languages). 

Kurdish Song

Syrian Kurdish refugee children in Iraq, via eKurd Daily.

"Covfefe", traditional Kurdish children's song

laughing fe fe
tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe
kov tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe
tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe
tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe, laughing tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe
kov tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe, laughing tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe

Deep Donald

(New Google Translate poems at bottom)

Doughnuts by vegan chef Sam Melbourne, via Lost at E Minor.

In contemplating the science-fiction Singularity, we always picture the machines learning to think, and becoming more and more like people; not the possibility that the alienated humans will become more mechanical, but a cool idea from the neuroscientist Robert A. Burton in the Times's philosophy department suggests thinking this way about our Emperor Trump could account not only for his deep strangeness but also for his incomprehensible success:

If conventional psychology isn’t up to the task, perhaps we should step back and consider a tantalizing sci-fi alternative — that Trump doesn’t operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense.

A "deep learning" program like Google's Deep Mind or IBM's Deep Blue, programmed to accomplish a specific task (like winning a chess game, or an election) by mapping the data of previous efforts onto the background of the current situation, the same kind of heuristic that is used by the Google Translate algorithm we've been having fun with.

Burton can suggest a startlingly persuasive account of how a Deep Donald could have won the election, by having the single objective of winning and undisturbed by any other motivations or calculations of consequence after the election:

I for one welcome our new DJ overlords

Niv Bavarsky, Zombie DJ.

David Brooks is taking Halloween off, and turned his space over to one of those Google experiments analogous to the self-driving car, for an entirely automated piece composed by his Gmail account.

Verbatim David Brooks, "Our Machine Masters", October 31 2014:

Some days I think nobody knows me as well as Pandora. I create a new music channel around some band or song and Pandora feeds me a series of songs I like just as well. In fact, it often feeds me songs I’d already downloaded onto my phone from iTunes. Either my musical taste is extremely conventional or Pandora is really good at knowing what I like.

I'd say the two options kind of feed off of each other. Also, I'd kill myself if I felt that way.

So you don't trust Obama? Compared to the Eye of Sauron?

.@pierre certainly is for me. When giant unaccountable corps align against a govt with electoral system I will always be biased toward govt
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 11, 2013

I'm pretty sure I really mean this, though it's always hard to be totally certain. Government is not always right by any means, and it may not be right in the present case, but if it is pitted against Microsoft, Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo, and LinkedIn that is to me a prima facie indication that it just might be right this time. Or not "right", that's absurd when you're talking about the behavior of intelligence agencies, but more interested than the corporations, in spite of appearances, in being on my side and on the side of the rabble in general.

Has there ever been a historical case where an elected government clearly in the wrong was opposed by the corporate establishment? Did the railway and telegraph magnates tell [jump]

Headquarters of Field Marshal Lord Raglan, sometime between 1855 and 1865. 

Being not evil

Saw this at Raw Story and it made me all sorts of heartwarmed:

Google has set out to save the world’s dying languages. In an alliance with scholars and linguists, the Internet powerhouse on Wednesday introduced an Endangered Languages Project website where people can find, share, and store information about dialects in danger of disappearing.

“People can share their knowledge and research directly through the site and help keep the content up-to-date,” project managers Clara Rivera Rodriguez and Jason Rissman said in a Google blog post.

“A diverse group of collaborators have already begun to contribute content ranging from 18th-century manuscripts to modern teaching tools like video and audio language samples and knowledge-sharing articles.”

 The story on Google's own official blog has some great videos: here.