Seeing Hopper

Anyone who lives in a city is accustomed to seeing other people—usually lots of them. Remarkably, Edward Hopper lived and worked in New York and painted moments in which the settings are sparsely populated, if at all. And the people in his images are often absorbed in an inner world. They’re both part of and apart from the scene in which we see them.

The problem with welcome news about AI in China

I’m wary of anything I read that gives people news they might like to hear. Russia is bungling its war in Ukraine? Maybe so, but it hasn’t withdrawn yet. China is falling behind in artificial intelligence R&D? Maybe so, but if I remember correctly the current version of a Chinese large language model (LLM) called Wu Dao is bilingual, which isn’t true of any Western LLMs I know of. A New York Times business article that’s the latest to prompt my doubts, which aimed to explain (according to its headline) “Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT,” was most notable for this spot of humor, which pertains to government control and censorship:

The trouble with football

Just after the first of the year, an NFL player named Damar Hamlin literally died on the field—he had a cardiac arrest as a result of a blow to the chest—and was resuscitated. That was still in the back of my mind when I noticed among my PDFs a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about football. I had saved it but for more than 10 years avoided it, fearing it would tell me something I didn’t want to know. I was right. It’s profoundly disturbing.