Using AI, I was able to take some old painting and make it better. First the painting. Notice how you can barely see what's even going on. Where even is this? Who are the people? Huh? You're too far away to really see the setup. Whole left side blank. Nothing here to grab onto. I had the AI parse the image, & create a full description of it. Using that description, I had it regenerate an image and it was just way better. Instead of night, it's a gorgeous sunny day. It went ahead & moved the people outside. Everyone's smiling; this is a welcoming place.

Using AI, I was able to take some old painting and make it better. First the painting. Notice how old and colorless it is. And you can't even see the girl's face. There's just no info to work with here. So blah. But the AI was able to parse the image, & create a full description of it. Using that description, I had it regenerate an image that was way better. Just look at the vivid colors, and it also went ahead and turned the girl around.

I don’t think racism is good or anything but the concept of ‘anti-racism’ as we encounter it is so simplistic/univariate I find it hard to take seriously. Like something an autistic 7yo would come up with. ‘Racism is bad? Ok its inverse must be good. I understand the world now’ When I see Kendi types whose rhetoric is all about ‘anti-racism’, and then the edifice of bureaucracy that’s apparently sprung up downstream of it, it just comes across as So Stupid How Can Anyone Seriously Think This Way.

That is its power, that is why it wins.

IMHO scientists, politicians & ‘public health officials’ acted out of some combo of: panic, ego-trip, mindless groupthink, China-worship, hubris, simple corruption, & political gamesmanship. But they weren’t ‘purposely trying to make things worse’ so it’s all ok, it’s cool

https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/1637446533623758850

For example when ‘public health experts’ signed that open letter that, during the absolutely necessary Lockdown, Going To BLM Protests was good actually (public health-wise), that wasn’t ‘trying to make things worse’. Just nakedly politically-motivated nonsense. So it’s fine

ChatGPT, gimme 'python code that draws mario (the video game character)' Van Gogh's Starry Night

Apparently LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT has been on for 24 seasons.

seems like a lot

https://twitter.com/FINALLEVEL/status/1621509565136117760

I’ve seen zero episodes of this 24-season television program. Should I binge-watch?

in retrospect seems like a crime against humanity by comparison that HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET only had 7 seasons and, I think, a TV movie

Am I the only person suspicious of the 'low-income housing' story whenever I see it? Who exactly do we imagine will be these 'low-income' people moving into 23 Oakwood Boulevard town houses in Atherton. The whole thing makes my spidey-sense tingle as some kind of arb.

https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/1620388949117046785

Yes, yes, that's right, let the developer build townhouses, they are designated 'low-income', & what's going to happen is, here's who's going to move in there, see: a poor single mother w/5 kids who works 7 days/wk cleaning motel rooms. That's who we're meant to imagine, i guess?

Just finished getting my MPH. Took years and years of study but I’m a Public Health Expert, MPH now. Thread of the main things I learned doing all that hardcore study:

1. frequent handwashing. I bet you didn’t know that washing hands is good like I do as a MPH 2. clean water. I bet you didn’t know that clean water is better than yucky water, like I do as a MPH

Some things I learned from trusted ‘mainstream media’ (MSM) sources in recent years

1. Donald Trump was a cultivated, controlled agent of Russia (possibly as far back as the 1980s) via Kompromat, almost a Manchurian Candidate, certainly a traitor working against the US. 2. Lockdowns of entire, healthy populations to suppress and eradicate a virus were a tested and established Public Health Measure, justified by all the state-of-the-art, established science of that field. No one in that field disagreed.

Not going to @ anybody b/c that gets me annoying replyguys however I do it/whichever way I go, but just want to say it's interesting that there's almost no way this booster-advice-construction exercise isn't more art than science. Just hadn't thought much about it before

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1617627763824889856

Let's say I pose the question thusly:
For someone who's taken N shots in the past Y years, and has had Covid a couple times, is taking an N+1st shot right now of positive benefit vs. risk?

I don't know. And you don't know. Actually, no one knows. It's not like there's an RCT

My old friend Jonathan Reiner MD is still whining that CDC publishes what he calls a 'greenwashed' map, based on some more holistic community-risk metric (not just transmission).

Reminder that if they hadn't made this switch, many/most schools might still be closed. I guess people forget now, but a while back there were still many parts of the country fighting with their own school boards to open schools. They insisted on 'following CDC guidance', which 'guidance' was based on (made-up) thresholds for community transmission rates and so on.

Because of the way Google News works, serving you what you're 'interested in', I get little widgets showing me Movie News. And it's making me aware of the seams of what must be an absolutely sleazy movie 'review'/promotional campaign cottage industry just day after day of clickbaity headlines from websites you've never heard of with 'reviews' or something of whatever is the latest movie/TV show being pushed. and you just know some poor twentysomething got an assignment to write this dumb thing

BTW don't listen to the catastrophists on here who say we 'have to' mint the Coin or whatever. There's a completely standard process which is to just Raise The F**king Debt Ceiling (#RTFDC). People who doubt this are bonkers, it's been done dozens of times without fail.

https://twitter.com/soncharm/status/1611753912134139904

'But but this time it's different' yeah yeah how many times have we heard this in the last decade. Do these Coin-fanciers ever feel like Charlie Brown with the football?

Pretty ironic how we tend to have this view of Mexico & perhaps some South American countries as being totally corrupt narcostates, and meanwhile, BIg Pharma apparently owns our entire government/establishment now & makes the cartels look like lemonade-stands i don't think there are any narcostates that have their government bureaucracies mandate the product for 3-year-olds

Helpful guide to understanding US elections, for foreign onlookers:

-If it’s close but the count is taking a long time, the D will eventually win.
-Any legal challenges automatically remain open, unless/until the D wins.
-Any race that goes to a ‘runoff’ means the D will win. There’s no such thing as an extended counting process in which the reported R percentage of the vote increases over time rather than decreases. This is physically impossible for some reason. That’s just part of our system.

teacher 30y ago: you did poorly on this test, get your mom or dad to sign it & bring it back

kid: aw man

parents: hey do better

teacher now, to parents: you didn’t know about that low test score 3 months ago? but it was posted on the EduGreat app you should’ve gotten a PIN in the welcome 1st day email near the bottom. then just download the app, create an account with a password, enter then PIN. then check it every day, just suddenly make checking this one specialized app/website nonstop an integral part of your life

Here is what someone needs to explain: how, and why, this sort of advice isn’t a recipe for universal mask-wearing forever.

The virus is endemic. It’s everywhere. It’s in animals. Your Blue community/state/region ‘wears masks’ for N months and then…what, exactly?

https://twitter.com/theangryepi/status/1505626790047281152

Let’s grant for sake of argument that community mask-wearing actually meaningfully suppresses the virus. (I don’t buy this, but pretend)

There are two possibilities from there:

1) the virus is gone

2) the virus is not gone

If not gone, you can’t take off the masks. Right?

is there any scientific content whatsoever to the fields of Virology, Public Health, Epidemiology, or Pediatrics besides ‘masks’ and ‘when and where humans should be mandated to wear masks’, or nah ‘masks’ just seem really really really really really really really really really important to a lot of people in these fields

people who, as far as I can tell, had essentially zero interest in ‘masks’ prior to March 2020

People like infographics so here's a very simple illustration of what's wrong with all Wuhan Virus Policy: folks thought we were in Picture 1, but we're in Picture 2. Policies perhaps justified via 1 are absolutely insane in 2, yet Public Health refuses to acknowledge this. The key/appeal of Picture 1 was that it absolved everyone who embraced it of doing anything resembling cost/benefit analysis. Since the 'delta' (potential benefit) was thought/assumed to be very very big, it was treated as near-infinite. Therefore any Policy is "justified".

Working on hypothesis about Pixar movies: imagine it being replaced with live-action (+CGI but just for physically impossible effects stuff)

If it’d be almost the same? Good Pixar Early on it always seemed like each Pixar movie had a single clean cartoony ‘conceit’, a hook or angle. What if toys / cars were alive. What if things that don’t really have personalities had personalities (bugs, monsters, fish, rats, robots).

FROM HERE: Biden should nominate a generic D-style replacement to sit on the Supreme Court, & then Rs should have an absolute hissy-fit, look up that person's high school yearbook, team up with some DoJ employees to gin up a false 35-year-old accusation based on someone's memoir, have loud protests where they occupy the steps of the Supreme Court building and climb statuary and pound on the front doors, say in large numbers that the person nominated 'looks like' someone they disliked or who bothered them in high school, say that the FBI should 'investigat