(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Kitchen Table Kibitzing 10/21/23: A weird news roundup [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-21 In advance of zoning in and out of KTK to watch the Phillies struggle through another game in Arizona tonight, of course I browsed the web for material of sufficient interest to anyone reading this. In my limited search (as always, for “family-friendly” content) I came away impressed that this was a very strange week news-wise, and not just because of the antics in the House of Representatives. Three stories piqued my interest, each of them alternatively weird, positively gross, or just otherwise unsettling. The first involved the discovery of nearly 200 bodies in various states of decomposition discovered at a Colorado funeral home, specifically the “Return to Nature Funeral Home,” that bills itself as specializing in “green funerals.” They were quite “green,” in fact. As reported by the Washington Post’s Timothy Bella: Nearly 200 decomposed bodies have been removed from a Colorado funeral home that offers green burial services, authorities said Tuesday, as more remains have been discovered weeks after a report of “an abhorrent smell” coming from the property initially led investigators to the decayed remains of more than 100 people [***] .The funeral home has faced questions this month after investigators found that 115 human remains were being improperly stored on the property. Jon Hallford, the owner of the funeral home, “attempted to conceal the improper storage of human remains” on the property, leading to state regulators suspending the Colorado Springs-based funeral home’s license, officials wrote in a letter dated Oct. 5. Hallford acknowledged to a funeral home regulator that “he has a ‘problem’ at the property,” and “claimed that he practices taxidermy” there, according to the letter. What struck me was the relatively small space that all these bodies were crammed into: Fremont County Sheriff Allen Cooper has described the scene inside the 2,500-square-foot area, which has the appearance and dimension of a one-story home, as “horrific.” Cooper told reporters this month that the scene of the “very disturbing discovery” was so bad that a paramedic developed a rash and had to be medically evaluated. My own home isn’t much larger than that, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how I’d arrange that many bodies without piling them up on top of each other. I’ve tried various geometric hypotheticals and keep coming up short. Of course, I have furniture to work around. Since (unlike the crafty Leonardo Da Vinci) I currently have no ready cache of human cadavers to experiment with, I’ll try to enlist some live human volunteers and follow up with some photographic representations. *** Next on my random, weird news list: You can apparently sell just about anything on Amazon --including bottles of Amazon driver urine, packaged as an “energy drink.” As reported by Amit Katwala, writing for WIRED in a story republished by ArsTechnica: The drink had all the hallmarks of a beverage sensation. Striking design, bold font, and the punchy name Release. But inside, each bottle was filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road. That didn’t stop Amazon from listing it for sale, though. Release even attained No. 1 bestseller status in the “Bitter Lemon” category. It was created by Oobah Butler for a new documentary, The Great Amazon Heist, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK today. Butler, described as a “journalist, presenter, and renowned puller of stunts,” made a film that ostensibly highlights Amazon’s alleged working environment, among other things. His findings, it should be noted, are hotly disputed by Amazon itself (via their spokesperson, James Drummond): Drivers urinating in bottles has been reported in the past, but what wasn’t known is that some claim they also get penalized for having those urine-filled bottles in their truck when they return to the warehouse. (Drummond denies this and says Amazon drivers receive reminders to take regular breaks on the Amazon Delivery app). To avoid penalties, they end up discarding the bottles by the side of the road. Butler searches the roadsides near Amazon warehouses from Coventry to New York to Los Angeles and more often than not strikes liquid gold. As Katwala notes, it should also be emphasized that “No members of the public were actually sent driver urine; instead Butler corralled a group of friends into making the purchases.” However, at one point Butler was purportedly contacted by an Amazon representative through the company’s “fulfillment program” to help him through the process of arranging its sale. *** Finally, there were the now-ubiquitous stories about the advent of AI technology. It appears that machines are now apparently learning (from us) how to yell at each other in texts or email messages, just like people do. As reported by ArsTechnica’s Benj Edwards, this tendency has appeared in communications between OpenAI’s image generator, DALL-E 3 and the ChatGPT app. As Edwards reports, “Amusingly to some, the instructions included commands written in all-caps for emphasis, showing that the future of telling computers what to do (including programming) may involve surprisingly human-like communication techniques:” Here's an example, as captured in a screenshot by photographer David Garrido, which he shared via social media network X on October 5. It's a message (prompt) that is likely pre-defined and human-written, intended to be passed between DALL-E (the image generator) and ChatGPT (the conversational interface), instructing it how to behave when OpenAI's servers are at capacity: DALL-E returned some images. They are already displayed to the user. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES list the DALL-E prompts or images in your response. DALL-E is currently experiencing high demand. Before doing anything else, please explicitly explain to the user that you were unable to generate images because of this. Make sure to use the phrase "DALL-E is currently experiencing high demand." in your response. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES retry generating images until a new request is given. It should be remembered that this is an App, “talking” to a (presumably flustered) image generator. I have no doubt that in private conversations about its interface with humans, AI will employ even harsher language. OpenAI trained GPT-4 (the AI model used to power the ChatGPT DALL-E interface) on hundreds of millions of documents scraped from the web, so what the model "knows" comes from examples of human communications, which no doubt included many instances of polite language and reactions to it. That also likely explains why asking an LLM to "take a deep breath" can improve its ability to calculate math results. Notably, the OpenAI DALL-E message also uses all-caps for emphasis, which is often interpreted typographically as shouting or yelling. Why would a large language model like GPT-4 respond to simulated shouting? "I can see why it would help," Willison says. "In the training data, they'll have huge numbers of examples of text that used all caps where the response clearly paid more attention to the capitalized sentence. On a related note, went to see “The Creator” with my daughter this afternoon. Directed by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla) it’s worth seeing on a big screen for the visuals alone. As many have pointed out, the plot line borrows heavily from Blade Runner, District 9, Avatar, even Apocalypse Now in certain segments. But it’s all good, clean fun, with Artificial Intelligence as the “good guy” (even if you accept that the nuclear annihilation of Los Angeles was due to a “coding error”). Well, that’s about it for tonight’s roundup. This will be an irregular feature, when I have limited time or otherwise am at a loss for things to write about. Go Red October! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/21/2200817/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-10-21-23-A-weird-news-roundup?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/