Stun Gun!

Every now and then, Trumpers and other ne'er-do-wells intrude at our protest at Howe and Arden. In this portion of a video, three interlopers provoke us (two in a red car with Hammer-Down-SS plates and a third who menaces us with a stun gun).

 

Bandage Change On Jasper’s Splint Today

 

Our Bad - You Get Your Job Back

AI lacks an important trait, "gut instinct," and so Ford is hiring back some quality-control engineers:

Ford says that over the past three years, it has hired 350 veteran "gray beard" engineers, many of whom are former employees, to help train younger staff and reprogram the AI tools that simply were not performing the way Ford had hoped.

The move reincorporates humans into the auto giant's process at a time when many other companies are pivoting away from human involvement. 

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters last week via Bloomberg. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.”

Gambling Will Soon Infest Facebook

I'm getting worried about Meta's evident decision to gamify Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and every other platform it controls. 

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket make gambling really easy to do online, but the bets can be opaque, poorly-defined, and they are sometimes laughably easy to manipulate. 

I particularly liked that fellow who recently brought a hair dryer to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, in order to apply heat on a weather-service thermometer recording the temperature there, so he could win a bet. 

In addition, once money changes hands, there's no way to reverse judgements even if the game is later found to be fraudulent. The hair-dryer guy skated because there's no law for this situation. Money changed hands: he won, it's over! 

The rules matter in gambling. Lax rules, lax definitions, and an international market subject to no one's law means you'll get fraud everywhere. 

You get better treatment in a real casino in the event of error. You actually get your money back! 

Do you think you'll ever get your money back from that lousy bet you placed on Facebook? Dream on! 

Just another reason why we need to back away from Meta, and think about going elsewhere for social media. Save the gambling for real casinos, which are more honest and subject to regulation:

As prediction markets surge in popularity, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly calling for his company to consider partnering with Polymarket and Kalshi, two of the biggest platforms, while he develops a similar in-house app, Arena. According to a Friday report by the New York Times, Zuckerberg wants to design Arena to specifically target 18 to 34-year-olds.

Meta also hopes to implement parts of Arena into Facebook and its messaging app, Messenger, attaching betting options to group chats, news feeds, and videos. 

“We believe that prediction markets are one of the more interesting new content types,” Ime Archibong, a senior Meta official leading Arena’s development, reportedly said in an internal company post last month. “The social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.”