The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
For every earnest, creative filmmaker carefully using AI to enhance what they are doing to tell a better story, there will be thousands of grifters spamming every platform and corner of the internet with keyword-loaded content designed to perform in an algorithm and passively wash over you for the sole purpose of making money. For every studio carefully using AI to make a better movie, there will be a company making whatever, looking at it and saying “good enough,” and putting it out there for the purpose of delivering advertising.To extract from the article one salient point, if I may, it's that there's a reason the first company to lean hard into AI-generated shows is a company only tangential to the entertainment industry who employs zero creators.
Sam Altman [OpenAI CEO and known liar] has grown rich and powerful lying about how GPT will somehow lead to AGI, but at this point, what exactly is OpenAI meant to do? The only way it’s ever been able to develop new models is by throwing masses of compute and training data at the problem, and its only other choice is to start stapling its reasoning model onto its main Large Language Model, at which point something happens, something so good that literally nobody working for OpenAI or in the media appears to be able to tell you what it is. ...Unfortunately, Zitron ends the article by highlighting Bluesky, saying they're "selling an honest product and an open protocol" – except that Bluesky is backed by Cryptocoin scammers, so he's sacrificing credibility by either not knowing this or being a Cryptobro himself.
The revenue isn't coming. The products aren't coming. "Orion," OpenAI's next model, will underwhelm, as will its competitors' models, and at some point somebody is going to blink in one of the hyperscalers, and the AI era will be over. Almost every single generative AI company that you’ve heard of is deeply unprofitable, and there are few innovations coming to save them from the atrophy of the foundation models. ...
I also want to be clear that none of these companies ever had a plan. They believed that if they threw enough GPUs together they would turn generative AI – probabilistic models for generating stuff — into some sort of sentient computer. It’s much easier, and more comfortable, to look at the world as a series of conspiracies and grand strategies, and far scarier to see it for what it is — extremely rich and powerful people that are willing to bet insanely large amounts of money on what amounts to a few PDFs and their gut.
Dear President Trump,
I hope and pray that in your next term in office, you will be a president for all Americans, advancing the principles of democracy, justice, and commitment to rule of law that have been sources of strength for our nation throughout its history.
As an American and a Reform Jew, I am committed to the protection of the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. I will support any serious effort by your administration to combat antisemitism, and I will champion a strong U.S.-Israel relationship that fosters democracy in and security for the Jewish state and demands the rights, well-being, and national aspirations of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank are upheld.
At the same time, I will join in fierce opposition to any further efforts to eviscerate reproductive rights, to target the safety and rights of the LGBTQ+ community, to harm communities of Color, or to undermine the health of our air, water, and land. I will join in defense of the security of immigrants and the right to claim asylum. I will vehemently oppose the weaponization of political power against individuals and institutions that are core to our democracy, including the courts and the press. And above all, I urge an end to the repeated demeaning of women, the use of hateful language against those who hold different views, and the persistent coarsening of our political culture.
We are all made more whole when we treat others with the respect every human being deserves. Please, help heal the wounds our nation bears and govern as a president for all Americans.
Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.
'The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.' On 27th September 2016, Rabbi Sacks delivered a keynote address entitled 'The Mutating Virus: Understanding Antisemitism' in the European Parliament. The speech opened a conference on the future of Jewish communities in Europe hosted by Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament. To read a transcript of the speech, please click here.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
In light of Zamenhof Day (two days ago, whoops), the wiki page for the constructed language Esperanto's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, claims the language has an estimated 1,000 native speakers. It does? Really?
The wiki cites sources, as it should, giving us two. The first is Ethnologue, a group which studies all languages, and which contrarily makes no claim towards there being any native speakers of Esperanto. Huh.
The second wiki source listed, though, is an article on the online language school Babbel's website called What Is Esperanto, And Who Speaks It? The article text is as you'd expect from the headline, and includes this quote: "And even though Esperanto was made to be an auxiliary language, there is a cohort of about 1,000 people who speak Esperanto as their first language, a few of whom were interviewed in the video above." The 'video above' is six minutes of casual interviews with ten-ish people entirely in Esperanto (and with no subtitles, in any language), so whether these people are native speakers and if so, how they came to be, is not possible for me to determine.
The next line of the Babbel article claims, "The most famous native speaker is Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whose father was a devotee of the language." George Soros is a Jewish banker, liberal political donor, and conspiracy magnet, but he is also the son of Tivador Soros, an Esperanto author who changed his family name from Schwartz to Soros supposedly because of the Esperanto meaning will soar (or maybe he just was a fan of palindromes). But the Soros family was very much living in Hungary, and even if Tivador did teach his children Esperanto at a young age, surely they must have primarily used Hungarian in their day-to-day life, right?
This 2016 article from Tablet with a title referencing George Soros and Esperanto claims that while the invented language has an active and thriving community, it has no native speakers: "It’s probably better to spend your time learning Lithuanian or Tamil, which, unlike Esperanto, stand at the center of a living culture, with native speakers and a literary tradition." And later, "Esperanto was never supposed to be a native tongue, but rather an adaptable second language that would form a bridge between foreign speakers." But what about George Soros? Here, the article contradicts itself: "One currently world-famous Jew is that rarest of birds, a denaskulo (native speaker of Esperanto): George Soros." That and a few sentences following is his only mention in the article, although it does go on to mention an "Esperantist refuge called Bona Espero in rural Brazil." There, presumably, children could be raised speaking Esperanto natively... unless "the children prefer to speak Portuguese rather than Esperanto." [Aside: the article's worth a read for its detailing of the complicated relationship between Zamenhof, Esperanto, Judaism, and Zionism.]
In 2010, the New York Times says about George Soros: "He also recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet." But this contradicted by a Transparent Language Esperanto Blog 2011 post by (founder of the Esperanto-language wikipedia) Chuck Smith where the word "native" is crossed out in the quote "George Soros is the wealthiest
nativeEsperanto speaker." Smith, in an interview with Esperanto advocate Humphrey Tonkin, prompts Tonkin into saying: "George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker. Esperantists have made that claim on numerous occasions (it’s all over the Internet), but it’s simply not true. Soros learned Esperanto from his father when he was growing up, but his native language (his only native language) was Hungarian." (Tonkin also disputes that the name Soros was picked with its Esperanto meaning in mind.) But What Tonkin says makes sense, growing up learning a language even from childhood is not the same as being a native speaker. A native speaker of a language is a term without precise definition but connotes the person's mother tongue – the language in which they think.Unreferenced on the Zamenhof wiki page is another wiki page, called Native Esperanto Speakers. While explicitly stating George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker, it lists only five claimed native speakers by name, all notable people. First is Daniel Bovet, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of antihistamines. His wiki page claims he's a native Esperanto speaker (sourced to fellow tertiary source NNDB, which itself cites no sources) while neither his biographies at the Nobel Prize nor the Royal Society even mention the language. He also once claimed that tobacco increases its user's intelligence, so, um...
Second is Petr Ginz, a novelist and teenage Holocaust victim whose diary was published posthumously. While he was the son of Esperantists and fluent in the language, his novels and diary were written in Czech, arguing against him being a true native Esperanto speaker. Third is Carlo Minnaja, a mathematician and author of the Esperanto-Italian dictionary. While undoubtedly fluent at a young age, being that by the time he was 20 he was on the board of the World Esperanto Youth Organization, I can find no further claim that he is a native speaker.
But then we have people who may actually be the real deal. Kim J. Henriksen's claim is strong since he has had said about him by American linguist and Klingon-speaker Arika Okrent that he "appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents' relationship and of the entire home life of their family." She then adds, "Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue. For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish."
And lastly we have Ino Kolbe, an author and proof-reader of the Esperanto-German dictionary. The wiki says "Her parents were so dedicated to the Esperanto movement that the only language they used around her was Esperanto; therefore before entering school she learned her German only from other children," and that she grew up in a hotbed of Esperantism and at a time when even the League of Nations was considering the language's use in its General Assembly. (The source is a German newspaper; the link is dead but presumably trustworthy.)
So are there really 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto out there in the world, as the original statement claims? Are there 1,000 people who were raised by dedicated, diehard Esperantists, speaking the constructed language in their households and utopian villages? The existence of at least three scholarly papers would seem to argue towards this claim's substance, each being a study of native speakers of the language. The 2001 study by Benjamin K. Bergen of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department of eight native speakers claims to be the first ever (investigating the 'nativization' of Esperanto), even though the 1996 study by Renato Corsetti, an Esperantist, (in Italian and Esperanto) documents 350 families with Esperanto-speaking children, saying the closest linguistic parallel seems to be the Hebrew revival. The 2005 study, again by Corsetti and now joined by Maria A. Pinto and Maria Tolomeo, traces development of Esperanto-speaking children but points out that they all have "two or three mother-tongues."
Let's end this long, pointless, rambling entry by linking to another Transparent Language Esperanto Blog post, this one from 2013 and titled 3rd gen native Esperanto speaker: Nicole! Here, Chuck Smith says, "Some people don’t believe that native Esperanto speakers exist." Yes, this is true. And while the article is updated with the face-palm correction that she's actually only a 2nd-generation native speaker, a native speaker she is. Nicole when asked about it says, "Well, I can’t compare that to what my life would’ve been like as a non-native Esperanto speaker, of course. However, it wasn’t annoying at all, and often it was nice to have a 'secret' language. It’s difficult to describe, but it was part of the family and somehow always felt 'nice.'"