Dementia Incidence Linked to Inflammatory FoodsMedPage. Caffeine is anti-inflammatory, along with calorie restriction
Anyway, I would ask him these things, and he would just explain stuff to me. I would say, “What’s happening in Poland?” This is the 1980s, and he would say things to me like, “The idea of civil society is the opiate of the intellectual class.” Everybody was completely enamored of the concept of civil society in the ’80s, especially via the Polish case, and so I would ask him to elucidate more. “What does that mean, and how does that work?”
He told me once that class in France came from disease in Paris — that it wasn’t because of who was a factory worker, who wasn’t a factory worker, but it was your neighborhoods in Paris and who died from cholera and who didn’t die from cholera. A colleague of ours who was another fellow graduate in Berkeley ended up writing a dissertation using that aside, that throwaway line.
My excellent Conversation with Stephen Kotkin
Those new service sector jobs: “How to Make $100 an Hour Scratching Someone’s Back.” (WSJ)
Jennifer Doleac on what we get wrong about crime NYT
There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI
The Atlantic – Dialogue from these movies and TV shows has been used by companies such as Apple and Anthropic to train AI systems[unpaywalled] By Alex Reisner – “I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. It even includes prewritten “live” dialogue from Golden Globes and Academy Awards broadcasts. If a chatbot can mimic a crime-show mobster or a sitcom alien—or, more pressingly, if it can piece together whole shows that might otherwise require a room of writers—data like this are part of the reason why.”