Notes and Essays -- John Brown

From: The Styles Desk,  The New York Times , May 30, 2023  Ilona Chernobai: Most On Message!   As the Ukrainian influencer ascended the festival’s red-carpeted stairs wearing a blue-and-yellow gown, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, she popped balloons filled with a red liquid on her head. Those who witnessed her fashion statement included security personnel, who escorted her off the carpet soon after.

For years before the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, tensions between the U.S. and Russia over arrests were rising—along with swaps of prisoners  By Brett Forrest, The Wall Street Journal , May 31, 2023 8:49 am ET U.S. professional basketball player Brittney Griner appears in a Russian court last year after being imprisoned there; she  was later freed in a swap.    PHOTO:  KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES Russia’s detention in March of Wall Street Journal reporter  Evan Gershkovich  was a breach of international norms, but it also was the latest chapter in a long history. For more than a decade, Moscow has been expressing outrage over several cases in which the U.S. arrested and convicted Russian citizens for various crimes. Over the past five years, the Kremlin has turned to seizing Americans and trading them to reclaim those prisoners. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, designated by the U.S. as wrongfully d...

The Shoggoth, a character from a science fiction story, captures the essential weirdness of the A.I. moment.  The Shoggoth meme has gone viral in the small world of hyper-online A.I. insiders. Credit... @TetraspaceWest By  Kevin Roose , The New York Times ,  May 30, 2023,   2:20 p.m. ET A few months ago, while meeting with an A.I. executive in San Francisco, I spotted a strange sticker on his laptop. The sticker depicted a cartoon of a menacing, octopus-like creature with many eyes and a yellow smiley-face attached to one of its tentacles. I asked what it was. “Oh, that’s the Shoggoth,” he explained. “It’s the most important meme in A.I.” And with that, our agenda was officially derailed. Forget about chatbots and compute clusters — I needed to know everything about the Shoggoth, what it meant and why people in the A.I. world were talking about it. The executive explained that the Shoggoth had become a popular reference among workers in artificial intelligence, as a ...