"The artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, has just sold an NFT at a record-breaking $69.3 million, the third-highest price achieved by a living artist."

"The sale, at Christie’s, for the purely digital work was the strongest indication yet that NFTs, or 'nonfungible tokens,' have taken the art market by storm, making the leap from specialist websites to premier auction houses. Beeple, a newcomer to the fine-art world who first heard about NFTs five months ago, is the most high-profile artist to profit off the huge boom in sales of these much hyped but poorly understood commodities. If you’ve heard about them and want to know what the fuss is about, here’s a primer... An NFT is an asset verified using blockchain technology, in which a network of computers records transactions and gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership... ...NFTs make digital artworks unique, and therefore sellable."

From "What Are NFTs, Anyway? One Just Sold for $69 Million/'Nonfungible tokens' and blockchain technology are taking the mainstream art world by storm, fetching huge prices. We explain, or try to" (NYT).

This post is the stark opposite of the previous post.

The ludicrous babying of Biden.

I'm reading "Opinion: The White House’s use of Zoom for meetings raises China-related security concerns" by Josh Rogin in The Washington Post:

The Biden White House is using the teleconference platform Zoom for most of its unclassified government-related virtual interactions, even as the Justice Department is prosecuting one of the company’s China-based executives for working with Beijing’s intelligence services to interfere in Zoom calls. Some lawmakers, former officials and experts are warning that the Biden administration may be ignoring the risks....

May be?!!!

"[A] robot protagonist... meets mostly sultry, suggestive women who moan, gyrate, and throw themselves at his feet."

"It is strangely reminiscent of a middle-aged male fantasy, but with clunkier chat-up lines. 'I wish my binary self had a body like that,' he says to one woman. He tells her she has lips like 'warm honey' and says: 'I’ll make love to you all over your body.'... Another scene features the robot with a man who drops his trousers and tells him, antagonistically: 'You’ve got a finger in my butt.' They stand facing each other on an almost bare set... Questions on life, companionship and mortality are voiced but they seem like emotionless musings with no sense of drama, depth or story, and the robot moves on from one surreal scene to the next, as if in a bad dream.... It is all fairly puzzling and quite a relief when the hour is over."

From a review of a play about a robot that was written by a robot —  "On the scene, like a sex-obsessed machine: when a robot writes a play/In a drama written by artificial intelligence, the computer’s imagination touches on themes of love and loneliness – but is mostly obsessed with sex" (The Guardian).

I need to know what was fed into that artificial intelligence. That had to have been human-written text. If the results are "strangely reminiscent of a middle-aged male fantasy," I suspect that's because the writings of fantasy-prone middle-aged men were fed into the nonjudgmental robot. Perhaps the play should be viewed not so much as evidence of the shortcomings of robots but as a window into the weaknesses of human minds. But you have to tell us which human writers were uploaded into the computer!

"We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology."

Said Microsoft President Brad Smith, quoted in "Microsoft won’t sell police its facial-recognition technology, following similar moves by Amazon and IBM" (WaPo).