Lobsty Klawfman

Pete Hegseth has proposed routine testosterone testing for U.S. soldiers. I am not making this up.

In 2012, Chris Kubasik was president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin, which makes fighter jets and various other things that governments purchase when they would prefer to make a point from a significant distance. He was expected to become its next chief executive. The board of directors learned about a personal relationship he had developed with a subordinate employee. He left the company. He did not become CEO of Lockheed Martin.

In 1770, a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen built a chess-playing machine for the Empress of Austria. He called it the Turk. It wore robes and a turban and sat at a cabinet containing gears and levers, visible through glass panels. It played chess against Napoleon. It beat Benjamin Franklin. It toured Europe for decades, defeating everyone it sat across from, because it was not a machine. Inside the cabinet, behind the gears (which were real but decorative), a small person sat in a carefully arranged space and moved the chess pieces using a system of magnets. The Turk was a human pretending to be a machine.

Avengers: Endgame will be re-released this fall as Avengers: Endgame Encore. The re-release will include new footage and corrected color grading. The original film was released in 2019. It made $2.793 billion at the box office.

The price of artificial intelligence, measured as the cost to the person using it, is collapsing. This is the good news. The cost of building it, measured as the money required to run the servers and buy the chips and keep the lights on in buildings that cannot be allowed to get warm, is not collapsing. This is the other news.

Ryan Gosling is developing a live-action movie about Bamm-Bamm Rubble. This was announced this week, and it was announced in the normal way that film projects are announced, which is to say through a trade publication, with an agent, as though it were a reasonable thing that was happening.