Can someone give me some examples of what this article is so worried about?

Several experts have warned about artificial intelligence (AI) exceeding human capabilities, a "singularity" at which it might evolve beyond human control. Whether this will ever happen is a matter of conjecture. A legal singularity is afoot, however: For the first time, nonhuman entities that are not directed by humans may enter the legal system as a new "species" of legal subjects. This possibility of an "interspecific" legal system provides an opportunity to consider how AI might be built and governed. We argue that the legal system may be more ready for AI agents than many believe. Rather than attempt to ban development of powerful AI, wrapping of AI in legal form could reduce undesired AI behavior by defining targets for legal action and by providing a research agenda to improve AI governance, by embedding law into AI agents, and by training AI compliance agents.

I guess I have it in my head that AI doesn't do anything without being prompted by a person? So explain for your kindly dimwit exactly why AI would be a legal agent?

Or maybe that's the difference? You can be a legal subject without being a legal agent?

Look, I still think that calling corporations "persons" was a dumb choice from a marketing perspective, but I get that a corporation has a distinct set of priorities and motivations from any of the individuals in it. But does AI? Isaac Asimov aside, what am I missing?

Full disclosure: the article was too dull to read very closely.

Same country! Who wore it better?

1. 20 more Texas students lose their theatre roles over gender policy

The student-run production of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical 'Oklahoma!' for Sherman High School has encountered even more controversy after a new Sherman ISD rule allowing theater students to only be cast in roles matching their birth gender has cost about 20 students their parts.

It was later reversed and the students were allowed to resume their roles.

2. Contrast this with California: An acquaintance of mine has a daughter who recently starred in their high school production of Rocky Horror Picture Show: 𝅘𝅥𝅮 Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me....Creature of the night! 𝅘𝅥𝅮

The juxtaposition of these two high school theater performances is blowing my mind a little bit. (I am in no way judging a RHPS production. It's a lot of ridiculous campy good fun.)

The contrast reminds me a little bit of when I lived on a dorm. I never smoked cigarettes, but I was placed on a smoking hall, so we were allowed to smoke cigarettes in our rooms. Then there were regular, non-smoking halls, where cigarettes were banned.

But then there were a third type of halls, called Drug-Free halls. Here, the penalties were higher for being caught with pot, alcohol, and cigarettes. And while the premise was that students would ask to get placed on a Drug-Free hall because they preferred the peer group, occasionally students got stuck there without requesting it, just like I'd been put on a smoking hall.

So you had some ordinary students who were allowed to smoke cigarettes in their rooms, and other ordinary students who had to do excess community service hours for smoking cigarettes in their room. Right now I feel like Texas is a Drug-Free hall in all the dumbest ways.

Mossy Character sends along this link: Navajo sheep herding at risk from climate change. Some young people push to maintain the tradition.

I don't have a lot to say, but the last names Begaye and Begay come up a lot in the article, which reminded me of the Navajo artist Harrison Begay. When my mom was a girl, they were on a road trip and stopped at a Navajo roadside shop, and she bought a painting from the artist with her spending money, because she liked the horse. We were talking about the items hanging in their house, and we got to this painting of the horse, and discovered that the artist went on to have a long and somewhat famous career.

I'm having some ill-formed thoughts that I'm trying to get clarity on, in terms of how strategic planning processes get used to shore up the status quo and bar the door on systemic change.

By "strategic planning" I mean some sort of process that involves:
- Pull the community together and have a mushy workshop that results in some convoluted but idealistic mission statement.
- From there your focus group picks out your major priorities
- From there you develop your outcomes
- From there you define some nitty-gritty details.

Each stage is supposed to align with the stages that preceded it. I've seen it work basically well enough at Heebie U, where I generally trust that the university upper echelons are operating in good faith.

I'm trying to organize my thoughts on how it plays out at the city level, with the budget process each year. It starts off so milquetoast and vague, but then that seems to lock in the bounds for the next stage, and ultimately it seems to lock out any opportunity for activists to advocate for transformational change.

Help me think more clearly about this, please!

NickS writes: He comes across surprisingly well (and, predictably, deeply earnest) in this GQ profile:

It's around noon. I've spent the morning driving around Charlottesville with Ann Kingston, who went to work for Dave's manager Coran Capshaw at Red Light Management right out of college and now directs the company's philanthropic initiatives. Dave's people want me to see the results of one of those initiatives--a sweeping effort to redevelop Charlottesville's entire public-housing infrastructure, some of which hasn't been refurbished since the '70s. It's an attempt to address broader inequalities dating back at least to 1964, when Charlottesville razed Vinegar Hill, a historically Black community near what became the city's Downtown Mall, and displaced its population into housing projects.

When something like that happens, Matthews says, "you lose the restaurants, you lose the hotels, you lose the clubs, you lose the playgrounds. All this community just gets erased. Because then you're just all stacked in apartments. And that was a blueprint that was repeated around the country, and was very effective in undermining Black communities and underserved communities. And the results of that are hard to miss."

It's strange to say this about him, but Dave Matthews still talks about America like an immigrant. "I definitely felt--and I still in a weird way feel--like I have an outside perspective," he says. When he settled in the US in early adulthood, he says, it was the racial divide that surprised him--in part because omnipresent racism wasn't part of the story America told the world about itself back then. "I grew up in South Africa, where it's in your face," he says. "It's everywhere. And then I came back to America, and I was stunned that it was everywhere...because I expected it not to be."

Heebie's take: I once read some analysis of one-hit wonders, that said that you can predict which artists will continue to make hits and which will flame out. Roughly, the breakout song for both categories is noticeably novel, compared to the canon of Top 40 songs, in some way that the computer can detect. Then you compare it to the rest of the songs in their repertoire. If the novelty continues, they have a chance at sustaining fame, If the rest of the songs are bland drivel, then they're likely to be a one-hit wonder.

I always think of this regarding Dave Matthews, because I do think that Ants Marching was novel and catchy, and the rest of their music was mushy drivel, and yet boy did they thrive.

This is fair, although I really was commenting on the quality of the music above:

Most of the time, though, if someone tells you they don't like Dave Matthews, they're really voicing a deep tribal aversion to the type of person they picture when they picture a Dave Matthews fan--spiritually incurious trustafarians, pumpkin-spice basics, fleece-vest IPA bros, or whichever straw-man stereotype offends their imagination most.

But it's as unfair to judge Matthews himself by the perceived predilections of his audience as it is to judge David Lynch by the most insufferable dorks at a midnight Inland Empire screening. Especially since Matthews is ultimately more of a brooding bohemian than anything else. Plus he's never been afraid to risk alienating some of the folks under his big tent when it comes to things that actually matter.

Which leads to an entertaining question: which famous person has the biggest gap between the quality of their work and the insufferability of their fan base?