So It Turns Out, #13: Free Books, and We Are All Jim Amendments Now
Also, I built a cocktail AI
So,
What a week, huh?
First, a follow-up on last week’s newsletter, with FREE THINGS:
If you live in DC (as a disproportionate share of our readers do), you can get digital copies of anti-racist books for free from our local library system! Though, if hypothetically Your Employer has given you the right to expense books on these topics, you should still buy them, and from local Black-owned bookstores…
If you want to read Twitter and Tear Gas (previously), there’s a free, authorized version of it available online direct from the author.
As always, if you want to read Seeing Like A State, I will buy it for you and send it to you. [0]
This Newsletter Stands With Jim Amendments:
One of the key themes that you, the reader, have conveyed to me is that you love hearing about the adventures of Jim Amendments, defender of America’s least-infringed Amendment, the 3rd. Alas, that issue never comes up, right?
You see, DoD had put some of its National Guard deployees to DC on the District’s tab without our consent. This led to the resurrection of 3rd-Amendment-hot-takes on Twitter, and the brief rise of America’s least useful cable news expert, the 3rd Amendment Expert….
But who needs a CNN expert when. You. Have. Jim. Amendments.
But wait, you might say, hotels aren’t homes.
SOUNDS LIKE YOU’VE IGNORED SOME PENUMBRAS AND EMANATIONS
After all, at the time of the Founding Fathers, it’s unambiguous that many house owners rented out rooms for travelers as a source of income. So if “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law” — well then, maybe it’s a constitutional violation for DoD to try to put it on DC’s tab without our consent.
After all, this isn’t just any statute, this is the word of the Founders, and…
A one-tweet summary of what’s wrong with US Govt cyber policy:
It’s going to take a lot to drag me away from you, because I charged this coil with current of high amplitude:
A cocktail recipe, sort of:
At work, my team has a monthly creative contest of some sort, like sewing or baking. This month, we had a cocktail competition. Due to my well-known love of Pre-Prohibition cocktails [1], I was declared “probably going to win anyways,” and disqualified from active competition.
So instead, I decided to train a machine learning algorithm to do it for me.
This turns out to be shockingly easy to do in the year 2020 — all you have to do is download the Google GPT-2 sample code, spend a few hours fixing some minor incompatibilities from code versions (the sample was released a while back, and the state of the art has advanced a bunch, so the latest versions of the modules it uses actually don’t work — you have to revert to older versions of Python and tensorflow), and feed it the public-domain text of Jerry Thomas’s path-breaking cocktail recipe book.
It also teaches you some amazing things about how machine learning models don’t work great without a lot of model training — for example, this is one of the first recipes it outputted:
Champagne Champagne Champagne:
Take either :
1 bottle of Champagne.
1 quart of water.
A bottle of champagne.
Fill the bottle with Champagne, and add the water.
Fill the bottle with water, put in a little boiling water,
and then pour it into a champagne pitcher. Fill it with Champagne,
and pour the Champagne into the pitcher, and then pour it
to the next bottle of champagne. Keep the pitcher filled ;
the next day pour the Champagne into it.
Needless to say, I’m not worried about the rise of the bartending machines yet.
Other news:
Confidential to the Chief of Space Operations: Hire a better IP attorney. Also, consider a laser tag arena.
The Colorado legislature adjourns its session by bouncing a giant rubber band ball. Yes, really.
Footnotes:
An earnest attempt to reduce the digressions in my prose
[0] One of my deepest regrets in life is that the “recommends Seeing Like A State to everyone in government and tech” content niche is already fully owned by Dave Guarino. But his stuff is good, so you should read it.
[1] As Derek Brown notes, we all say we want to drink in a speakeasy, but we don’t want to drink the cocktails they served then, with rotgut booze. We’d much rather prefer Pre-Prohibition cocktails…
Next time on Dave Kasten:
We attempt to get my bartender AI to recommend a nice cheese pairing.
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
I may on occasion use Amazon Affiliate or similar links when referencing things I’d tell you about anyways. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases; I donate the proceeds to charity. While Substack has a paid subscription option, I don’t have any plans to use it at this time and anyone who gets this newsletter now surely won’t be ever paying for their subscription.