Sacha Baron Cohen says Marvel worried about casting a Jewish actor as the devil Mephisto because it could be perceived as antisemitic. “It was a wonderful meeting when I was offered it. It was primarily, I think, an almost entirely Black producing and directing team. And they said, ‘We want to offer you Mephisto, but we are aware of the negative association of Jews historically with the devil, and we want to make sure that you’re not insulted by us offering this.’ It was such an amazingly considerate, empathetic thing to say. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m good.’ I think for the Jews out there, sometimes we don’t feel seen. We don’t feel like people can empathize with us, that we are suffering too. And so to have this entirely Black producing and directing team be so empathetic was a moment of being seen. It was an amazing experience.” wp.me/pc8uak-1lHZPz

I was at the Tesla Roadster event - Just now leaving the Space X facility. I am a magician - I own the Magic Castle in Hollywood. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The demo was real. I was a kid again watching it.

OPENAI to EMPLOYEES: If someone is trying to seduce you, first consider — could they be a spy??? OpenAI is warning its employees about honeypot spies and strangers with children in playgrounds ... a very fun one with @georgia_wells and @MeghanBobrowsky: wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-companies…

LLMs are magical alien technologies we’ve managed to conjure up from a distillation of the internet. Even if progress completely stalls, we have years worth of value to harness from what we already have. In other words, these lego bricks still haven’t been put together in the most obvious combinations.