thathotpepper retweeted
Bob Costas was 18 when his father dropped dead at JFK airport. At the wake, a man handed him a thick envelope with $6,000 in $100 bills. It was everything his father left behind, and a bookie would never have paid it to a dead man.
In the video below, he tells the story himself.
His father, John, was a big-time gambler. Not casinos, not racetracks. Ball games. Bob says the mortgage was literally riding on his bets.
When the games went the wrong way, he threw things, cursed and yelled. Bob’s mom and sister would leave. Bob stayed, because watching the games with his dad was the only way to be close to him.
Friday, May 15, 1970. A cop knocks on the door. Before he says a word, Bob’s mother asks, “My husband’s dead, isn’t he?” John Costas had a heart attack walking through JFK. He was 42.
At the wake, one of his gambling buddies walked in with the envelope. “Your father was up when he died. Give this to your mother.” A bookie never pays a dead man, so the friend went to the bookie himself and said John sent him to collect.
Decades later, Bob Costas refused to read sports betting ads on air. Today the bookie lives in everyone’s phone. Is that progress?
thathotpepper retweeted
Kyle Shanahan says a 51% analytics recommendation won’t convince him to go for it because he gets one shot, not an hour at a blackjack table
“I don’t want to hear about it if it’s 51% of the time we should go for it.”
“As I always say, I’m not sitting here playing Blackjack for an hour with no one else at the table, and eventually I’ll get 51% of it. Like, I have this one try, and I have a feel for it. I’ve been doing it too long.”
“But what I want to know from him, when it’s not a feel, when it, no, this is 98%. We don’t even need to talk about it. So we don’t need to talk about it. Tell me when it’s that, and I’ll just do it.”
thathotpepper retweeted
For the first time in Cincinnati Zoo history, we are planning to livestream a birth. As Tessa the giraffe prepares to welcome her calf we are planning on sharing the special moment with the world! The cameras are LIVE NOW: youtube.com/live/Hh4XNA0Ea9A youtube.com/live/Hh4XNA0Ea9A…
thathotpepper retweeted
Wow. Never-before-seen locker room footage of Nick Saban telling Jalen Hurts he was turning to Tua Tagovailoa in the 2017 National Championship Game.
(via "Saban" on ESPN App)
thathotpepper retweeted
Meet Miguel Rojas.
He studied all 100 citizenship questions. He wanted no special treatment because he’s a professional baseball player. And when he passed, he said he was prouder of that perfect score than his World Series home run.
What stood out to me most was his gratitude. He talked about America opening its doors to him 21 years ago and said he’s never taken that opportunity for granted.
Preparation. Respect for the process. Gratitude for the country that gave you an opportunity. Wanting to contribute and be judged by your character, not your status.
thathotpepper retweeted
This hijacking story is INSANE but I’m looking forward to hearing the terrorists side of the story on Miss Rachel today.
thathotpepper retweeted
The fact that no one can make a nuanced point w/o a million hyper partisan slop accounts reframing the context to manufacture maximum outrage is so bad for our whole political ecosystem. I hate this practice no matter who’s being clipped or doing the clipping. It’s bad!
thathotpepper retweeted
Socialism is NOT roads, firefighters, or public schools. Those are public services, and they have existed under every system. Socialism is collective control of the means of production: businesses, factories, land, and capital. Whether by the state, workers, or some theoretical public collective. DSA candidates are exploiting people’s ignorance of that distinction to rebrand ordinary public services as proof that America is already socialist. It’s bullshit bait and switch.
thathotpepper retweeted
George Kittle signed a $76,400,000 contract but says he skips luxury cars or watches and instead spent his money building a football field and 50-foot American flagpole at his house
Taylor: “You signed the contract. What nice little juicy gift did you get yourself this time?”
Kittle: “Nothing. This is the third one, it's kind of getting redundant. This time I'm trying to remodel my house, so I was like, yeah, I'm good. Gonna chill on this one. Let this one simmer.”
Taylor: “What's your favorite luxury in life? Something you look at and you're like, this is worth spending my money on.”
Kittle: “Anything on my property. Building a football field at my house. Building a workout facility. Putting up a 50-foot American flagpole, that's probably my favorite purchase I've made. My wife really likes that one. Right when you pull in, it's right next to the football field, so it's the only thing you can f*cking see.”
Taylor: “That's got to fire you up.”
Kittle: “It does… We have lights pointing up at it and I almost got out of the car. I was like, ah, God, it's so beautiful.”
thathotpepper retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
thathotpepper retweeted
The reason Trump isn’t rushing to save Saudi is that Bab el-Mandeb is not Hormuz. Hormuz is an energy choke point. Closing it directly raises gas prices in US, and Trump has a stake in that.
Bab el-Mandeb is the route for consumer goods going from China to Europe. That’s mainly their problem.
Saudi keeps saying this is an international waterway and everyone has to help. That’s true. Now let’s see if China and Europe actually show up.
For months the UAE worked with Trump, joined the Abraham Accords, helped on Hormuz, and took a position against regime in Iran.
Saudi did the opposite. They didn’t even let Trump use the American base in Saudi to hit the regime. When it came to reopening Hormuz, they stepped aside. They sent a big team to Tehran for Khamenei’s funeral. Then instead of joining the Abraham Accords, they launched the Mecca Pact.
Now they have to live with that. @realDonaldTrump doesn’t mind if MBS sees the consequences of those bad calls.
That Barak Ravid article didn’t come out of nowhere either. Trump wanted it out there to make MBS look stupid, which he is.
thathotpepper retweeted
If you want to know where your state is, the @WSJ print version labels all the dots.
thathotpepper retweeted
25 years ago today Welles Crowther gave his life helping others on 9/11. This is the best story @espn has ever done. Share it with your kids and any others who may not have been alive on 9/11 and don’t know what true bravery in the face of evil is.
