Tech companies in China let you create AI versions of your loved ones who have died to chat with.

The company that made the avatar of Sun's mother is called Silicon Intelligence, where Sun is also an executive working on voice simulation. The Nanjing-based company is among a boom in technology startups in China and around the world that create AI chatbots using a person's likeness and voice.

The idea to digitally clone people who have died is not new but until recent years had been relegated to the realm of science fiction. Now, increasingly powerful chatbots like Baidu's Ernie or OpenAI's ChatGPT, which have been trained on huge amounts of language data, and serious investment in computing power have enabled private companies to offer affordable digital "clones" of real people.

They call them "deadbots".

This ties into another thought I've been having. We listened to a RadioLab podcast on memory, and a key concept was "remembering is an act of creation". Like, we think of it as retrieving info from a database that is fixed, but it's more like creating a new experience by strolling through the neurons that were activated long ago. You're kind of living a new experience inspired by a memory. The more you access a memory, the less accurate it becomes. (My first reaction was "THIS IS WHY YOU WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN!!")

I think this ties in with how hard it is to retrieve memories of earlier versions of loved ones. If you last saw a friend 15 years ago, it feels like you have a vivid, solid grasp on who you were. But if you have seen a friend weekly for twenty years, it's impossible to say what they were like 15 years ago. You've retrieved the idea of their person so many times in an ongoing way that its a big mushpot now.

I think this is a big difference between losing someone in a sudden (horrible) shock vs losing someone in an slower (horrible) loss of health and wellbeing: in one version, the healthy version is cut off suddenly, in the second version the healthy version starts to blend with the sick and diminishing version.

Which brings me back to the deadbots: I love the idea of visiting with some of my loved ones that I miss. But the idea that I might gradually replace and merge my memories of the real person with the deadbot interactions is horrifying.

This is a very idealistic, expensive, kinda charming and sweet, but definitely slow approach to curing what ails us:

In a novel program designed to break down entrenched stereotypes and spark lasting friendships, the American Exchange Project sent 13 urban L.A. teens to places like rural Arkansas, Ohio and South Dakota while 10 students from Texas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere arrived in Los Angeles.

So basically, study abroad for one week, in a different part of the country. It started after 2016 and has grown to about 500 students, from a range of cities.

It's not a bad idea! Just so small scale. And expensive. But kinda sweet. Honestly it seems more like a premise for a teen movie than anything else. Either a romance or an SNL alum comedy would work just fine!

The intonation, the head nod, the eyebrows, the absolute self-confidence. Hall of fame moment.

Laura Ingraham: If you know Minnesota well, and I know it well -- especially Milwaukee -- it's changed. pic.twitter.com/2L0HvrHMo6

— aliciasadowski (@aliciasadowski6) August 7, 2024

Have I posted yet about Houston Independent School District? So Texas grades its schools with a super shitty* A-F grading system that more or less correlates with poverty. Houston ISD got an F for a certain number of years, so it got taken over by the state.

Since then, it's been a wild series of headlines:
- HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools
- Houston ISD superintendent accused of funneling tax dollars out of state
- HISD sees 'unprecedented' departures, with more than 4,000 employees leaving the district in June

That last one is paywalled, but it starts like so:

More than 4,000 employees left Houston ISD in June, bringing the total departures since the state takeover to over 10,000.

The record number is three times higher than the June departure average for the past five years, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of district employment records. Over 75% of the departures were recorded as "voluntary," including retirements and resignations.

Teachers accounted for more than 2,400 of the employees who left in June, with the monthly tally exceeding the total number of teachers who typically leave HISD over an entire school year, according to the analysis. About 4,700 of HISD's roughly 11,000 teachers left the district during the 2023-24 school year.

Anyway the whole thing is depressing. Maybe the feds can take over Texas schools.

(Also DeSantis literally vetoed the entire $30 million state funding for the arts in Florida.)

*currently tied up in lawsuits. I have a good story about this grading system

Mossy writes: FP piece from last month (metered paywall); Reuters political obituary; big goddamn fish.
I'll be dropping more stuff in the thread.

Heebie's take: Thanks, Mossy!!

Minivet writes: Walz is the darling of Bluesky. The face of Minnesota hammering in progressive reforms on a bare majority. The good kind of grandfatherly despite being only six months older than Kamala. Military, rural, and schoolteacher background. Seems to play well with both activists and labor... But not from a critical swing state, unlike Shapiro and Kelly, the other two last reported to be on the short list.

Shapiro would annoy activists, Kelly would annoy labor (just belatedly endorsed the PRO Act for this reason). Kelly may have just been winnowed, per Reuters.

Hopefully the intentional unity marshaled for Kamala can be continued whoever the pick is.

Heebie's take: Gnash those teeth away here! I somehow think that the promise of Pennsylvania is too irresistible for it to be anyone besides Shapiro.

While we twiddle our thumbs and wait for Harris to name her pick for VP, how 'bout some good old-fashioned family drama? Not me, but Swistle, who I've linked before and she didn't exactly win over lots of hearts and minds, but I think we can still use the post as a launching off point.

Here is our current crisis: we found out recently that Edward's freshman year of college resulted in mostly D's. These were not just required/core classes, but classes in the chosen major. And Edward did not tell us, but let us cruise along inexorably toward the next school year without knowing anything was wrong, or that academic probation was in place, or that the academic scholarship had almost certainly been lost. We found out when we received a tuition bill for Elizabeth for next year, but didn't receive one for Edward. (Interestingly, this turned out to be a glitch unrelated to the crisis. I am reminded of a college administrator joking to parents during an orientation seminar that they could not breach student privacy but they could sometimes give hints that might cause us to breach it ourselves.)

I found out about this situation abruptly, and so my initial reaction was to say "What happened?? What HAPPENED?? But what HAPPENED??," with varying degrees of emotion and intensity and voice-breakage, roughly twenty times. Edward was not able to answer this question in any way that would make anyone go "OHHHHhhhhhh I see!!" Still unknown: if Edward DOES know what happened, but can't/won't answer, or if Edward doesn't know. The only thing we've heard so far is that the classes were all repeats of already-repetitive high school classes, and Edward couldn't stand to do Computer Programming 101 for essentially the third time. This could be true! This could also be bullshit. The thing about this claim is that the chosen strategy for dealing with it has resulted in needing to take it for a FOURTH time, so I'm not sure reason and result line up. Part of Going To College is slogging away at some classes you don't want to take and classes you find boring/repetitive, and/or finding ways to get more out of them, and/or doing such stellar work that the professor notices and asks you to be a teaching assistant. That is PART OF IT. If that's not something a kid can do, there may need to be a reevaluation of the plan.

I've definitely seen this play out with plenty of bright young adults before, but man, what a bummer.

The problem is really just the price tag of college. We should live in a world where you can be an immature 18 year old, fall flat on your face, pick yourself up and learn and grow from the experience without now being $50K in debt.

(That's not exactly how things played out in Edward's case, of course. Losing your scholarship and spending a year at a community college seems like a fine outcome to me, although they're giving him one more chance.)