Tech companies can’t seem to figure out how to lay people off without making some type of gaffe.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) is upset that Apple Maps still calls the Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico. So upset that he tagged Apple CEO Tim Cook on X and said he’d filed a complaint. “Hey @tim_cook, just noticed Apple Maps still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Sent a report through the app, but thought you’d want to know!” said the former Navy Seal.
It seems that Crenshaw is upset, triggered if you will, that Big Tech isn’t changing as fast as he’d like it to. He’s so upset that he did a cringe post in the style of a suburbanite upset at Target. Crenshaw’s whining typifies a behavior I’ve seen in right-wing pundits and politicians in the last few years, the rise of a kind of post and style once attributed to the left in online spaces.
Crenshaw is posting cringe and doubling down on the culture war. They’re obsessed with identity politics, attempting to cancel their enemies, policing gender norms, and demanding that the culture bend to their whims despite the culture not being interested. This is all the stuff they’ve long accused the left of doing.
Hey @tim_cook, just noticed Apple Maps still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Sent a report through the app, but thought you’d want to know! pic.twitter.com/fA7cWtOGY1
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) January 21, 2025
Less than 24 hours ago, as of this writing, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.” Along with a host of other changes, the order said that the U.S. would henceforth call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Google and Apple haven’t updated the name.
These things take time. But just because Trump says the name is different doesn’t make it so. It’s a body of water that’s not exclusively used by the U.S. and Mexico, and the rest of the world will still call it the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of people who don’t live in the U.S. use Google and Apple Maps and it’s a good bet that the name won’t change for them.
Wikipedia also hasn’t changed the name on its entry for the Gulf. “Even if it was official, America does not get to own Wikipedia entries. [It] stays the Gulf of Mexico as the rest of the world calls it,” said an unnamed Wikipedia editor in the editing history of the page.
“This is a modern version of the Freedom fries jingoism, having nothing to do with geography and everything to do with politics,” another Wikipedia editor said, referring to a post-9/11 attempt by conservatives to rename french fries. “We have the same sort of thing as a perennial complaint with British Isles from a series of Irish editors. This nothing new or special, and can be documented on its own and with simple passing mention in the article if and when it becomes more than a sound bite at a news conference.”
But Conservatives like Crenshaw will publicly make the demand, posting cringe and embarrassing themselves. Ignoble in victory, they now exhibit the traits they’ve long accused their opponents of having.
The American right has control over the Supreme Court, the presidency, and the legislature. That kind of total political victory isn’t enough. They want you to like them too. They want you to laugh at their jokes, take their memes seriously, and call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
The pinned post on Crenshaw’s X account is a “Conservative Guide to the Culture Wars” from 2021. The second item on the list is the claim that a “victor mentality is better than a victim mentality.”
Over the next four years, I suspect we’ll see a lot more cringe posts from Crenshaw and others as the victors twist themselves into victims when every little thing doesn’t go their way. Or when it doesn’t go their way quite as fast as they’d want.
The world’s richest man doesn’t have time to level his characters but wants people to see him as a ‘living god of video games.’
On December 21, 2024, just before 2 pm, scientists made the dead speak. ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot is back. Long imitated, but not perfectly replicated, ELIZA has long been thought lost. But scientists discovered an early version of its code in the archives of its creator in 2021 and have spent the intervening years piecing it back together.
ELIZA has been reanimated and you can download it here to see for yourself.
Coded and iterated from 1964 to 1967, ELIZA was developed by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. Rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was a hit at the time of its creation. He gave it the personality of a psychotherapist and his secretary was so enchanted by it, that she asked Weizenbaum to leave the room when she chatted with it.
A new scientific paper from members of the ELIZA Archeology Project details how they found and resurrected the chatbot as well as its origins and subsequent dissemination. Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA in an early language called MAD-SLIP on a time-sharing computer system called the Compatible Time-Sharing System or CTSS.
ELIZA quickly got away from Weizenbaum. As it disseminated through early computer networks, programmers adapted it into other languages. One of these early clones was built in Lisp by one of the technical leads of ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern internet. The Lisp version of Eliza was one of the first bits of data on this nascent network and it spread fast.
“As a result, Cosell’s Lisp ELIZA rapidly became the dominant strain, and Weizenbaum’s MAD-SLIP version, invisible to the ARPAnet, was left to history,” the paper said. “Until it was rediscovered in 2021, the original MAD-SLIP ELIZA had not been seen by anyone for at least 50 years.”
A decade later, a magazine called Creative Computing published an ELIZA clone written in BASIC. It was 1977, the same year that the Apple II, Commodore Pet, and TRS-80 all hit the market. Those machines led to an explosion in home computing and the proliferation of the BASIC computing language.
“And probably not a small number of those hobbyists were interested enough by the possibility of AI to type in this BASIC ELIZA (which was only a couple of pages of code), and experiment with it themselves,” the scientists said. “Because of its brevity and simplicity, and the personal computer explosion, this ELIZA begat hundreds of knock-offs through the decades, in every conceivable programming language, making it perhaps the most knocked-off program in history/ Just as Cosell’s Lisp ELIZA spread via the ARPANet, the BASIC ELIZA spread via the explosive contagion of personal computers.”
There are countless versions of this BASIC version of ELIZA online right now and the original MAD-SLIP version was long thought lost to history. Then Stanford computer scientist Jeff Shrager convinced MIT archivists to root through boxes of Weizenbaum’s material and they made a critical discovery: early versions of the MAD-SLIP code.
The code was incomplete, and it took a lot of tinkering and complicated emulation to get it running again. “It required numerous steps of code cleaning and completion, emulator stack installation and debugging, non-trivial debugging of the found code itself, and even writing some entirely new functions that were not found in the archives or in the available MAD and SLIP implementations,” the paper said.
It took time and a lot of effort, but the code archaeologists got ELIZA working again and they’ve made it available for anyone to play with. “This has been tested on various Linux and MacOS versions, but we’ve noticed some issues with different versions, so your mileage may vary,” they said in the paper. “If you get it working on your machine and find that you have to change something, let us know.”