Comment on The Golden Age of Music - Gillian Welch

SANTA CLARA — Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna on Wednesday called for a “full and transparent” investigation into the death of Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI whistleblower who gained national attention last year after publicly claiming the company violated federal copyright laws. Khanna’s request — made in an apparent exchange on the social media site X with Balaji’s mother — came weeks after the whistleblower’s family began publicly questioning a preliminary determination by the San Francisco County Medical Examiner’s Office that the 26-year-old man died of suicide nearly two months ago inside his San Francisco apartment.

In America today, the cannoli is considered a quintessential Italian pastry, a staple at Italian delis and bakeries. Mundelein pastry shop Tony Cannoli, owned by Tony Volpentesta, certainly fits the image of a small, local Italian shop, and Volpentesta even learned the trade from his Italian grandmother. But his inspiration to start a cannoli shop actually came from an island several thousand miles away from Sicily, where the cannoli was first born — Japan.

CTA chief of staff Nora Leerhsen will become the interim president of the transit agency, taking over after Dorval Carter’s retirement at the end of January. Leerhsen will, for now, take on leadership of an agency that has faced rampant complaints from riders in recent years, with another challenge on the horizon as a massive budget gap looms and lawmakers in Springfield prepare to debate the future of the region’s four transit agencies in a move that could have significant repercussions for the CTA’s authority.

A month ago, officials at Vista Health Systems and Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan spoke publicly about the purchase of millions of dollars in new equipment and the strides they were making in regaining lost patients. But last week, Vista furloughed 69 non-medical personnel — 8.6% of its workforce — for the next six weeks. A hospital with a large number of uninsured and underinsured patients, Vista CEO Kevin M. Spiegel said financial stability is dependent on it becoming a safety-net facility and receiving emergency funding from the state.

In 2023, AI researchers at Meta interviewed 34 native Spanish and Mandarin speakers who lived in the US but didn’t speak English. The goal was to find out what people who constantly rely on translation in their day-to-day activities expect from an AI translation tool. What those participants wanted was basically a Star Trek universal translator or the Babel Fish from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: an AI that could not only translate speech to speech in real time across multiple languages, but also preserve their voice, tone, mannerisms, and emotions.

News stories about the likely existence of extraterrestrial life, and our chances of detecting it, tend to be positive. We are often told that we might discover it any time now. Finding life beyond Earth is “only a matter of time,” we were told in September 2023. “We are close” was a headline from September 2024. It’s easy to see why.