Calixto García Íñiguez, born on this day in 1836, was a general in three separate Cuban uprisings for independence - the Ten Years' War, the Little War, and the War of 1895, which bled into the Spanish-American War.
García joined the Ten Years' War at the age of 18. Five years later, when surrounded by Spanish troops, he shot himself under the chin with a .45 caliber pistol to not give them the satisfaction of capturing him. Although the bullet went out of his forehead and knocked him unconscious, he survived. The wound left a great scar and gave him headaches for the rest of his life.
García played a key role in the ultimately successful War of 1895 and protested the subsequent lack of Cuban autonomy in the conclusion of the war (no Cuban was allowed to sign the terms of surrender and the Spanish leaders in Cuba were allowed to keep their posts in Santiago).
After American military commander William Shafter excluded Cubans from negotiations for the surrender of Santiago, declined to invite García to the surrender ceremonies, and let Spanish authorities remain in control of Santiago until the U.S. could establish a military government, García resigned from the rebel army in protest on July 17th, 1898.
García died of pneumonia on December 11th, 1898 while on a diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C. Today, his portrait is on the 50 Cuban peso banknote.
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It's really funny that the marketing teams for AI-products keep getting their use-cases so fucking wrong; the latest example is Google doing an ad where Gemini writes a fan letter. I don't know if they are just incompetent, completely detached from the human experience, or if they are forbidden from touching certain topics. But you'd catch more flys if they sold AI for what it is: a way to bullshit your way through work and go back to playing video games, or to doing laundry, painting, "WFH" or "digital nomading" your way through a beautiful summer vacation, or getting home early to see your kids, without your boss knowing about it.
Give me an ad, where an absolute dumbass, ala Office Space, requests a TPS report or memo at 4:30 in the afternoon, and you just have ChatGPT, LLAMA, or Gemini write it up for you with a couple of pdfs uploaded "here's a draft, let me know what you think!" and you fuck off at 4:35. Give me an ad, where your high school coach doing the mandatory "don't do drug week" has you write a paper on why drugs are bad that no one is going to read. Have it summarize a fucking snoozefest of a lecture, so the student can get their notes while playing video games.
That's the failure of AI deployment, nobody else has read David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" so they are stuck providing treacly sweet examples of AI replacing humans; when in reality, we could just admit 90% of all jobs are busy work.
The people pushing this AI shit are the ones requesting the TPS reports at 4:30 on a friday though
Which is the irony of them deploying such a technology in the first place, lol.
They want you to automate away talking to your kids so you can spend your valuable time manually writing the TPS reports for them
It's why I think they are also detached from their humanity. It reminds me of the Silicon Valley bit where Russ Hanneman has an AI tell the kid its bedtime.
Because real victim of llama is bureaucracy, meaningless legalese and fifteen pages reports containing 5 thoughts smeared across pages. I think email jobs would become increasingly sillier with them, just two chat bots taking to each other until human says I consent to this.
I remember on Trash future they talked about some startup AI thing that would take an email sent to you and remove all the stupid office etiquette and give you the bullet points or do the opposite and take bullet points and make an office etiquette email to send out. One of them pointed out that if this was used by both sender and recipient there would be a secret message in the middle no human would ever see.