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USA Today
12 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
The Pacers-Thunder NBA Finals is making a compelling case for parity
I've got to admit that I wasn't the biggest fan of the NBA's decision to lean into parity. That's just not the NBA I grew up loving. I'm used to the era of super teams. The peak of my basketball-watching years began with the LeBron James Heatles facing off against the league with an us-against-the-world mentality. That resulted in four of the most incredible years of sports television I've ever seen. The Heat were rockstars. ESPN developed the "Heat Index" that tracked the team's every move. When Miami started its season 9-8 in 2010? It was over. The experiment failed. When Miami won 27 straight games? Whew. We were so back. Every single night was compelling. The Steph vs. Bron era followed that. This ultimately became the modern-day Magic vs. Bird. People ultimately hated this because the Warriors added Kevin Durant, and whatever intrigue there was in the matchup dissipated. The KD Warriors were arguably the most unbeatable team I'd seen in my lifetime. The only thing that stopped them was Durant's Achilles popping and Klay Thompson's ACL snapping. Even then, I didn't believe Kawhi Leonard and the Raptors could beat Curry by himself until it happened. Those were the days, man. Super teams ruled. It was them against the league. That was my NBA. But my NBA is dead. Today, we exist in the league's parity era. And, while I'm not the biggest fan of it, I have to admit that the show the Thunder and Pacers are putting on in the NBA Finals is doing a convincing job of turning me into a believer. The NBA's parity era is here and, instead of stars stacking up in one spot, the NBA's best talent is spread everywhere. This spread has resulted in there being a bunch of teams that are just good to OK with a handful of teams sticking out as truly great ones. But none are particularly excellent and that excellence is what I thrived on. With that said, I must admit that these current NBA Finals are doing a fantastic job of convincing me that parity is the best choice for the NBA moving forward. Everything about these NBA Finals has been incredible. The ratings don't matter. The glitz and glamour don't matter. The celebrity doesn't matter. These two teams are playing some of the best basketball we've seen in over a decade. This series has had everything. Game winners, incredible comebacks, dominant performances, star star-driven narratives. Tyrese Haliburton has emerged as one of the premier faces in the league because of this series and the Pacers' overall run. Pascal Siakam has proven himself to be a championship-level star. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has a chance to become an immediate NBA legend with a win here in the Finals. Rick Carlisle has solidified himself as one of the game's greatest masterminds. Jalen Williams can't stop getting Scottie Pippen comparisons — even from Scottie himself. Do I love super teams? Yes. Absolutely. I'd much rather see that here. And maybe, as the Thunder get older and continue to develop, that team turns into one. But I'd be lying to you if I said what we've seen so far in these finals hasn't been just as compelling as anything I've watched in the last decade. What a series. I can't wait until Sunday. Speaking of incredible performances If you'd told me two months ago that we'd be waiting on a Game 7 in the NBA Finals and that T.J. McConnell of all people would be on the short list of names for potential Finals MVP, I'd probably have told you I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn somewhere. Alas. Here we are. T.J. is incredible. The Pacers' "Great White Hope," as Tyrese Haliburton calls him. If you think I'm doing a bit much with the Finals MVP talk, take a look at this. He's the first player in league history to have at least 60 points, 25 assists and 15 rebounds off the bench in the history of the NBA Finals. This is unreal, man. It's like we're watching Rudy in real time. Shootaround — Bryan Kalbrosky dropped his latest NBA Mock Draft just five days out from the big day. Fears to the Wizards? I like it. — DeMarcus Cousins is spreading rumors. Kevin Durant is squashing them quickly. — T.J. McConnell's dad stole the postgame show at the finals. I love this. Robert Zeglinski has more. — Mark Daigneault refused to let his team off the hook for their terrible Game 6. You can bet they'll be a lot better on Sunday. Will it be enough for the win? We'll see. That's a wrap, folks. Thanks so much for reading. Have a fantastic weekend. Peace. -Sykes ✌️ This was Layup Lines, For the Win's basketball newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Atlantic
13-06-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Newspaper That Hired ChatGPT
For more than 20 years, print media has been a bit of a punching bag for digital-technology companies. Craigslist killed the paid classifieds, free websites led people to think newspapers and magazines were committing robbery when they charged for subscriptions, and the smartphone and social media turned reading full-length articles into a chore. Now generative AI is in the mix—and many publishers, desperate to avoid being left behind once more, are rushing to harness the technology themselves. Several major publications, including The Atlantic, have entered into corporate partnerships with OpenAI and other AI firms. Any number of experiments have ensued—publishers have used the software to help translate work into different languages, draft headlines, and write summaries or even articles. But perhaps no publication has gone further than the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. For one month, beginning in late March, Il Foglio printed a daily insert consisting of four pages of AI-written articles and headlines. Each day, Il Foglio 's top editor, Claudio Cerasa, asked ChatGPT Pro to write articles on various topics—Italian politics, J. D. Vance, AI itself. Two humans reviewed the outputs for mistakes, sometimes deciding to leave in minor errors as evidence of AI's fallibility and, at other times, asking ChatGPT to rewrite an article. The insert, titled Il Foglio AI, was almost immediately covered by newspapers around the world. 'It's impossible to hide AI,' Cerasa told me recently. 'And you have to understand that it's like the wind; you have to manage it.' Now the paper—which circulates about 29,000 copies each day, in addition to serving its online readership—plans to embrace AI-written content permanently, issuing a weekly AI section and, on occasion, using ChatGPT to write articles for the standard paper. (These articles will always be labeled.) Cerasa has already used the technology to generate fictional debates, such as an imagined conversation between a conservative and a progressive cardinal on selecting a new pope; a review of the columnist Beppe Severgnini's latest book, accompanied by Severgnini's AI-written retort; the chatbot's advice on what to do if you suspect you're falling in love with a chatbot ('Do not fall in love with me'); and an interview with Cerasa himself, conducted by ChatGPT. Il Foglio 's AI work is full-fledged and transparently so: natural and artificial articles, clearly divided. Meanwhile, other publications provide limited, or sometimes no, insight into their usage of the technology, and some have even mixed AI and human writing without disclosure. As if to demonstrate how easily the commingling of AI and journalism can go sideways, just days after Cerasa and I first spoke, at least two major regional American papers published a spread of more than 50 pages titled 'Heat Index,' which was riddled with errors and fabrications; a freelancer who'd contributed to the project admitted to using ChatGPT to generate at least some portions of the text, resulting in made-up book titles and expert sources who didn't actually exist. The result was an embarrassing example of what can result when the technology is used to cut corners. With so many obvious pitfalls to using AI, I wanted to speak with Cerasa to understand more about his experiment. Over Zoom, he painted an unsettling, if optimistic, portrait of his experience with AI in journalism. Sure, the technology is flawed. It's prone to fabrications; his staff has caught plenty of them, and has been taken to task for publishing some of those errors. But when used correctly, it writes well—at times more naturally, Cerasa told me, than even his human staff. Still, there are limits. 'Anyone who tries to use artificial intelligence to replace human intelligence ends up failing,' he told me when I asked about the 'Heat Index' disaster. 'AI is meant to integrate, not replace.' The technology can benefit journalism, he said, 'only if it's treated like a new colleague—one that needs to be looked after.' The problem, perhaps, stems from using AI to substitute rather than augment. In journalism, 'anyone who thinks AI is a way to save money is getting it wrong,' Cerasa said. But economic anxiety has become the norm for the field. A new robot colleague could mean one, or three, or 10 fewer human ones. What, if anything, can the rest of the media learn from Il Foglio 's approach? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Matteo Wong: In your first experiment with AI, you hid AI-written articles in your paper for a month and asked readers if they could detect them. How did that go? What did you learn? Claudio Cerasa: A year ago, for one month, every day we put in our newspaper an article written with AI, and we asked our readers to guess which article was AI-generated, offering the prize of a one-year subscription and a bottle of champagne. The experiment helped us create better prompts for the AI to write an article, and helped us humans write better articles as well. Sometimes an article written by people was seen as an article written by AI: for instance, when an article is written with numbered points—first, second, third. So we changed something in how we write too. Wong: Did anybody win? Cerasa: Yes, we offered a lot of subscriptions and champagne. More than that, we realized we needed to speak about AI not just in our newspaper, but all over the world. We created this thing that is important not only because it is journalism with AI, but because it combines the oldest way to do information, the newspaper, and the newest, artificial intelligence. Wong: How did your experience of using ChatGPT change when you moved from that original experiment to a daily imprint entirely written with AI? Cerasa: The biggest thing that has changed is our prompt. At the beginning, my prompt was very long, because I had to explain a lot of things: You have to write an article with this style, with this number of words, with these ideas. Now, after a lot of use of ChatGPT, it knows better what I want to do. When you start to use, in a transparent way, artificial intelligence, you have a personal assistant: a new person that works in the newspaper. It's like having another brain. It's a new way to do journalism. Wong: What are the tasks and topics you've found that ChatGPT is good at and for which you'd want to use it? And conversely, where are the areas where it falls short? Cerasa: In general, it is good at three things: research, summarizing long documents, and, in some cases, writing. I'm sure in the future, and maybe in the present, many editors will try to think of ways AI can erase journalists. That could be possible, because if you are not a journalist with enough creativity, enough reporting, enough ideas, maybe you are worse than a machine. But in that case, the problem is not the machine. The technology can also recall and synthesize far more information than a human can. The first article we put in the normal newspaper written with AI was about the discovery of a key ingredient for life on a distant planet. We asked the AI to write a piece on great authors of the past and how they imagined the day scientists would make such a discovery. A normal person would not be able to remember all these things. Wong: And what can't the AI do? Cerasa: AI cannot find the news; it cannot develop sources or interview the prime minister. AI also doesn't have interesting ideas about the world—that's where natural intelligence comes in. AI is not able to draw connections in the same way as intelligent human journalists. I don't think an AI would be able to come up with and fully produce a newspaper generated by AI. Wong: You mentioned before that there may be some articles or tasks at a newspaper that AI can already write or perform better than humans, but if so, the problem is an insufficiently skilled person. Don't you think young journalists have to build up those skills over time? I started at The Atlantic as an assistant editor, not a writer, and my primary job was fact-checking. Doesn't AI threaten the talent pipeline, and thus the media ecosystem more broadly? Cerasa: It's a bit terrifying, because we've come to understand how many creative things AI can do. For our children to use AI to write something in school, to do their homework, is really terrifying. But AI isn't going away—you have to educate people to use it in the correct way, and without hiding it. In our newspaper, there is no fear about AI, because our newspaper is very particular and written in a special way. We know, in a snobby way, that our skills are unique, so we are not scared. But I'm sure that a lot of newspapers could be scared, because normal articles written about the things that happened the day before, with the agency news—that kind of article, and also that kind of journalism, might be the past.
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Saturday Night Forecast: Severe Storms Possible
TONIGHT: Increasing Clouds. Low 73. Wind S 5-10 mph. SUNDAY: 20% Chance of Thunderstorms After 4:00 A.M. Some Possibly Severe. Mostly Sunny. High 92. Heat Index 103. Wind S 5 mph. SUNDAY NIGHT: Increasing Clouds. 50% Chance of Thunderstorms. Some Possibly Severe. Low 70. Wind S 5. MONDAY: Partly Cloudy. 50% Chance of Thunderstorms. High 86. Wind S 5 / NW NIGHT: Mostly Cloudy. 60% Chance of Thunderstorms. Heavy Rainfall Possible. Low 69. Wind N Mostly Cloudy. 60% Chance of Thunderstorms. High NIGHT: 40% Chance of Thunderstorms. Low 60% Chance of Thunderstorms. High NIGHT: 40% Chance of Storms. Low 60% Chance of Storms. High NIGHT: 30% Chance of Storms. Low 40% Chance of Storms. High NIGHT: Mostly Cloudy. Low 20% Chance of Storms. High 91. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hindustan Times
07-06-2025
- Climate
- Hindustan Times
Delhi: No rain forecast in next 5-6 days, mercury to rise
Despite a wet start to June, mercury is on the rise and the maximum temperature could inch closer to 44°C next week, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast, stating that no rain is likely in Delhi-NCR in the next six days. It has not issued a colour-coded alert or a heatwave alert for the region. On Friday, the city saw clear skies and mostly humid weather, with the maximum settling at 38.2°C. Though this was two degrees below normal, relative humidity between 41% and 78% meant that the Heat Index (HI) or 'real feel' temperature was 43°C. IMD has now forecast clear skies, with dry westerly winds to dominate once again, leading to a spike in mercury. The maximum is likely to be between 39-41°C on Saturday, and between 40-42°C on Sunday. 'Next week, this trend will continue, and on Monday, it may touch close to 43°C and around 44°C by Tuesday,' said an IMD official. According to the officials, there is a 'break' in the monsoon at present, with a resumption in progress likely around June 11 or 12. Till then, temperatures are expected to continue to rise in the region. This despite the monsoon progressing at a quicker pace than usual this year. Its onset was declared over Kerala on May 24 – a week in advance and on May 26 in Maharashtra, as compared to a normal date of June 11. Mahesh Palawat, vice president at Skymet said that the cyclonic circulation over northwest Uttar Pradesh was also weakening, leading to a rise in temperature. 'Dry winds from northwest India will continue, leading to a decrease in humidity levels but a rise in temperature. We do not expect any rain for at least the next five days,' he said. It has been an unusually easy summer so far, with excessive rains in May largely keeping the temperature in check. The highest maximum recorded so far this year was 42.3°C on May 16. The month of May ended with 184.6mm in monthly rainfall — the highest ever for Delhi, data from as far as 1901 showed. May also did not see a single heatwave day this year, as compared to six such days last year. Despite a rise in temperature this coming week, heatwave conditions are unlikely in the region, IMD has said. In terms of air quality, the average air quality index (AQI) stood at 161 (moderate). This was down from a reading of 203 (poor) on Thursday, according to Central Pollution Control Board data .
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Yahoo
Three Slidell teens indicted in death of St. Tammany Parish Sergeant Grant Candies
ST. TAMMANY PARISH, La. (WGNO) — Three Slidell teenagers were indicted on Tuesday for their alleged involvement in the death of St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office Sergeant Grant Candies. According to the 22nd Judicial District Court, on March 25, Candies was hit and killed while deploying a spike strip to stop a vehicle in a high-speed pursuit. Bounty hunter believes escaped inmate Antoine Massey's days are numbered In connection to the investigation, 17-year-old Adrian Waughtal, 17-year-old Mason Fischer and 18-year-old Michael Lanier were indicted and face the following charges. Waughtal: Second-degree murder. Aggravated assault with a motor vehicle upon a peace officer. Aggravated flight from an officer. Aggravated obstruction of a highway. Obstruction of justice by tampering with evidence. Conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Fischer: Second-degree murder. Aggravated flight from an officer. Aggravated obstruction of a highway. Obstruction of justice by tampering with evidence. Conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Lanier: Manslaughter. Obstruction of justice by tampering with evidence. Conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Court officials say that, although the murder of a police officer allows for the potential imposition of the death penalty in Louisiana, due to a United States Supreme Court ruling, the death penalty would be off the table for the three suspects, as they were all under the age of 18 at the time the crime was committed. New Orleans jail escapee releases videos, prompting search of home where they were made, source says The suspects' arraignment is scheduled for July could lose health insurance with GOP's 'big, beautiful bill?' Senate GOP talks cutting Medicare 'waste, fraud' to offset cost of Trump tax bill Judge blocks deportation of Boulder suspect's family as DHS prepares removal Thunderstorm potential as Heat Index reaches triple digits Judicial nominees appear before Senate Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
