Tag: ncaa

This was never a matter of if, but when

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYP: Stanford busted for using AI-altered student photograph for advertising, most notably swapping out Hispanic male for black female

If I’ve never put it in writing before, I’m a firm opponent of AI.  I think it serves a purpose for doing monotonous tasks that can save people a lot of time and efficiency, but obviously this was never the objective of the companies and individuals who are hellbent on advancing it, and it’s astounding how many people who work on AI seem blind to the notion that they are expediting the extinction of jobs and careers for people all across the world.

Will we see AI become sentient and ultimately take over the world, enslaving or terminating the human race, a la The Matrix or Terminator?  Probably not in our lifetime, but as all those stories have predicted, it really does seem inevitable that machines will eventually see human behavior as truly redundant and expendable, seeing as how machines are devoid of emotion and well, humanity.

For the time being, AI is primarily being used (publicly) to “inadvertently” kill my line of work, in the creative field, as hundreds of thousands of companies, businesses and individuals are churning out gojiggabytes of AI-generated “artwork” from shitty restaurant menus, billboards and signage, as well as a trillion memes and bad video edits.

Genuinely, I feel that my line of work does have an expiration date, and I have experienced multiple instances at my own job, where colleagues and collaborators have leveraged AI to haphazardly try and create rogue content, and having to be gently reminded that it’s not okay… as long as products shown aren’t necessarily from competitors.  And the faster that AI advances and lazier the uneducated and unethical become, the sooner people like me will be out of a job, forcing me to probably go into the trades and improve my life exponentially.

But anyway, this was a highly dramatic cold open to a post where I wanted to write about Stanford University getting busted using AI to create graphics, namely altering a photograph, where a poor Hispanic kid was swapped out for a black girl, presumably so that Stanford could look more diverse in advertising.

There’s a lot of different angles to approach this one, but most of it circulates around the notion that Stanford, being in northern California, simply does not have any diversity, being in Silicon Valley, so they’ve gotten to the point where they’re leveraging AI to make it look like there is, instead of, actually allowing some black students attend their hallowed institution.

But on the other hand, I’m a firm believer of merit, and that the best students should attend schools, regardless of race or gender or any other categorization.  Sure, Stanford is probably racist as fuck I mean come on, just look at them, and have as flagrant of a black people scale as big as they probably have an Asian scale, so it’s hilarious to me that instead of going out and actually recruiting some actual living black students to attend their school, they’re just using AI to pretend like they have some.

Frankly, as the subject of this post implies, this was never an if it would happen situation, it was always a when would it happen, and we’d all be blind and deaf if we believed that this was the first time that this had occurred, but the fact that an institution as reputable as Stanford was the one busted doing it is what makes it news right now.

Honestly, my reaction was similar to the victim of the shitty AI swap, at first glance, it is funny, but when you sit down and really give it some thought, it really is just sad and pitiful and actually malicious, that they’re not only deleting the actual humanity from a photograph, but replacing it with something artificial, false and completely dishonest.  Let’s not even get into the cosmetic modifications to the people that were allowed to stay in the photo.

When the day is over, Stanford, for all their academic praise and reputation globally, is no different than any other shitheads on the planet who are completely okay with the global takeover of AI.  It just sucks for all the Billy Ramirezes of the world who draw the short straw in photos that need to be modified to force in some artificial diversity by dishonest companies who are too chickenshit to accept actual diversity into their holy confines.

We all know that college football is mostly rigged, but goddamn

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ICYMI: #16 ranked University of Michigan avoids getting upset by unheralded Western Michigan by virtue of refs allowing them to have a second chance at a Hail Mary in spite of them running out of time on the final play of the game

Throughout the history of sport, most sports fans have seen their share of bullshit finishes in just about every sport that they follow.  Questionable calls on hits or pitches, foot on the line in basketball, blatantly missed call in football, a phantom offsides in futbol or hockey, it really doesn’t matter.  If there’s any form of competition, there will inevitably be a controversial finish every now and then.

But this game, between Michigan and Western Michigan, is definitely up there as one of the more notable instances in modern history, because it’s not often that we see on a such a national level, flagrant favoritism and game-rigging, with their absurd ruling to finish out the game.

The television clock, the scoreboard clock, and even the clock shown on the camera operators all showed that time had expired, when Michigan failed to convert their initial Hail Mary game winner, which for all intents and purposes would have meant WMU defeated Michigan, and we’d have the upset of the year on Week 1 of the CFB season, calling back to about 20 years ago when Michigan lost to Appalachian State on the opening week of the season.

But instead, we witnessed one of the most blatant cases of game-rigging in the history of sport when the referees spun a masterclass of bullshit, citing all sorts of moonspeak about clock accuracy, some sort of grid, global time and space continuum and other nonsense, but the conclusion was that there was actually still one second left in the game, repeat second down.

In all fairness, Michigan did have to convert the Hail Mary, but given a second chance, QB Bryce Underwood clearly recalibrated his throw, and didn’t overshoot the end zone, and the Michigan receiver was able to haul it in, for the game-winner, but the obvious reality is that this attempt should never have been allowed to take place, without the obvious fixing of the game to ensure that Michigan was supposed to win.

I have no doubt in my mind that if Michigan failed to convert on their second attempt, there would’ve been a late flag thrown, probably for a phantom pass interference, and they would’ve gotten a third attempt, but 15 yards closer, since games cannot end on penalties, and probably a fourth attempt and a fifth attempt, and so forth, until the desired outcome was reached.

‘Ball don’t lie’ is a fate-based phenomenon where whenever a bullshit call occurs, an equally improbable occurrence happens not long afterward to rectify the imbalance of fairness; but is still dependent on there being game time available in order for the scales to balance.  In a perfect world, WMU immediately picks off Underwood and returns it for a pick-six to close out the game, but I think the situation was so egregious that even the mythical gods of sport were too busy cleaning out their ears and glasses to realize that Michigan had capitalized on their second chance before they could do something about it.

Unsurprising, the Big-10 and the NCAA have tripled down on their stance, absolutely denying all accusations of game-fixing, and have been trotting out all sorts of supposed experts and league officials and technology talking heads to try and explain to the rest of us peons why there was absolutely, irrefutably one second left in the game, in spite of just about every official clock in existence saying otherwise.  The masterclass of attempted gaslighting is crazy and impressive, and later on in the season, fans are just going to hit a point where they’re just going to say that nobody’s going to be mad, we just want to hear someone admit that the shit was fixed.

And to think I thought week 1 of this CFB season was a snoozefest with absolutely no upsets, with all the notable teams just blowing out scrubs by Madden scores.  Even the James Franklin era beginning for Virginia Tech where they hung 70 points on VMI was so boring I went to bed early, and have little to say about it except I was disappointed that they still allowed three points.

Hopefully, the Ball Don’t Lie gods are quite disappointed in this situation, and we see Michigan falter to some unheralded team later this season, because WMU was screwed and Ball demands the scales be balanced.  Would be funny if Michigan gets bounced by like UTEP or Rutgers as retribution for this farce, but with the higher powers clearly on their side, it’ll take some Herculean scoring and evidence to make sure they’re irrefutable.

Finally, some #TRYHARD answers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ABC7 Chicago: Gary, Indiana teen with “perfect 4.0 GPA” accepted into 126 colleges, amassing $9M in cumulative scholarship offers

Gary, Indiana must’ve never heard about Westlake High, because 126/$9M seems kind of mid in the grand spectrum of the #TRYHARD game.  Also, I put perfect 4.0 GPA in quotes above, because not long after discovering the Florida nerd with the 11.99 GPA, the whole concept of grade point averages has been blown out the door, and every number warrants questioning and examinations that nobody wants to have to do and it sucks to be a egghead teenager today in that regard.

Anyway, not that I really wanted to get back in the swing of documenting teen #TRYHARDs left and right like I did that one year, this particular story came of interest to me for one specific reason: it appears to have shed a little light on the whole #TRYHARD game, namely potentially answering one of the biggest questions I had about the game as a whole itself: how are all these kids able to apply to so many colleges without seemingly having to worry about those pesky things called, application fees?

Apparently, there’s a site/service, CommonApp, where there are 1,100 schools on the platform, so it’s apparently easy to make a profile and fling it out like Gambit to any and all schools available; many of which seemingly have no, or are willing to waive, those pesky application fees.  I don’t care to dig into just which schools are on the platform, but imma guess many notable and nameworthy ones, based on the cache of schools that have been mentioned by #TRYHARDs throughout the years.

Welp, that answers a lot of questions I’ve always had in regard to how these #TRYHARDs are applying to hundreds of schools.

Anyway, before I wrap on this post, a few things I want to clown on:

[They had] a perfect 4.0 grade point average and is ranked second in [their] class.

Second?  If they’re ranked second in the class, what does first place look like?  And why aren’t they making the news?

[They] did have to write about 30 essays to go with some of the applications. But [they] says it was worth it.

30 essays?  Oh the humanity!  Oh the strain, the labor, the exhausting ordeal!  Lmao, I could knock out 30 essays in a day, but then again, there’s nobody I know who has been writing as much and as long as I have, and even Jerry Seinfeld probably has taken more breaks than I have.  But if 30 essays was the cost for not having to pay application fees, I would’ve written 100 to not have had to pay for the 3 colleges I paid to apply to.

And in true #TRYHARD fashion, I can’t seem to find any intel on where they actually picked.  This article originally dropped in March, and decision day was back in May, but no information on where they ultimately chose, which goes to show that once the initial news of #TRYHARDing breaks, frankly nobody cares what happens afterward.

The poor Chick Fil-A recruiting class

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, there was a Chick Fil-A that then-mythical gf and I went to pretty regularly.  There was a guy that managed the place, who we called Sam; whether that was actually his name or not is irrelevant at this point, but Sam was one of those guys that had an explosively bubbly personality, was always smiling, always happy, and clearly had an 11 on his attribute slider when it came to people skills.

One time, he saw us in the drive-thru line and addressed the two of us by name, and after we had left, we had one of those collective moments that both found it a little weird that he clearly learned, us, and that we probably come by too often, to where it’s gotten to this point.

All the same, as slightly uncomfortable as it felt to be learned by Sam, there was no mistaking the fact that he ran a really tight ship, and this particular location was always firing on all cylinders.  The line moved fast, orders were almost never inaccurate, and the place had to be among the leaders or the region in terms of profit and satisfaction.

Any time mythical wife and I come across any sort of business, whether it’s another Chick Fil-A or not, where the customer service and general quality of employee performance seems below par, we often remark about how this place could use a Sam.  He’s basically become the measuring stick of effective leadership, regardless of it it’s in the fast food space or not.

Anyway, I’ve made no secret of my general love of the Chick Fil-A app, and locations that utilize an app-only lane.  The app is one of the greatest apps in the history of mobile application development, and I love how it gives me access to the app-only lanes of certain CFA locations, because fewer things in the world tickles my fancy than checking in with the app, and then bypassing at least five cars, slowly ordering and waiting in the pleeb line, multiplied only by how fast I get my food and am on my way versus how many cars are still waiting in pleeb class.

One of the greatest days of my fat guy life was when the CFA location that my house frequents the most, underwent renovations in order to implement a dedicated app lane.  Sure, when they re-opened, there were some growing pains and some training needing to be done by the restaurant and to the idiot customers, but eventually we got to a point where it became business as usual; I could whiz into the app lane, check in, pass by 3-7 pleebs in the old people manual ordering line, and be on my merry way.

However, over the course of the last contemporary school year, it has been noticed how ineffective the local CFA has become.  Long waits, frequency of inaccuracies rising.  It didn’t matter if I were using the app or not, the kitchen would get backed up and overwhelmed from what seemed like fairly predictable and busy periods that should be relatively easy to anticipate.  The app lane did very little to change things, and the gleeful text messages I’d send mythical wife of how many cars I passed in the pleeb lane were often replaced by frustrated texts detailing how long I’ve been waiting, and how generally annoyed I was feeling from this experience.

The coup de grace was when I was coming to pick up some food from the CFA, and I noticed that although the drive-thru still began with two lanes, with one of them being solely for app users, prior to reaching the pickup point, the lanes forcibly merge.  And in some cases, in a twist of irony, by the sheer nature of zipper merges, occasional pleebs who ordered with sticks, nuts and pebbles get to jump in front of the savvier app users, and conversely, few things annoy me as much as that.

Naturally, when inane bullshit like this begins to go tits up, I often ponder, how?  I began to think about how the whole school year, performance has been relatively on the lower-tier of output, and I concluded with the notion that my local CFA just simply had, a bad recruiting class. 

Much like in the same vein of when a college has a poor recruiting class, resulting in poor performance throughout the season, and an eventual sense of wanting this to be over with so that they can possibly retool and rebuild for the following year.

I suppose the people in my community and I have been taking for granted the general strong yearly performance of our local CFA, seeing as how when it’s actually bad, it’s really noticeable, but it’s still disheartening that they seem to operate much like a college program, where if you’re bogged down with marginal talent, you’re stuck with it until they all graduate out, and hopefully a more talented class takes their places afterward.

But make no mistake, the problems at my local CFA definitely stem from the fact that they had a very poor recruiting class for the 25-26 season, that can’t handle the kitchen, which in turns taxes the runners, which in turn slows down the drive thru lines, which unfortunately results in the deactivation of the app-only line in order to drop the general speed to something that the kitchen is capable of handling.

All I’m saying is, if Sam were in charge of this CFA location, none of this bullshit would even be a part of the discussion.

Every business out there, regardless of if it’s a Chick Fil-A or not, could only benefit from having a Sam of their own.

Xaivian Lee’s parents must be so disappointed

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: Xaivian Lee’s late three-pointer secure’s Florida’s upset against #10 Vanderbilt

In other news, I learned of Xaivian Lee’s existence and upon a cursory fact check, yes he is Korean.  Which means that there is a Korean hooper out there outside of Korea, that is actively playing for a North American D-I program.

Color me surprised and fascinated.

Granted, according to his wiki, boy is from Toronto, and is about as white-washed as I am, especially based on the fact that his name is “Xaivian,” and based on his general physical appearance and the fact that he cleared 6’0, I’d really be curious to what his 23 and Me looks like, but for all intents and purposes, he’s of enough Korean descent for this post to manifest.

My knee-jerk reaction to seeing that he had transferred out of Princeton to go to UF was that his parents must have been apoplectic at the notion of him leaving an Ivy to go to an SEC school, but I saw that he was at Princeton for four years, which leads to the assumption that he had to have graduated, which is the absolute bare minimum of acceptance for Korean parents.  I’d guess that they let him chase his dream of moar hooping contingent of graduation from an Ivy League school although they probably would have preferred if he went to Harvard or Yale instead of Princeton.

Initially, I was ready to make all the bad jokes in the world about own disappointed his parents must’ve been that he went from Princeton to Florida.  But the more I read and learn about his general bio, the more my thoughts and opinions alter, since I’m kind of writing this off the cuff and learning while I write as opposed to doing my research in advance and coming up with a general basis before writing out.

Seeing as how ol’ Xaivian finished his time at Princeton, and his numbers scream out, nowhere close to good enough for the NBA much less should he even want to go considering the absolute racist gate he would be inevitable to slam into, he’s a perfect case for the college player to bilk as much eligibility and NIL money as humanly possible, and a move to UF was probably a great idea. 

And therein lies some of the effects of the NIL pendulum swung so hard to the opposite end of the spectrum, where fringe and no-chance-at-pro caliber players are clinging to dear life at college eligibility and are looking like a bunch of Van Wilders staying at school at 24+ years of age.  But for every Asian athlete that literally has no shot at North American pros, there are probably like 3-4 non-Asians who might be, but know they can still bilk more from NIL versus being a practice squad or development prospect at the pro level, and these guys can eat dicks and gtfo out of the NCAA.

I saw some shit recently about how there were like over 3,000 players currently in the transfer portal currently; that’s almost like 60-70 entire teams’ worth of players.  This is what’s making college sports so crazy right now, is that the entire collegiate level is jam packed full of all these kids bouncing around all over the place trying to sniff out as much NIL money as they can.  And among them are all these 23+ year old graduates enrolling in patsy graduate programs in order to keep playing college sports against other Van Wilders or literal teenagers.

But I’m straying off topic here, the point of this post was to acknowledge the existence of Xaivian Lee, an actual Korean hooper playing for a noteworthy NCAA program, and being good enough to be hitting game winning threes and getting a little bit of spotlight from North American sport media.  He may have already graduated from Princeton and is doing a little bit of Van Wilder-ing because he knows he has no shot at the NBA, but there’s no doubt in my mind that his parents are probably still disappointed in him, even if he is pulling in a million bucks in NIL.  They probably think he could’ve already been making four times that had he traded up to Harvard or Yale and become a doctor or lawyer instead.

Akron is probably the only honest school in the nation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ASM Sports: University of Akron ruled the only school ineligible for bowl participation due to poor academics

In unrelated news, the University of Akron is probably the only honest school in the nation.  Reporting completely honestly in regards to the academics of their student athletes, whom, unsurprisingly are probably as collectively intelligent as a nursery school, instead of boasting falsely inflated graduation rates, and the flagrantly high GPAs of all the guys they have playing sports who are there are probably majoring in African-American studies, sports management, physical education, or any other patsy program that is a red flag for a student ringer.

Seriously though, anyone who’s ever heard a college student athlete ringer speak can tell right away that they’re not attending their schools in order to get an education.  There have been numerous published stories and documentaries about how flagrant this whole issue is, it’s just that as long as college sports keeps raking in the money as it does, there is no end to the amount of cheeks that will be turned to ignore the truth.

Not sure who’s the captain of the ship at the University of Akron, but they seriously haven’t been paying attention at the NCAA money making game, and should probably feel pretty embarrassed being the only school in FBS that has this distinction.  Lord only knows how many other schools, from low-tier FCS programs all the way to the royals in the Power-4 are actually as equally academically inept as Akron was, but are being run by smart enough people to be able to work around that and lie through their teeth in order to remain bowl eligible, but mostly important eligible to keep making that bonus money that comes from participating in bowl games.

This is entirely one of those situations where Akron shouldn’t be ashamed of being the dumbest school in the nation because of their poor academics, they should be ashamed of being the dumbest school in the nation because they’re the only ones who got caught being dumb, since every single other FBS school is probably lying their faces blue in regards to their academics.  If every school reported their academics honestly, the entire NCAA would probably be like, Stanford, Army and Navy vying for every single championship, because every single other school in the country has more athletic ringers that are illiterate than they have people that can pass econ 101.

Either way, kind of good on Akron for just trying to be honest, but in a field as crooked as the NCAA, they’re only shooting themselves in the feet at hamstringing their earning potential by doing such.  I get wanting to have integrity and honor and all that jazz, but at some point it’s just fucking embarrassing being the only ones in the entire division that didn’t get the memo, especially in a state that has six other FBS schools that they could have copied their homework off of.

Wouldn’t be surprised if next year, Akron is miraculously bowl eligible again, and academics across the board somehow are suddenly genius level.

When it comes to college application time, my kids are now ‘white’

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYP: Chinese-American kid with near-perfect credentials and worthiness rejected by 16 out of 18 schools; family pursuing legal action

Firstly, I’m astounded how this story managed slip by me considering it appears to have originated back in March.  I suppose my Google notification queries weren’t adequate enough to have found about this kid sooner.  Secondly, regardless of the fact that I closed the book on #TRYHARDSZN2025, when I found out about the general context of this story, it couldn’t help but fire up the powder keg of my brain into wanting to write about this, because it really is a pretty astounding story.

We have a student who scored a 1590 on the SAT* and has a 4.42 GPA; typically those things alone are enough to get kids accepted into a whole slew of high-tier colleges.  On top of it, it’s a computer science whiz, was offered a job at Google when he was 13 because his code was so clean, he was assumed to have been an adult, and he founded his own e-signature startup, which really should have had most schools with strong computer science and/or engineering programs salivating to bring in a talent like this into their folds.

*I can’t help but wonder what question he possibly could have gotten wrong on the SAT to dock those ten points, and also wonder if his dad beat the ever-living fuck out of him for failing to miss a perfecto by one question

The problem is that he happened to be Chinese-American, and suddenly he went from diamond in the rough to being a gold flake in the sluice, and was turned down from nearly every school he applied to.  There are so many Asian whiz kids out there every single college application season, that it’s probably more exceptional to be mediocre and full of character like me, instead of being a monster in the books.  Even doing shit like creating startups, developing apps or other exceptional-sounding achievements have begun to sound cookie cutter amongst Asians and guys like this are left to pay the price for everyone being so fucking over-the-top #TRYHARD.

As Syndrome said in The Incredibles, when everyone is super, nobody will be.

And the thing is, it’s not like he was one of those #TRYHARDs that applied to every Ivy League school, in fact the only one he did apply to was Cornell.  With the exceptions of MIT, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, the meat of his applications made it clear that he was favoring staying out on the west coast, with most of his applications staying in California primarily; they’re all good, noteworthy schools, but they’re not Ivies, and they still turned this poor kid down.

So despite my knee-jerk reaction being fuck this kid and his seemingly overzealous dad for going straight to threatening lawsuits, because frankly this happens every year, where a few wunderkind Asian kids get the shaft during college application time, because frankly Asians always get the shaft when it comes to succeeding in America, I’m actually rooting for them to hopefully make some noise and either get the college system in the country to change their racist acceptance policies, or flat out admit that they do discriminate against Asians for being too good at school.

It’s the Asian Curve at its best-worst, where Asian kids basically start the SAT with a score of -200, because without it, they’re completely annihilating the competition, but on a college-application level where Asians are getting rejected by schools because they’re unofficially trying to fill diversity quotas, as opposed to having their student bodies look like the Beijing Olympics.

The funny thing is though, in spite of the bullshit of getting completely owned by the college acceptance system, the kid in question is going to be just fine.  He’s already been hired by Google, and his story, as well as his previous rub with the company, you know he’s already pulling in serious coin, and the ironic best part is that he’ll be getting to do so without having a modicum of student debt to pay towards.

Granted, his parents will forever be denied the Asian honor dream of having a son that went to Harvard or Yale, much less any college at this point, but in a few years once he’s made some money, and has bought them some high-end cars and paid off their mortgage, I’m sure their songs will sound a lot less flat.

All the same, it was an interesting story that really puts the spotlight on how much bullshit #TRYHARDSZN is capable of being, especially for those of kids who are stalwart Asians, because they have to know that their plight to get into top schools is going to be thirty-times harder than those students of different colors of skin, regardless of if anyone will admit to it or not.