June 2024
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The Future, Present, and Past of News
Eleventh in the News Commons series. all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in Ulysses News flows. It starts with what’s coming up, goes through what’s happening, and ends up as what’s kept—if it’s lucky. Facts take the same route. Continue reading
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The Personal Internet
—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. Everything on the Internet that requires an account has a lock on you—for their convenience. They don’t know any other way. That’s because all the services we use in the online Continue reading
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A very local storm
It was a derecho, or something like one. The gust front you see in the third image here — —looks a lot like the storm front in the top image above (via Weatherbug, storm tracker view). I’d experienced one twelve years ago, in Arlington, Mass. It felt like a two minute hurricane, and when it Continue reading
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Does personal AI require Big Compute?
I don’t think it does. Not for everything. We already have personal AI for autocomplete. Do we need Big Compute for a personal AI to tell us which pieces within our Amazon orders are in which line items in our Visa statements? (Different items in a shipment often appear inside different charges on a card.) Continue reading
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Jayson Tatić and the Boston Celtićs
Nobody’s talking about this, so I will: Jayson Tatum is playing a decoy. More to the point, he is playing Jokić, Dončić, or a bit of both. Not all the time (such as when he’s doing one of those step-back threes with lots of time on the clock, but enough). So let’s call him Jayson Continue reading
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Archiving a Way
My father, Allen H. Searls, was an archivist. Not a formal one, but good in the vernacular, at least when it came to one of the most consequential things he did in his life: helping build the George Washington Bridge. He did this by photographing his work and fellow workers. He shot with a Kodak Continue reading