AI
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Remembranes
And I thought the voice was a knockoff of Leo Laporte Washington Post: He spent decades perfecting his voice. Now he says Google stole it: NPR’s David Greene says he was “completely freaked out” when he heard an AI voice that sounded just like his own, and he’s suing over it. It's still vendor sports. Continue reading
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Weekstart
Or both Monday and Tuesday? If Saturday and Sunday are the weekend, why not call Monday the Weekstart? Smart? Or just good at whatever this is? An AI counterargument to the mirror thesis. And not just because my name gets dropped in it. This Ezra Klein podcast with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu is required listening. Continue reading
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Sum Day
Super. Bowls a strike. Against ChatGPT. This is brilliant. Here's a bonus post from the reliably contrary Gary Marcus. Later… I didn't see this ad during the Super Bowl. But maybe it ran but I got sacked by the Seattle defense, which several times came right through my TV screen and threw me on the Continue reading
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Funday
I shall not see my shadow It’s too cold to go out today, so far, here in The Bahamas. So I am staying bundled and warm, getting work done. This was not my vacation plan, but it’s cool. For maximum freakage and fascination Moltbook is it. Zvi Mowshowitz runs it down. “Best start believing in Continue reading
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Shutter Day
Without losing its charm I am in Harbour Island, where all the old houses have shutters. The house where we’re staying is a small cottage built in 1832. It has survived countless hurricanes. Remember Her? Moltbook is a Reddit for AI chatbots. NBC: Humans welcome to observe: This social network is for AI agents only. Wikipedia. Continue reading
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Warm Takes
We still await truly personal AI. Google just launched Personal Intelligence. “Get highly personal help with everything from vacation ideas to project plans, and more. Gemini connects the dots across your Google apps—like Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube—and your chat history preferences to provide suggestions tailored to your world.” That should be called personalized, because Continue reading
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Numb Day
Clobbering tourism, sports, higher ed, and all tech conferences Privacy International says “The U.S. Government intends to force visitors to submit their digital history and DNA as the price of entry.” The proposed changes are here. Particulars from the piece: The changes include: All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’ Continue reading
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Dept. of Contentions
His story A thousand years ago, when I was in college, there was a traveling museum of some kind, I forget what. All I remember was a pair of very large bronze hands, from a plaster cast. The hands were thick and plainly those of man whose work was heavy manual labor. Then I looked Continue reading
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Thrustday
That right? This is a slash: / This is a backslash: \ One can call the former a forward slash, but when telling people a URL, for example, one would say “slash.” That’s two syllables less than “forward slash.” I hope the answer is no In 2006, when Twitter and Facebook came along, this blog Continue reading
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Now the Future Can Start
That’s a screen grab of an email we’re sending out for the MyTerms launch in London. Links: Be there in a Zoom square. Or in old-fashioned reality. Continue reading
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Discourse & Datcourse
The reverse centaur. That’s where Big AI is the human part, and you’re just the horse part. If you have a suspicion that the AI bubble will burst, or even if you don’t, it’s worthwhile to read Cory Doctorow’s AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage, in The Guardian. Some useful metaphors in Continue reading
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Everwhat
Um… Shanaka Anslem Perera: The Megawatt Mirage: NVIDIA’s $4.5 Trillion Valuation Depends on a Grid That Cannot Deliver. Chips Ready. Software Ready. Power Infrastructure? Eight-Year Queue. Credit Markets? Flashing Red. The tweet version: “Microsoft’s CEO admitted GPUs are sitting in warehouses unplugged. Not demand. Not defects. Power. Transformer lead times: 4 years Grid interconnection queues: Continue reading
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Paths
We’re in the phone book! We’re real now! MyTerms now has a YouTube channel. The one item there, so far, is a short and remarkably good NotebookLM summary of my hour-long talk, The Case for MyTerms, at Indiana University. Also, Gemini failed. I still don’t know who she was. I think we could have powered two Continue reading
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Toward a Proof of Concept for MyTerms
I’m thinking out loud here about how to get development rolling for MyTerms. Right now I see three pieces required for a proof of concept: When we first thought about this at ProjectVRM in the late ’00s, we saw a browser header that looked like this: The ⊂ and the ⊃ are for the personal Continue reading
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O’Hare can you see?
Always buy in the past In 1991, my bride bought us both lifetime memberships in United Airlines’ airport lounge, then called the Red Carpet Club. I forget the price, but it was cheap, considering. I’m guessing it was less than what one would pay now for just a year’s worth of club membership. Naturally (and Continue reading
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Everwhen
Same cancer, different tumor Show of hands: Who wants surveillance pricing? Sez Wikipedia, at that link, “Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer’s personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay.[1] This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for a products or services based on an Continue reading
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Taking it Slower
To the best editor I’ve ever had Paolo once told me that cats came to Earth to enslave the standing monkeys. While funny and in some ways true, cats can be more and other than that. They can be as loyal as dogs (and both species far more loyal than grown humans to each other), Continue reading
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Where Has All the Interest Gone?
The answer to the headline is Almost Everywhere Else. The new wheres are uncountable, and their number and variety are growing. The transition is from Think about the word station. That’s where we got our audio and video before the Internet came along. Some of that audio and video was distributed by or though stations Continue reading
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How to Civilize Digital Life
The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.” Those six words Continue reading
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Cerebrations
Can you guess the two voices? Mr. Rogers meets the bass player. Still funny 50 years later. It burped in our direction How and why the Sun grounded 6000 planes last month. Watch out above As of 7pm ET, a solar storm is starting, causing auroras that may be visible in North America across many Continue reading