AI
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Cluesday
Closer to homes Tornado Alley moves east. Here’s one I recorded live on my phone in February here in Bloomington, Indiana. Here is the trench of destruction dug by a later tornado that went through thick woodlands about twelve miles north of here. Didn’t know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against… Continue reading
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WaningCrescentMoonday
That’s what it says at MoonPhase.today Specifically, 26%. I’ll consider them unreal if they’re not at IIW. The UOR Foundation has plans to… Well, I can’t copy and paste the text, so here’s a screengrab: I’ll say not. Quite. AM I? | A Documentary About AI Consciousness. Ever notice the groovy ditches in tidal swampland?… Continue reading
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Lintlinks
If you don’t, you’re a human AI Test: See if you don’t laugh at something as you scroll down through this. Am I alone in finding it annoying? Does anybody want, or use, the “workspace” that shows up, whether you want it or not, every time you open a Zoom session? Getting less faint Wall… Continue reading
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Thumbsday
A billion rights don’t make a wrong Except for a few books and thousands of long-since-tossed magazines and newspapers, all my writing is on the Web. Some of that died long ago. For example, David Bunnell (four days older than me, and for whom I was often mistaken) did nothing (to my knowledge*) to save… Continue reading
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Cruiseday
Real hard forks Hmm… NiemanLab: NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future. Specifically, “NPR … landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.” I subscribed to Casey and Kevin’s old podcast, Hard Fork, and I’ll subscribe to Machine Gods too. But I doubt I’ll… Continue reading
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Attaday
It’ll get better before it gets worse before it gets better I trust Meta’s Muse.ai about as far as I can throw a data center. But at least one person whose wisdom I value says Muse will be the winner in the personal AI wars that I want none of the giants to win. It will… Continue reading
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Blitheday
Turned out to be yummy Thirteen years ago, I wrote this defense of QR codes, which friends were calling “robot barf.” If I count this right Public radio in the Boston market has a 17.6 Nielsen share. WBUR is #1 with a 7.9. Impressive. And not just because when governments try to erase history others… Continue reading
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Hey Europe: Make Privacy a Contract
Anu Bradford‘s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially in respect to personal privacy. And for that we should be grateful, because the US and China mostly don’t give a shit. On the other hand, every cookie… Continue reading
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Reanimating a Corpus. Or Two. Or More.
For many years, I have despaired of ever saving the contents of my old blog (1999-2007), my writing for Linux Journal (1996-2019), and countless other articles, essays, and posts, published mostly on the Web—which looks and sounds like a permanent place (“sites,” “locations,” domains”), but in fact is a whiteboard. Then, last week, I asked… Continue reading
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Linkalongday
War prep redux Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since then, while… Continue reading
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Nextings
See them while you can Later: I turned this section into a Big Idea. Read it there and skip this section or read this section and continue over there. As I’ve been writing about at length on my Trunkline blog, broadcast towers are both a lifelong preoccupation of mine, and (like all of us) doomed… Continue reading
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Boomerangday
Just the Anthropocene, rolling along The photo above was shared in a group I’m in. It was photographed by ornithologist and naturalist Robert Ridgway in November 1875. The tree is identified as an American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) in the lower Wabash River bottoms of Gibson County, Indiana, across the river from Mount Carmel, Illinois, Ridgeway’s… Continue reading
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AI as a Teacher of Athletes
On the whole, AI writing is good. Yes, I’ve called it “AutoTune for the human kind” and “fancy blah.” Claudio Nastruzzi called it “semantic ablation.” But Big AI’s grammar, styling, and prose still tends to beat the shit out of the ways most people write. Does that have to be a bad thing? Nearly all of… Continue reading
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Fraturday
John Venn has the perfect historical marker. Cory Doctorow makes sense of wtf is happening with AI. The Indiana Hoosiers football team, still-undefeated national champs (17-0 including last year and this one) take on the Howard Bison today at noon. I’ll be watching. (It’s on Fox One.) How Tony Pierce’s busblog took off on 9/11.… Continue reading
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Lureday
You can buy a new Duo 18 folding iPhone with max storage (2 TB, which is what I have in my iPhone 16 Pro Max) for the low-low price of just $3199. For that you get bigger display but a lesser camera on the back side (two lenses rather than three in the Pro series,… Continue reading
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Fearday
So much doom and gloom about AI. Lordy: Samuel Marks on X. Ted Gioia on that one and many more. Quoth The Raven Jeffrey Snover And I'm exactly at the expected age: Life expectancy vs. Health costs Not good Nicholas Cage's house has a hole Seems NPR is super-serving its core demographic Continue reading
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Undeadlines
Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random): Continue reading
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Moneyday
Turing Testings Like “Goldie Boone,” whom I wrote about here last month, “Luna Azul” (above right) is a fake singer. Pure AI. Her music too, I suppose. I’m sure of it. But neither artist nor music are identified as AI-generated. “New music every week,” Luna’s YouTube channel says. At first, I thought she traced to… Continue reading
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Oozeday
I was overheard to have said Exhumed this from a Facebook comment to repost here: About advertising, there have been two state changes in the business. One I unpacked eleven years ago, in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff. The pull-quote: “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as… Continue reading
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You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing
How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Gary Isaac Wolfe (who contributes a comment below): “Anthropic watermark scheme appears as a comic policeman blowing his whistle while his pants fall down and Mark Pauline loads a cannon with rotting fish.” But maybe that’s… Continue reading