AI
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The California AI Rush
There have been five tech booms since Gordon Moore coined his eponymous Law in 1965: In my long experience, the AI boom is the biggest of all. Tom Friedman calls it “the second big bang.” Watch that. I think he’s right. Business-wise, we get a lot of sky-pie, naturally. This, for example, from Mordor Intelligence:… Continue reading
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Harvest Moonday
Stripe, Meta, and Apple, sitting in a tree In Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, Patrick Collison (of Stripe fame) says (among much else), Much of what I’m writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer’s side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it’s true, and what… Continue reading
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The Fossil Present
The Web isn’t dying, but it is being distanced from us. As a place to seek knowledge and connections, it is being replaced for many (including me) by AI chatbots that harvest findings from it, rewrite and summarize what they find, and—as gravy on that steak—point to sources it finds there. To some degree, this… Continue reading
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Friday Tab Clearance Sale
Stormy Whether GDPR services is a market we shouldn’t need at all, but it’s growing like a thundercloud. See the above. (Source: Mordor Intelligence) Looking up, more or less Though not the intention, Starlink’s 11,000 satellites are a planetary barometer. Spaceweather.com: Starlink has many downsides. The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, pollutes the atmosphere with metallic… Continue reading
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Fuseday
First, and most importantly, don't miss Peter Kaminsky's talk today at 4 PM Eastern. Required Viewing I EXPOSED what big tech knows about you by becoming… a data broker, by Chris the Producer, on YouTube. It's brilliant. More about him here. And here. And here. Hat's off to Don Marti for the find. Bonus link.… Continue reading
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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… 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