AI
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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 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 in the long run. That’s because high-bandwidth wireless digital tech doesn’t require them. (Yes, over-the air broadcasting may be with us forever, but on… 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
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Burrsday
A flipping iceberg. I subscribed to the Los Angeles Times early last year when I was writing about the challenges for journalism in covering the wildfires there. That was in my News Commons series, which I think has some brilliant and useful stuff. But it didn't go anywhere, so I wasn't sure about renewing. But… Continue reading
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Unotherday
Another Para Digm Spotted one of the above, flying up and down East Beach in Santa Barbara. If I were half my age, I’d be up there too. Unhuman Matt Hinkle: The Week AI Agents Got Hands. It begins, The chat window era just ended. This week, AI agents got hands — Cloudflare shipped a… Continue reading
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Throbsday
On AI wronging and writing I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It’s not just the excess of one-line paragraphs, the contrasty “not that, but this” argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It’s a tone that sounds like the average of a million well-put hunks of text published by… Continue reading
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Chooseday
Working to kill off cookie notices The IEEE’s cookie notice says, “This website utilizes technologies such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as for analytics, personalization, and targeted advertising. Privacy Policy.” Its privacy policy, at that last link, says it collects eighteen kinds of personal information, and says one of the purposes… Continue reading
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A Lesson in AI Economics
I am a heavy Photoshop user, and recently upgraded to Photoshop 2026 at Adobe’s robotic insistence. But, when I went to do a “generative fill” on an old photo (in the outlined area above), I was met with this: Fuzzed by that, I hit the View my balance button and got this: This shows I’m… Continue reading
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Ownday
Elemental differences Look up graphite, graphite company, or graphite the company, and you’ll mostly get geological and industrial answers. (Unless, of course, your search history suggests the company signing the billboard above.) The easy way to find out, of course, is to ask your friendly AI. It will tell you the company behind the billboard above is Graphite.com,… Continue reading