Business
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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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Shots and Misses
There is a meteor impact crater in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. It’s called Upheaval Dome, because that’s what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn’t. When I visited the place with my teenage kids in the late ’80s, all the placards along the trail explained that the circular canyon was what… Continue reading
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Whetherday
Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other… Continue reading
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The Web and the New Reality
Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where… Continue reading
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Local radio lives in Burlington and Graham
WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands in… Continue reading
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Earth to Southwest (and every other service company): make your surveys about your service, not just personnel facing customers
Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight: And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking: I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one doesn’t have a way… Continue reading
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No body day
Let’s have her sing a country song about life in the uncanny valley Goldie Boone is a “digital country artist” who looks too good to be real. So I’m sure she’s not. Convince me otherwise. Nothing personal. Yet. Mozilla’s The State of Open Source AI is required reading. It makes a great case for open… Continue reading
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Cryday
Haven’t figured out lighting yet, but I like the idea After struggling for days to make my new Epson FF-680W photo scanner, which does a much poorer job of scanning photos than my iPhone 16, I’m ready for one of these. Welcome to New York AeroXplorer: LaGuardia Tower Alerts Pilots to Possible Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat Near… Continue reading
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Thurbsday
It’s still a bubble In May of 2018, I posted GDPR will pop the adtech bubble. It didn’t. The bubble is now bigger than ever. My mistake was assuming that there was a policy answer to a morally awful business that paid well. In retrospect, it’s a humbling reminder of how long one can be wrong… Continue reading
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InOrOutDay
This is the first morning since I arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday that stepping outside in the morning didn’t feel like walking into an oven. It was 76° F (24.4° C), which isn’t bad. I also couldn’t see far up the road, because the air was full of smoke, and it was hard to breathe.… Continue reading
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Heatday
To your health It’s 96° here in Baltimore, where the air quality sucks thanks to fires in Canada and Minnesota. But write on I shall. And your money Ed Zitron’s long read on the coming AI crash is worth your time. Seriously In paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms, Don Marti gives us a… Continue reading
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Oneday
That’s all I have to prep for a month on the road. Tomorrow is Baltimore. After that, North Carolina. After that, California. Back in Bloomington in mid-August. Right now it’s hot in all my places: Ground down Says here that Rogers Sports & Media has closed six of its radio stations. One of those, CKWX… Continue reading
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Eponyday
To whom else has God sold naming rights for days of the week? And you thought Tuesday was a grace of our turning Earth. <bonus content to avoid if oral surgery grosses you out> Since I had a molar extracted last week, there remains an open wound in my mouth where the tooth used to… Continue reading
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Moosday
We'll see what happens Call for Tenders: Development, consultancy and support for a data altruism consent management system went out from the European Commission on 27 May of this year. It begins, "This call will fund a robust, legally compliant and user-friendly digital solution that enables individuals to give, withdraw and manage consent for data… Continue reading
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The George Carlin Model of AI
Forty-five years ago, George Carlin forecast the future of AI: Listen to what George says, if you haven’t already. You can stop about two and a half minutes in, after he talks about how all your shit is stuff and everyone else’s stuff is shit. Because that’s the reason Big AI will never be personal… Continue reading
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The Formerlies
This Knicks NBA championship run is the greatest of all time. Reasons: All this is debatable, of course. Just not right now. Continue reading
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Customer Service Sample of One
Our Samsung TV* and our Samsung soundbar/woofer no longer connect over bluetooth. Well, they do connect—both displays say they are connected—but the TV only plays through its own speakers. I called Samsung for help with this, but the phone maze robot said only texts would work at that time. Here’s the text monologue from Samsung:… Continue reading
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Knicks Rule
I expected the Knicks to win tonight. I also expect them to win the NBA championship. Two reasons. One is what I said about the Cavaliers ten years ago: they’re a better story. And something I said about the Warriors in that post applies to the Spurs now: they feel entitled. They just beat the… Continue reading
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How DuckDuckGo Can Be a Hero
In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout said, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” So consider what’s happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has always been—a search engine for the Web—when… Continue reading
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From Losing the Web to Saving Us All
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy—Thesis #7, The Cluetrain Manifesto Big AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks, which are what make the Web a web. With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls. They top the new hierarchy, which… Continue reading