language
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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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Mittwoch
Overheard Copilot is the new Clippy. Another one bites the sky In NiemanLab, Joshua Benton asks, Will Pittsburgh become America’s most important city without a newspaper? Sure, if you're just counting the size of the city. But the paper itself was kind of a mess anyway, at least as Joshua tells it. I'm guessing that ways will Continue reading
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Department of Collections
Gruntles First, I hate liquid glass, with its water-stain lettering and deeply cropped and rounded window and icon corners (which give you fewer pixels to click on and harder corners to grab and pull.) I’ll say more about it after the holidays. Meanwhile, if you’re with me, this will help. Second, I continue to insist 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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Who and what are you?
Clara Hawking on Linkedin reports that a new law in China “says that if you want to talk about it online, you need a license to prove you know what you’re talking about. As of October 25, China now requires influencers to hold official qualifications before posting about ‘sensitive’ topics such as education, medicine, law, Continue reading
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Workings
Photos from the 41st IIW. Also from the first Agentic Internet Workshop. Many pix among them are of our group working on MyTerms, which I believe will be the biggest advance for the Web since the Web* itself. Nitin Batjatia: The Coming Illumination: When AI Reveals How Work Really Happens. Related, from an Amazon earnings call, how Continue reading
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Flying Wide
The crash of UPS Airlines Flight 2976 at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport (SDF) yesterday afternoon was 76 miles from here. Feels closer. A house in the middle of nowhere, Texas, contains a Boeing 727 fuselage. French words in English for airplane parts: fuselage, nacelle, aileron, empennage. This is largely because the Wright Brothers held tight Continue reading
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Mittwoch
More lost privacy. 404 reports that Flock Safety, an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, “is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches to ‘jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person,’ allowing police to much more easily identify and track the movements of specific people around the country Continue reading
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Real Agency
I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that Continue reading
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The Interknit
I just looked for the word “weave” among my half-million photos, and found this: We’ve been trying to solve identity problems online since the Internet showed up, roughly in the middle of the curve in the image above. It wasn’t much of a problem before then. Consider what Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Continue reading
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How anywhere is everywhere
On Quora, somebody asked, Which is your choice, radio, television, or the Internet?. I replied with the following. If you say to your smart speaker “Play KSKO,” it will play that small-town Alaska station, which has the wattage of a light bulb, anywhere in the world. In this sense the Internet has eaten the station. Continue reading
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About face
We know more than we can tell. That one-liner from Michael Polanyi has been waiting half a century for a proper controversy, which it now has with facial recognition. Here’s how he explains it in The Tacit Dimension: This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. Take an example. We know Continue reading
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Data is the New Love
Personal data, that is. Because it’s good to give away—but only if you mean it. And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking. I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say “data is the new oil.” That’s because a massive personal data Continue reading