problems
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What Works After a Disaster Happens?
When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, the Swannanoa River rose three storys above its shores, all but erasing the town named after the river, and leaving hundreds homeless. But the challenge for Swannanoa was not just recovery. It was regeneration. For that, Swannanoa’s residents formed new kinds of partnerships and problem solutions that could Continue reading
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What Are Stories?
Twenty-first in the New Commons series Fifth on the #LAfires Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling joists of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed since the house, Continue reading
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Los Angeles Fires and Aftermath
Nineteenth in the News Commons series Third on the #LAfires 6:50am Friday, January 10, 2025—I will now shift my blogging about the #LAFires from the kind of continuous coverage I’ve done for the last three days to what we might call coverage of coverage. Or something beyond that: shifting to a new kind of news Continue reading
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Personal vs. Personalized AI
Personal AI is personal. It isn’t personalized. Context: There is a war going on. Humanity and nature are on one side, and Big Tech is on the other. The two sides are not opposed. They are orthogonal. The human side is horizontal, and the Big Tech side is vertical.* The human side is personal, social, Continue reading
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Death is a Feature
When Parisians got tired of cemeteries during the French Revolution, they conscripted priests to relocate bones of more than six million deceased forebears to empty limestone quarries below the city: a hundred miles of rooms and corridors now called The Catacombes. It was from those quarries that much of the city’s famous structures above—Notre Dame, et. al.—were built Continue reading
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Looking for DALL-E 3 Help
I just returned to DALL-E 3 after using its Microsoft version (currently called Copilot | Designer) for a while. But I can’t get in. See how it says “Try in ChatGPT↗︎?” When I do that, it goes to https://chat.openai.com/. After I log in there, it offers no clue about where DALL-E 3 is. So I Continue reading
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A workflow challenge
I shoot a lot of pictures. Most are from altitude (such as the above). But lots are of people and places; for example, here are a few I shot at DWebCamp last summer with my new Sony A7 IV camera (to which I migrated last year after many years shooting Canon): Importing and curating photos Continue reading
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Attention is not a commodity
In one of his typically trenchant posts, titled Attentive, Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) compares human attention to oil, meaning an extractive commodity: We used to refer to an information economy. But economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value), and in an age of information abundance, what’s scarce? A: Attention. The scale of the Continue reading
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The Empire Strikes On
Twelve years ago, I posted The Data Bubble. It began, The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten Continue reading
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TheirCharts
If you’re getting health care in the U.S., chances are your providers are now trying to give you a better patient experience through a website called MyChart. This is supposed to be yours, as the first person singular pronoun My implies. Problem is, it’s TheirChart. And there are a lot of them. I have four (correction: five*) MyChart accounts Continue reading
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Is there a way out of password hell?
Passwords are hell. Worse, to make your hundreds of passwords safe as possible, they should be nearly impossible for others to discover—and for you to remember. Unless you’re a wizard, this all but requires using a password manager.† Think about how hard that job is. First, it’s impossible for developers of password managers to do Continue reading
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Just in case you feel safe with Twitter
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen (@firstpersonpol) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. This is it: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Norwegian Data Protection Agency today fined Grindr $11.7 million following Continue reading
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Toward new kinds of leverage
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said. For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the Continue reading
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How we save the world
Let’s say the world is going to hell. Don’t argue, because my case isn’t about that. It’s about who saves it. I suggest everybody. Or, more practically speaking, a maximized assortment of the smartest and most helpful anybodies. Not governments. Not academies. Not investors. Not charities. Not big companies and their platforms. Any of those Continue reading
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We’ve seen this movie before
When some big outfit with a vested interest in violating your privacy says they are only trying to save small business, grab your wallet. Because the game they’re playing is misdirection away from what they really want. The most recent case in point is Facebook, which ironically holds the world’s largest database on individual human Continue reading
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Social shell games
If you listen to Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source of the latest Reality 2.0 podcast, you’ll learn that I was blindsided at first by the topic of Parler, which has lately become a thing. But I caught up fast, even getting a Parler account not long after the show ended. Because I wanted to see what’s Continue reading
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Is Flickr in trouble again?
December 10, 2020: This matter has been settled now, meaning Flickr appears not to be in trouble, and my account due for renewal will be automatically renewed. I’ve appended what settled the matter to the bottom of this post. Note that it also raises another question, about subscriptions. — Doc I have two Flickr accounts, Continue reading
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One example of how subscriptions suck
My goal here is to make e this brilliant poster by Despair.com obsolete: Starting with just one magazine: The New Yorker. I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for most of my life. As an adjective, loyal doesn’t cover what that magazine means to me. But wholly shit, they sure make subscribing a pain in the ass. Continue reading
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Bet on obsolescence
In New Digital Realities; New Oversight Solutions, Tom Wheeler, Phil Verveer and Gene Kimmelman suggest that “the problems in dealing with digital platform companies” strip the gears of antitrust and other industrial era regulatory machines, and that what we need instead is “a new approach to regulation that replaces industrial era regulation with a new more agile regulatory model Continue reading
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So far, privacy isn’t a debate
Remember the dot com boom? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do. That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end. Sure, it’s hard to imagine that when we’re in the midst of the mania, but the end will come. When it Continue reading