Technology
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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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From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium
Hollywood Park Racetrack is gone. In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, named after the racetrack. Wikipedia says the park— consists of over 8.5 million square feet (790,000 m2)… 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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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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Beyond the Web
Note: This post was updated on the morning of 17 October 2023 (the one when I am writing this) to help me prepare for the latest salon in the Beyond the Web Salon Series, themed Human +/vs. Artificial intelligence, which is happening at noon today, co-hosted by Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School, both at IU. To prep for… Continue reading
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Sucky car design trends
On Quora, here’s my answer to What are the worst design trends in modern cars?—updated by our family’s experience with a new Toyota that features even more indicators than the bunch above. Based on that, plus driving lots of late-model rental cars, here’s a list of what sucks about most (and in some cases all)… Continue reading
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Welcome to the 21st Century
Historic milestones don’t always line up with large round numbers on our calendars. For example, I suggest that the 1950s ended with the assassination of JFK in late 1963, and the rise of British Rock, led by the Beatles, in 1964. I also suggest that the 1960s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, and disco took off,… 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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How the once mighty fall
For many decades, one of the landmark radio stations in Washington, DC was WMAL-AM (now re-branded WSPN), at 630 on (what in pre-digital times we called) the dial. As AM listening faded, so did WMAL, which moved its talk format to 105.9 FM in Woodbridge and its signal to a less ideal location, far out… Continue reading
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How to get fans inside the NBA’s playoff bubble
For folks visiting from the future, this post went up during the Covid Pandemic, when fans couldn’t attend ganes inside what came to be called the 2020 NBA Bubble. Here is the idea:::: Sell tickets to attend online through Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Webex, GoToMeeting, Jitsi or whatever conferencing system can supply working tech… Continue reading
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Coming From Every Here
To answer the question Where are SiriusXM radio stations broadcasted from?, I replied, If you’re wondering where they transmit from, it’s a mix. SiriusXM transmits primarily from a number of satellites placed in geostationary orbit, 35,786 kilometres or 22,236 miles above the equator. From Earth they appear to be stationary. Two of the XM satellites,… 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
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The best way to forget is to never know
@EvanSelinger tweeted, While some companies think it’s enough to tweet support for social justice while marketing a tool for oppression, IBM gets out of the facial recognition business & states opposition to mass surveillance & racial profiling. In that tweet he pointed to IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology (Subhead: IBM’s CEO says… Continue reading
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Will our digital lives leave a fossil record?
In the library of Earth’s history, there are missing books, and within books, there are missing chapters, written in rock that is now gone. John Wesley Powell recorded the greatest example of gone rock in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon. Floating down the Colorado River, he saw the canyon’s mile-thick… Continue reading
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Helping Zoom
[This is the third of four posts. The last of those, Zoom’s new privacy policy, visits the company’s positive response to input such as mine here. So you might want to start with that post (because it’s the latest) and look at the other three, including this one, after that.] I really don’t want to… Continue reading
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The universe is a start-up
“Pillars of Creation” is a live view of stars forming in a neighboring region of the Milky Way. (Inside the Eagle Nebula, 5,400 to 6,100 light years away.) The Solar System, formed 4.6 billion years ago. Earth became a planet .46 billion years later. That was 9.247 billion years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.787 billion years ago, meaning… Continue reading