Mitch W
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  • Today I learned that it is perfectly fine to say to someone, “I’m sorry, could you speak a little slower–I’m having difficulty understanding your accent.”

    Previously I thought it was rude and maybe xenophobic to point out to someone that they spoke with an accent.

    I do not want to admit how long I have struggled with this delusion and failed to arrive at the simple solution.

    → 10:26 AM, Jun 1
  • Meanwhile, on the Bluesky social network

    → 8:56 AM, Jun 1
  • Reddit’s new API charges would cost the developer of Apollo $20 million per year. Apollo is one of my favorite iPhone and iPad apps. I’d hate for it to go away.

    → 12:55 PM, May 31
  • Furries Now Have Serious Beef With Ron DeSantis: A furry fandom con in Florida just announced it would ban minors based on the governor’s ridiculous laws

    Many parents whose children are involved with the subculture credit it with helping them overcome bullying, or gain self-esteem. At conventions, [a furry convention organizer] says, “there will be parents crying in a corner because they don’t see their kids so happy every day. We had a mom break down because she’s never seen her kid feel so comfortable just sitting at a table and interacting with other kids.” She says it is “heartbreaking” to think of young furries not having a space to connect.

    The furry fandom has been a target of the far-right for years, with numerous politicians baselessly claiming that schools are placing litter boxes in bathrooms to appease students who identify as furries. A number of school boards across the country have attempted to prohibit children from wearing animal ears to school, with Florida’s Brevard Public Schools most recently attempting to adopt a dress code banning clothing “which emulates non-human characteristics.” (A spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools denied that children dressing up as furries was a “widespread issue.”)

    Glad to hear that poverty, violence, Covid, cancer, climate change, and rising healthcare costs are now solved problems, so we can go after furries.

    → 12:36 PM, May 31
  • I wrote this: Today’s data centers require extreme makeovers to meet AI requirements, says Marvell

    → 9:29 AM, May 31
  • The threat of human extinction by AI is only scary for billionaires and centimillionaires

    I see now that tech executives are once again warning about risk of human extinction caused by AI.

    I think it’s adorable when the plutes worry about that kind of thing, while the rest of us worry about paying for healthcare, food, and housing.

    More than 30 million Americans are living below the poverty line. And 40% of Americans were having difficulty paying for normal household expenses.. That’s scary.

    AI is only scary to the extent that it will be an excuse to put more people out of work.

    → 8:27 AM, May 31
  • Today I learned: A canary trap is a technique to identify an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to several suspects and observing which version gets leaked.

    I was familiar with the technique, but I’d never heard the name before, and I was ignorant of the technique’s history.

    This Wikipedia article gives 40 years of history. I expect the canary trap is much older than that–thousands and thousands of years.

    → 1:12 PM, May 30
  • Researchers are using Shoggoth, a monster out of HP Lovecraft, as a mascot for AI.

    Kevin Roose at The New York Times:

    @TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

    Attempts to train AI to be more human-like are like putting a smiley face or human mask on Shoggoth. It’s still inscrutable, but it creates the appearance of understandability.

    That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

    And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

    → 12:32 PM, May 30
  • Adam Engst at TidBITS writes an in-depth review of the new, experimental Arc browser for Mac. Lately I’m switching off between Arc, Orion, and Safari.

    → 12:53 PM, May 29
  • Cory Doctorow: The FDA literally granted pharma company Ferring a monopoly on shit. More precisely, the FDA rescinded its “discretionary enforcement” guidance relating to fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs), where doctors implant a small quantity of processed poop from one person to another, which turns out to be a powerful, safe treatment for serious and potentially fatal intestinal infection. The FDA ruling makes it illegal for doctors to source their poop from Openbiome, a nonprofit that coordinates between doctors, patients, and donors to provide safe FMTs. Ferring conducted clinical trials on FMTs and received approval for an FMT product called Rebyota, which charges $20,000 per treatment, compared to Openbiome’s $1-2k per treatment. So sick Americans will have to pay 10x higher for shit.

    → 11:50 AM, May 29
  • We recently learned about “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” a 2017 movie directed and written by Luc Besson of “The Fifth Element,” which Julie and I both love. The previews have the same look and feel as the other movie. It stars Dane DeHaan (never heard of him), and Cara DeLevingne, who appeared in “Carnival Row”—we enjoyed the first season of that—along with a hell of a supporting cast: Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Rutger Hauer and John Goodman.

    → 9:42 AM, May 29
  • Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design:

    The term brutalism is derived from the French béton brut, meaning “raw concrete”. Although most brutalist buildings are made from concrete, we’re more interested in the term raw. Concrete brutalist buildings often reflect back the forms used to make them, and their overall design tends to adhere to the concept of truth to materials.

    …

    A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

    → 9:31 AM, May 29
  • Panpsychism is the view that the mind “or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.”

    → 8:56 AM, May 29
  • Possibilianism is a religious philosophy that’s open to exploring possibilities. Neuroscientist David Eagleman described it this way:

    Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

    → 8:54 AM, May 29
  • The iPhone will auto-reply to text messages—but only when you’re in Driving Focus. I want auto-reply in all Focus modes. I hope that’s coming in the next version of iOS.

    → 8:40 AM, May 29
  • What novel should I read next? 📚

    I woke up this morning and decided to break up with the novel I’m currently reading. This is a new thing for me; I recently decided to start more books and quit reading more books when they’re not working for me.

    I’m not finding that resolution easy. A part of me feels compelled to finish a book once I start, as if failure to complete was wasteful, like not eating all the food on my plate. But of course, that’s ridiculous, and quitting reading a book that isn’t working opens up time to read something I might enjoy more.

    The book I’m quitting is “Cetaganda,” by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s part of her Vorkosigan series of novels. These are far-future science fiction about a hero named Miles Vorkosigan. Miles is the son of one of the most powerful men on the planet Barrayar, scion of a warrior caste. Miles’s father was one of the greatest warriors and statesmen of Barrayan history, who saved the planet after a revolution and coup against the rightful Emperor, and then ruled as regent.

    But Miles is not his father; he’s disabled, short and frail, with a rare medical condition that makes his bones fragile and easily breakable. He’s also brilliant, hyperactive, a wise-ass, and prone to getting himself into trouble and thinking himself out of it. The books have an enthusiastic fandom and won a lot of awards.

    But I always find myself having to push through the middle of the Vorkosigan books, and in the case of “Cetaganda,” it’s too much pushing.

    The Vorkosigan stories are mysteries of one kind or another: murders to be solved, spy plots to be uncovered, military capers to be executed. The plots are intricate. I think the books are meant to be read quickly, over two or three days at most. I read books slowly, over weeks or months, and I get confused about what’s going on in the Vorkosigan novels and who’s who.

    The books were written in the 90s, and they already seem a little dated.

    Julie went to school with Bujold, though they were not close. And here’s an interesting Wikipedia bit: Bujold’s inspirations for Miles include T.E. Lawrence, a young Winston Churchill, a disabled hospital pharmacist she once worked with, “and even herself (the ‘great man’s son syndrome’).” I’ll have to ask Julie what, if anything, she knows about Bujold’s father.

    I may come back to Miles Vorkosigan. But not today.

    So what should I read next? I think I’m going to stick with series novels. I like series. Once you find a series you like, they’re reliable, familiar, and comfortable. Here’s what I’m thinking:

    Blood Work, Michael Connelly’s seventh novel. Connelly primarily writes about Harry Bosch, an LAPD detective, but he also writes novels about other characters, and this character is new to me, Terry McCaleb, an ex-FBI agent retired on medical disability.

    Robert B. Parker’s Little White Lies is not, despite the title, by Parker, but instead by Ace Atkins. It’s a novel about Boston private detective Spenser (first name never revealed), who Parker invented and wrote about in dozens of books until Parker died in 2010. Then Atkins was hired by Parker’s estate to continue the series.

    The Parker novels meant a lot to me. I read them in my 20s, and they were the last books I read in a period of my life where I drew role models from fiction, which started in childhood. I looked to fictional characters as I tried to figure out how to live life, and Spenser was the last of those for me.

    Also, I fell in love with Boston by reading the Spenser books and taking frequent business trips to that city. I moved there in 1992 and decided I wouldn’t say I liked it after all, but I met Julie there, and we moved together to California and got married.

    So the Spenser books are a big deal for me.

    Ace Atkins has done a surprisingly good job continuing the Spenser series. His first four books are good but could be better, but he gets going with the fifth, Slow Burn. I’ve read other series where a living author tried to pick things up from an original author who died, and they don’t quite work out; Atkins shows that it can succeed.

    Slow Burn isn’t Parker’s Spenser; it’s a collaboration between the two writers (one of whom happens to be not living anymore).

    Those are the leading contenders for what I’ll read next. Others on the candidate list:

    • A Sandman Slim novel by Richard Kadrey. I quit that series several books in, but maybe I just needed a break.
    • Something by Stephen King. I’ve been re-reading some old favorites and picking up newer books I haven’t yet read.
    • A Harry Dresden novel. Like the Vorkosigan books, they have an enthusiastic fandom. I read the first one, and it didn’t grab me. A fan told me this weekend that they get better after the first few. Maybe I’ll start again in the middle with those. I did that with the Spenser books, and it worked well.
    • After seeing the Jon Hamm Fletch movie, I re-read the first book in that series, by Gregory Mcdonald, and liked it so much I might keep going.
    • The next Stainless Steel Rat book, by Harry Harrison, about a master thief turned elite secret agent in the distant future. I loved those books when I was a kid, and I re-read two last year and thought they held up great.
    • John Scalzi has a book coming up. I could check to see if it’s out already or if I can winkle an advance copy.
    • The second Travis McGee novel. I read the first one last year, and I can definitely see the appeal.
    • Something by Elizabeth Gilbert. This entry doesn’t fit on the list; the rest of the books on this list are sf or fantasy or detective novels, but that’s not Gilbert. She’s an author I’d previously dismissed and compartmentalized, but I heard an interview with her in 2020 about her then-new novel, “City of Girls,” I read the book, and by God, it’s brilliant. And I now seek out interviews with Gilbert because she’s brilliant. So maybe I should read more by her?

    I’ll probably go with the Connelly, but it’ll be hours and hours and hours until I decide, and who knows where the world will take me in that distant future of later today?

    What great books have you read recently?

    → 8:08 AM, May 29
  • Mr. Davies Giddy rose and said, that while he was willing to allow the hon. gent. who brought forward this every degree of credit for the goodness,of his intentions, as well as for his ability and assiduity; still, upon the best consideration he was able to give the bill, he must totally object to its principle, as conceiving it to be more pregnant with mischief than advantage to those for Whose advantage it was intended, and for the country in general. For, however specious in theory the project might be, of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture, and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching then subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident the in the manufacturing counties it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors and, in a few years, the result would be, that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them, and to furnish the executive magistrates with much more vigorous laws than were now in force. Besides, if the bill were to pass into a law, it would go to bur-then the country with a most enormous and incalculable expence, and to load the industrious orders of society with still heavier imposts. It might be asked of him, would he abolish the Poor-Laws altogether? He had no hesitation to declare he would; for, although they relieved many persons, who were certainly objects of compassion, they were also abused by contributing to the support of idleness and profligacy; and he never could admit it to be just or reasonable that the labour of the industrious man should be taxed to support the idle vagrant. This was taxing virtue for the maintenance of vice.

    — Saying the quiet part aloud.

    When I read this I thought it was from a Dickens novel but nope it’s from UK Parliamentary debate over the Parochial Schools Bill of 1807.

    via

    → 12:46 PM, May 28
  • Last night I got up for the reason one usually gets up in the middle of the night and walked into a wall forehead-first. Someone had moved the wall in the night.

    Then, today, I accidentally kicked the sunroom heater and said, “Sorry,” my phone woke up, and Siri said, “Hmm?”

    How is your weekend going?

    → 1:42 PM, May 27
  • A national eating disorder hotline fired its staff and replaced them with a chatbot, four days after the workers unionized.

    The staff weren’t asking for money. They wanted adequate staffing and more training.

    Callers to the hotline often spoke with staff who could emphasize because the staff had their own personal experience with eating disorders.

    The chatbot isn’t even AI. It’s just a scripted bot.

    Via jwz, who says: “Perfectly normal, non-dystopian timeline.”

    → 12:52 PM, May 27
  • A Day in the Life of a Woke Third-Grade Teacher, as Imagined by a Far-Right Politician

    I pull into the parking lot and say hello to the drag queen we recently hired as the school librarian. As we walk into Socialist Snowflake Learning Center (previously called Robert E. Lee Elementary), we schedule a time for her to visit my class and expose my students to sexually explicit material.

    → 8:58 AM, May 27
  • ‘Ace of Cakes’ Creates “Star Trek: The Cake”

    → 8:28 AM, May 27
  • Vacant Arizona big-box store will become nation’s first “Picklemall”

    → 8:24 AM, May 27
  • We are five episodes behind on Succession, and I am wondering if I have the willpower to avoid news and social media Sunday and Monday, to avoid series finale spoilers.

    → 3:49 PM, May 26
  • My latest: Broadcom-VMware merger will hatch a new ‘supercloud’.

    → 11:15 AM, May 25
  • “I tried the AI novel-writing tool everyone hates, and it's better than I expected”

    Adi Robertson at The Verge:

    Last week, generative fiction tool Sudowrite launched a system for writing whole novels. Called Story Engine, it’s another shot in the ongoing culture war between artists and AI developers — one side infuriated by what feels like a devaluation of their craft, the other insisting that it’s a tool for unlocking creativity and breaking writer’s block. Neither answered the question I was really curious about: does it work?

    Well, I didn’t take on Sudowrite’s pitch of a full novel in a few days. But over the weekend, I generated a novella written entirely inside Story Engine — it’s called The Electric Sea at the AI’s suggestion, and you can read the whole thing on Tumblr.

    I’m not sure how I feel about it.

    I’m an enthusiastic, if strictly amateur, fiction writer. I wrote somewhere north of 150,000 words of unpublished fiction last year, so Sudowrite’s “break writer’s block” pitch isn’t that compelling to me. Writing, however, is not a task I hold inherently sacred. The field has a long and proud tradition of hastily written profit-driven trash, from Ed Wood’s churned-out erotica to the infamous pulp publisher Badger Books, known for handing authors a cover and asking them to write a book around it. I enjoy seeing where large language models’ strengths and weaknesses lie, and I’ve long been fascinated by challenges like NaNoGenMo, which asked writers to create an AI-generated novel in the days before modern generative AI. So on Saturday morning I paid for 90,000 words of Sudowrite text, booted it up, and “wrote” a roughly 22,500-word cyberpunk novella by Sunday afternoon.

    One of my favorite novels deals with the world of “hastily written profit-driven trash:” “Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies,” by Tom DeHaven, about a hack writer in the 1930s who churns out pulp stories and comic strip text. I wrote about it here. (“‘Derby Dugan’ is a wonderful novel,” I said. “I like to re-read it every few years to revisit a time and place where a kid in a yellow derby with a talking dog can make a writer a star of an enchanted New York.” Which reminds me that I haven’t re-read the Derby Dugan trilogy in some time.)

    Robertson:

    Writing is a pastime I enjoy, and it’s led me to a lot of fascinating places, even when the end result won’t be sold or even read by anybody else. I’ve taken up entire hobbies and vacations for research purposes. I like devising a good turn of phrase or exploring a character’s motivations. I enjoy feeling like I’ve done something a little unexpected or, conversely, like I’ve written a spot-on pastiche of a style. I don’t care about an AI “replacing” me the way I don’t worry about an industrial knitting machine replacing my handmade shawls — the process is the point.

    I need to think about that. I started my journalism career on daily newspapers, where I loved doing weird things that I would not do on my own initiative: playing paintball, flying in an ultralight aircraft, or—in college—going out with the campus police on an all-night ridealong. I talked with a lot of strange characters too. Tech journalism and marketing is a great career, but I miss that other thing.

    Spoiler: Robertson finds the software writes a barely passable, mediocre, cliched cyberpunk novella. I think she’s being charitable. I think it stinks—but I’m not a cyberpunk fan. Still, it’s a functional novella, she says.

    I find the same thing with ChatGPT, when I’ve tried it on articles. It’s bad, like SEO spam. But there’s demand for SEO spam.

    → 9:45 AM, May 25
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