Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s ‘crumbling infrastructure’ until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.

— It Is Happening Again. By Erik Baker at n + 1

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble…. To me it looks very much as if the usual hucksters and grifters are now chasing the sweet VC/private equity money….

— Charles Stross, Place your bets

Jamelle Bouie: The Founders Were More Creative Than You Think

The Supreme Court’s originalism “rests on a cramped view of the framers of the Constitution and their ability to think and reason. In the hands of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Supreme Court, the founding fathers are small-minded and provincial, unable to think beyond the narrowest possible interpretation of the words they wrote.”

Belief that the Earth is flat, not round, is having a moment.

The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories

It’s the uber conspiracy theory, and a new book goes inside the culture of Flat Earthers.

Diana Gitig at Ars Technica:

The underlying premise behind conspiracy theories is that “They” are hiding the truth for shady, nefarious purposes. But you—because you are so perspicacious, smart, special, or have access to privileged information—can see things as they really are. “They” can be the government, Russia, China, aliens, Democrats, Republicans, the CIA, the FBI, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and/or obviously, more often than not, the Jews. (Jewish Flat Earthers do not have it easy.) These entities actually have hidden the truth at times, which makes it that much tougher to argue with conspiracy theorists.

It bothers me slightly that the fundamental core of my political and economic beliefs soundslike a conspiracy theory when I speak it out loud: The world is run for the benefit of billionaires and centimillionaires. To the ruling class, the rest of us are simply livestock or prey.

I’m calling out the writer of this article on a careless error—a dangerous one in the current political climate: “the Jews” have never hidden the truth about anything.

Showerthought: Why don't the supporting characters in “The Office” just find other jobs?

Why don’t they just go work elsewhere, where they don’t have to put up Michael Scott? Most of them could easily find other jobs. Why do they stay?

Habit is a big part of it. Every day that you do the same thing it becomes harder to do something different the next day.

Beyond that, everybody has individual reasons.

Pam stays in the Scranton reception desk for the same reason she doesn’t dump Roy. She has low self-confidence. She doesn’t think she can do any better.

Jim is in love with Pam, and stays where she is. He also likes thinking he’s superior to everybody else he’s working with—Michael and Dwight first and foremost—while starting to fear he’s no different than they are. And for Jim, Dunder-Mifflin is easy money.

Easy money is the lure for Stanley, too. He just doesn’t give a shit about office politics.

Dwight and Angela get off on their perceived power, and Dwight of course has a massive bro-crush on Michael Scott.

Kelly is oblivious, and in love with Ryan.

Ryan sees the office as a necessary stepping stone to a bigger future.

Meredith is a drunk.

Toby, like Pam, doesn’t think he can do any better. In Toby’s case, he may be right.

Left as exercises for the reader: Kevin, Phyllis, Creed, Oscar, Darryl, and the later-seasons characters.

Fighting the privacy wars, state by state: Treating Congress as damage and routing around it.

An excellent and informative rant by Cory Doctorow. Includes such choice turns of phrase as:

Basically, Congress only passes laws that can be sandwiched into 1,000-page must-pass bills and most of the good stuff that gets through only does so because some bought-and-paid-for Congressjerks are too busy complaining about “woke librarians” to read the bills before they come up for a vote.

…

As Congress descends further into self-parody, the temptation to treat the federal government as damage and route around it only mounts.

…

… there are so many would-be supervillains who just can’t stop themselves from monologing, and worse, putting it in writing.

Elsewhere on the Internet, a friend started a discussion of the Danny Dunn books, which I absolutely loved when I was a kid.

In the series, which started in 1958, Danny Dunn is an all-American boy living in the all-American college town of Midston. He lives with his mother, who works as a live-in housekeeper for Professor Bullfinch, a scientist at the local university and is a grandfather-figure to Danny. The boy hero and his young pals have adventures with the inventions Prof. Bullfinch brings home—a time machine, a computer, antigravity paint, a miniaturization ray, and so on.

Danny’s pal includes a girl named Irene who’s a budding physicist, and a sidekick, Joe Pearson, who’s a boy poet. Notably for a series that started in the 50s, Irene keeps up with the gang.

Can we really be sure the new Microsoft Bing isn't conscious or intelligent?

AI-based chatbots like the new Microsoft Bing aren’t really conscious or intelligent, right? They’re just using algorithms. They look at an existing sequence of words and use probability to select the next word. And then they do it again and again, so rapidly and fluidly that it seems like they’re talking, but they’re not.

But to leave it there seems overly simplistic. Because there’s still something amazing and (metaphorically speaking) magical going on in the interaction between a person and the Bing chatbot. Something powerful, that could potentially be very useful, and also very dangerous.

Also: to declare that Bing isn’t really conscious or intelligent presumes we know what consciousness and intelligence are. Which we don’t. Consciousness and intelligence are all around us, in all the people and animals we see and interact with. Maybe plants too. And yet we do not know what it really is.

Reading "The Poet," by Michael Connelly

I am reading “The Poet,” a murder mystery by Michael Connelly, and I notice the author does a thing that I usually find annoying, but I do not find it so in this novel.

About two-thirds of the novel is told in first person. The main character is telling the story, and he says “I did this” and “I did that.”

But the main character’s chapters are interwoven with chapters from the point-of-view of another character, and those chapters are written in third person. “He did this” and “he did that.”

Usually I find that kind of thing distracting. I want a narrator to pick a point-of-view and stick with it. If you’re going to go with first person, stick with that for the whole novel—and that means the reader is only going to be inside the head of that one character.1

I think the point-of-view switch maybe works for me because the main character, the one who tells the story, is a newspaper reporter and he writes in a journalistic style. Often, in a first-person-novel, the main character seems to be speaking intimately with the reader, but the main character of this novel is writing for a mass audience.

Some years ago, I came across an online discussion on a Stephen King fan forum, about his novel, “Dolores Claiborne.” The fans thought the novel was a huge departure for King, and they didn’t like it. They said he was pandering to the critics and putting on literary airs.

That surprised me, because I liked the novel just fine. And it seemed very much of a piece with King’s other work: A horror story, set in rural Maine, with working-class main characters who lacked formal education but who were wise, intelligent, and spoke beautifully in regional, working-class language.

But the fans who hated it noted it was much shorter than King’s other books, had almost no supernatural element–and was written in the first person, whereas King’s other novels were written in third person, with multiple point-of-view characters. To them, these differences were huge–and they didn’t like them–but to me, the differences were nearly incidental.

  1. Unless it’s a fantastic fiction novel, and the character can read minds. Or the character finds and reads a document written by someone else, like a journal that was bricked up in the fireplace mantel of an old manor house or something. ↩︎

Maybe Roald Dahl books just aren’t suitable for kids today. If we have to twist them all out of shape to get rid of the fatphobia and misogyny, then maybe they shouldn’t be aggressively marketed to children anymore.

Everyone bopmuggered by vomitous gobblefunk in censored Roald Dahl books (Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing)

“ … in fact no-one asked for this: not the left, not the right, not anyone…. the fake ‘wokeness’ of fiduciary duty and shareholder value.”

Roald Dahl’s books aren’t getting a big marketing push and extensive revisions for political reasons. It’s happening because a corporation thinks it can make a lot of money, and is twisting itself into knots to make that happen.

I loved Dahl’s books and the movies that have been made from them, and was troubled by the current round of editing. I was also troubled a few years ago, learning about Dahl’s racism and anti-semitism.

What’s the right answer here, I thought? On the one hand, it’s wrong to make wholesale edits in original work. Usually it’s a good idea to simply present the work as published, while also putting the work in historical context. But that seems like it’s unreasonable when dealing with children’s literature.

Beschizza suggest another solution: Just stop trying to make Dahl’s books into a big pop-culture sensation. Do continue to make his books available, but stop pouring big money into new editions and marketing.

Dahl may, simply, be inappropriate for today’s audiences, particularly children.

I’m not even sad about that. If Dahl is wrong for kids today, that’s fine, because pop culture is inherently evanescent. Very little pop culture survives a century—but that’s OK, because new pop culture comes along to replace it. And the old books are still around. You can still find E.E. Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard and those guys. Put Dahl in the same category, once immensely popular works slowly fading into obscurity.

When I was eight years old, our third grade teacher sat in front of a class after lunch every day and read to us briefly aloud—just for entertainment, and to awaken a lifelong love of books in us. Among those books were “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.” That’s a wonderful memory, and it worked. I have loved reading, particularly fantastic fiction, my whole life. Nothing’s going to take any of that that away.

A new generation of kids can experience the same thing, with new books, appropriate to them.

By the way, that teacher’s name was Arlene Kaufman (or Kaufmann—maybe two Ns). Miss Kaufman. A wonderful teacher. I’ve written about her online before and received a Facebook Message from her in 2018, after not having spoken with her since I was a young child. It was a fantastic and weird experience, and I wish I’d kept up the correspondence.

RIP Richard Belzer, 78.

Very good overview of Belzer’s life and career, by Chris Koseluk at the Hollywood Reporter.

Belzer played Det. Munch as a regular character on two different series and as a guest on several others, including an animated appearance on The Simpsons and as a Muppet on Sesame Street.

Belzer’s last words were “Fuck you, motherfuckers,” which is very much in character.

1958: The San Diego Evening Tribune interviews 18-year-old local beauty pageant winner Raquel Tejada, and finds her intelligent and vivacious, as well as beautiful.

Tejada later became famous as “Raquel Welch.”

The author of this article makes it pretty obvious he doesn’t think highly of beauty pageant winners, but is impressed with young Raquel’s brains and charm, as well as her beauty.

Note the sidebar explaining how to pronounce the beauty pageant winner’s name. Did people really need to be told how to pronounce “Raquel?” That surprised me at first—but I guess the name is well known now because this Raquel made it famous.

I am also surprised that the Tribune in 1958 thought its readers needed to be told how to pronounce “Tejada.” San Diego was just as close to Mexico then as it is now; neither San Diego nor Mexico has moved.

And it’s sweet that her friends called her “Rocky.” I wonder if that continued in later life.

PS. Rereading the article, I see I was pronouncing “Tejada” wrong. I had the “J” sound right, because I’m not a bumpkin, but I was pronouncing the first syllable “tay,” rather than the correct “tuh.”

Watching RoboCop on the Spanish language channel while getting a haircut. You really lose out on the emotional subtlety and nuance when you can’t understand the dialogue.

How to Win at Monopoly and Lose All Your Friends.

Monopoly starts as a fun exciting romp, only to turn into a bitter cesspool of despair.

…

A little-known rule of Monopoly is that the game has exactly 32 houses and 12 hotels. Once you run out of houses, no more can be purchased until they re-enter the supply by being sold or upgraded to hotels. … The core of this strategy is to buy up as many houses as possible before anyone realizes what you’re doing, and DO NOT UPGRADE TO HOTELS to prevent people from improving their own properties.

…

If losing a normal game of monopoly is frustrating, losing to this strategy is excruciating, as a losing opponent essentially has no path to victory, even with lucky rolls. Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition. If you want to see these people again, I recommend not gloating, but simply state that you’re playing to win, and that it wasn’t your idea to play Monopoly in the first place.

I asked ChatGPT for my bio. The result has a staggering number of errors packed into a small space. I never wrote for CIO Mag or Network Computing. I am not now and never was EiC of LR, which is not best described as an IT and cloud computing website. I did not write those books. And so on.

Picard rummages through a trunk, searching for the source of the sound of an Enterprise-D commbadge chirp. He tosses the contents one at a time over his shoulder: Tennis racket, bowling shoes, harmonica, clown nose, groucho glasses, rubber bulb horn (which he squeezes twice: honk! honk!), feather boa. He unscrews the lid from a canister labeled “cocktail peanuts” and rubber snakes spring out…..

On Lake Murray: This metal platform is usually attached to the concrete walkway, and people fish from it. It came loose in the storms this week.

Lake Murray from Baltimore Dr., first clear day after this week’s storms.

A little while back I heard about a conspiracy theory claiming the Roman Empire didn’t exist–that it’s a hoax promulgated by the Spanish Inquisition, which happened in the 15th Century.

I learned that it isn’t really a fully-blown conspiracy theory, which to me implies a movement. It’s just this one popular TikToker, who goes by the handle @momllennial_, and she also has claimed that Alexander the Great was a woman, and Jesus Christ’s name can be translated as “clitoris healer.”

2021: This TikTok Conspiracy Theory Is Infuriating Historians (Daily Dot / Gavia Baker-Whitelaw)

Google’s chatbot panic

Cory Doctorow:

The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar – even more remarkable is that Google agrees.

Also:

Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it. The company desperately wants to be a “making things” company, but it’s actually a “buying things” company.

The last time Google went into full-on panic mode, the result was Google+, which was actually a great product that Google bungled spectacularly.

Honestly, I don't need reporting to the Social Media Mental Health Police

I received this message when I logged in to Facebook just now, and I find it sweet (aww, somebody is concerned), ridiculous (I’m fine, aside from the normal amount of stress from living in the 21st Century) and creepy (Facebook, you’re not my Mom).

According to the explainer, the message comes up when someone has flagged one of my posts as concerning, involving self-harm or suicidal thoughts. None of which I am remotely having or sharing.

I received a similar message a few months ago, on Reddit, where I rarely post, though I do read and upvote a lot.

WTF is going on here? Are people misinterpreting my posts? Are Facebook and Reddit algorithms reviewing my activity and finding my interest in memes and vintage photos disturbing? Why am I not getting these messages on Tumblr, micro.blog, or Mastodon—do those platforms not love me?

I went indy three weeks ago and since then I’ve had many discussions about about potential full-time and freelance opportunities.

Pluses:

  • Exciting new opportunities
  • Income means we can buy proper food and not have to eat the dog or cats.
  • Videoconferencing shirt is getting a good workout.

Minus:

  • I have to shave every day.

Teaching generative AI to give factual answers is going to prove as difficult as teaching it to write credible answers has been.

Even human beings have difficulty distinguishing information from bullshit on the Internet. We can’t even agree which is which.

I’m continuing my project of relearning how to read books. Remembering that as a voracious teenage reader, I would discover an author and read everything I could find by him, until I was caught up or had at least read everything by that author in the local mall bookstores and libraries. Asimov. Clarke. Heinlein. Ellison. Niven. Joe Haldeman.

I am adopting that strategy now, starting with Michael Connelly. He’s written about 40 books. I’m now reading his fourth. This is going to be a while.

In 30 years as a journalist, I’ve never been part of a crowd of reporters shouting questions while chasing a public official or other famous person. I’d probably trip and fall down.

J.K. Rowling and “Separating the Art from the Artist."

Charlie Jane Anders discusses how you can’t separate the art from the artist when the artist—Rowling—has spent her career as the public face of her art.

Anders is uniquely positioned to discuss this issue, as she is a trans woman science fiction and fantasy writer with a large public presence. I’m a fan.

How Liberals — Yes, Liberals — Are Hobbling Government (Ezra Klein / NYTimes)

The legal scholar Nicholas Bagley argues that the liberal “procedural fetish” makes it difficult for government to accomplish anything bold.

…

… to achieve the goals liberals hold most dear, we need a liberalism that builds. A liberalism that builds everything from multifamily housing and mass transit systems to transmission lines and solar farms. And we need a liberalism that can build it all quickly, cheaply and effectively. But even in the places where liberals have governing power, they are often failing to do exactly that. Why?

Conservatives hate big government, and pile on regulations and red tape to cripple agencies. But liberals’ love of procedure and rules, designed to ensure fairness, have the same effect.

The Last Man Without a Cell Phone

Anne Kadet interviews New Yorkers without cell phones. 3% of Americans go without.

I use a computer—a lot! For my work, and reading things online. I do email. But I don’t have any felt need to have it with me all the time. It’s like, I watch TV, but I don’t feel like I need to carry it around with me all day. The cell phone feels like a solution to a non-problem. Before it existed, you didn’t see undergraduates running across campus to get back to their room after class so they could make phone calls. But now you see them walking around, on their phone, all the time. The contrast I’ve sometimes used is, I grew up in the DC area with no central air conditioning. And we knew perfectly well there was a problem. It was hot and stuffy all summer. And we’re laying on the floor reading the paper in front of a fan. Everybody knew there was a problem, and central AC solved it. But in this case, what was the problem? I don’t see the need.

… iPhone users are extraverted, free-spending, narcissist party monsters. The Android users, meanwhile, are all home binge-watching Law & Order with their extended cat families.

Android or iPhone—Who’s the Real Sheeple? (Anne Kadet)

The real sheeple is the person who thinks their choice between Android and iPhone defines them.

Small Government: The ref has to be more powerful than the players (Cory Doctorow)

Companies should never be allowed to grow too big to fail, because they also become too big to regulate. Mega-corporations become more powerful than the governments that regulate them. Government becomes too weak to even enforce contracts, the one function that even extreme libertarians agree that government needs to do.

… even if governments do nothing but enforce contracts, they still have to be bigger and more powerful than the largest companies and cartels. This should be an area where good faith leftists and capitalist trufans can come together: making small government possible by banning big business.

Why did ‘The Last of Us’ Change Pittsburgh to Kansas City? An Investigation (Dais Johnston / Inverse)

It’s easier to make Canada look like Kansas City.

The answer could be found in one of its nicknames: City of Bridges. Any glimpse of the Pittsburgh skyline will show plenty of bridges along the three rivers surrounding it. Kansas City is also on a river, but the heart of downtown — the part of the city we see in The Last of Us — is more inland, meaning the grim, dry cityscapes we see in the show are more suitable for Kansas City.

Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.

— Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America

Or, in the words of novelist Michael Connelly: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

Julie replaced our toaster oven with a convection oven that also makes toast, with a fancy electronic control panel, and I managed to successfully use it to make toast without burning the house down. I knew today was going to be a good day.

Artificial intelligence is not a threat. The threat is that we live in a society that considers ownership as sacred and work as worth very little.

If I ever think about adopting a puppy again, I’m going to first reread my journal entries from late 2013 and early 2014.

So much poop. Poop everywhere.

Microsoft unveiled its AI chatbot-driven Bing search this week, presenting possibly the first challenge to Google’s search dominance in 25 years. In response, Google laced up its clown shoes and immediately stepped on a rake and smacked itself in the face. Google demonstrated its own AI chatbot-driven search which (a) isn’t available to the public and (b) prominently and spectacularly answered a question incorrectly.

I wrote this: Oops! Google’s new AI tool Bard showcases artificial stupidity

Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina and plant scientist Cassandra Quave watch “The Last of Us” and discuss the science. (Your Local Epidemiologist)

Cordyceps, the fungus that causes the zombie epidemic, is real, and it is every bit as horrific as portrayed in the show … but it only affects carpenter ants. The fungus hasn’t significantly evolved in hundreds of millions of years, not even to affect other types of ants.

We will not have mushroom heads running at exorbitant speeds trying to kill us any time soon. While not as sexy, real fungal infections are a major health issue and, with climate change and the rise of antimicrobial resistance, will become even more of one in the future. But if you’re worried about a pandemic, focus on viruses. In the meantime, enjoy the show.

I posted a photo here this evening that I took at the park this afternoon. It was a photo of a woman that I thought was a bride. But some friends here pointed out that she’s almost certainly a quinceañera. Now I feel weird about it, so I deleted the photo. Here’s a photo of a duck instead.

It’s way too early to start nailing the coffin shut on Mastodon

The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump (Wired). “Active users have fallen by more than 1 million since the exodus from Elon Musk’s Twitter, suggesting the decentralized platform is not a direct replacement.”

My $0.02: No, it’s not a direct replacement. Mastodon is similar to Twitter, but different, and the differences will become more pronounced over time.

The article notes that traffic went from 380,000 users late last year to 1.4 million by late January. That’s insanely rapid growth!

Two steps forward, one step back still gets you a step ahead of where you were before.

AI is going to make it a lot harder for journalists, as CNET and other publishers turn to machines to generate copy.

[Many publishers] no longer have audiences in real sense; what they have instead is traffic — a huge stream of drive-by readers, delivered by search engines, that they can monetize primarily by getting them to make attributable purchases.

Casey Newton writes on Platformer about the emerging wave of AI and how it will disrupt search and publishing.

Many publishers already operate like spam operations and the time may be running out for them to be able to convert human journalists’ output into Google search results and then sales, Newton says.

Some of this is probably fine, or at least inevitable. If you run a men’s health site, there are only so many ways to tell your readers to eat right and get regular exercise.

…

… with digital publishers’ businesses already hugely dependent on search traffic, and traffic toward news sites declining precipitously, the incentives are for almost any publisher to transform into an AI-powered, SEO-driven content farm as quickly as they can.

I used to think I had become unplugged from pop culture. Now I think pop culture might not exist anymore.

For an example of my ignorance today: I only have a vague idea who “Drake” is. I gather he’s a rapper? And super-famous? Other than that, I can’t tell you a single thing about him.

It’s not just Drake. I routinely don’t recognize the names of popular actors, other musicians, movies, and even many TV shows.

This intrigues me, because in the 70s and 80s I was pretty plugged in.

For the years this has been going on, I’ve just assumed it’s because I’m middle-aged, don’t have kids, and pop culture is not for me anymore.

However, this SNL skit suggests the phenomenon goes much deeper. The skit suggests that famous people and movies just aren’t actually famous anymore.

I recognize the guy with the mustache, though. He’s Pedro Pascal, star of “Last of Us” and (the exact same role, only with a helmet) “The Mandalorian.”

The last question in the skit is spot on. Just like Pedro, I would have been totally stumped.

“Procrastination is not a result of laziness or poor time management. Scientific studies suggest procrastination is due to poor mood management."

This makes sense if we consider that people are more likely to put off starting or completing tasks that they feel aversion towards. If just thinking about the task makes you anxious or threatens your sense of self-worth, you will be more likely to put it off.

Research has found that regions of the brain linked to threat detection and emotion regulation are different in people who chronically procrastinate compared to those who don’t procrastinate frequently.

When we avoid the unpleasant task, we also avoid the negative emotions associated with it. This is rewarding and conditions us to use procrastination to repair our mood. If we engage in more enjoyable tasks instead, we get another mood boost.

…

But:

In the long run, procrastination isn’t an effective way of managing emotions. The mood repair you experience is temporary. Afterwards, people tend to engage in self-critical ruminations that not only increase their negative mood, but also reinforce their tendency to procrastinate.”

— Fuschia Sirois, Professor in Social & Health Psychology, Durham University, writing on The Conversation:

And procrastination is linked with health problems.

I recently had this insight about myself and why I procrastinate: I put tasks off that stress me out. I found the insight itself to be life-changing—just knowing why procrastination happens went a long way to correcting the problem, though I still have a long way to go.

I am grateful for the insight—and I wish I’d had it fifty years ago. Sigh.

Eleven years ago today I deposited $21.45 in cans to the recycle center. I drank a lot of club soda and Diet Dr Pepper then.

I saw this in the sidewalk while walking the dog. Someone was trying to send a complex message to Tom and Sharon.

Strangely, this is the second house I’ve seen with a dinosaur in front of it.