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Where’s Petrillo when we need him?
The tech demons read dystopian fiction as blueprints and instruction manuals, not horrible warnings. Anthropic digested Bradbury’s book along with millions of others, and decided to do more than just copying Bradbury. They bought millions of books from used-book stores, scanned and stole the content, then destroyed the books. The news story popped from emails…
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What Sherlock meant
This task of (more or less) satisfying the absurd ADA mandate has two main parts. The first part was LONG in quantity and simple in concept. I examined 2000 images and wrote an alt-text description for each. It took exactly one month of fulltime drudgery. The second part is much shorter in quantity but much…
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Not new at all.
The vast majority of headlines in sciency websites are clickbait. Half of them are ads or promotions. Others are “Study suggests A could cause B”. Wake me when you prove causation by a controlled experiment**, not by stats. Some headlines are simply rebranding an old thing as new or rebranding a universal as a particular.…
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China is helping more
Via Protos, China is rooting out and executing fraudsters and mafia leaders. They’ve closed down several ‘pig-butchering’ factories operating in China and nearby countries, especially Burma. Before Mao the Chinese government was sometimes operated BY the tongs and mafias, but the post-1980 version is hardass. The US government has mostly been operated BY the gamblers,…
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It’s a valid point anyway
In previous item, the proposal to teach reliable signatures focused on a past era when signatures were easy to recognize and hard to forge. I argued that the signature itself isn’t nearly as important as the PURPOSE of the signature. Nevertheless, the marketing point is true. = = = = = REPRINT FROM 2019: The…
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Bad marketing, halfway good idea
Via the local newspaper: Some state legislators want to add “creating a signature” to civics classes. The marketing focuses on John Hancock, but the proposal is somewhat more meaningful than the usual civics crap. It turns out that poor signatures are a real problem for voting officials. Mail ballots require a signature which is checked…
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Manufactured fine art
Got another Hudson book. This one doesn’t have many cars I haven’t seen before, but all of the illustrations are clear and high-res, suitable for closeup views. This ’39 shows the graceful detailing of stamped parts, typical of the Moderne era. The parking lights were horizontal strips on the hood sides. Closeup view of the…
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Hey four eyes!
Via Smithsonian, a close look at an early vertebrate shows that it had four eyes. = = = = = START QUOTE: The earliest known fossil vertebrates, from 518 million years ago, may have viewed the world through four eyes — and one pair of them was the precursor to the pineal gland, according to…
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Random language note
Reading one of Burge’s pieces on the categories of non-religious people, churched vs unchurched, believing vs non-believing, praying vs non-praying, I thought: I’m a prayer, not a believer. I’m not sure if there are any gods, but I spend a lot of time and effort praying to them. Oops! Language isn’t logic. When you believe…
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What “democratize” means
A 1960s training film, aimed at store clerks, says “To the criminally inclined, free enterprise means freedom to take anything without paying for it.” Nothing has changed. To the criminally inclined, democratize means trillionaires are free to take anything without paying for it. Via NiemanLab, several publishers have blocked Archive.org from scraping their material. They’ve…
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They should be worrying
The big tech companies who are rushing to replace their employees with Altman’s Holy Spirit should be worrying more about plain old computers instead of AI. I’m seeing a trend toward basic errors of the type that computers formerly ELIMINATED, not ENHANCED. A couple days ago CenturyLink sent me a notice that my service was…
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Distillate?
Thought-provoking observation from Chris Arnade, who knows lots of places: If a foreigner asks me which single US city to visit to understand America, I would say Chicago. LA/SF are coded as an Asian city, NYC/Boston European, Miami Latin America, but Chicago is very much an American city. Caught my attention since I’m thinking about…
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Dammit, it’s not the output 2
Last week I noted that people were trying to sound “more human” by varying their vocabulary and grammar. I predicted that Altman’s coders would quickly counteract this tactic by adding more variation. A couple days later a Verge item revealed that Altman’s coders were already working on it. I’m more concerned with the input theft…
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Confusion to the enemy
Via NewScientist, a solid but unsurprising bit of research. Why do some mushrooms produce psilocybin, which causes hallucinations in humans? Turns out to be the same reason as many other non-obvious plant chemicals. It kills and confuses insects. The researchers took the direct approach, microdosing fruit fly larvae with psilocybin. Most of them died, and…
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