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Diversionary tactic
Scary headline: AI writing assistants shrink linguistic diversity and blur personal identity Alarming! We’re limiting our language! Judging by the non-paywalled abstract, the article is just dumb, not alarming. The study wasn’t looking at all human writing, it was looking at the output of people who were USING CHATGPT. Constant: When you use a machine…
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Reprint on unexpected combinations
Truth is stranger than logic! I’ve always been fascinated by the name Daniel of St Thomas Jenifer, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I always ass-u-me-d that the of was an indicator of nobility, like French de or German von or Irish o or Scottish mac. I further ass-u-me-d there was a…
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Little pleasures
The best pleasures in life are “after all” moments. It still works after all, I have enough after all, I can still do the task after all. On Wednesday I deinstalled the air conditioner, part of annual winterizing. It’s a complicated task with a heavy lift that has to be done fast, so I focus…
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Y no salesmen?
Saw this silly headline in the reddit pro-bitcoin area: The Silent Mutiny Against the Dollar: Why 61% of Americans Are Ready for Bitcoin (And Why We Are Explaining It All Wrong). My question: Why have nearly all parts of life forgotten the basic rules of selling? It’s not new. Read the New Testament or Dale…
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Grammar under the surface
Language is a mix of genes, habits, visible structures and hidden structures. Hidden structures probably deserve more attention. My favorite example is adjectives and nouns ‘agreeing’ or adopting parallel endings for number and gender. English is the only Indo-European language that lost this parallelism. BUT: We retain number-harmony on exactly two words, this and that.…
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Not alone!
Clothing disobeys physics. It sticks when it should slide, slides when it should stick, drops when it should stay up, stays up when gravity should pull it down. When I try to arrange sheets and blankets at night, they twist into a topologically impossible Mobius strip or Klein bottle. I’m not alone! This frustration is…
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Y beaches and mountains?
Just figured something out. The COOL people only like mountains and oceans. When COOL people show pictures of places, it’s always grand vistas of rocks or blank beach and ocean. I’ve never understood why these things are interesting. There’s nothing to see, no plants or animals or houses or creeks. Beach is plain white, ocean…
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You asked for it
Via Nieman, another survey on the loss of newspapers, both print and digital. As usual it misses the reasons. Here’s the REAL danger signal: = = = = = START DANGER: The price of newsprint rose nearly 18% over the past year, Dudley reported, as U.S. mills closed or stopped production of newsprint. That’s about…
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Happy Hundredth, Halliburton!
This year is the centennial of Erle Halliburton’s first invention, a device to analyze oil formations. His company quickly branched out into all areas of oilfield service. This old training film shows the complex descendant of the original in full detail. I’ll reprint my tributes to two well analyzers from the same era. The Fessenden…
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Refreshingly straight
Amid the chaos stirred up by Altman’s gang, here’s one refreshingly straight court decision. An AI startup gobbled some of Reuters Westlaw’s writing and produced its own versions, directly competing with Westlaw. The AI company claimed “fair use”. The judge wasn’t fooled or bribed: = = = = = START QUOTE: “Under ROSS’ framing, this…
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Truly unprecedented
For the first time since 2011 this state is doing something sensible and sane. It’s a very small piece of sanity, but a bit of goodness is better than 100% genocidal evil. Via Spokesman, the Dept of State, which handles referendums, has made two SMART changes to halt spammers. Habitual ref-makers like Tim Eyman were…
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Cloud politics then and now
Currently we have a werewolfpack of California-based tech tyrants deeply involved in politics. Elon became semi-official Copresident for a while until Trump got bored with him as psychopaths do. The others are household names, massively influential in the Dow, which is another name for the government. Did this happen before? It did happen before with…
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One good thing about the internet
The web has always been an interesting carrier of obscure hobbies. Even before the HTML web, the Compuserve and USENET forums were full of peculiar hobbies. Some of those tribute pages are still around, untouched since 1996, and still valuable. Here’s a new one I haven’t seen before. Preparing railroad spikes on a bed of…
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Backward definition of rogue
Headline seen at RealClear: Math formula predicts when AI agents go rogue First thought: Well, that’s dumb. No formula needed, they’re rogue by definition and intention. In programming terms, if Exists(agent): GoRogue(agent) Second thought: No, this misses the meaning of rogue. In normal life a man goes rogue by breaking his contract, an animal goes…
Polistra's Mill
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