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Latest on the Anthropic lawsuit
July 21: Latest update: The judge has given final approval and the payout will start. = = = = = May 15: A judge in Frisco heard the final set of arguments and objections. The basic decision was already pled out by a settlement agreement last year, so the money WILL be paid in some…
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Headline words
Newspaper headlines and radio announcers had a vocabulary of short words replacing longer words. I was thinking about famed. It was standard headlinese, but it only saved one letter vs famous. It also saved a syllable, which must have been why it stuck. While pondering this deep philosophical conundrum, I noticed a headline in the…
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Sounds extremely good.
Burnham’s first speech is short but perfect. He wants to end rough sleeping in Britain. Brits like understatement but they can also speak with less euphemism. No American politician would ever be so straightforward. We pussyfoot around the question with bizarre phrases like Individuals Experiencing Distinctive Domesticity. Mostly they don’t talk about the problem at…
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Y no Dewey for code?
Question asked by somebody on substack, aka Onlyfans For Books: We have lots of new categories in books. Have librarians been updating Dewey and LC to keep track? Easy answer: We don’t have new categories. Cybernetics isn’t new at all. Academic journals and popular scientific books have been discussing it in detail since the 1930s.…
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Sounds good…
As I’ve observed a trillion times, England’s system works. It worked in 1776 and it still works. We replaced it with a system that was EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO FAIL, solely to benefit the richest fuckheads and tax evaders. In the parliamentary system a PM is more like a foreman than a CEO. He is elevated…
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Reward crime, punish honesty.
Rewarding crime and punishing honesty is COOL now. Cities and states refuse to jail thieves, so stores turn into prisons for honest people. Companies reward hackers and punish honest users. Canvas was expertly hacked by an organized gang who worked through Canvas’s private Github area to locate user data, then captured millions of users and…
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Just because all the cool kids…
Classic story of faddish stupidity. The Australian stock market had a smoothly functioning computer system. This means it was written in COBOL. Smoothly functioning == COBOL. So they decided to make it COOL instead of COBOL. What’s really really cool? Bitcoin! They spent 7 years and untold millions of dollars fucking around, trying to develop…
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Updater, update thyself
I’ve heard that Microsoft is planning the first HELPFUL Windows update in several decades. Supposedly it’s scheduled around today’s date, so I checked the WindowsCentral website to see whether it’s available and what’s in it. I think the text on this page is saying that Windows Search will be free of annoying ads and popups?…
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Answered two questions
On this morning’s walk I took the south loop, passing the Champion Hoarder House. There are other half-baked or temporary hoarders. This one has been packed for as long as I’ve been looking, at least 20 years. He seems to have good taste in cars. For a long time a ’65 Lincoln was parked in…
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Why do they join?
Latest stupid news: The usual D team is suing the Ellison monsters for trying to merge Warner and Paramount. The Ellisons were fine when they wore the D team shirt. Now they’ve joined the R team so they’re not fine. This is a constant rule. Why did the Ellisons put themselves into this position? They…
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Are grammar toxic?
Substack has started carrying ads after claiming that it would never have ads. You’d think that an ad for PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, appearing in Onlyfans For Librarians, would be edited more carefully. I don’t expect or want the Upon whom shall one rely level of grammar, but I do expect basic noun-verb stuff.
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Solution is available
This story in Courthouse News grabbed my compassion. Hartman is a teensy town in the northeast corner of Colorado, not near much of anything. The population was 56 at the last census. Per Googlemap, it’s way off Highway 36, west of Syracuse, in a dry area with very few towns. It has a leftover grid…
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Nice symbol
Just noticing a symbol I haven’t seen before. This plan is in a 1948 book published by FHA, providing sample plans and guidance for homebuyers and contractors. Note the little slashed square meaning Square Feet. It’s also a Square Phi, though I doubt that was the origin.
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Samizdat makes sense
Interesting note from a (so far) trustworthy archeology type: Medieval universities had entire underground economies of forbidden books. Alchemy, astrology, banned philosophy, smuggled in and traded among students. The image of the rebellious scholar chasing dangerous knowledge isn’t a modern invention. It’s at least 800 years old. A commenter politely disagreed: Books weren’t widely disseminated…
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Are these results useful?
Here’s what an outstanding AI helper can do for you! Well, I wish I had trusted AI to write to write welcome I’m the guy side of back of Welcome, I’m the guy with side on the back on of my JS and CSS and Welcome, I’m the guy, HTML5 on the back of the…
Polistra's Mill
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