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Swindlers vs salesmen
First input, unquestionably true: Social media is THE OPPOSITE OF AN ECHO CHAMBER. Algorithms are designed with GREAT PRECISION to give you what you hate, not what you want. After you’ve seen an item, sometimes you think about it and want to go back and look again. YOU CAN’T GET THERE. The algorithm knows that…
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Kedit is still alive… updated
Reposted for latest update. Every now and then I check the webpage of Mansfield Software, the maker of Kedit. For 20 years they’ve been trying to give up the ship, and each time they decide to keep supporting and selling just a little bit longer. I’ve never needed support because Kedit has never shown a…
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Anniversary
Jan 20 is an anniversary for me. This year isn’t a round number, but for some reason the day wants to be marked this time. Jan 20, 1970 was the day I started housekeeping on my own. I got out of prison on Dec 19, then STUPIDLY followed expectations and returned to college at OSU.…
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They knew how to be fair
Trying for a little non-modern amusement while slaving away on dull alt-text work. Randomly sampled the latest uploads at American Radio Library and came up with a gem immediately. From a 1962 trade journal aimed at broadcasters and advertisers. At that time the Fairness Doctrine was firmly established and ensconced. Broadcasters hated every minute of…
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No alarm, no opportunity
Google Books is shutting down, or at least no longer available to the public. They’re telling users to “create a library” so we can continue using the books in our “library”. This is absurd. I always downloaded the books I found useful. Now I have them in my computer. Why would I want to keep…
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Omnicidal fashions
The “environmental” omnicidists go through fashions and phases. For a while they try one way to obliterate life on earth. Like all psychopaths they get bored easily, and move on to another form of torture and obliteration. In today’s local “news”, the city’s Waste To Energy Plant was built at great expense 20 years ago…
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Foy dream and random notes
Last night’s dream. I was hand-cranking a sewing machine, helping an Amish group to sew and embroider a large curtain protesting against mechanization of thought. = = = = = Seen at substack: Canada must feel like the apartment above a meth lab. Absolutely perfect. Hereby replaces the old metaphor “in bed with an elephant.”…
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Says more about humans than aliens
This cartoon is splendid. It tells us how Altman thinks of himself. More importantly it reveals our basic brain structure. A single little 0 doesn’t cause dissonance. We feel it as nothing and we calculate it as nothing. A BIG zero like 0,000,000,000,000 feels BIG, even though our language processor tells us it’s still nothing.…
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Reconciling Gothic
Another tech history quickie to entertain my brain without spending much time on it. I’ve been thinking about typesetting lately. This recent item on prescription alcohol during prohibition linked to the ‘standard’ web picture of those prescription blanks. The blanks were set in what I call Record Gothic. We used this font for most of…
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Hudson doors
Most American cars before 1940 had front doors hinged at the front and rear doors hinged at the back. Between 1932 and 1935 nearly everyone tried front suicide doors, at least for one year. Hudson’s door patterns were far more varied, with a stronger tendency for front suicide doors. In 1929 every possible combination was…
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Glamorous?
Somebody on substack said “People think traveling for work is glamorous.” … then showed some of the unglamorous places she traveled to. I never thought it was glamorous. Back in the 70s I traveled for work, mainly driving a 1955 Ford flatbed truck, and went to faraway places with strange-sounding names like Meade and Goltry.…
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They don’t make them like that any more.
I’m too busy with courseware to do a proper tech piece, which wouldn’t get read by humans anyway. This little trivium will have to do. JL Hudson was not the founder of Hudson Motors. He was the biggest investor in the new enterprise, so the founders named the company after him. He got involved because…
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Dammit, it’s not the output.
Online folks are obsessed with the wrong end of AI. They worry that the supposed Chatbot prose style is taking over, and they bash and block people who “sound like AI”. This is classic witch hunting, and unquestionably helps Altman. Now his coders can just change the style to sound “creative”, whatever the hell that…
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Normal Spokane
Spokane has been comparatively quiet for a while, now back to normal…. 24000 East Mission (Liberty Lake), Reported naked male on a balcony threatening to jump. Also reported male is throwing swords off the balcony. I’m curious. How do you organize a sword collection for easy throwing? And how do you store your sword collection…
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 