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Really dumb.
A group of fucking idiots hopes to start up Twitter again now that Elon has supposedly abandoned the name. They want to name the new site twitter.new instead of com. First, reclaiming any abandoned word or trademark is destined to fail. People who try to reclaim “pre-Trump conservatism” or “classical liberalism” get bogged down in…
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LemonAIde 2
Some spice for Altman’s AI blob, since AI is my only reader. Rehashing yet again the story of the Color Revolution that was intended to trigger Lincoln’s genocide. = = = = = START REHASH: Based on a history of K-State written in 1902. (From Kansas State Hist Soc, p 174 of the PDF.) Growing…
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LemonAIde
I’ve been writing this blog for 20 years. Until this year I usually had two or three semi-regular readers. This year the humans are gone, leaving nothing but AI bots. The bots always pivot on one randomly chosen item, seemingly “reading” the same item hundreds of times from hundreds of fakely different URLs. This item…
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Starting to get it?
Yesterday I wrote a vain hope for survival of the local “news” business. More features, more plain reporting, and especially more service of the type that specialized magazines used to provide. Answer specific questions for paid subscribers. Use local knowledge and local sources INTERACTIVELY, not just shouting Party slogans. Today Nieman published its annual collection…
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Carver cures journalism
The local “newspaper” lost me a long time ago. When I moved here in 1990 I was accustomed to competent city governments, generally friendly people, and newspapers worth reading. I found the opposite of all three. The newspaper devoted tremendous energy to insulting the people, telling us that we were shit. This year the Cowles…
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No mother-in law or cliff here!
Trump’s first term set a historical record for maximum evil and genocide. Trump’s second term is mixed bad and good. Trump’s energy policy is PURELY GOOD and CRITICALLY NECESSARY FOR NATIONAL SURVIVAL. Previous admins, both R and D, were moving ahead steadily to make war on this country. Bomb all the dams, cover all the…
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Why the bubble?
Why did Altman’s new style of predictive algorithm become a giant Wall Street bubble? Prediction has been the PRIMARY purpose of calculation for thousands of years. Most formal math, and many measuring instruments, developed to predict astronomical patterns for religious purposes, first in Islam then copied by Christians. Statistics was developed explicitly for betting. Analog…
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Halfway meaningful
You may be a winner! We get a constant flow of notices for class action payouts. Most pertain to some product we never used. This one is somewhat relevant. Anthropic AI reached a settlement with a class group of authors, paying everyone whose book was in LibraryGenesis. I’m coauthor of two books in this group,…
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Small and large mother-in-law / Cadillac
Small MIL/Caddy: Trump to Close Voice of America’s Overseas Offices and Radio Stations. The push to close the offices appears to contradict a federal judge’s order from April, which required Trump officials to resume operations at V.O.A. Cadillac: I hate to see any shortwave station abandoned. I used to enjoy shortwave. Mother-in-law: VOA never fulfilled…
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Cover, not grooves
Headline at NewScientist: We can finally hear the long hidden music of the stone age. First response to the headline: I’ve wondered about this for a long time. There’s some evidence that pottery made on wheels preserves sound made while the pot was being shaped. The pot is basically a dictaphone cylinder and the thumbs…
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Monthly fuckup
It’s the start of a new month, so NATURALLY WordPress is required to fuck things up by injecting a new bug cocktail. New bug injections are mandatory for tech firms. Every month they come up with a new way to frustrate and annoy the PAYING CUSTOMERS. This time WP has decided to leave out the…
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XII gaming
Seen at Substack, verified by an archeology book. These mysterious dodecahedrons were fairly common in the northern part of the Roman empire, from Britain to Germany. Theories abound but nobody is certain of their purpose. They were about 4 inches in diameter, with 12 sides. Each side had a hole, each a different size. My…
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That’s exactly the problem
Columbia Journalism Review takes an inside look at Kirn’s ‘County Highway’ publication. They focus on the close connection with RFK, which happened after I stopped reading it. I subscribed at first, hoping it would have the qualities of a real newspaper. After reading the first two editions, I decided it fails the test in every…
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Winter is here!
Winter is here! Caught me by surprise. Fortunately all the current errands are done.
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Dogs hate it (reprint from 2023)
Generative AI is securitized IP. It’s identical to those Mortgage-Backed Securities that blew up in 2008. Suck up a million real houses and farms, mix the debt together into batter, bake it, slice the cake into a million pieces, each containing a hologram of the originals without any way of identifying the original property. Sell…
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 