Tag: Editors
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No COs now
Checking today’s dayness as usual, I notice that today is ‘Pause for the Pledge Day’ along with ‘Flag Day’. I figured out a long time ago that the 1950’s loyalty oaths for employees, required by the McCarran Act, were more about sieving and selecting than creating loyalty. A genuine enemy agent would easily and calmly…
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Always missing the editor
Typical AI point-missing, neglecting the role of editors as usual. = = = = = START QUOTE: In the wake of artificial assistants, searching the “traditional” way will get thrown out as the internet totally transforms; nonetheless, it might take a while for AI to fully replace search engines like Google or Microsoft’s Bing. Until…
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Trying to clarify
Inspired by Mabel, trying to clarify my thinking about the line between publisher and common carrier. First: Section 230 of the Communications Act was a bad piece of “law”, undoing a very old balance and a very old distinction. In the 1990s the new online publishers like Yahoo and Myspace didn’t look like newspapers, so…
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Kirn vs Cervantes
Latest from Kirn: Privacy, censorship, surveillance, and freedom of expression must be explicit, top-tier issues in the upcoming presidential contest. All candidates must be pressed to take clear stands. First, there’s never any point in saying must. Government does what it wants. Government doesn’t care what peasants think it must do. Writers who put must…
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Good bad example
When making illustrations and animations for anatomy, I should be sure to avoid comparisons like this. EDITING is the most important part of creating. Later thought: The above ‘bad example’ is French. There’s a long French tradition of inserting sly double entendres and plain old silliness in technical illustrations. Maybe the example is continuing the…
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Durable goods
Gaming is already larger than movies and TV shows in the younger generations. Hollywood and gaming are overlapping both ways, with movies based on games and games based on movies. The companies and executives are also overlapping both ways. Gaming still doesn’t show up in mainstream media, which almost solely covers Hollywood and TV stars…
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The editor is the inventor
Reading an old article about GM’s dream cars and Motorama shows. When AI produces a car to match a prompt, its result often has the same flavor as GM dream cars, which were NOT manufacturable or drivable. Everyone has dreams. If you’re familiar with cars, you’ll dream about impossible combinations of cars. If you’re familiar…
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Input
In two of today’s brief items I made the same point without trying. Input matters more than output. This isn’t true of everything, but it’s a view we tend to skip when analyzing social, economic, and physical quantities. When we discuss “freedom” and “rights”, we concentrate on what people are saying. We neglect the equally…
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Audits and edits
FDIC is like an insurance company, but one crucial aspect of real insurance is missing. Real insurers can raise rates or halt coverage for a driver who has accidents, or a business that allows too many thefts, or a homeowner who allows methies to squat in his garage. Real insurers, especially at the business level,…
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Booms and busts
An essayist at Medium gives us 12 quotes from Beat Generation philosopher Alan Watts. I read the piece to see if his selection was the same as mine. Nope, it was disjunct. He remembered and treasured the stuff that I had tossed aside as mystical drivel. I read Watts when I was about 14, and…
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Some fishy rambling on AI
Creativity can be measured commercially. A new product gains profit when it serves some people better than an existing product. Duane Jones emphasized the need to find your niche and defend it. An older product generally broadens and simplifies to be halfway pleasing to a broad range of cultures and places and personalities, which leaves…
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Unsurprisingly
After writing about Frank Edwards, the newscaster who found his niche in UFOlogy, I started looking for related material. Surprisingly, Archive.org has an organized collection of the material, curated by Wendy Connors in the ’90s. There’s a huge amount of material: the UFO Hotline, news broadcasts, private interviews with Hynek and others, comedies that happened…
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