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Reading some James Ellroy
I have been meaning to read James Ellroy’s American Tabloid for a few years now, so I picked it up at the airport bookshop this morning. I’m about 200 pages into it, and it does not disappoint. I met Ellroy many years ago, back when I was a manager at…
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Potemkin productivity
🔗 Are We in an AI Bubble? - The Atlantic: Even if AI tools don’t increase productivity, the hype surrounding them could push businesses to keep expanding their use anyway. “I hear the same story over and over again from companies,” Daron Acemoglu, an…
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Do what you feel like you are able to do.
🔗 The world is something that we make | Terminal: A number of people have fairly gleefully (?) told me that not shopping at Amazon doesn't change anything because AWS powers 35% of the Internet, like I don't already fucking know what a dismal situation…
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🔗 The Olive Bar And The End Of Little Things: It feels like those sorts of experiences—where you’re slightly free to do your own funny thing—are diminished. Everything in that genre of service/activity feels shut down and squeezed out. Maybe it’s harder…
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Useless bike gear
As a thoroughly casual rider of bicycles, my probably uniformed, knee-jerk opinion is that most people do not need stuff like hydraulic/disc brakes and electronic shifters. Unless you are a professional racing cyclist, I am super skeptical that any of the…
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Watching the hummingbirds
At my in-laws’ house where we are staying this week, there is a hummingbird feeder just outside of the window over the kitchen sink. Each morning as I am grinding my coffee, I watch the hummingbirds come and go. I am always amazed at what territorial…
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AI is fantasy, not science fiction.
Of the many, many problems I have with the whole notion of AI, one that particularly bugs me is the baked-in assumption that if we were to build an actual artificial intelligence, then all this magical shit would start happening. You hear these assholes…
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A rare post about tools
I generally like to think of myself as someone who is not overly into tools and gear. I have my specific tastes when it comes to this stuff and I like nice things, but the specifics of those tastes aside, that feels not all that different from most…
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Stop trying to use computers to solve problems caused by computers
Someone at work was telling me the other day about how they had attended a demo of some LLM-powered tool that “will write documentation just from looking at all the code.” They went on to suggest that we could point this tool “at all the old legacy stuff…
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Thus Love at the Green River Festival
Thus Love, tearing it up at the Deans Beans stage on day two of the Green River Festival: I have done a shit job this year at even knowing what bands are playing at the festival. Usually, I would have made a playlist with the last album, EP, singles from…
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Loud motorcycles suck and should be banned.
I do not understand why it is legal for motorcycles to be so goddamned loud. I was out for a ride around town on my cycle this afternoon. While I was waiting to turn out from a quiet residential side street onto a more major thoroughfare, a guy rolled…
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Science fiction is not the future. It’s made-up stories about the past and the present.
The amount of time and energy that otherwise smart people spend convincing themselves (and trying to convince others) that made-up science fiction stories and shows/movies with actors playing fictional characters are actually some kind of blueprint for a…
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Algorithmic recommendations are shit.
🔗Jeff C. on Mastodon: Amazon: "I see that you're shopping for a rice cooker! Would you like to buy this rice cooker along with a rice cooker and another rice cooker?“ I am 100% convinced that, nearly two decades into the age of algorithmic…
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Donating to NPR and thinking about communal needs
As is my Sunday-morning habit, I am sitting here in my kitchen planning out the week and—as usual—I am listening to our local public radio station’s classical channel. Something about Sunday mornings just always says classical music to me. While…
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No one should have to say they’re redundant
I hate hate HATE that when huge companies make dumb, short-sighted decisions and then lay off people they don't give a shit about and think of as interchangeable parts, those same people are then forced to go on social media to talk about how their "role…
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Yeah, bubbles are fine.
🔗 the writer type: I deny that I'm in an echo chamber, and so do the voices.: The stark truth is that far from cocooning us, social media exposes us to a wide variety of previously unencountered people and opinions. These people are invariably weird, and…
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Fiction is ridiculous. And also great.
🔗 I Like Sally Rooney's Novels - The Biblioracle Recommends: When you get down to it, every novel is something of a con job where the author is trying to put one over on the reader. We know these people don’t exist, that everything is made up, an…
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The only way to stop platforms from exploiting personal data is to make it too expensive for them.
🔗 Social media and online video firms are conducting ‘vast surveillance’ on users, FTC finds | Technology | The Guardian: The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon,…
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I kind of think all software should cost money.
Whenever someone posts a new privacy-focused app or service they have discovered—web-search, chat, social media, etc.—my first question is "How much does it cost?" If the answer is that it is free, my next question is "How does it make money?" If I can't…
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When that thing you like turns into a business
I think we need a word for that moment when you realize that the individual creator you like has turned their thing into a hustle. It’s when the podcast you’ve been enjoying that was about a specific topic is spending more and more of their time talking…