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You’re welcome

I don’t hate April Fools Day. I’m just too busy to participate. So this is a fooling-free blog post.

Much to munch on

Getting great hang time with Jon Udell (who also manifests here) lately. Here are two of his recent publishings ya’ll might dig:
• Introducing XMLUI
• Beyond The Dip

Is there also a Gander?

Just discovered Goose.

Also, while we’re not at it, A2UI.

Bad try

This appears to be an interesting story, and available to free (as well as to paying) subscribers, but the shakedown is so hard and blunt that I moved on.

Good song title

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling.

Another example of how BigAIs have become the Great Typicalizers of Everything

Florian Roth is tired of reading AI-written posts. His main take: “They all sound like the same guy.”

I fear that guy is, at least in part, me. The sentence fragments, the short paragraphs, the em dashes. (These: —.) As source material, my writing is thick on the Web’s ground, going back to the early ’90s. Example.

I’ll cop to one of his tells: absurd certainty. Some of mine turned out to be the opposite of absurd. Examples: personal computing, outlining, the Net, the Web, Linux, open source, Cluetrain, blogging, smartphones. And some not (at least so far, or not yet in a big way): home Web servers (or “personal clouds”), desktop Linux, VRM, EmanciPay, the intention economy, MyTerms, personal AI, news commons, market intelligence that flows both ways…

Anyway, AI-style writing is now like Received Pronunciation in the UK: the way things are done.

Something I didn’t know

Ben Collier in the MIT Press Reader: The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy

Not  looking good

Thomas P.M. Barnett on the current war:

History doesn’t grade on effort. It grades on outcomes. And right now the outcomes are running about 3-to-1 against anything resembling the vision that justified the operation in the first place.
As usual, the postwar is everything.

Free at last

NiemanLab: The Salt Lake Tribune will drop its paywall.

Might do the same for you

In The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis, the latest episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra compresses by Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, into 55 minutes of pure inspiration. Not just because Demis is a hugely inspired and driven dude, but because a pile of ideas came to me while I was listening.

Big fact

YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly users.

Here's almost looking at you

Imagine scattered bits of coffee grounds, floating in space in front of your face, a few inches to a few feet away. Among them, blurred filaments float around, like zero-gravity worms. These are bits of debris inside my left eyeball, not far from my retina, exfoliated, I am told, by my cornea, which is slowly healing from the effects of cataract surgery that required a somewhat aggressive emulsification of the lens before a new replacement lens was installed.

An interesting thing: if I don't move my eyes, the debris slowly vanishes, erased by my brain as if by Photoshop's healing brush. Then they reappear when I move my eyes. Strange shit.

Observations

Explore these observatories. Read what they are about and how they are produced. One more way (within which are many more ways) that the world will never be the same. Bonus link in the same vein. Big HT to Jim Cowie of the Berkman Klein Center, the Internet History Initiative, and much else.

Unanswered

I still have questions about two Dorothy Parker quotes.