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Culture 24% · Nature 18% · Tech 18% · Writing 18% · Art 6% · Film & TV 6%
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Currently reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 📚 Re-reading Jurassic Park, last time I read it was maybe 20 years ago. Realizing now how much of a metaphor for the AI age it is.
Life finds a way.
Finished reading: Palaver by Bryan Washington 📚
Ghost Pipe flower (not a fungus!) spotted while hiking near Asheville, NC. Thanks Beth and Jonathan for teaching me about this plant!
How to Hate AI • Steve Simkins I read a blog post recently saying that it was ok to hate AI. While I agree to some extent, I think it was missing some key points about how to hate AI. It’s easy to just hate something you don’t like. We as humans have a natural propensity to hate or dislike things we are not familiar with. The problem is that this approach is akin to putting your head in the sand or screaming at the clouds; it doesn’t actually help anyone.
Nobody Pushed Back: Why Engineers Stay Silent Until It’s Too Late | How to Center a Div Someone walks through an architectural decision and nobody in that room actually agrees — they just act like they do, because saying what you really think is socially expensive. Meeting ends, decision gets made. Six months later production blows up and everyone says “we knew this would happen.” I wonder how AI is going to change this situation? Will it become harder to push back against something AI has…
Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win. That contract is now broken.
Free stuff unintentional (?) still life.
Some photos taken outside Taos, NM from last year that I don’t think ever made it to the blog.
If you like classic Macs and home automation, you’ve got to check out the Cydintosh project: https://github.com/likeablob/cydintosh I assembled mine and it’s working great! It’s amazing to me that this little board is emulating a Mac while listening to events for weather data. What a clever project! If this appeals to you and you don’t have access to a 3d printer for the enclosure, reach out. I have plenty of PLA in this color to go around. :-)
BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea. Great essay by Nilay. It feels to me like the whole industry has forgotten about the “personal” in personal computer. I’m someone who loves computers, or at…
A few friends convinced me that I should give film photography a try so I took the plunge! The camera I chose is the Pentax K1000 which came with a 50mm f/2 lens. I wanted to find something that was completely manual/analog but still had a functional exposure meter and that’s exactly what the K1000 provides. With the exception of the meter, the camera is completely functional without a battery. It’s been an adjustment to photograph with full manual controls, including manual focus which I alm...
This barred owl lives in this magnolia tree right near our home!
Trump’s latest salvo to upend offshore wind: Pay firms… | Canary Media In its efforts to block U.S. offshore wind development, the Trump administration has halted project construction, rolled back tax credits, and spread misinformation. Now, in the latest maneuver, the administration is paying a global energy giant nearly $1 billion to walk away from its plans to install turbines off the east coast. On Monday, the Interior Department said it had struck a deal with France’s TotalEnergies, whi...
A portal in El Morro.
Finished reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 📚
