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Decline and fall
This is a different sort of essay. Instead of just writing and posting and that’s it, I’m adding to it daily as I find more and more evidence that the United States I grew up in is done, gone, and replaced by a thuggish, fractured, immoral and criminal rogue society. For most of my life, Continue reading
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Are they liars, or just stupid?
One thing I’ve found you can safely assume about virtually anything committed right-wingers say is that it’s not true. Doesn’t match reality that you can quite often check easily. Which they never do. Another twist when they’re in charge of something is keeping secrets about things they do wrong. What I don’t know for sure Continue reading
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This is what’s wrong with US business models
Chinese large language models like DeepSeek are smaller and more efficient than the centralized commercial behemoths from OpenAI and Anthropic, et al. They’re also open source, so you can use and implement them however you want. They’ve been released to the world and they’re free and open. The US response is to create a new Continue reading
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Come quick, Timmy fell down the well!
It seems the failsons and privileged dullards running what’s left of the US government got their paws on a military laser designed to knock threatening drones out of the sky on a battlefield. They gleefully (I assume) set out to use their shiny new toy. They identified a drone threatening the El Paso, Texas airspace! Continue reading
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Bust the Rust Trust
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely accepted (especially by American boys whose dads had subscriptions to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics that in the impossibly distant twenty-first century, we would no longer be limited to tooling along roads and highways in our Chevys and Fords. We would have flying cars! This morning, Continue reading
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All too human
Sam Altman, the public face of OpenAI (ChatGPT vendor) is most of all a fast-talking salesman. He’s really good at that. As such, you can’t really believe anything he ever says; when he says “A”, it’s just a reason to obtain “B”, no matter what it takes. Truth is entirely beside the point. Seems like Continue reading
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Questions unasked
There was a Cisco AI Summit event yesterday. It was a corporate-captured attempt at a TED conference. They did, to their credit, attract the top names in AI, including Sam Altman (of OpenAI) and Jensen Huang (of Nvidia). The whole point, if there was one beyond real-time hagiography, was to get the tech celebs to Continue reading
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meta meta
I’m not talking about the company formerly known as Facebook. I’m talking about the actual noncommercial sense of “meta,” which is basically self-reference. You have to be careful about letting self-reference tie your thinking up in knots. It gets complicated very quickly. The traitors and dragons (in the sense Tolkien used the term) attempting to Continue reading
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As the secret police shoot citizens…
I get text messages. A typical one begins “This is Barack Obama…” First of all, no it isn’t. Second of all, these messages are invariably just requests for donations. Nothing else, just money. Third of all, I’m not even a Democrat! It must be even worse if you are. Continue reading
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Connecting the dots
The tech bros snagged government contracts worth billions from the orange baby, and set about constructing new software and databases. Musk’s DOGE punks stole private information about, frankly, everybody known to the US government. Tax records, social security records, and everything else they could purloin. The tech bros’ companies, like Palantir, poured all that data Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com