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What is it about Florida?
The latest irritating, disappointing, and astonishing story coming out of Florida is about Vinita Prabhakar and Fred Hawkins. And others. Prabhakar is a professor of literature who has taught for years at “small, private liberal arts schools in Upstate New York.” By all reports, she’s quite good at it. She moved to Florida to be… Continue reading
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Why does anybody listen to this grifter?
Apparently Tesla, headed up as we all know by a certain Mr. Musk, has started trying to drum up interest in companies buying fleets of self-driving cars so they can enter the robot-taxi business. These are the killer robot cars that just claimed another victim, and of course the company, the cars, and the man… Continue reading
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Fashionable or able to fashion
Years ago, mobile phones were designed with easily-swappable batteries, memory cards, and SIM cards. You could even disassemble them (to a point) and repair or replace components. Not that you generally had to; many phones from that era were far more durable than the iPhones and Android devices nowadays. Yes, I know you can still… Continue reading
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The corporate overlords and the long despair
Hello. Thank you for calling our support line. Please be aware our options have changed. Press one to continue in English. Pulse dos para español. tlhInganvaD Tap wej. If you know your party’s extension, enter it now. If you don’t know your party’s extension, please say or enter “I have no friends.” If you would… Continue reading
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Decisions, decisions
There are a lot of ways to make decisions, from rolling dice to analyzing data. Some approaches to decision-making define entire fields of human activity. Voting is the realm of politics. Experimental evidence and independently verifiable results means science. Then we have Pluto, which is evidently still controversial (who knew). It was “demoted” in 2006… Continue reading
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RIP
I never heard of Yayoi Kusama while she lived. I don’t much understand art until long afterward, but now that I’ve heard of her, I think I would have liked her work. Because I do now. RIP. I knew about a small subset of Tim Curry’s work. I enjoyed his performance in The Rocky Horror… Continue reading
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The Grift Also Rises
Ed Zitron’s latest overly long missive about the AI industry and its misdeeds includes this: “LLMs Are Built To Help Grifters and Imbeciles Do Impressions Of Work.” I’m sure it gets a lot of agreement. I mean, look how much grift and scamming surrounds LLMs, vendors, and many users. But grifting existed for a looong… Continue reading
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Where does power reside
The Crooks and Liars website publishes political commentary. Their recent story about the orange baby and Natalie Harp, the apparently troubled young woman who idolizes it, includes this, that the orange baby “…still has the power to inspire that sort of loyalty…“ I think this is a basic error, and a very common one. The… Continue reading
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Can’t keep a secret?
The orange baby just blurted out the number of nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea. It’s fifty-seven, by the way. This seems more than a little off for several reasons: • It seems like the number of weapons an extremely hostile nation has might be a secret worth keeping.• How did we get this information?… Continue reading
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Look to the rigging
I spent many years paying fairly rudimentary attention to “the economy.” It was never an academic subject that interested me, and a lot of what I skimmed by and about economists seemed to me poorly reasoned nonsense. People studying and opining about the subject seemed to me to be particularly prone to directed reasoning; they… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- What is it about Florida?
- Why does anybody listen to this grifter?
- Fashionable or able to fashion
- The corporate overlords and the long despair
- Decisions, decisions
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