Blogfog
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A Blast(er) from the Past
Anil Dash’s new post really took me back to the days of the Commodore 64. What a fun machine that was. He perfectly captured the scene, too; the paper magazines with program listings you had to copy by hand. Perfectly. Somehow I never heard of the automatic proofreader before; I coulda used it. The Commodore… Continue reading
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Yet Another Hoax
The tech bros, and most especially Elon Musk, have somehow become such centers of attention that they can spout nonsense and have it reported — by media outlets with actual reputations! — as something like “news.” I’m talking specifically about Musk’s “flying” “car” that was “demonstrated” in a stage show in Texas. It was a… Continue reading
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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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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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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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Do not call your friend…
Shawn Smucker’s poem Please Use AI is, I suspect, about to be both a meme and a classic. Definitely do read it. Continue reading
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Once more, into the breach
Not for the first time, I have launched a newsletter, piggybacking on the Substack platform. The guiding question, or perhaps lament, driving this effort is what are we to do? That applies to a great many areas these days, but my concern is around artificial intelligence, its oppressive and sudden domination of practically everything to… Continue reading
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But all my friends say I should…
Nikhil Suresh wrote a thought-provoking essay that introduced a term to me (I don’t think it’s a brand-new term) that really resonates: AI mania. Suresh is a director at a software engineering consulting firm. I think they’re pretty well connected, such that he’s often in conversation with top executives and directors at major companies we’ve… Continue reading
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Author! Author!
What is writing for? What matters, who wrote some text, or who reads it? One idea is that text — I’ll call it “literature” here — only matters, and only really exists as a significant entity at all when someone reads it. This is a key idea from “reader-response criticism,” a branch of literary theory.… 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
- A Blast(er) from the Past
- Yet Another Hoax
- Exasperation
- Car Shopping
- C’mon give it up, sluggish human
Categories
Artificial Intelligence
Chocolatiana
Essays
History, sort of
Immorality
Incompetence
Quotations
Resistance
Stories
Tales from the Forest
Technicalities
Tragedy
Unanticipated Consequences