Blogfog
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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
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“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it”
Does Elon Musk deserve a trillion dollars? Did he earn it in any way? My answer would be no, and I think I’m not alone. But let’s ratchet the scale down a bit. How about Tim Cook, CEO of Apple? According to the most recent SEC filing (required of publicly-traded companies), he was paid $74… Continue reading
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Unincorporating
My most recent employer recently decided the jobs I and many of my colleagues were doing no longer needed to be done. We had, of course, been doing exactly the work that same employer specified. We were doing it pretty well, too, judging by the performance reviews, bonus payments, and acclaim we were receiving. But… 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
- Can any good come of any of it?
- What is it about Florida?
- Why does anybody listen to this grifter?
- Fashionable or able to fashion
- The corporate overlords and the long despair
Categories
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Unanticipated Consequences