History, sort of
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The great human document
Another idea from Jaron Lanier: large language model software systems are not artificial intelligence. A large language model is one enormous document comprised of contributions from countless people. It’s “something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics.” It “can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between… Continue reading
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Data Dignity and Xanadu
Jaron Lanier is always interesting to listen to or read. Just this week he was a guest on Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Startalk. The discussion turned to AI (in its current form), and Lanier brought up his notion of data dignity. This hasn’t gotten much attention, as far as I can tell. According to Lanier, the… Continue reading
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Time to do better
The US is not going back to the way we were. And good riddance, in my view. Without meaning to, American society and business practices have become a means of enriching and aggrandizing despicable people. This is not entirely new, but it seems to me that it’s more common and systemic now. There is not… Continue reading
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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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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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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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The lost gatekeepers and the watchers
This is a followup to a previous post, where I complained that the internet information environment shifts a lot of work from the creation/dissemination side to the consumer/user side. Walter Benjamin offered another much richer analysis in his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He lived long before the… Continue reading
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Godwin’s Law 2026
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Republicans, MAGA, or Trump approaches one.” Even earlier is the Reduction ad Hitlerum fallacy, a Leo Strauss creation from 1953. It’s a description of an attempt to counter an argument by claiming the same notion can be attributed to Hitler or Nazis. As… Continue reading
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The rat in the house
“January 6, 2021 was the most shameful day in American history. It should live in infamy, as should the traitor who refused to accept the election results and incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol — Donald J. Trump.“ Continue reading
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About prepping
“Prepping” is a trendy meme, and it seems to usually means preparing a backpack with stuff you’ll need when you leave the city or town and go live a life of brave, individual survivalism in the woods. That is delusional; a fantasy that comes from watching too many movies. A lot of aspects of our… 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 other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!