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A new Moore’s Law?
“The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the… Continue reading
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Railroad yard engines and history
The port of Baltimore has just begun using an electric rail car mover. Again. Here’s a photo of the new one: And here’s a photo of one of the ones they used back in 1912: Continue reading
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Bald eagles are not bald
Words often change meanings over time. This happens in different ways. The word “deer” for example, today means a specific type of animal. But back in Old English, when the same word was “doer,” it meant any kind of animal. “Enthusiasm” changed in the opposite way; it comes from Greek and originally meant something very… Continue reading
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Bookmarking vs Collecting
Continuations is a newsletter/blog by Albert Wenger that has a fascinating button at the top right: Collect. What it evidently does is “Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.” An NFT is a “non-fungible token,” which means that it’s a digital object that’s uniquely identified and recorded in a permanent… Continue reading
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A darkness has descended
A moving and important essay from Max McCoy, in the Kansas Reflector. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luthor King said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.“ The Internet Archive unveiled a bust of Aaron Swartz. Swartz died 12 years ago by suicide;… Continue reading
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Time for dinner
The analysis of last week’s barmecidal meals is just a subcategory in a science that is — or at least should be — producing any number of treatises and research programs this time of year: aristology. In spite of the way it sounds, aristology doesn’t have anything to do with Aristotle. It’s the science (or… Continue reading
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Silly Word Games
A word has “vertical symmetry” when you can draw a vertical line in the middle and it’s the same on both sides — this is not quite the same as a palindrome, because it’s not just the same letters; it has to be visual symmetry. For that reason it matters whether the word is all… Continue reading
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A great summation
David Roth wrote an incandescent piece at Defector: Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government. “…Musk just isn’t a very smart or principled guy, and has been insulated from any accountability by his wealth for long enough that he has liquefied into a slurry of… Continue reading
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Nice idea for spreadsheet design
I don’t mean the design of a spreadsheet; I mean the design of the spreadsheet application. As far as I know, nobody has proposed anything new for spreadsheet apps in ages. But here’s an idea: Ambsheets. A cell can contain multiple “ambiguous” values, making it easier to explore alternatives. Via Simon Willison. Continue reading
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My human family has no clueAbout this fact I have for you:When they can’t sniff, although they try,It’s ’cause their nose is up too high! If they watch me, they might learnTo recognize, detect, discernTheir local world (the stuff I know).The key is simple: nose down low! -Chocolate 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. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
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