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Value Parasites and How to Avoid Them
Originally published May 2023 A couple of years back, Cory Doctorow coined a word, “enshittification,” that’s a perfect summation of why we can’t have nice things. Enshittification is the process that takes a service, or a system, or a tradition, or even an institution, and degrades it to the extent that it’s just no good any… Continue reading
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Hard Boiled Carrot
It seemed like an ordinary day in the forest. The breeze stirred the leaves around. The river flowed. The plants grew. But then Hare heard a knock on his door. It was an ordinary knock; just a quick rat-a-tat. But something about it gave Hare a bad feeling. On his way to open it he… Continue reading
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Thrasonical
Around 1616, Shakespeare finished “As You Like It,” in which Rosalind mentions “Caesar’s thrasonicall bragge of I came, saw, and conquered.” Likewise, Thomas Carte’s “A General History of England,” from 1754, points out that “It is too thrasonical to deserve any credit.” I don’t know what he meant by “it”. “Thrasonical,” though, is quite clear,… Continue reading
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Misophosy
It’s pretty conventional, in mainline western-civilization thinking at least, to have a high regard for the combination of knowledge and judgment we’d call “wisdom.” In fact, if you were to rate English words by their positive connotation for most people, “wisdom” would probably come out somewhere near the top of the list. At least so… Continue reading
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GPT
Originally published April 2023 There’s a lot of, um, chat going around about ChatGPT, the well-known large-language-model generative chatbot. I’m holding off on calling it an “Artificial Intelligence,” but I will go as far as calling it an AEM — Artificial English Major. ChatGPT and its pals really are a lot like the typical caricature… Continue reading
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Descartes
I keep circling back to Descartes. René freaking Descartes. Maybe the original tech bro. Guy decided animals were machines. It wouldn’t have made any difference, except the jerk was an a-list persuader and people listened to the things he said and for some reason (this reason is still around and you know it) took the things… Continue reading
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Born Today: June 30
In the spirit of diversity, we’re eschewing any suggestion of speciesism and celebrating today’s birthday of Cookie, a cockatoo who lived in the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago in the US. Cookie was born June 30, 1933, and lived for…wait for it…82 years. Cookie was a “Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo,” also known as Leadbeater’s Cockatoo. The birds… Continue reading
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Born Today: June 29
Instead of featuring a particular birthday person today, I have a very unusual set of coincidences to report. I get birthday information from Wikipedia, which has a page for every day of the year listing events, births, deaths, and holidays around the world. Because there have been a lot of years for people to be… Continue reading
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Born Today: June 28
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva, was born 311 years ago today. When he was born, Geneva was a city-state, and his middle-class family had voting rights there. He was always proud of that, and signed his books with the “Citizen of Geneva” comment for his entire life. He never lived to see the Republic of… Continue reading
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Born Today: June 27
Helen Keller was born 143 years ago today in Alabama in the US. She’s known because of her writing, speaking, and advocacy for women’s rights (including the right to vote) labor rights, peace, and for disabled people — of whom she was one; she lost her sight and hearing when she was 19 months old.… 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!
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