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All too human
Sam Altman, the public face of OpenAI (ChatGPT vendor) is most of all a fast-talking salesman. He’s really good at that. As such, you can’t really believe anything he ever says; when he says “A”, it’s just a reason to obtain “B”, no matter what it takes. Truth is entirely beside the point. Seems like Continue reading
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Questions unasked
There was a Cisco AI Summit event yesterday. It was a corporate-captured attempt at a TED conference. They did, to their credit, attract the top names in AI, including Sam Altman (of OpenAI) and Jensen Huang (of Nvidia). The whole point, if there was one beyond real-time hagiography, was to get the tech celebs to Continue reading
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meta meta
I’m not talking about the company formerly known as Facebook. I’m talking about the actual noncommercial sense of “meta,” which is basically self-reference. You have to be careful about letting self-reference tie your thinking up in knots. It gets complicated very quickly. The traitors and dragons (in the sense Tolkien used the term) attempting to Continue reading
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As the secret police shoot citizens…
I get text messages. A typical one begins “This is Barack Obama…” First of all, no it isn’t. Second of all, these messages are invariably just requests for donations. Nothing else, just money. Third of all, I’m not even a Democrat! It must be even worse if you are. Continue reading
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Connecting the dots
The tech bros snagged government contracts worth billions from the orange baby, and set about constructing new software and databases. Musk’s DOGE punks stole private information about, frankly, everybody known to the US government. Tax records, social security records, and everything else they could purloin. The tech bros’ companies, like Palantir, poured all that data 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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We were not ready to lose the gatekeepers
Over the centuries of printed and broadcast media, a system emerged that put intermediaries between the original writers and us, the receivers. Editors and publishers reviewed, improved, or rejected a piece of work before publishing. Whole professions arose whose focus was establishing and enforcing standards. To be published or aired, a piece of content had Continue reading
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Cornered
The lying weasels trying and failing to ruin the US are more violent lately. More idiotic “don’t believe your own eyes” bloviation. It’s because they’re cornered, and they know it. I hope there are real consequences on the way for all of them, but there probably won’t be. Maybe a few of the brute squad Continue reading
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ICYMI
Every once in a while the nonstop liars tell the truth — and sometimes about their lies. Way back in 2024, JD Vance openly admitted that he made up lies about Haitian immigrants, even though his lies led to violence and injuries. “…he wasn’t going to stop repeating his false narrative just because his words 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 Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but 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.
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