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Kwaai not?
Kwaai is an organization working on personal AI. Part of that is figuring out what “personal AI” means. Looks interesting, and you can join in at various levels — the lowest level is “observer,” which is akin to subscribing to their newsletter. Not that they have a newsletter, exactly. Anyway, let’s see what can come… Continue reading
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Productivity tools
Joan Westenberg is going to “shut down [their] laptop, take a deep breath, step back from the endless to-do lists, and reconnect with what makes me a Goddamn human.“ When you see someone lamenting the effects of focusing too much on “productivity,” there’s almost always some mention of the tools they use. The tools, these… Continue reading
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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
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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