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What is twitter really for?
I’ve been thinking about “social media” quite lot lately. And here I’m focusing on twitter-like systems more than, say facebook. Services, that is, that are for short messages that are widely distributed, the authors have little control over once they’re posted, and that have such a massive flow of data that the focus of the Continue reading
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To Anxious Friends
The editorial below was written by William Allen White on July 27, 1922. The disorder of the day, which he mentions, was a nationwide railroad strike. In 1922, railroads were critical infrastructure — they still are, but in 1922 there were no alternatives. White was the editor of the Emporia Gazette of Emporia, Kansas, where Continue reading
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Tragedy
Imagine for a moment that you’re 22 years old. You’re healthy, you’ve had a good education, you’re pretty bright. You have a family that’s close; you’re not isolated. You live in a peaceful beautiful place among a population that’s reasonably happy. How do you come to decide to throw your life away by killing someone Continue reading
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Not my president
In the past, I’ve always assumed that a phrase like “not my president” had to do with a hissy fit by some snowflake way out on the right or left wing of political bent. But this time the president has decided on its own that it is not my president. And that goes for more Continue reading
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Passions, Products, and Utility
or: It’s Just a Phone The MacPsych blog has an interesting post about mobile phones, on the occasion of the latest Apple “event” introducing new iPhoniana. They say: “I have read lots of differing perspective online, from fanboy exclamations of ‘the best phone everrrrrr!’ through to the much more realistic ‘it’s just a fucking phone’. As time passes, Continue reading
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Will we ever learn?
Just Another Day in the USA; Charlie Kirk shot to death on a campus in Utah (which allows anybody to carry a concealed firearm). And three students shot in a high school in Denver. That old nonsense “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Not exactly. People with guns kill people. Continue reading
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Sure, just make it up
“Zuckerberg joined Trump at a White House tech event on Thursday evening and sat next to the president. Trump asked Zuckerberg about Meta’s upcoming investments in AI infrastructure, “How much are you spending, would you say, over the next few years?” “Oh gosh. I mean, I think it’s probably going to be something like, I Continue reading
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Silver Lining
by Chocolate My human has an injured footand so can’t walk too far.He doesn’t know I get it,I can wait ’til he’s back to par. He feels bad and guiltythat we’re missing daily miles,But I can run & play in my back yard;I tell him with some smiles. One part of this that I don’t Continue reading
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Symiliptic report Sember 7
In creating the sixth republic, we have an advantage the founders of the first and the reformers of the fourth lacked: we have more collected data about methods and processes of governing and their outcomes. We have more tools to analyze the data as well, and other, better-functioning societies to be emulated. In addition to Continue reading
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Simple tools
There are certain things I very much like about old-school unix software. I’m talking about the command-line utilities that were each designed to do one thing very well. To accomplish a more complex task, or in modern lingo, “workflow,” you could easily combine several programs, sending the output of one to the input of another, 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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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com