a glimpse into the tiny mind of Chris Radcliff
20 years ago I started a Netflix subscription because Star Trek: The Next Generation was an expensive show to watch. Over the past decade I switched that to CBS All Access and then Paramount Plus to keep my Star Trek Channel going. Today I m ending my Paramount subscription, and it turns out it s not so [ ]
The second note was a surprise. The first letter was a delight, of course, the best possible gift for your 11th birthday. It told you of your purpose, and set out in detail how you had built – would build – the time machine. It told you step-by-step how you would stop – had stopped [ ]
My head s a swirl of different ideas right now, but here s one that keeps coming up: libraries as resilience centers, and whether that s a problem or a solution. One of the attractive (to me) features of a resilience center is placing emergency supplies and aid in the same place that people will ordinarily use on [ ]
News stories describing the reality behind AI hype just keep coming, and they re starting to remind me of Molly White s excellent Web3 Is Going Just Great site. Turns out LLMs won t so much solve the climate crisis, but the energy they use will hasten it. (from The Tyee, which I encourage reading on the regular [ ]
There s an entertaining Youtube video about the R.O.B. toy robot that Nintendo included with the first NES system. The toy was pivotal in recasting the video game system – which to be sure was a video game system at the start, was a video game system when released, and continues to this day as a [ ]
Tracy and Patrick from the Functional Nerds podcast were kind enough to host me this weekend. Functional Nerds is a podcast about science fiction and fantasy media; they usually talk to authors, but I supported the Uncanny Magazine kickstarter so they brought me on as the third nerd for a just us episode.
I loved popular science magazines as a kid in the 80s. Omni, Popular Mechanics, the eponymous Popular Science. I also read the occasional comic book, though they never seemed to give the same bang for the buck; most comic books at the time felt like watching the middle 5 minutes of a soap opera episode. [ ]
I m anti-advertising. Not sure if I ve mentioned that here before, but it drives a lot of my behavior. It also tends to infuriate companies. I opt out of being their product, opting instead to do things the slower, less-convenient, expensive way. Luckily we live in a time when that s a choice. I don t just mean [ ]
My day job is to build automation. Some of my best work is when a person can show their intent with a small effort and automatically marshal hideously complex processes to carry out that intent. I show them the hideous guts of the process once to prove that I ve done work – a standard wizard [ ]
This week s airline disaster – and in particular the engineering and procedures that got everyone out of the plane alive – reminds me that I m attracted to preparing for the worst. I m the one on the plane who checks where the nearest exits are and what kind of flotation device is available. Not that I [ ]