LLMs are a resource, not a tool
Like the wind or electricity, LLMs are a resource to be harnessed, not a tool to be used.
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Latest posts
The inconvenience of Kagi
I’m a big fan of Kagi. I’ve been paying for it for years. Any time I have to use a different search engine, it’s a frustrating experience. Kagi just sent me three invitations for three free months of Kagi. I forwarded it to one friend who I thought might be interested. But when I tried [ ]
LLMs make good analysts, bad oracles
I’m not an AI apologist by any means, but I’m frustrated by the muddled way LLMs have been marketed, portrayed, and used. I want to focus on the utility of them here, rather than the moral or legal implications of using copyrighted content to feed their corpora. One of the first things we started doing [ ]
Apple TV+’s takeover of the Apple TV app Home Screen
Part of what used to be great about the Apple TV is that — unlike an Amazon Fire TV, for instance — Apple didn’t really have specific content it was trying to push on you. Sure, it might suggest that you rent or buy a movie from iTunes instead of from Amazon; and it would [ ]
The war in Elon’s head
Everybody’s been talking about Elon’s “go fuck yourself” moment from DealBook, and the expletive is what is making most of the headlines. From a distance it could be easy to see this as just a petulant outburst from someone upset with the financial struggles of his company, but considering what he went on to say [ ]
The Monetized Web
Nobody loves a paywall, but everybody loves Substack Increasingly, it feels like paid memberships for web content are not only a viable alternative to surveillance-driven ad revenue, but one that readers are eager to embrace. The success of Substack demonstrates this. This success is often framed as a preference for reading in the inbox rather [ ]
Apple’s incomplete pronoun fields
In iOS 17, you are now able to add pronouns to contacts, including your own contact card. This is a good thing, but at least one important pronoun case is missing from the “English” options. The cases included are: These three cases mirror the common “she/her/hers” structure used to communicate pronouns on social platforms like [ ]
MDN’s rogue definitions of <b> and <i>
From 1993 through roughly 2008, the b and i tags in HTML meant “bold” and “italic,” respectively. Using those tags will still, in 2023, cause most (all?) browsers to render text with either a bold font weight or an italic font style, but the tags no longer “mean” that. It’s now more correct to consider [ ]
How to get Jetpack’s “Writing Prompts” in WordPress
The WordPress Jetpack plugin recently (and experimentally) added “Writing Prompts” like those seen on WordPress.com-hosted sites since…I wanna say 2020? I’ve been thinking about getting more into “Personal Blogging” elsewhere, and I figured these would be useful in getting words out. In order to get these prompts on a self-hosted WordPress site, you need to [ ]
“The Moon” Is Wrong
Three years ago, in December 2019, a tweet went viral posting a link to a YouTube video in which all the lyrics to Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” had been changed to “The moon is right.” Two days later, another, far more viral tweet joked that the lyrics can be read as the interruption of an [ ]