Simplicity rearranged
How Much is That Doggie in the Window? was a hit song back in 1953. It was partly about window shopping, which was a thing back in the days of “departments stores” located on city streets. They typically had large plate-glass windows with elaborate displays of all their most desirable goods. Macys in New York […]
Writers have to deal with interruptions. I think that’s universal — among writers, at least. It’s pretty common to read that a writer has a garden shed, or a private nook, or an attic, or some private place. A writer’s environment shapes their work, for sure, but the immediate environment can also sometimes function as […]
Digital technology, and indeed technology in general, seems like it moves in cycles of usability and utility. I’m not sure whether the cycles apply equally to every user, or if it depends on the features you, as a specific user, find most helpful. Printers connected to personal computers are one example. Long ago it could […]
Shawn Smucker’s poem Please Use AI is, I suspect, about to be both a meme and a classic. Definitely do read it.
Not for the first time, I have launched a newsletter, piggybacking on the Substack platform. The guiding question, or perhaps lament, driving this effort is what are we to do? That applies to a great many areas these days, but my concern is around artificial intelligence, its oppressive and sudden domination of practically everything to […]
My human’s a dunceAnd I’ll tell you how:His head’s in tomorrowWhile mine’s here and now. The problem with humans?Too big in the head.Their brains are too huge.So there. It’s been said. They worry and fretabout stuff that’s not there.As a dog, I can tell them’bout what they should care: Not about things That they dream […]
Once you have a broadcast station, you have to broadcast something. And once you decide to publish a periodical, you have to print something. Sometimes that “something” turns into “anything.” International Business Times (IBT) sounds like a perfectly normal, staid, commercial publishing outlet. It’s based in the UK, and has a typical financial results crawl […]
Nikhil Suresh wrote a thought-provoking essay that introduced a term to me (I don’t think it’s a brand-new term) that really resonates: AI mania. Suresh is a director at a software engineering consulting firm. I think they’re pretty well connected, such that he’s often in conversation with top executives and directors at major companies we’ve […]
The US has been at war for 93% of its entire existence. Let’s just take the most recent ones. Korean War, 1950-1953. Two whole years of peace after that; an aberration. Then Vietnam, 1955-1975. A bit more peace, until invading Grenada for some reason in 1883, invading Panama in 1989, invading Iraq for some reason […]
I was recently laid off by a large tech company after more than a decade. The experience reminds me of something I learned when studying organizational behavior many moons ago: there are two organizations, not one. The obvious one is the formal organization. The name, the “mission,” the org chart, the bylaws. Then there is […]