Just an offhand comment about ChatGPT.

I had run it about six months ago, giving it a simple subject to write about. It gave me three generalized paragraphs with much repetition. I dismissed it.

Last week, I gave it a more complex task to write about. I asked for a critique of neoliberalism. It wrote an entire page of well-composed text, even ending on a crescendo of a final paragraph, drawing clear conclusions.

I would, of course, rewrite a sentence or two in each paragraph, if I were to reuse the text.

But I am impressed. And kind of alarmed.

Fifteen minutes of linkfinding.

ReadWriteWeb: Apple iMac could be set to try out touchscreen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After I use my iPad, it drives me crazy when I try poking my laptop or desktop’s screen.

Paris Review: Backyard Bird Diary. Always wanted to create one of these kinds of diaries. Been a long time since I’ve sketched. I should buy some colored pencils.

Capital+Main: Power of the Pulpit: How Conservative Congregations Scale the Church-State Wall to Political Victory. Listen to what Bible scholar Dan McLellan says about this.

AppleInsider: Neil Young tries excusing his return to Spotify by saying Apple Music is now as bad. Water-drop torture is the same, no matter the brand.

PVC: Podcast playback: immersive reading + italics on website-desktop & mobile. I know there are rules for use of italics; I use them when they make the most sense for emphasis. Keeping their ‘power’ is paramount.

Vox: Biden is not “waging war” on American energy. He’s boosting it. Yet OPEC still has its heavy hand on prices. Seen that recent $0.30/gallon price increase?

DP Review: Nikon Z9 gets firmware v5.0 with portrait processing options and feature refinements. A Z8 or Z9 is on my dream wishlist.

SciAm: How the Solar Eclipse will impact electricity supplies. Paywall keeps me out. If you’ve got a subscription, enjoy.

CNet: Do You Need a Screen for a Projector? As an A/V professional, I can tell you that you’ll be blown away by the quality of a good projection screen. The materials have advanced so very far. Contrast and color are exponentially better than they were just a decade ago.

Zeldman: Open-source moderation.

Fifteen minutes and NetNewsWire.

VF: Mark Seliger’s Portraits From the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Beautiful light.

Atlas Obscura: Why the April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse May Blow Your Mind. A nice discussion of the experience of awe. Reminds me of some of my experiences back in September and October of last year.

fx guide: The Ultimate RC podcast +1 (Reunion Show) – Nikon buys RED. “The Good, the Bad, and the Damn Annoying.”

The Hill: Press: Does telling the truth matter anymore? Bill Press hits the target.

Popular Information: New data explodes myth of crime wave fueled by migrants. “… across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.” We all know the 'crime wave’ rhetoric was bullsh-t.

PVC: The Updated Professional’s Guide to Buying an M Series Mac. Still love my M1 Ultra Macbook Pro.

Guardian: Legal action could end use of toxic sewage sludge on US crops as fertilizer. I thought this had been outlawed decades ago! Good lord. So many more toxic chemicals these days, on top of heavy metals.

New Scientist: Mars's gravitational pull may be strong enough to stir Earth's oceans. Now that’s going to set tarot readers and astrologers wild.

ReadWriteWeb: A rogue AI might be able to replace all music with Taylor Swift covers. Our local radio station plays “Hotel California” so many times a day, I think I’d welcome a Tay-Tay cover.

Medium: How long does it take to design a website? Many clients will balk, yet this is a very realistic timeframe. The reality is, many will not have the cash or the deep desire to have such a highly-customized site. Hence Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress themes.

Fifteen minutes and NetNewsWire.

I have been celebrated for my concise, fast blog posts. Lately I’ve had a few people accuse me of being false, being something I’m not. I’m getting a bit triggered at these accusations. I’ve had enough Johnny Walker tonight to want to start a regular challenge - set the timer for fifteen minutes, see how many good links I can find … and intelligently comment upon. I’ll do a video at some point. It’s a bit dark now for such things. Why NetNewsWire? I support my friends. Here goes.

Guardian.UK: Juliette Binoche: ‘Does Steven Spielberg hate me? You’ll have to ask him.’ Ah, my weakness. Not a good link to start with … I just adore ‘La Binoche.” Le Hussard Sur Le Toit forever.

Guardian: World Book Day finds children are put off reading for pleasure. Librarians had to chase me out of the adult section, back to the damned fairytale section. I had a lot more fun reading adult fiction. Even at 8 years old. Don’t restrict your child’s reading endeavors. Learn of James Hillman’s “acorn theory.

Barn Finds: Right at Home on a Trailer: 1986 Zastava Yugo. Who else remembers in the ‘80’s, when you could buy a new Cadillac and get a free Yugo?

MeFi: Voter Fraud, disproven again. Bookmark this one; you’ll want to refer to it over and over. A great FPP. Appropriate that I include a MeFi link. Find my contributions under “crazyhorse.”

There’s another Barn Finds link I want to elucidate, but I don’t like repeating myself in a fifteen minute challenge.

Looking through my Apple/Macintosh feeds … still waiting for the large screen iMac. Beginning to give up hope.

BBC: Kate picture heats up royal rumours instead of quelling public curiosity. Oh, for heaven’s sake. You should see what I do with portraits these days. Occasionally I’ll forget an extra hand; I’m quick to re-render a proper result. Easier to make mistakes with Photoshop and other AI functions. No fire here.

Vox: Do Americans still have a right to privacy? I fervently hope so. Yet, “One reason the modern right to privacy rests on shaky ground is because it is not explicitly laid out in the Constitution.” Of course, the Constitution has no position on UFOs, either.

Colossal: The Nooks and Crannies of Amsterdam Are a Canvas for Frankey’s Playful Interventions. I love when one runs across things like these. I remember when taking shoes and tossing them over phone lines, leaving an unspoken story, was all the rage. Men’s shoes, laces tied. Women’s pumps, linked by a jeweled bracelet or necklace. It was an invitation to titillation, imagination.

Mashable: Instagram is copying TikTok, and the strategy is working. Or they’re just making a bet that TikTok can’t find a buyer before Congressional paranoiacs shut them down.

ReadWriteWeb: AI chatbots ‘think’ in English, research finds. I would imagine that puts a significant damper on a certain amount of creativity and variability in results. Like having the archetypal Eliza chatbot interact with the rhetoric of Trump (including artful mispronunciations and sigh-codas that might denote dropping a deuce).

CSPAN: Former President Trump Mocks Stuttering. I’ll have more to say tomorrow. Dead to me. Not that he wasn’t already. My regular readers know I am a stutterer also.

My fifteen minutes is up, all too soon. Let’s see what you can do, haters.

Personal Improvement: Plumbing the depths, polishing the jewel.

Pain will leave, once it is done teaching you.
— Bruce Lee

I’ve been a bit quiet on this front lately. Doing some intense readings, journalling, delving deep into my past doing what the metacosm calls “shadow work”. Looking back into my childhood to find unhealed traumas … identifying them specifically, seeing them clearly, empathizing with the feelings and exploring how they affect my psyche today.

I’ve said this before, I’ve been doubtful of this kind of work in the past, but at this point in time, I’m finding incredible revelations about circumstances that bent me into shapes I was never meant to embody.

We all love our parents for the most part, and I did love mine dearly. But noone gets a manual for raising children, and my parents were WWII generation, influenced by the cultures they were raised in. There were many mistakes made that are very clear to me now. Some I knew to heal myself, and did many years ago. But I am surprised that some of my more idiotic kneejerk responses are based in how I was nurtured as a toddler. The fixes proposed by the various books I’ve been reading have been very effective in both bringing attention to the source, confirming the diagnoses as I apply the recommended cures.

I wish I could mention specifics, but I think many may have done work like this. You’ll know what I’m going through. Again, I was raised with a healthy suspicion of psychiatry and psychology. My interests in those subjects are wholly my own. Long ago I delved into James Hillman’s work … and I’m finding on re-reading his books is bringing incredible amounts of new appreciation and deep knowledge.

Can reading a book change a life? Good Christ, I can tell you yes. I am triangulating across many books right now, and there are nuggets of gold even in the worse-written self-help Kindle tome. It feels like my quick-scan abilities from decades of blogging were gifted to me just for this purpose.

I’m chomping at the bit to have these newly healed hurts tested in the real world. As each opportunity comes, I find myself joyfully wading into situations I felt were uncomfortable or painful before.

I’m the same. But different. It’s a good start. And it’s great.

Ever hear of "zettelkasten"?

The latest rabbit-hole I’m diving into. My Evernote has become a black hole of thousands (15,000+ tags alone) of aged content. I need something better. Been looking at The Archive and have downloaded Obsidian. Longtime readers will recall my experiences with The Brain (too pricey now), also.

I’d really like to have a filing system to back up my grey matter in a more useful, Google-Search-like manner. But moreso, to save some of my longer writings. I’m discovering lately that blogging has ‘built’ me for longer form pieces, and I’d like to categorize and save them in useful (quick recall) formats. So many times, when composing a longer blog post, I recall a piece of writing from the past. I can’t tell if I’ve stuffed it in Ulysses, Drafts, IA Writer, Evernote, FreeMind, Notes, Omni Outliner, Open Office, Google Docs, OneDrive, Yojimbo, Highland 2, Scrivener, Word, Pages, Textedit, or wherever. After decades of writing for the internet, I’ve got good things stuffed in every nook and cranny on my hard drives, depending on what latest whizzy app or app update I was fiddling with, in order to give a salient comment on the blog.

I’ve been terrifically disorganized with my longer writings, and now I need to pay the piper. I really wish I’d come up with some dazzlingly brilliant method of naming files, but alas … it never crossed my mind until now.

Consider this a ‘spring cleaning’. Thought others might want to peek, too.

Nice Marmot: Concur.

Omigod. Remember Klout? God. One of my social bugbears, back after Twitter stole some of our best bloggers.

Read Dave’s item first. We know each social channel should really have custom content crafted for each. I would routinely just post an excerpt to Twitter for years through IFTTT. I do so on Mastodon by hand, if I’ve got something I know my friends there might enjoy (some prefer it to RSS at times).

I feel we bloggers prefer deeper interactions. Visitor numbers alone are like eating candy - that quick dopamine hit, but after a few dozen, the overload of mental ‘sugar’ doesn’t really drive us to our best work. Having a person meaningfully interact … that’s the ambrosia we wish to drink.

Ambrosia, of course, was the drink of the Greek gods, bequeathing longevity or immortality.

I find the description particularly apropos, because those interactions spur us to blog better, more regularly, and longer.

Driving all over hell and high water today.

I’ve got some scheduled posts in the queue. I’ll see if SS behaves as I dip in and out of cell ranges. Any clients who read here, I’ll get back to you later this afternoon.

Later: Jesus, the winds. Drive your lowest-profile vehicle today. I’m navigating the XTerra along the roads, dodging other cars and tumbleweeds … even TREES … like it’s a demolition derby where God is a toddler gripping your roof and going ‘vroom vroom’, shoving you in the midst of toy chaos.

The Verge: When does a journalist become a hacker?

“The story begins with Tucker Carlson’s extremely cursed interview of Kanye West in 2022. Most interviews are edited for clarity; in this case, the interview was cut to exclude a rambling, antisemitic rant. That unaired clip and others made their way to Vice and Media Matters through Burke, who downloaded them from LiveU, a streaming service that media companies use to share video files. The FBI raided Burke’s home last year, seizing phones, laptops, hard drives, and notes.

Something for we bloggers to remain aware of, if we run across sensitive materials online.