FeedCity

Great artists, before they die, should share their secrets, so the next generation can be even greater.

[Anthony Ha at TechCrunch] China Miéville, who is one of the great contemporary science fiction and fantasy authors, is right on the money about Silicon Valley's tendency to create the Torment Nexus. This is exactly why I think science fiction is so importan...

Yesterday I uploaded an image of a pizza pie, in a New York pizzeria, with a couple dressed in evening clothes with a NYC cop and off-duty sanitation worker lurking in the background. Paolo Valdemarin writes from London, "Have you tried adding more images to a prompt? From my experiments it can easily keep 'in mind' five different images and mix them. You can get a bunch of people sitting in the same room, with a very detailed version of the room." He sent two examples which are somewhat embarrassing, but you'll probably enjoy them. :-) First, he uploaded my profile picture from Facebook. And asked ChatGPT to add me to the picture and then to "sit him next to the couple, with both of them kissing him on the cheek, and as you can see ChatGPT complied! Facebook profile picture. Original pizzeria. Dave inserted. Kissing Dave.

There's now a home page for Radio Free America. Once we have more feeds, the home page will be a timeline of news that can be acessed outside of Bluesky. Please subscribe now, and help spread the word. Via the dynamic OPML file that's publicly available there can be many such pages on the open web.

Finished reading: The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Beautiful and haunting. 📚

Spurs / Warriors tonight. Not a close game but still fun. It has been too long since I was last in San Antonio. 🏀

[Brian Krebs] Sobering roundup from Brian Krebs about how each of the five pillars of the First Amendment - speech, religion, the media, the right to assembly, and the right to petition the government and seek redress for wrongs - has been attacked during th...

One of the many pressing issues with Large Language Models (LLMs) is they are trained on content that isn’t theirs to consume. Since most of what they consume is on the open web, it’s difficult for authors to withhold consent without also depriving legitimate agents (AKA hu...

A new Bluesky news feed, Radio Free America. It will also be on a web page as a river of news, and of course in dynamic OPML so it can be reproduced in lots of places. It will be hard to shut down, if it catches on. The idea: deliver news stories, blog posts and podcasts fro...

Whether you’re an AI optimist or skeptic, or somewhere in between, you can probably relate to this blog post by @paulrobertlloyd. It’s going to dominate tech headlines for at least a couple more years until everyone is completely burned out on hearing about it, then (maybe) fade into the background.

Decided to subscribe to The Atlantic. There’s a certain kind of story that I miss from the NYT and WaPo after cancelling both those subscriptions last year. I still don’t want to obsess with the news, but when I dip my toes in, I want the coverage to be good.

Same.

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We talk about Apple getting into trouble with Siri + LLMs, but Google has major problems too. Their search business is going to fall out from under them. Not sure they have the decisiveness to actually redesign their main product.

I’m enjoying Kagi instead of Google, but it’s still not quite right. For a paid search engine, there should be no clutter. If the query is an actual question with an answer, give me a ChatGPT-style UI, free of distractions. If the query is to find a web page, give me 10 blue links and nothing else.

Did not finish: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. I enjoyed the first part of the book but after setting it aside just couldn’t get back into it. 📚

The US is being run like a TV show, with predictable results.

[Lubna Kably in The Times of India] Worrying stuff being reported by the Times of India (and, at the time of writing, under-reported in the domestic US press). AI is being used to flag international students because of their social media activity, among othe...

More details of when Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, from an upcoming book by Keach Hagey:

The board felt they couldn’t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altman’s management failings. They had banked on Murati calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board.

You come at the king, you best not miss.

There seems to be a timezone bug in Siri + ChatGPT. To get better answers while driving I experimented with telling Siri to “ask ChatGPT to…”, but anything that needs the time is 5 hours off. I assume Apple is including the current time in a prompt to OpenAI, in GMT. Hopefully an easy fix. 🤖

My NCAA women’s bracket is still holding on with that Longhorns win! Great game Texas / Tennessee. 🏀