FeedCity

I was hoping someone would write a post like this one from Andy Masley about AI energy and water use, via Simon Willison. From Andy’s post:

You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.

Models are also generally becoming more efficient and cheaper. We shouldn’t ignore the increase in demand for energy, though. It’s an opportunity to reevaluate nuclear and other clean sources of power.

City & State, morning in Memphis. Looks like there’s gonna be bad weather today heading west. ☕️

Dan Moren in his final article for Macworld:

Being a fan of Apple as a company means necessarily grappling with the reality of business itself. Apple is a moneymaking machine in a society built for and around moneymaking machines, and it is in some ways itself trapped in that system.

AI is really good for helping you if you’re bad at something, or at least below average. But it’s probably not the right tool if you’re great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?

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We're working on the "baseline" theme for WordLand, the default -- the one that shows the user's writing in a WordPress context. I did a survey of news sites and blogs to see how they show their titles: Gothamist puts the name in the upper left corner, leaving room for som...

The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

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Happy anniversary to “the patent that never was”:

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1164399/

Thanks, CERN!

Writing this one at the last second because I couldn’t let Jamie down. And the topic is quite fitting in a fun way. I started the year with the secret goal of posting on this blog daily. And I managed to do that in January only to discover that posting daily isn’t fun and wa...

An unofficial guide to the HTML cite element

[Joint Subreddit statement posted on r/AskHistorians] 30 or so Reddit communities have joined together to make a joint statement in defense of US research. This comes from people with real expertise: in addition to the depth of research talent involved in th...

Model train at the Casey Jones Home & Railroad Museum. I visited the museum today, nearly perfectly timed. Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of Casey’s death. Seeing the sign for the museum on the drive east last week, went down a deep rabbit hole of Dumbo, Disney, and Casey Jones history. 🚂

The New Yorker: The End of Children. This essay was from earlier in the year. There are some stories in it that are a little stunning to me. I knew about South Korea already, but I did not know that the average number of children in the United States had dropped recently. Not yet a crisis, maybe.

Fact-checking is a ChatGPT use-case for reporters. Feed a draft of your story into ChatGPT and ask if it spots any factual errors. There may be some false positives, so you can ask another AI chatbot, or investigate yourself elsewhere. And it may miss some. But it couldn't hurt and it might save your ass.

Remedy Coffee in Knoxville.

Upgrading another server today! Also a few little code optimizations.

New podcast: Building a billionaire's network.

This started out as an open podcast to my friend Jeff Jarvis. But it soon became a story about how in a few months we're going to be writing about how we gave up control of our last social network to the government. We could have made it decentralized, so users couldn't be ...

RSS defines a network of services and readers. Each one can go down, but the whole network stays up. That's all that Bluesky has promised, and that's why a layer of RSS on top of Bluesky would deliver a huge portion of the stability it would need to survive a disaster. It could be done in a matter of weeks, if they decided to do it. I would help.