FeedCity

People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.

This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.

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Enormous piles of money just sound crazy. Google spending $85 billion on capital expenditures this year, or about double what Twitter was sold for. Those AI data centers aren’t going to build themselves! Meanwhile, the scale of the OpenAI’s infrastructure in Abilene is starting to come into focus.

BTW, this business with Trump and the Fed is almost exactly what I wanted Obama to do with Garland when McConnell refused to hold hearings. Walk him over to the Supreme Court, unlock his office, swear him in and get back to work. Sometimes you just do it. The Dems weren't pragmatic that way.

Upgraded to the latest Tahoe beta and now a couple of apps seem to be confused. Nova thinks it’s expired. I have an older serial number, but they should work forever just without updates. I think something might be weird with the system keychain.

When trying to "work" with ChatGPT, realize that it's mistakes could be much worse than you could possibly imagine. It could be leading you down a blind alley. You must always consider how full of shit it is. It may not just be making things up, but it could not understand something very basic about what you're doing. There's no limit to the ways it can be wrong. And you can waste whole programming sessions chasing a solution where none could possibly every under any circumstances be found.

I now have a website on Tumblr. When I write, I usually have a direction in mind: a point I want to make. Today, however, I find that I instead have the feeling of discovery without yet having the exact words to describe what I want to say. Perhaps if I write a few words I w...

Question: I have a site with a well developed set of categories, I've added to it carefully over a few months, it covers most of the topics I write about. Another site has a small set of categories. I write all my WordPress posts in the same editor, and could easily set it up so that all categories were available to me in every site I post to. The question: Is that a good practice in the world of WordPress? I noticed that categories are given global ID's so if I use a category like "movies" it will have the same ID as yours has on your sites. I love this idea of a global namespace for categories, and see it as something that could be adopted by sites written in any other writing environment. Anyway, if you have a moment to comment, I'd appreciate your ideas.

You can see from this Bluesky post that I do copy-edit my linkblog items, but not enough. The web isn't a write-only medium, so to say that Bluesky is part of the web, well in this way it isn't.

Find freedom not in infinite choice, but in working a single seam until you strike gold: conducting dozens, even hundreds, of iterations within a tight parameter space—not in search of more, but in search of better.

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CSI London, York, and Oxford:

Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.

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Lupe Tortilla. 🌮

If you could look into people's minds and see if, at their core, they feel it can't happen here, most of us would have that belief. We'll probably still believe it when the last of our freedoms is gone.

Here's a benchmark. I just asked ChatGPT for 250 words on climate change. Let's check that out in a year and two years and see if they're still telling the truth.

Question. If you have to choose between Google's web browser or one from your favorite AI company, which would you go with? And let me know which is your favorite AI "universe." Also yeah Google is destroying the web, as is ChatGPT and Claude etc. Because the people who tried to capture flow using SEO made you wade through mountains of garbage before you got the info you were coming there for. If instead, they had some focus on providing a product that made people happy and built respect for theri brand, they'd still have a seat at the table. It's too late to complain, you had a chance to view your efforts as a business. But there's still plenty of potential for the web, esp if developers get imaginative in how to use the new browser platforms. I don't imagine Google's going to rock and roll too much with Chrome, but maybe they will. 😄

Trump says he's going to give AI companies freedom except with DEI and climate change. Here we go.

Mastodon will experiment with donation banners:

The initial campaign will appear via a banner to people that use our Android and iOS apps, if they are signed-in to an account on one of our instances, and only if their account has existed for four weeks or more. The banner will be easy to dismiss, of course, and we will not continually prompt users to donate.

Patron supporters have declined over the last couple of years, so they’ve had to rely on larger donations. Makes sense to rebalance to lots of smaller donations.

Meanwhile, sticking to paid subscriptions for Micro.blog. It’s more stable.

Back in 2016 I was using Twitter far more than I used this website, to my own detriment. Today while talking about politics, centrism, and Republicans with Thomas I thought of an old tweet of mine from 2016, which was a citation of a quote from Ronald Reagan: Civil Rights Concerning the President’s Views on...

I hate to add to the noise and news overload, but this article by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic is a good summary of Trump’s crazy rants over the weekend, posting dozens of times in just one day:

Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

He’s obviously unwell. Eventually he’ll be gone and we can start to pick up the pieces left by failed, vengeful administration. 🇺🇸