First Warm Day · This was the first day of 2023 when it was pleasant to be out in just a couple of light layers, and we have flowers, and I have a camera and a blog, so obviously flowersharing is gonna happen ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
Porn Spam: Zero to Zero · This is a true story: in 1988 I single-handedly knocked AOL off the air. What brought it to mind is, I just now took my once-daily look at the junk-mail folder and wiped a few dozen pornospams with a single keystroke, and there were none in my inbox; antispam is getting good enough that I may never see another, and I remembered, lo my righteous wrath and the awful consequences when I got my first one. [Reposted for your amusement on its 20th anniversary.] ...
The LLM Problem · So far I’ve had nothing to say about the LLM chatbot frenzy. My understanding of the technology is shallow and I’ve no sense for its functional envelope, and lots of other people have had smart things to say. I hadn’t even conversed with any of the bots. But I fell off the wagon a few days ago and put time into GPT3 and (especially) the new GPT4-based Bing chat. I got off Bing’s waitlist a few days before the recent general availability, so I have more hands-on than most people. Plus I caught up on background reading. So, question: Are LLMs dangerous distractions or are they a glowing harbinger of a bright future? (Spoiler: I’m dubious but uncertain.) ...
[12 comments]
[12 comments]
Stream Automator · I have a problem, and I think I’m not alone: Getting TV is too complicated and too expensive. I know what a solution might look like, and if someone can build it and charge just a little bit for access, they might become very wealthy ...
[12 comments]
[12 comments]
Two ongoing Decades · Today is the 20th anniversary of the first-ever public post on this blog (Spoiler: Not that interesting). Some posts mark milestones: Is This Thing On? (one day), One ongoing Year, 730 ongoing Days, Thirty-six ongoing Months, and for the ten-year mark, Birthday! ...
[9 comments]
[9 comments]
More Monos! · Our story thus far is here. Tl;dr: I looked at a bunch of monospace fonts and recommended a few. The piece went kind of nuts, way past 50K views as I write this, and a flood of comments here and on YCombinator, nearly all of which took the form of “You left out my favorite font, which is X!” So I harvested 14 values of X, and let’s have a look at them! I’ve enjoyed this little project enough to pay actual real money for three of these ...
[7 comments]
[7 comments]
2023 Crocuses · As is traditional, a few photos of the year’s first purple-and-yellow garden citizens; portents of approaching spring that are much appreciated while the days are still short and wet and grey ...
[5 comments]
[5 comments]
Larkin Poe Live, 2023 · Last night I enjoyed a concert by Larkin Poe (Wikipedia) at Vancouver’s excellent Commodore Ballroom. The music was just fine — more on that below — but mostly I’m here to think out loud about how Rock & Roll embeds into the wider world in 2023 ...
Amazon Q4 2022 Financials · For the last couple of years, each quarter I’ve been posting a quick analysis of Amazon’s quarterly business results in a Twitter thread. I don’t use Twitter much any more, and Mastodon doesn’t make it easy to post threads, so the blog it is. Summary: Amazon’s retail business loses money (as usual) but the AWS and Advertising businesses are huge, throw off lots of cash, and continue to grow fast. They subsidize the money-losing retail operation in a way that seems deeply unfair to me ...
[5 comments]
[5 comments]
Modern Mono · I’ve just finished setting up a new Mac (14" MBP, M2 Pro, 32G, 4T). It dawned on me that most of my really intense interactions with this thing involve looking at “monospace” (i.e. fixed-width) text; in Emacs where I write this blog, in my IDE, and in my terminal. The ones that came with the machine by default are, well, OK, but maybe we can do better. So I got on Mastodon and asked: “Dear LazyWeb: Setting up a new Mac, what are some groovy new monospace fonts for terminals and IDEs?” ...
[30 comments]
[30 comments]
Abbie Angie Velar · I’m driving a loaner car from the Jaguar Land-Rover dealership, a 2023 Range Rover Velar. I’m not in love with it. But it’s got a name: Abbie Angie ...
[1 comment]
[1 comment]
Quamina v1.0.0 · Today I hit the “release” button on v1.0.0 of Quamina (introduction here), a fast open-source pattern-matching library in Go. Gotta keep doing some coding to keep me honest! The purpose of today’s piece is to provide a snapshot status report and record a few technology gripes just to get them off my chest; sharing is caring ...
Class Reductionist · Like many geeks, I hoard a few dozen domain names, and currently they include the .com/.org/.net triple for “classreductionist”. “Class Reductionist” is considered an insult by many progressives and as far as I know, there’s no organized faction claiming the label. And while I wouldn’t either, I’m pretty sure I’d support the key policy goals that a hypothetical Class Reductionist would ...
[5 comments]
[5 comments]
Winter Market · Saturday dawned chilly and rainy, but I went to the Riley Park Market anyhow. What with family and health and weather issues, I’ve been mostly cooped up lately, have been feeling caged, bored, and blue. Also, the Market is only ten blocks from our place, along a bike route. So I saddled up the e-bike and went hunting ...
Private and Public Mastodon · Here’s how to get into a lot of trouble:
Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet.
And (like me) are a reasonably competent programmer.
And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter.
And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see that it has nice Web APIs so you could build an app to vacuum up all the stories and laments and cheers and dunks and love letters and index ’em and let everyone search ’em and find wonderful things! So you lurch into the Mastodon conversation, all excited, and blurt out “Hey folks, I’m gonna index all this stuff and let the world in!”
That’s when you get your face torn off ...
[12 comments]
Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet.
And (like me) are a reasonably competent programmer.
And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter.
And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see that it has nice Web APIs so you could build an app to vacuum up all the stories and laments and cheers and dunks and love letters and index ’em and let everyone search ’em and find wonderful things! So you lurch into the Mastodon conversation, all excited, and blurt out “Hey folks, I’m gonna index all this stuff and let the world in!”
That’s when you get your face torn off ...
[12 comments]
Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical? · The big story occupying space in my mind (and on this blog) is the #TwitterMigration. As Twitter grows troubled and troubling, “Fediverse” technologies in general and Mastodon in particular are successfully attracting many users and providing a pleasant experience. Everyone is wondering out loud whether Mastodon can take the strain and whether it can provide cool new features. What we haven’t been discussing are two ethical questions: First, is it OK to bail out of Twitter? And if bailing out, is Mastodon a acceptable place to land? ...
[6 comments]
[6 comments]
Long Links · I hope everyone’s winter (or summer, depending) is going well. I find myself much busier recently, but still the browser tabs add up. Herewith another curation of long-form pieces that few will have time for all of, but a subset of them may be enriching for a subset of you ...
[1 comment]
[1 comment]
Privacy Is OK · I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes, forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes ...
[9 comments]
[9 comments]
Google Memory Loss · [Update: As of Jan 1, 2023 this is fixed! Thanks to Danny Sullivan and John Mueller of Google for figuring out what was going on. Yay!]
I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better. [Update, Feb. 2022: It’s still happening.] ...
[39 comments]
I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better. [Update, Feb. 2022: It’s still happening.] ...
[39 comments]
