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Why the fear of dead air?
Once you have a broadcast station, you have to broadcast something. And once you decide to publish a periodical, you have to print something. Sometimes that “something” turns into “anything.” International Business Times (IBT) sounds like a perfectly normal, staid, commercial publishing outlet. It’s based in the UK, and has a typical financial results crawl… Continue reading
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But all my friends say I should…
Nikhil Suresh wrote a thought-provoking essay that introduced a term to me (I don’t think it’s a brand-new term) that really resonates: AI mania. Suresh is a director at a software engineering consulting firm. I think they’re pretty well connected, such that he’s often in conversation with top executives and directors at major companies we’ve… Continue reading
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War games
The US has been at war for 93% of its entire existence. Let’s just take the most recent ones. Korean War, 1950-1953. Two whole years of peace after that; an aberration. Then Vietnam, 1955-1975. A bit more peace, until invading Grenada for some reason in 1883, invading Panama in 1989, invading Iraq for some reason… Continue reading
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Absentee Landlords
I was recently laid off by a large tech company after more than a decade. The experience reminds me of something I learned when studying organizational behavior many moons ago: there are two organizations, not one. The obvious one is the formal organization. The name, the “mission,” the org chart, the bylaws. Then there is… Continue reading
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It’s a (the) process
Sigmund Freud observed that humanity has suffered three great “humiliations.” Galileo found that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin found that we are not the culmination of nature, and he himself (Freud) found that we are not in control of our own minds. Ayad Akhtar recently made the point in The Yale… Continue reading
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I’m with stupid
Large language models actually work. They’re not fake, and they’re surprising, amazing technology. LLMs are real. The LLM vendors and their business models, though, might be something else again. They’ve raised historic amounts of money, which the venture capitalists are going to want repaid at some point. But if you examine their revenues, expenses, and… Continue reading
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Screens and mirrors
The year is 2063 and you were never interesting, writes lizleatrice. It’s a story about a person who would be 33 this year. This is about the age when screen time with social media “fills the dead spaces in your life.” Didn’t notice it at the time, of course, and although the narrator observes it,… Continue reading
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Trusting in trust
Trust is fundamental to society, to economic systems, to getting through daily life…it might be the most basic and foundational value there is. We need to trust the people and institutions we deal with locally in order to work efficiently and avoid spending time and effort trying to validate and ensure every little thing. In… Continue reading
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Do you have the time?
If you have a reasonably detailed understanding of modern physics, you probably know about the Schrödinger equation. It’s as fundamental to quantum physics as Isaac Newton’s Second Law is to classical physics. Newton’s is easily expressed in English: The change of motion of an object is proportional to the force impressed; and is made in… Continue reading
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Author! Author!
What is writing for? What matters, who wrote some text, or who reads it? One idea is that text — I’ll call it “literature” here — only matters, and only really exists as a significant entity at all when someone reads it. This is a key idea from “reader-response criticism,” a branch of literary theory.… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- Why the fear of dead air?
- But all my friends say I should…
- War games
- Absentee Landlords
- It’s a (the) process
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