Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social), page 7

@vfrmedia @autumn @thomasfuchs

Good point

@roadriverrail

I suspect there are a ton of subterranean issues, logistical economic and psychological, going on with Big Trucks today

@roadriverrail

Yep yep -- they stopped selling them because they could make more money selling the bloated, jacked-up models

@bruce @thomasfuchs @autumn

Yeah, that's what I wondered about too -- they're fiddly, just more things to break

@thomasfuchs @autumn

o yes

Having bicycled to 10,267 feet in the rockies, I can attest it is QUITE A CLIMB

(Though I didn't do the Teton pass, which has several miles of a 10-degree grade yeeeeow)

@thomasfuchs @autumn

Yeah, I've seen some good options in smaller trailers

Some of 'em have these wild fold-out engineering now -- it's like you pull a cord and *pop* it's a three-story house 😂

@thomasfuchs @autumn

(Though I've always been a bit dubious about how durable are those fold-in/fold-out units)

@autumn @thomasfuchs

Yep yep -- I know plenty of folks who'd prefer alternatives that are lighter yet highly capable

If a European firm ever produced a left-hand-drive version of those trucks, I bet they'd find a decent, and possibly significant, market in the US

As a rough parallel, consider all the smaller US towns that are permitting golf-carts to be driven around -- residents seem to enjoy having a small lightweight alternative for errands

@autumn @thomasfuchs

That golf-cart trend has its own problems, mind you; in a collision with a regular car, it's terribly dangerous to be in a golf cart

But the *demand* for vehicles that are smaller and lighter, in so many towns -- I encountered tons of them while riding across the country this year -- is damn interesting

@thomasfuchs

Yeah, I take your point about towing

I would hazard a guess, though, that a rather small proportion of these ginormous trucks on the road are doing much towing

I could be wrong! But that'd be my guess

People tend to buy vehicles based on an imaginary maximum spec (I'll be offroading a lot, etc) that they never use

I repeat this anecdote a lot so forgive me if you've heard it, but ...

... my Ukrainian-Canadian grandfather ran his dairy farm using a 1960s-era truck ...

... which was by today's standards *tiny*: Lower-slung, small cab

But!

It was *more usable* than today's monstrosities

It had a longer bed than today's trucks; being lower-slung made loading/unloading easier

Again: He ran a whole-ass farm with this vehicle; drove over rough terrain

Nobody *needs* today's bloated, paramilitary trucks

In this paper in Nature, the researchers find that essays generated by ChatGPT were rated higher for quality than human-written ones

Interesting on its face, but …

… what really drew my eye was this finding: human students are more likely to use language that conveys “speaker attitude“

I wonder how much of that is due to ChatGPT’s relatively low temperature (to minimize weird results) and/or prompting?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45644-9

(Via @jasemrau)

1/2

Can you imagine the conversations going on right now in all the startup companies that built their product on top of ChatGPT?

I don't mean to mock or belittle any of them -- some of those services are good, some are just a layer of html/css/javascript dirt on top of OpenAI

But it really shows the risks of building a company entirely on top of someone else's product

I try not to post too much meta discourse about social media, but …

… I’ve been giving Threads more of a try in the last few weeks. A lot of folks I know IRL and professionally are on there and like it

But damn, it’s just kind of … dull and predictable, compared to Mastodon

Mastodon has way more weirdos and obsessives and deep idiosyncratics

Just so much more deeply interesting over here

A bot that automatically does stock trades …

… by identifying trades being done by US politicians …

… who probably have inside (I.e. and thus basically illegal-to-act-upon) knowledge of market-moving government info …

… and doing the same trades

He’s up 20% since May 2022

https://www.threads.net/@quiverquantitative/post/CzcB-Gsgqow/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

"The Laptop That Wouldn't Die"

In a few of my blog posts on right-to-repair culture, I've mentioned my 12-year-old Thinkpad T420

It is: indestructible

My six-year-old Macbook Pro just died, so I'm using the thinkpad while I await a replacement

This Thinkpad has outlived *two* of my top of the line Macbooks

It was built when my eldest son was six ... he's now in college

And it's still going

My ode to it: https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c

Free "friend" link: https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c?sk=dc587d3647aa02107f8b447e01d095f9

Christine Dierk designs a dress made from light-diffusing panels -- using them as pixels to change the patterns on the fly

Item #1 in my "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read here online and subscribe: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-12-tyromancy-point-nemo-and-why-movie/

(Hover over that gif to watch it loop)

@tim

I think if we need one word, call it “culture” — that’s what it is!

Like I said at the end of the piece, though, the best thing is to be specific about the specific forms of culture we’re talking about

@tim

Sure, I take your point

One could avoid saying “culture” if it seems too thusly broad

But so is calling a film, a song, a book, a tweet, or a TV show “content”

Unless we’re specifically discussing the network in which these pieces of human expression reside — ie the ground and the figure, the database and the data within, in which case “content” *can* be a useful term — “content” is maddeningly vague

Trump recently posted that America's top general should be put to death ...

... and it barely registered in daily news media

This, as Brian Klaas -- a scholar of political violence -- is truly bad. It's obviously horrific to have a leading presidential candidate, and former president, so nakedly endorse violence against top government figures ...

... but what's worse is growing *numb* to that

Klaas' essay: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/trump-milley-execution-incitement-violence/675435/