New version of chatbot reaches level of function where it responds to all queries by making a little twisty-wrist gesture with pinched fingers and saying “But isn’t it more *complicated* than that?”
I’m open to being hired by Hollywood as a design consultant for films set on college campuses in the golden age after the laser printer but before platforms, when the social media presence of academics consisted entirely of carefully-curated office doors.
Could also be a Coffee Table Book, tbh. Should launch a kickstarter.
An absolutely mortifying read. Really classic case of what happens once a person gets successfully snagged by the initial implausible hook, and everything after is like a cascade of mutually-confirming events, right up to the end when suddenly you realize you’ve been totally conned. https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html
My book with Marion Fourcade, "The Ordinal Society”, now has a website and is available for preorder. So go click a link and put your name down for the absolute best kind of holiday present, viz, the sort that arrives next April, long after you have forgotten about it. But then you’ll have the book. It's good, I promise! A highly readable and acute analysis of technology and society! Packed with jokes!*
*In truth there are only a few jokes. But they're good.
Just picked up the newly-published Second Edition of the AWK book. Amongst other things they recently updated original awk to natively deal with both Unicode characters and CSV files. The authors are all in their 80s. Respect.
PS There are a bunch of Kernighan videos on YouTube, ranging from the classic Bell Labs Unix overview from 1982 to more recent Computerphile ones and he's just delightful in all of them.
Me planning to teach computing stuff, imagining exchanges:
— So, the file system is like a filing cabinet with an index … — What’s a filing cabinet? — And you have these files in it … — What's a file? — OK imagine a bunch of index cards th– — Wh– — Sorry, sorry. Uh, you know the wallpaper on your laptop screen? — Yes — Imagine that was a real desk. — OK. Do I have to share it? — No. You know all the documents you have on it? — Yeah — Imagine they were really on the real desk — OK? — Now,
Imagine controlling a brand whose name and associated actions have, miraculously, entered the language of everyday life in the only way that can really happen … just a purely organic process of adoption, to the point where competitors use pastiches of “your” words. The kind of thing marketers dream of but know in their hearts cannot be artificially induced. Astonishingly valuable. Now imagine you are a boneheaded narcissist billionaire with a long-term fixation on the letter ‘x'.