The Metamorphosis of a Prime Intellect.

Everclear

Apparently: Them playing our local city square, doing a terrible performance, acting like prima donnas, and then after inviting people to come see them at the merch booth after the show, then never showing up.

I’ve watched it on YouTube, it’s pretty good. It starts “this is an impersonation of George Carlin”. Wonder if a court ruling would prevent human impersonation.

Last weekend I used https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic to copy my Spotify playlists over to YouTube Music, and the shuffle play is SOOO much nicer there! That was my primary gripe with Spotify, the shuffle play is idiotic

I had been programming C for almost a decade at that time, and was tired of working so low level. I hoped Java would get me higher level, but it didn’t work out. Eventually ended up on Python, which was fairly light weight, fast enough, but a joy to program (unlike java).

The wonderful ditto machine! Loved the smell of those copies!

Your parents weren’t worried about the math co-processor doing all your homework for you? That was the GPT-387? :-)

I’m a fairly slow reader. I figure I’ve got something like a mild dyslexia, if I read too fast the words get all jumbled up in my head. Never was diagnosed with anything when I was in school, though looking back at it now it seems odd the way I was shadow-banned from the speed reading class in High School.

So, anyway, I’m all about getting some summaries. Yes, I realize it’s really hard for writers to condense things, and sometimes the journey of a story lifts the point. So, I’m gonna use the tools to help me out.

You young fellas sit back, I’mma tell you about the time in '96 that I bought a 1GB hard drive for a thousand doll-hairs. And then later that year got 64MB of RAM for another thousand doll-hairs, and the next month the price dropped in half. I could run two java programs AT THE SAME TIME!

This was done with Claude.

Love Doctrow, but this is a loooong article. I’ve used AI to summarize it:

1. Big tech companies grew explosively due to network effects, but are now too big to govern effectively.
2. Social media platforms in particular are poorly suited to moderate billions of diverse users and are prone to failure and scandal.
3. Governments and regulators have failed to rein in big tech, often protecting companies rather than users.
4. Low switching costs mean that tech companies’ growth could rapidly reverse if people leave the platforms.
5. However, tech companies use acquisitions, lobbying, and legal threats to lock in users and block competitors.
6. Instead of trying to fix inherently flawed large platforms, we should make it easy for people to leave them.
7. If we could export networks of relationships from platforms, people would have the power to migrate based on companies’ practices.
8. Allowing people to easily leave would force platforms to respect users and address problems to retain them, or else face implosion.
9. The alternative is an endless cycle of scandal, ineffective reform, and accumulating ‘fire debt’ that eventually erupts in crisis.
10. It’s time to stop trying to perfect huge tech companies and instead give people the means to choose alternatives.

“Companies cannot unilaterally mediate the lives of hundreds of millions — or even billions — of people, speaking thousands of languages, living in hundreds of countries.The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn’t exist. We don’t need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg.”

“Rather than passing laws requiring Threads to prioritize news content, or to limit the kinds of ads the platform accepts, we could order it to turn on this Fediverse gateway and operate it such that any Threads user can leave, join any other Fediverse server, and continue to see posts from the people they follow, and who will also continue to see their posts.”

"Tech companies are even more concerned with criminalizing the things you want to do to them.

Frank Wilhoit described conservativism as “exactly one proposition”:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

This is likewise the project of corporatism. Tech platforms are urgently committed to ensuring that they can do anything they want on their platforms — and they’re even more dedicated to the proposition that you must not do anything they don’t want on their platforms."