The “Memindex Method” was a 1906 precursor to the Bullet Journal, Hipster PDA, GTD and related productivity systems. It preceded Vannevar Bush’s seminal “memex” essay by nearly a half-century.
Many "ews" were said
Last night, Julie went into the pantry to get a snack. She found a pound and a half of sliced deli turkey breast that had gotten lost on the path from the supermarket to the car to the refrigerator.
This explains the unpleasant smell and flies that had been lingering inexplicably in the kitchen for weeks.
Many “ews” were said that night, and the turkey found its way out of the house and into the trash bin. Fortunately, trash pick-up was this morning.
As a pleasant surprise, the smell and flies were gone almost immediately.
Scott Dworkin: The press must cover Trump’s cognitive decline.. Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: “Trump’s “obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.”
A friend said one of my earlier posts about Trump was fat-shaming. Not sure he’s right, but I amend the word “obese” to “with an unhealthy lifestyle.”
Articles I read over lunch today on Fierce Network: Brightspeed’s multi-billion-dollar cash infusion, US and Sweden team on 6G, and Huawei looks to beat Nvidia chips
Brightspeed gets a whopping $3.7 billion to build fiber networks. Linda Hardesty breaks the news.
The US and Sweden are teaming up to develop 6G technology. By Dan Jones
Natural gas companies want to power artificial intelligence. Nuclear power won’t arrive fast enough. By Diana Goovaerts.
Investors are pouring money into hardware to secure sufficient compute power for AI. By Diana Goovaerts
Huawei is developing a new chip to challenge Nvidia and surmount US sanctions
Alert readers will note that last article is not from Fierce Network.
ChatGPT updated to new model based on user feedback — Release notes? OpenAI has heard of them.
Donald Trump is a 77-year-old obese man who is clearly losing his mental faculties. He can’t even remember who he’s running against half the time or remember her name even when he does. What happens when his decline is obvious even to his supporters? Or if he drops dead? What if that happens before Election Day?
An enjoyable, informative but unsatisfying read. Bouie concludes that the party will still be Trump’s as long as he wants it.
Andy Borowitz: Trump and Musk Share Tips on Running Companies into Ground
Trump is starting to give off “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” vibes. via
Trump is accelerating AI-driven truth decay
Ina Fried at Axios AI+: AI’s biggest danger isn’t that it can be used to make up lies — human beings are already great at lying. It’s that bad people can claim that inconvenient facts are AI-generated deepfakes.
Many people saw big crowds at Harris rallies, but Trump claims the photos and videos were manufactured by AI.
Warnings about the danger of deepfakes have helped arm the public against an expected flood of fakery.
- But they’ve also unavoidably made it possible to question the trustworthiness of any evidence you don’t like.
- The next time a recording surfaces of some private event where a politician said something damaging, it will be that much easier to deny it.
Some Jan. 6 defendants tried to argue that photos showing them attacking the U.S. Capitol were AI-generated fakes, invoking what a recent American Bar Association article calls “the deepfake defense.”
- “The growing use of AI-generated false and misleading information is exacerbating the challenge of the so-called liar’s dividend, in which widespread wariness of falsehoods on a given topic can muddy the waters to the extent that people disbelieve true statements,” a Freedom House report last year argued.
…
- A world in which nobody trusts anything is one where autocratic leaders can easily mobilize hate and invent their own realities.
The bottom line: As Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” puts it, “What authoritarians do is they say, ‘Look, there’s no truth at all. Sure you don’t trust me – but don’t trust them, or them, or certainly not the media. Don’t trust anybody.'”
- “And so just stay on your couch, basically … just do nothing. Affect a pose of cynicism. Be equally skeptical about everything.”
An appreciation for the under-appreciated, brilliant sci-fi writer John Varley.
Timothy Sandefur at Discourse Magazine:
It was 50 years ago this month that American science fiction writer John Varley – who celebrates his 77th birthday today–published his first short story. It sparked a rapid rise that brought him the praise of the genre’s most prominent figures, along with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (the science fiction equivalent of the Pulitzer). Isaac Asimov was among the many who called him the natural successor to Robert A. Heinlein.
Yet despite the immense admiration Varley has enjoyed both within the science fiction community and without (Tom Clancy called him “the best writer in America”), he has never gained the following that Asimov or Heinlein enjoyed. That’s a shame because his unique blend of imagination and realism–and his underlying belief that freedom is essential to the human personality–make him one of the finest authors ever to set his fiction in the future….
Varley moved to San Francisco as a young man, and the “hippie element” plays an important role in his fiction, “not (or not usually) in the sense of ‘tune in, turn on, drop out,’ but of rebellion, self-reliance, hard work and creativity that remain underappreciated elements of the ’60s counterculture.”
Contrary to the popular stereotype of hippies as drugged-out, unemployed hitchhikers, many members of the Woodstock generation (Varley attended Woodstock, by accident, after getting stuck in the traffic jam while driving through New York) put a heavy emphasis on manual trades, intellectual innovation and self-improvement. Many members of the counterculture weren’t anti-capitalist per se, but were committed to what historian David Farber calls “right livelihood”: that is, a life of genuineness not offered by what they called “the Establishment.”
Disappointing: Confess, Fletch director Greg Mottola says the series “curse” got him and no sequel is currently planned. I very much enjoyed the Jon Hamm movie that came out two years ago and would gladly have watched a sequel every year for the rest of my life.
Ericsson is working with partners to supply private 4G and 5G networks to US rural electrical cooperatives “of all sizes and service terrains.” My colleague Dan Jones reports on Fierce Network.
“Peggy Sue Got Married” for 2024. I like it.
For a research report, I’m looking for companies outside the tech industry that are doing interesting work with artificial intelligence. If that’s you, or if you have any leads, email me at mwagner@questex.com.