Sivraj and Me. Phil Gomes created a personal AI advisor using GPT Builder, with a sarcastic personality based on Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
This is brilliant. I’m going to try something like it.
Humans are a basically civilized species. We know not to go barefoot in restaurants, treat our friends’ living rooms like landfills or nap on the shoulder of our office cubicle mate. And yet, as soon as we step inside an airport or onto a plane, our manners seem to vanish. Perhaps it’s the delirium of travel or the belief that everyday rules do not apply to vacations, much like calories don’t count on holiday and foreign currencies aren’t real money. Or maybe there has never been a canon for proper passenger behavior — until now.
Amazon would rather ask its workers to humiliate themselves instead of paying living wages.
Meanwhile, founder and chair Jeff Bezos is worth $172 billion, and the company tripled its profits to $9.9B in its most recent quarter.
John Scalzi has a delightful short essay on “Die Hard," a movie that works so well because of its wonderful cast. Even small parts get their moments to shine.
And of course “Die Hard” created thousands of variations and ripoffs. My favorite “Die Hard” variation is “Paul Blart, Mall Cop.” The way I remember it (it’s been a few years), Paul Blart is a hero–and he was a hero all along: Courageous, loyal, and ingenious.
Thankfully, Scalzi spends only a little time on the question of whether DH was a Christmas movie. That was a good joke the first year it came up but enough already. Sometimes the Internet can be like a four-year-old that just wants to keep telling the same knock-knock joke over and over and over and over…..
The iPhone’s Notes App Is the Purest Reflection of Our Messy Existence.
If you want to know who someone truly is—what they eat, what books they read, what movies they watch, or how furious they get inside their own minds—you should probably check their Notes app.
Alexandra Petri: GOP baffled that ‘We Don’t Care if You Die’ is not a winning slogan
Jason Snell @jsnell@zeppelin.flights makes the case for clipboard managers—software that saves a history of what you copy to your clipboard.
I find clipboard managers to be essential. The lack of a clipboard manager on the iPad is a big reason why I find it difficult getting real work done on those tablets.
My earliest memory of using a clipboard manager was the late 1980s. 35+ years later, a clipboard manager should be standard on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. Instead, it’s a third-party add-on for the Mac and you can’t get one at all on the iPad and iPhone.
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How the NYPD defeated bodycams. “NYPD leadership were accountability’s adversaries, not its partners.”
Police control bodycams in New York—as they do in other cities, including Minneapolis (site of the George Floyd murder); Montgomery, Ala.; Memphis—and they use that control to protect murderous, brutal cops.
Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that’s exactly what will happen.
And it’s exactly what does happen.
I hate to say I told you so but Death’s hand rests on the shoulders of some of the largest Western telecom equipment cos. Steve Saunders predicts imminent shake-out in the telecom vendor market.
I bought supermarket coffee beans yesterday—and like them. My status as a coffee snob is in grave danger.
At the supermarket today I was in line at the cash register behind a rotund voluble middle-aged gentleman who chatted up not one but TWO middle-aged women, also in line. He laughed “HURH HURH HURH” with every sentence. A real John Candy “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” vibe.
I also saw another gentleman, sinewy build, with leathery skin, wearing plaid shorts, a sweatshirt, a leather tyrolean hat and a small knapsack on his back. His clothes were weathered and so was he. It was a good look.
Apple buried the setting in WatchOS 10.2 for re-activating swiping to change watchfaces. You need to go into the Settings app, and then Clock -> Swipe to Switch Watch Face. And you need to do it on the Watch itself, not in the Watch app on the phone.
My latest: Cloud cost-consciousness is having a moment. Companies are rediscovering cost awareness, which Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls a “lost art.”
What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?
As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause