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Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

Artsy photo of a pink toy pickup truck converted to a planter, on a house's front porch.

Benj Edwards at Ars Technica analyzes Anthropic’s announcement of the latest version of its Claude AI, which for the first time beats GPT-4 on benchmarks and demonstrates “near-human” capabilities in some areas (or so Anthropic says).

Benchmarks don’t necessarily show how effective the tool is, Edwards notes.

Also:

It’s probably true that Opus is “near-human” on some specific benchmarks, but that doesn’t mean that Opus is a general intelligence like a human (consider that pocket calculators are superhuman at math).

I used Google to find a PDF of the movie “Love, Actually.” I fed the URL to ChatGPT and told it to create a poster. It said it can’t access documents on the Internet—even though it had done so a few minutes earlier. I uploaded the PDF and tried again. It gave me a text description of the poster. I told it to create the poster and it did.

Lazy robot!

I used Google to find a PDF of the screenplay of “Die Hard.” I fed the URL to ChatGPT, with the prompt, “Here’s the screenplay for a movie titled ‘Die Hard.’ Create a poster for this movie.”

I asked ChatGPT to create a poster to promote the TV show “M*A*S*H.”

City leaders in Escondido reject “Housing First” policies for homelessness because they say homeless people need addiction and mental health treatments first.

“Homelessness is a complex problem that requires complex solutions,” San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond said.

I’m skeptical. Are most homeless people mentally ill? Or is the problem caused by housing being too expensive and scarce?

And even if many mentally ill people are addicted and/or mentally ill, to what extent is homelessness driving that problem? Living on the streets could drive anybody nuts, and make them turn to alcohol and drugs to get through their lives. And it seems ridiculous to ask someone to get sober and sane while they’re living on the streets.

Inside me are two wolves.

One wants only the finest coffee, ground just before brewing from the finest beans roasted delicately within the past two weeks from a local microroaster.

The other wolf will drink anything that’s brown and hot and has caffeine.

I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the book “Cities in Flight” by James Blish. ChatGPT responded with the illustration, and the text:

Here’s the illustration for “Cities in Flight” by James Blish, capturing a futuristic city lifting off from Earth’s surface, enclosed in a transparent, dome-like force field, transitioning from the planet to space.

That’s an accurate description of the premise of the world Blish created: A force field called a “spindizzy” enables whole cities to lift off the Earth and fly around as spaceships.

I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the novel “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet,” by Becky Chambers.

I asked ChatGPT to create a cover illustration for the novel “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” by Michael Chabon.

I asked ChatGPT to create a cover illustration for the novel “The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet,” by Becky Chambers.

We watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the 2011 movie starring Andy Serkis as a motion-capture chimpanzee. We expected to enjoy it of course – why else would we have decided to watch it? – but It was better and had more heart than we expected.

Seen on a Techmeme headline: Threads is planning to open a developer API in June. I’m happy to hear that—less cut-and-pasting for me! @manton

Facebook is my favorite social network. It is also the one I hate most, and consider quitting several times a month.

Terry Pratchett doesn’t work for me because he writes loving parody of a genre I don’t read.

Julie started drinking coffee again regularly, and I’m drinking more. The Aeropress is getting to be too much hassle.

I ordered a drip of coffee machine. It arrives this afternoon.

This seems like more of a big deal than it actually is. It’s weird how little things become attached to our identities.

The Shirky Principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution.

Examples: Tax preparers that lobby against laws to simplify tax filing, private prisons that lobby to support increased incarceration, a bus company suing a carpooling service, an employee resisting attempts to automate their work.

Also, British colonial officials in India set a bounty on dead cobras to reduce their population, only to find that people were breeding cobras to collect the bounty. In 1902, in Vietnam, French colonial rulers set a bounty on rat tails—figuring people would kill the rats to cut off their tails. Instead, people captured rats, cut off their tails, and set the rats free to breed more rats. Later officials found that people were raising rats to collect the bounty.

I thought I had invented the Shirky principle because I couldn’t remember hearing or reading about it anywhere else.

Josh Marshall: The Republican effort to impeach Biden was a Russian operation.

Press Watch:

… the ludicrous Republican impeachment investigation has now been exposed as a Russian intelligence op. This, even as Republicans do Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by blocking support for Ukraine and only a few short years after Trump aides welcomed Russian moves to help the Trump campaign in 2016.

David Roberts:

The entire Biden impeachment effort was built around a guy who was peddling Russian disinformation. This seems like significant news, unless … [finger to ear] … never mind, I’m being told Biden is still old.

I’d like for micro.blog to become a Mastodon superset, supporting the important features of Mastodon—including likes, boosts and compatibility with Mastodon clients like Ice Cubes. I would cancel my Mastodon account and use micro.blog to participate in Mastodon and the Fediverse. @manton

The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast does a delightful episode on industrial musicals.

For more than three decades, it was common for American companies to put on “industrial musicals” for their employees. These elaborate productions could rival Broadway shows, and featured original songs about the company and its products. And while this music was never intended for the general public, once you hear it for yourself, you might just get hooked. This is a story about bathroom remodeling, corporate art, and one man’s obsession with a forgotten corner of pop culture. Featuring comedy writer and collector Steve Young

Young discovered industrial musicals in the 1980s when he was a writer for the David Letterman Show. Letterman did an occasional segment where he showed the viewers the covers of weird old record albums, read the title and made a snarky comment about each. Part of Young’s job was to scour old record stores and look for those records. Of course, industrial musicals were ideal for the show.

Young started out mocking the records and productions behind them, but he came to enjoy them noncritically.

I feel the same way about the 70s kitsch and 50s recipes I sometimes post. I started out mocking them, but over time I just came to enjoy it. Midcentury was a courageous, experimental and playful time. We’re more cautious and beige today.

Young says this about people who produced the industrial musicals:

There were so many that said, “We only have one setting: Use all our talent and make it as great as it can be, even if it’s a lawnmower show that’s going to be heard once at 8 am in a hotel ballroom. Because that’s just the reason they got into this world of work, because they enjoyed making things great.

That’s how I try to approach my work as well. I know if I’m writing a whitepaper, case study or guest article that what I’m writing is not literature. But I try to approach it as if I were writing the Great American Novel.

Treat your work as if it matters and it will matter.

Also: I was peripherally involved in the production of an industrial musical in the very early 1990s. It was a production for the computer trade publication I wrote for at the time, Open Systems Today. The writer/director/producer was my friend and then-boss, Evan Schuman, whose day job was as news editor of the publication. The whole experience was a blast—great fun, though I didn’t have much to do with it myself, I just served as a sounding board for Evan for his ideas and helped out a bit backstage during the production.

I did a little blog maintenance yesterday: streamlined the header to mitchw.blog, updating the about page and the my favorite posts page, adding a page on where to find me on social media and deleting several pages nobody was looking at.

I’m trying to make mitchw.blog into my home page (remember “home pages,” kids?) along with mitchwagner.com, which looks terrible and is badly in need of updating.

Micro.blog, the excellent service that hosts this blog, recently made it relatively easy to redirect mitchwagner.com to a single-page website hosted on micro.blog. The keyword here is relatively; I have ten thumbs when it comes to anything having to do with configuring DNS and domains. The mitchwagner.com domain is the domain I use for all my email—professional and personal—so I’m waiting to make the change to that domain until I have time to back out if I botch it.

I love that Pat Gelsinger’s plan for turning Intel around is to make things. He’s not turning to financial mumbo-jumbo, Web3, crypto, advertising, sprinkling AI magic dust and the other nonsense that Silicon Valley and Wall Street dudebros do when they want to grift the last nickel from a dying business.

Gelsinger’s idea is let’s make things! like Americans used to do!

I interviewed Gelsinger a couple of times when he was at VMware, and followed VMware closely during his tenure. He impressed me.

I’m always surprised to hear about companies still using faxes. Bring back pneumatic tubes!

App review: Map routes with your finger using Footpath

The Footpath app makes it easy for you to plan a route for walking, running, biking or driving, and then follow turn-by-turn directions when you’re out and about. I’ve been using the app several times a month for a few years while taking the dog out for her daily 3.2-mile walk. Footpath helps me vary my route and lets me explore the streets of my neighborhood.

I have plenty of useful iPhone apps. Footpath is the app that brings me the most happiness.

Footpath supports iPhones and Android phones. You can also use it on the Web and iPad, but the phone is the best experience..

When you open the app, Footpath presents you with a map showing your current location. Tap with your finger to set a starting point.

Then tap again to the next point on your route. Footpath prompts you whether you want to walk, bike or drive.

Footpath connects the two points, snapping the route to follow roads and trails on the map. Or you can disable snapping and just map straight lines from point to point.

From there, you tap the next point on your route, then the next and so on until you’re done. Footpath shows you the distance as you go. When you want to get back to your starting point, Footpath presents you with the choice to loop back—in which case Footpath offers you the shortest route—or “out-and-back,” to retrace your path. I like to use the loop option, which often gives me a different route on my return.

You can preview the elevation along your route. I like to do that when planning my route, to check to see if the route is relatively flat, or if it takes me on a steep climb.

Here’s a different route—a steeper climb. The red bits on the line are the steepest.

Footpath doesn’t just know about streets and roads. It also knows about, well, footpaths, even “desire paths”—unofficial paths made by people walking across vacant land between one road and another.

Footpath gives you the option to open the starting point of a route in Apple Maps or Google Maps. I usually drive a few minutes to the starting point of my walk, so it’s useful to be able to easily map a driving route.1

When you’re walking, Footpath will give you audible turn-by-turn directions—that’s a premium feature, for paid subscribers. Footpath plays nice with my podcast app (Overcast), the Audible audiobook player and Spotify; when giving directions from Footpath, the podcast, audiobook or music playback pauses and then resumes when done. You can check turn-by-turn directions and a route map on your screen as you go.

Turn-by-turn directions inside the app

Turn-by-turn directions on the phone lockscreen.

Footpath has an Apple Watch companion app, which I’ve set to tap my wrist diffidently and silently when it’s time to turn again. The Watch app itself is not as easy to read as the phone app, so I mostly just use the Watch app when I am already familiar with the route and just need a couple of reminders about when and where to turn.

Footpath gives you the option to view several different types of maps. I use “Mapbox Streets,” which resembles the default Apple Maps or Google Maps view. Sometimes I use the satellite maps view when planning out a new route, which will show me if there are sidewalks all along the way, for safety. I’m OK walking along the shoulder if I’m alone, but I’m concerned about the dog getting hit by a car.

There are topographical maps, too, to show elevation—this sounds great in theory, but I am not skilled in reading those, so instead, I just map out the view with my finger and then view the elevation.

Footpath is a freemium app. The free version gets you capabilities including tap-to-map and saving up to five routes. The Footpath Elite subscription gives you cue sheets to tell you where to turn, turn-by-turn audio directions, unlimited saved routes, and more. Here’s more information about plans. The subscription is priced at $4/month or $24/year. I pay for an annual subscription.

Footpath works in conjunction with the Workouts app on the Apple Watch. I use both together—Footpath to map my route, and Workouts to record the walk.

Footpath isn’t perfect. The home screen is confusing. Even after using the app for years, I get confused as to how to find a saved route, for example.

I have never been able to figure out how to edit existing routes with Footpath, even though that’s a supported feature.

Routes mapped and saved on the iPad don’t reliably sync to the iPhone.

The controls for manually playing your next prompt are the same controls for pausing a podcast, so when someone stops me on my walk and I pause my podcast to chat, Footpath starts talking with me and I look like an idiot waiting for it to shut up.

Despite a few hiccups, Footpath is a great, user-friendly tool for people looking to inject variety and exploration into their walks, runs, bikes or drives. Footpath does the job when the journey is more important than the destination.

  1. The dog loves it when I park the car when we’re driving together because she’s sure that means a walk is going to begin. I feel like a fink when we’re actually going to the vet. ↩︎

There is a road called Princess View Drive near our house that I have driven on many times, but I have never seen a princess.

The American Nazis (the organization formerly known as Republicans) aren’t coming for Jews—now. They say they love Jews.

They’re coming for migrants and LGBTQ people. They’re turning women into breeding cows.

But they will come for the Jews soon enough. We will not have to wait long.

“AI search is a doomsday cult…. Does anyone even want an AI search engine?”

when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs – fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says AI search is worse than conventional search and could potentially kill the web. AI search feeds on existing blogs, articles and other websites, while removing incentives for people to create those things. In this scenario, generative AI is like a wild animal that kills everything in the food chain that feeds it and then starves to death.

Also, Cory notes that we gave Google a monopoly on search and Google in return was supposed to protect us from search spam, a job at which it is utterly failing. “Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve been using ChatGPT for search, and have also used the Perplexity AI search engines. They’ve been fine for quick hits; I haven’t tried either on deep research.

Google is still good for some things, but I’ve noticed it falling down in two areas: Product reviews (I go to reddit or Wirecutter for those) and how-tos, where Google serves up a half-dozen videos before it gets to the actual instructions I’m looking for.

During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and later spent years in the Partisans fighting the Nazis) and I were walking toward a restaurant, and he expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”

— Dave Pell, NextDraft

When I was a boy attending Hebrew school, the Holocaust was living memory for the adults teaching us. They told us: “You think of yourselves as Americans first. That’s exactly how German Jews thought of themselves in the early 1930s.” I think about that more and more lately.

Cory’s Pluralistic blog turns four. Here, he talks once again about his Memex Method of taking notes in public. I have never been able to make that work for me, though I’ve tried. pluralistic.net

Alabama’s supreme court rules frozen embryos are ‘children’ theguardian.com

In a decision using flagrantly unconstitutional religious language, the court allows two wrongful death lawsuits to proceed against a fertility clinic.

Haley’s plan to unite the United States: pardon Trump. “It is unclear why or how Haley thinks this move would bring the American people together unless the together she speaks of is a civil war.” boingboing.net

My five-year-old Mac wheezes to a halt if I have more than a few Safari tabs open, but I recently switched to the Vivaldi browser, and now I have 93 open tabs. So, um, yay?

An in-depth explainer why the New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, which the AI community says would be catastrophic. arstechnica.com

We watched the first episode of “Resident Alien,” about an extraterrestrial who assumes the identity of a doctor in a Colorado small town where people are colorful. “Northern Exposure” meets “Starman.” The show stars Alan Tudyk, who played Wash in “Firefly.” Pretty good. I’ll give it another try.

Before the IBM PC, There Was the TRS-80

Radio Shack, known for its DIY kits and gear, unveiled this low-cost computer in 1977 in a bid to capture the fledgling PC market.

I had forgotten that the consumer PC revolution started in the mid-late 1970s, even though I was a teen-ager then and aware of what was going on. I think of it as a mid-80s phenomenon.

Trust Between Southeastern San Diego Flood Survivors and Local Government Is Dead

Flooded residents of the Southcrest, Shelltown and Mountain View neighborhoods of San Diego say they’ve been abandoned by the city and county and some say politicians are trying to drive them out to inflate real estate prices.

Will Huntsberry at the Voice of San Diego:

The flood waters have receded, but in these southeastern San Diego neighborhoods a crisis of trust is now ripping through the streets. From block to block the narrative is the same: City officials knew for years the flood canals were clogged and did nothing to clean them. After the floods, city leaders didn’t jump into action to provide relief; it was neighbors and homegrown nonprofits.

The residents of these historically Black and Latino neighborhoods can draw but two conclusions. At best, city leaders don’t care if they are forced from their homes. At worst, city leaders want them gone.

…

In other words, city leaders purposefully allowed Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View to flood, so that other people could take the land.

City officials, of course, have offered many explanations for why they never cleaned Chollas Creek. The amount of money for stormwater improvement is dangerously low. Certain environmental regulations were hard to get around. They have also said the amount of rain was so severe that cleaning the canals would not have stopped the floods. But none of this has resonated with the flood survivors. Would so many calls for a channel to be cleaned have gone unanswered in La Jolla they wonder?

Now, they are all forced to watch as the fabric of their community is torn apart.

Jessica Calix adored her neighbors in Southcrest. She rented a two-bedroom for $1,650 per month — unheard of in today’s rental market. Now, she’s stuck in a motel, searching for a new place. She can barely find a studio apartment in the same price range.

That’s bad for her and other renters, Calix said. But it’s good for landlords.

“Landlords will clean their places up and rent them for an extra thousand dollars or more now,” Calix said.

Roughly 70 percent of people in Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View are renters, according to US Census data.

And it’s not just renters being pushed out, according to the rumors going around. Stories of cheap cash offers for waterlogged houses are also making the rounds.

Rain and possible flooding is forecast to start again in a few hours and continue two days.

The season finale of “All Creatures Great and Small” was satisfactory. Drunk Carmody is my role model.

Ezra Klein: Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden. Biden is a great President, but he’s running a lousy re-election campaign. Polling shows him losing to Trump. The solution, says Klein, is for Biden’s closest advisors—people like Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer—to convince Biden to stand aside and not seek re-election, and then to choose a new candidate at the convention.

The New York Times explains the controversy around the 2023 Hugo Awards, hosted by China

Alexandra Alter:

The Hugo Awards, a major literary prize for science fiction, have been engulfed in controversy over revelations that some writers may have been excluded based on their perceived criticism of China or the Chinese government.

Suspicions in the science fiction community have been building for weeks that something was amiss with last year’s awards, which rotate to a different city each year, and in 2023 were hosted in Chengdu, China. Now, newly released emails show that the awards were likely manipulated because of political concerns.

Also:

“The Hugo Awards tried so hard to appease the Chinese government they circled back to being racist by preemptively disqualifying Chinese diaspora,” Xiran Jay Zhao wrote on X.

Chuck Mawhinney, a Camp Pendleton Marine who became the deadliest sniper in corps history, dies at 75.

The Marine Corps credited Mawhinney with 103 kills as well as 216 ‘probable’ kills that could not be confirmed because of the dangerous conditions in which the shootings happened…. The Oregon native recorded all of the kills before he turned 20….. Serving as a sniper “was the ultimate hunting trip: a man hunting another man who was hunting me,” Mawhinney told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “Don’t talk to me about hunting lions or elephants; they don’t fight back with rifles and scopes. I just loved it.”

Today’s memes: This is love

Superman II (1980) featured some ground breaking special effects, in particular the battle between Superman and the supervillains General Zod, Ursa and Non and here is special effects designer Derek Meddings (1931-1995) on the model “battle” set of Superman II. For his work on Superman (1978), he was awarded a shared Special Achievement Award for special effects by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and shared the Michael Balcon Award of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). He was also nominated for the 1980 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Moonraker (1979), for the 1990 BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects for Batman (1989), and posthumously for a 1996 BAFTA Award for Best Achievement (in special effects) for GoldenEye (1995). via

Facebook just sent me notices that it removed two of my posts for violating its rules. It won’t show me what those posts are so I don’t know how I violated the rules, therefore I can’t modify my behavior to be more in line with Facebook terms of service.

Joey deVilla:

If you’ve been laid off – and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time – you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.

Upper management makes bad decisions, and employees face the consequences:

The decision-makers at companies making these layoffs sound like Lord Farquaad from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

Bose introduced pricy open-air earbuds that sit on your ears, rather than in them. Bose is touting the devices as being comfortable enough to wear all day.

I already find my AirPods to be comfortable enough to wear all day. But I don’t because it would be weird, battery life isn’t up to all-day use and I can’t think of a reason why I would want to do that.

After much practice, I am now expert at photographing my own left ear. I do not expect this skill to be useful.

Antisemitic callers overwhelmed a La Mesa City Council meeting with hate speech. timesofsandiego.com. I am a Jewish person who has lived more than 25 years in La Mesa, a suburb of San Diego, California. This is terrorism.

UPDATE: I edited this post to remove criticism of the City Council. I have no reason to believe they behaved inappropriately.

‘A Black Thing.’ Fani Willis’s father explains why his daughter keeps cash: John Clifford Floyd III, attorney and former Black Panther, says that when he was younger, Black Americans couldn’t count on white-owned businesses accepting credit cards from them. And so he taught his daughter to always keep six months' cash on hand. crooksandliars.com

"Stinge-watching" vs. binge-watching

“Stinge watching” is the opposite of binge watching, says Jason Kottke—when you love a show so much that you stingily portion it out, postponing watching episodes to extend the pleasure.

We sometimes binge-watch, but not often. Generally, we watch 45 minutes to an hour of episodic TV every night. Sometimes a movie on weekends—and I like it better when movies are under 1 hour and 45 minutes. I feel like that’s the amount of time I want to spend watching TV. And yes that does have the beneficial side-effect of extending the pleasure of a good show.

We recently raced through the show “Funny Woman,” because it was so engaging. We watched three 45-minute episodes one night and two another. Does that count as binge-watching?

I went out to walk the dog the other day and discovered I’d forgotten to charge my AirPods. I found wired earbuds in a box near my desk, where they’d been unused and unopened for five years since I got them as a free giveaway. They worked fine. This is why nothing ever gets thrown out in our house.

I’ve been hearing about the Perplexity search engine, a competitor to Google. www.perplexity.ai I tried it yesterday and it’s really quite good. It’s like ChatGPT with links to sources. Those links are important because the inaccuracy problem with Perplexity is bad, like any other generative AI.

When I’m using Wikipedia for serious research, I fact-check by looking for the blue footnote links and following those to the source articles. Perplexity seems to work the same way, although Perplexity—like all conversational AI—is significantly less accurate than Wikipedia.

Play this video when you want to pretend to be busy so people will leave you alone. Say “yeah” at the three-minute mark.

Enterprise leaders swing between confidence and sleepless terror over AI.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) vies with fear of messing up (FOMU).

Enterprise leaders say they’re well along in their AI implementations and ready for more, but they’re also afraid of falling behind competitors, according to a study by Juniper Networks and Wakefield Research. These leaders are also concerned that employees within their organizations are out of control in their AI use.

My latest on Silverlinings.

Are there not-too-expensive alternatives to Grammarly? I’m starting to get fed up with it.

I began using Grammarly a year ago and loved it for most of that time, but it generates so many false positives that grinding through them can be a chore. I accept only about 30% of the suggestions it makes.

Also, the little helper chiclet that it puts on-screen gets in the way far too often. It is a horrible, horrible user interface and it drives me crazy.

I saw this extremely handsome pig in the front yard of a house in the neighborhood.

Young people may find this hard to believe, but I remember back in the old days we spent hardly any time making sure our devices were charged.

Overheard: A chain of grocery stores that specialize in donuts, bagels, Swiss cheese, Cheerios and Lifesavers. It would be called Hole Foods.

I don’t know why the new generation of productivity apps hates folders, but I’m sure enshittification has something to do with it.

I have rediscovered the “hide” command in Apple Photos. It’s great if you want to get photos out of sight but do not want to commit to deleting them. I’d forgotten about that command for years.

A mob set a Waymo self-driving car on fire over the weekend. arstechnica.com

Videos of the incident are all over social media. … In one video, a crowd of people surround the car, preventing it from moving. The vehicle is already covered in graffiti and has several smashed windows. One person then throws a lit firework into the cabin; the firework explodes and a fire starts inside the car. The Waymo car then burns to a crisp while it helplessly flashes its hazard lights.