“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”—Dorothy Parker
BookTokker wants books to have a list of tropes in front.. She gives “romance, love triangle” as an example.
I tried using the AirPods Pro as sleep earbuds. That didn’t work.
It started off well. I put the AirPods in my ears and tried lying down in bed to see how it felt. I’m a side-sleeper. I laid on my left side. Felt good. Right side. Felt good. Used the Dark Noise app to play background noise into the AirPods. Noise cancellation worked well enough; it muffled but did not stop sound in the room.
Then the trouble started.
The AirPods Pro have a safety mechanism to prevent you from pushing them too far into your ear. As I laid in bed on my side, the weight of my head began pushing the AirPods Pro deeper. They started to beep. That woke me up—but not fully awake. Just awake enough to move my head a bit so the beeping stopped.
This seemed to repeat dozens of times until I woke up enough to get the AirPods out of my ear. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I sat up for a bit until I got tired enough and went back to bed.
If you’re a back-sleeper or belly-sleeper, sleeping with the AirPods Pro will probably work well for you.
Have We Reached Peak AI?
Edward Zitron’s apocalyptic vision [wheresyoured.at]:
Every bit of excitement for this technology is based on the idea what it might do, which quickly becomes conflated with what it _could_do, allowing Altman – who is far more a marketing person than an engineer – to sell the dream of OpenAI based off of the least-specific promises since Mark Zuckerberg said we’d live in our Oculus headsets.
…
I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.
I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.
Things that don’t work [dynomight.net]
RIP Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge, father of the tech singularity, has died at age 79 [arstechnica.com]
I had an opportunity to talk with him several times, and always enjoyed our conversations. He was down-to-earth and liked hearing contradictory ideas, which I, as a singularity/AGI skeptic, was able to easily provide. He liked a good laugh.
Vinge invented the idea of the Singularity, though Ray Kurzweil gets credit, and the idea has long antecedents in occult beliefs. He wrote many good novels and stories, and at least one brilliant novel, “A Deepness in the Sky.” His 1981 novella “True Names” pioneered the concepts of cyberspace and virtual reality, and anticipated the 2020s practice of “doxxing.”
He was local to San Diego, and although I only ever saw him at cons, I sometimes thought about just ringing him up and seeing if he might like to get a cup of coffee.
It’s taken her 11 years, but Minnie now has me trained to let her back in the house from outside in the yard.
ME: “You are REALLY into grabbing my junk.”
HIM: “Sir, I am a urologist.”
I just activated the new, beta ActivityPub integration for my Threads account. We’ll see where this goes. I’m reluctant to commit too much to Threads because of Facebook’s deep history of making its products wonderful at first and then gradually enshittifying them over time.
Just Out There Running For Prez As A Straight Up Mob Boss [talkingpointsmemo.com] — “Trump is a sending a powerful signal that as long as you stay loyal and don’t cross him, even if it means serving jail time, you will be protected. Your loyalty counts, it’s noticed, and it’s rewarded.”