The lost ancient practice of communal sleep. “Until the mid-19th Century, it was completely normal to share a bed with friends, colleagues and even total strangers. How did people cope? And why did we stop?”
Powerful and disturbing: My grandpa was a Nazi, by Bastian Allgeier.
I canceled my ChatGPT subscription. I’m just not using it enough to justify the $20/mo.
I had in mind creating my own GPT—my own individual AI assistant—but I haven’t prioritized doing so, and I don’t see that changing in the near future.
I thought that ChatGPT might make a good writing assistant. But ChatGPT’s first drafts are hopeless. It’s easier and faster for me to write from scratch.
This is not a forever decision. I expect I’ll give it another try soon enough.
Is anyone else having a problem with micro.blog posts propagating out over ActivityPub? Maybe “propagating” isn’t the right word here—I mean that when I go to mastodon.social/@mitchw@mitchw.blog, the newest post I see is from Saturday. @help
Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr):
The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It’s like these guys can’t even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that’s how you get guillotines.
Big Pharma jacks up the price on Ozempic and other powerful meds because these companies are monopolies, and they can do that. Apple pulls “a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran.” Ello, “the ‘indie’ social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users,” goes ahead and sells out its users. Also: The Trolley Problem—solved (in the same way that James Kirk solved the Kobayashi Maru).
For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything.
The program was a weird combination of email, databases, and workflow that allowed companies to stand up custom applications and deploy them to relevant groups of workers inside Notes.
Also:
… It provided not just your email, but an internal telephone directory, contact database, booking system for time off, company handbook, and more, all accessible via a single application and a single set of credentials, long before single sign-on became a thing.
Nowadays, it is common for most if not all of these functions to be delivered via separate web-based applications, each requiring a different login so you need to have dozens of different credentials, and each one sporting a different user interface. So I guess you could regard the web browser as an app runtime that is the ultimate successor to Notes?
Also:
Eventually, IBM, which had acquired Lotus in 1995, announced in 2012 that it would be discontinuing the Lotus brand altogether, before offloading Notes to Indian software outfit HCL Technologies in 2018.
The platform still survives, with HCL releasing Domino 14.0 last year, which, as The Register commented at the time, speaks to the “stickiness” of the custom workflows built on the platform.
Also:
But Notes is nowhere near holding the record for the oldest piece of software still being used. The US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), which takes care of contracts for the Department of Defense (DoD), is said to have a program called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), which was introduced in 1958, making it nearly twice as old.
A tale of two cities: one real, one virtual.
Digital city-building has become a legitimate part of urban planning, helping to mirror the present — and map the future.
“Digital twins” are transforming urban planning in Barcelona, Ukraine(!), Helsinki, and Singapore and advancing archeology in Pompeii.
A digital twin is a digital model of a real-world object, using sensors to measure changes in real time. Used in urban planning, a digital twin of the city can predict how changes will affect the city over time: For example, how adding a traffic signal would affect traffic patterns.
The goal is “‘to build an oracle,’ says Jordi Cirera Gonzalez, director of the Knowledge Society at Barcelona City Council, and a man not short on ambition. ‘Like the ancient Greeks’: a place where you can ask anything you can imagine and it’s possible to find some answer.’”
Barcelona’s digital twin project “lives within the deconsecrated Torre Girona chapel, on the campus of the Barcelona Polytechnic. Where once one might have prayed to God for an answer, now one goes to a computer.”
I wrote about digital twins for cities for Oracle in 2021: The smart city gets even smarter
Today’s ephemera: What’s all this then?
The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition.
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
For liberal, secular Israelis, Netanyahu has always been an object of scorn on a range of social and political issues, but now, across the ideological landscape, he stands accused of failing utterly on his promise of vigilance and security.
A deep and thoroughly researched article on the current state of Israel, by David Remmick at The New Yorker.
The preceding article made me curious whether Lindy was as big an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer as all that. Hell yeah, he was.