ChatGPT is bringing back 4o as an option because people missed it. People said ChatGPT 4o was their only friend. www.theverge.com/news/7569…
Masked government-employed thugs harassed and threatened a couple of American citizens for the crime of being brown while driving around looking for places they might want to go camping sometime. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…
The couple, George and Esmeralda Doilez, voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, and say they are surprised by his extremism.
AI Is Here, and a Quiet Havoc Has Begun. Everyone knows artificial intelligence will destroy a lot of jobs. But not how soon it is going to happen. By Peggy Noonan. www.wsj.com/opinion/a…
Will AI destroy jobs? Automation, in the past, has created more demand for knowledge work. Spreadsheets increased demand for accounting, even though much of the work accountants did was automated away.
Also, we don’t know whether AI can actually do these jobs that are being replaced. All we know is that people doing the hiring are panicking. Like Cory Doctorow says: AI doesn’t threaten your job. Your job is threatened by your idiot manager who thinks AI can do your job.
I am repulsed by AI chatbots' attempts to emulate human behavior, and have all of that switched off in my ChatGPT customization.
Maybe one day we’ll achieve AGI or artificial superintelligence, but I see no reason to believe it’s coming anytime within the next 25 years or so. I view these ideas the way I view other ideas I first encountered in science fiction, like contact with alien intelligence or time travel. Could these things happen? Most definitely. Yes. Absolutely. But we have no reason to believe they will happen anytime soon, or ever.
Meanwhile, I use ChatGPT to suggest passphrases, synonyms, do currency conversions, and suggest article descriptions, headlines, transitions, introductions and conclusions to reports, and do first drafts of the occasional LinkedIn post and business email. And more. I am very happy to do so.
But ChatGPT is not my friend and it’s certainly not my lover.
Dave Winer on ChatGPT5:
The big lie is that they want you to believe this is human. This is a carnival stand imitation of a human. It may be that it’s getting worse, or it’s always been this way and I’m seeing more clearly. It was and is still a miracle, but nothing like what was in the science fiction books.
Dave uses ChatGPT in ways very similar to how I do. He makes heavy use of it, but does not personify it.
Mitchellaneous Vol. CVII: Eighteen things I saw on the Internet
“Female railroad workers employed during wartime eat in the break room of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad in Clinton, Iowa.” Photographed by Jack Delano in June 1943. www.tumblr.com/allhailth…
A newspaper man after US President Franklin D. Roosevelt died - Photo taken by a young Stanley Kubrick, which started his career at Look magazine. (April 1945) reddit.com/r/History…_newspaper_man_after_us_president_franklin_d
“When you think you’re the coolest guy in the parking lot and then this guy shows up.”
The Grooms Smashing Wedding Cake in Their Brides’ Faces. “I was thinking, ‘We are going to be together forever. But I’m not going to be happy.’” www.thecut.com/article/g…
This is why wireless is so weird right now. www.fierce-network.com/wireless/…
Is “A Candle in the Wind” or “Highway to Hell” more emblematic of the state of wireless in the aftermath of T-Mobile’s US Cellular acquisition? My colleague Monica Alleven assesses the state of things on Fierce Network.
Unfortunately, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil still holds up, 40 years after its release. “Wildly inventive at every turn, Gilliam’s satirical vision of a cruel and violent bureaucracy rings eerily true of this political moment.” www.theverge.com/film/7193…
The U.S. Air Force will deny retirement pay to transgender service members being separated from the service. This is a disgraceful betrayal of people who pledged their lives to serve their fellow citizens. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…
Dear Leader did not do military service. He had bone spurs.
Harvard is laying off young researchers and shelving years and decades of work after the U.S. government’s stupid decision to cut funding for research into cures for multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases, opioid addiction, cancer, and other afflictions. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…
But the White House is getting a $200 million ballroom to celebrate glorious Dear Leader.
‘Personality engineering’ puts a human face on telco AI agents. www.fierce-network.com/cloud/per…
My latest on Fierce Network. Amdocs is working with Nvidia on customizing AI customer service agents with human-like characteristics — they have faces and talk — to ensure they effectively represent telco brands. Trials delivered a remarkable 63% reduction in call handling time and a 50% uplift in first-call resolution and customer satisfaction. But AI agents may be facing backlash from consumers.
Mitchellaneous Vol. CVI: Twelve things I saw on the Internet
A dancer at a recent Powwow at Rocky Boy’s Agency on the High Plains in Montana. hachyderm.io/@elaterit…
Volkswagen Beetle 1959 www.tumblr.com/jimstares…
Which jobs can be replaced with AI? Jobs that have already been degraded to the point of uselessness. pluralistic.net/2025/08/0…
If you oppose the State of Israel, this post is not for you. coreyrobin.com/2025/08/0…
This quote in particular strikes close to home for me: “The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this.”
Links and ephemera Wednesday 8.6.2025
✪ Americans say no as terrified ICE agents flee from angry citizens. www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…
✪ The Camp Snap CS-8 is a $149 digital video camera that looks and works like a Super-8 movie camera from 1970 or so. My Dad had one like this one and I used it like crazy on a family vacation. I loved it. www.theverge.com/news/7191…
✪ As BEAD becomes uncertain, the fiber industry is pivoting to AI, providing connectivity between hyperscaler data centers. My colleague Linda Hardesty reports at Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/broadband…
✪ A Denmark zoo asks people to donate small pets as food for captive predators. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…
✪ The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away. By Thomas L. Friedman. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/0…
✪ Is progress humanity’s greatest myth? www.theguardian.com/books/202…
Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days, the US has a Gini coefficient – the most common international measurement of inequality – on a par with slave-owning Ancient Rome. Maternal mortality rates for American millennials are three times higher than those of their parents’ generation – and this in the world’s richest society.
Global life expectancy is falling. So, too, are food standards. Outside a few bourgeois sourdough enclaves, real bread has vanished. In its place we get mass-produced, spongy, tasteless “pseudo-bread” – as Guy Debord lamented in The Encyclopedia of Nuisances. In an earlier age, there would have been bread riots. Now? Just muted indigestion.
What accounts for our complacency? False consciousness, claims McDonald in this sparky polemic against the myth of progress. We have been hoodwinked by elite propaganda. The “progress narratives” of the ruling classes assure us that history only moves forward, that we should trust the system and surrender agency to our betters.
Reviewer Pratinav Anil argues that McDonald fails to make his case.
✪ The homes of “working class Romans” from the early empire were found during a dig for a new metro station in Rome. www.theguardian.com/world/202…
✪ AGNTCY is the next big AI platform you’ve never heard of. My colleague Diana Goovaerts explains for Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/cloud/agn…
✪ The MCP factor: Telco vendors risk being left behind. MCP is a standardized protocol for applications to provide context to LLMs, introduced by Anthropic in November. It may already be too late for telco vendors to get into the game. My colleagues Dan Jones and Elizabeth Coyne provide analysis at Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/wireless/…
✪ The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mot…
The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It’s a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss.
The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it’s a necessary evil–that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.
Journalist Adam Bonica argues that a single company, Mothership, is behind all those spams, raising $678 million from individual donors. The company only sends about 1.6% of funds raised to candidates.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns.
Megumi Odaka behind the scenes of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)
My sartorial and journalistic idol
Tim Curry photographed for After Dark Magazine, March 1975
Do I need a permit?
Neuromancer by William Gibson, 1986. Cover art by Barclay Shaw. www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…
Minnie is a medium-sized dog, which means even though she isn’t that great on the leash, it’s OK because I can muscle her into line if she engages in undesirable behavior. I am sure this is not an option when you are a normal-sized woman walking two weimeraners. Even if one of the weimeraners only has three legs.
Our next-door neighbor adopted a three-legged dog, and I saw her walking both of her dogs this morning, and that’s nine legs total. 15 if you count me and Minnie. Both neighbor dogs are Weimeraners, and our neighbor is a normal-sized woman.
Links and ephemera Tuesday 8.5.2025
✪ LinkedIn Joins The Parade Of Cowards: Quietly Strips Anti-Trans Protections To Appease MAGA Mob www.techdirt.com/2025/08/0…
✪ The cult of the ‘Spoons’: Inside the spartan, cavernous pubs that divide Britain www.cnn.com/travel/we…
Wetherspoon pubs are an institution in the UK. They enjoy cult-like status both among admirers, lured in by real ale and “pub grub” sold at astoundingly low prices, and detractors, who see them as emblematic of everything that’s wrong with modern Britain.
More than 800 Wetherspoon chain pubs freckle the country – from The Muckle Cross in Scotland to The Tremenheere in Cornwall. In just a few decades, “Spoons” have become so ingrained into British daily life that they probably now deserve to be up there with Stonehenge on the list of UK cultural institutions.
✪ Our crisis is not loneliness but human beings becoming invisible. Too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being. aeon.co/essays/ou…
✪ A History of Crisps. Or, as we say here, potato chips. deserter.co.uk/2022/05/a…
✪ British pubs have their own set of rules. Here’s what you need to know www.cnn.com/travel/br…
✪ “What few realize is that the KKK of that decade was not like the 1870s terrorist group, it was actually a pyramid scheme based on selling robes, membership fees, and life insurance to racists. It had a PR agency. It was big business. And it fell apart in 1925 when the key leader, the “Grand Dragon” of Indiana fell in a sexual assault scandal.”
— www.tumblr.com/jimstares…
Making a giant ice treat for polar bears
For me, like hundreds of millions of men around the world, every other morning I look in the mirror and say to myself, “shit I have to shave again today.”