Photocopier No More: The Reckoning with AI Creativity Has Arrived

Two esoteric programming events bubbled up this past week. If you’re not into computer science, they may appear irrelevant to you. They’re not. The arcane managed to bring to life our pressing questions about whether AI can create or is a regurgitation machine.

Fell For It

If there is anything as embarrassing as confessing one’s sins it has to be confessing one’s stupidities.

Yet here we are. Instead of describing how well my cool new Starlink-based phone-internet setup is coming together, I’m obligated to detail how I fell for a swindle so obvious that there’s no escaping the fact that my mind must have got disengaged for a while.

At Arms Over Anthropic

Remember when everyone on the Right was rightly upset at the government censoring opinions it found distasteful? Somehow that seems forgotten in the other war of this weekend.

When You Wish Upon a Starlink

It seems that the sycamore has been granted a reprieve. For now. The great and awful tree had been destined to attain horizontality as soon as I could find someone who would do it. That was necessary to give my cool new satellite dish a clear view of the sky. The tree is still under a death sentence, but the latest and most urgent reason for sending the thing to the wood-chip pile seems not to have existed at all.

Craft, Need and the Ever Devouring AI

A few hours away from me you can visit Silver Dollar City — a scenic, wooded theme park in the Ozark Mountains where craftspeople blow glass and mill flour 19th-century style. It’s charming and memorable. It’s also not the way I buy glassware or food normally.