Longform tweets, toots, and other stuff
Mastodon – Facebook – Bluesky – Threads – Tumblr – LinkedIn
-
Generative AI instead of search
About 6 months ago, I played a bit with large language models. It was interesting. The responses were like a middle school kid didn’t read the book, but tried to summarize the Cliff Notes. The past couple days, there has a been a problem in another IT area affecting my ability to do my work.…
-
Return to personal archiving
A prior habit saved so many possibly interesting things that I mostly never returned to. Think of it like instead of hundreds of open tabs, I collected thousands of items. Most recently the tool to collect them was Pocket, but I’ve abandoned huge troves of items in other bookmarking sites or apps. Evernote, Diigo, Instapaper,…
-
U.S. foreign aid & immigration
The United States uses foreign policy to save money. Wars are expensive. A single Hellfire missile costs more than my annual salary. That’s one shot. It doesn’t include the operational costs to get the missile in place to fire it. The superior firepower makes winning likely, but we don’t have a great track record of…
-
Jeff Bridges
Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met? Well, sort of. My daughter was an exploring toddler. And, perhaps running for Congress? She greeted everyone. One outing to a restaurant with outdoor seating with friends, she was antsy. She wandered as I shadowed to keep her away from dangers. Pretty typical…
-
App ad network malware
My home router’s security feature blocked some things when I was web browsing in increasing frequency. It got really bad. The AP and NBC News both experienced redirects to a page spoofing my ISP asking personal questions to give me a smartphone in the same hour. Obviously fake. Obviously a scam. Maybe phishing. These were…
-
Government shutdowns and cybersecurity
Watching the United States government hash out a budget and looming shutdown, I worry about the blackhat hackers exploiting it. Not enough of those protecting us from these threats are essential workers. Agencies I depend upon, like CISA, furlough 80% of their workforce, leaving whitehats in the dark about what they’ve detected. Their research feeds…
-
WordPress and Mastodon
Months ago, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will publish on the Mastodon network as a federated instance through the ActivityPub protocol. The blog basically becomes a server of sorts in the fediverse. That sounded cool, so I installed the plugin. This post will serve as a test to see if it works.…
-
Human hallucinations
Listened to a Marketplace Tech episode about AI backed banking chatbots. A line caught my attention.: Sometimes people characterize made-up statements as hallucinations. I think that’s giving a little too much humanity to a robot, but if you would be comfortable with a teller just fully making something up to a member of the public,…
-
Resolution progress 2022: End
I hope you like this blog. If you wish to get posts by email, subscribe below.
application Blackboard CE/Vista blackboard inc blogs Blog Software books Chief Information Officer design Education email Facebook flickr friend georgia Google information Internet member name online person Photography photos PHP port posted 2012 posted 2013 qotd reading remotepost Science search sneezy software support technology TED Talk University user interface users vehicle video WebCT web site wikipedia