Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Short descriptions matter

    To me, the most important part of an email is the subject line. What it tells me factors into whether I read it immediately or get back to it later. Later might take months as I don’t really have the time to read my email. Same thing with tickets. Additionally, several times a week, someone…

  • Federated social media

    Back in April, I learned about Mastodon. I made an account, but never used it. I made another and started using it. People are leaving Twitter. Many of those to Mastodon, so I will find them. You can find me there as @ezrasf@mas.to , so connect with me. The concept is interesting. There are many…

  • Hozered Start Me Up

    So, I dug out my old laptop and found that it was very low on space. The last time I used it was before Dropbox started using the Save hard drive space feature, so it had a ton of local files that ought to be online only. I did a stupid thing and tried to…

  • The email hammer

    A retired coworker was fond of the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. A super cranky former coworker railed about the terribleness of email. Mainly that too much stuff tried to go into email when it should be better off in RSS feeds or other. My…