Ken Smith's linkblog

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 14:30:54 GMT

And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 14:23:33 GMT

I see that due to early changes to Feedland.org, necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 556405 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 549368 . . . So it goes.

Lise Meitner | Biography & Facts | Britannica

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:21:37 GMT

Yes, Britannica, you can write it this way, softening the focus, blurring the details in that decade of mounting atrocities: "Because she was Jewish, she left Nazi Germany in the summer of 1938 to settle in Sweden." It's not as though she trotted over to a travel agent on her lunch break and casually booked her travel across international borders to safety.

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 14:25:17 GMT

"All of this confirms that when Trump threatens a bloodbath he means a bloodbath." The Bloodbath Candidate - by Timothy Snyder

Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter by Tim Berners-Lee

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 12:49:18 GMT

" . . . and to overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity. It is only then that the online ecosystem we all live in will reach its full potential and provide the foundations for creativity, collaboration and compassion."

The History Press | The unique joys of Speakers’ Corner

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 14:50:01 GMT

"The incident was a perfect illustration of the difference between real public debate and the usual, carefully choreographed appearances of our elected politicians."

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 14:23:37 GMT

"We use words to try to alter the course of events, to save people from humiliation or death." –Elie Wiesel, Against Silence

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 12:16:14 GMT

He is like King Lear, who trashed everything in his family and his nation. "Self-awareness isn’t among the former president’s strong suits."

"Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself."

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 15:57:52 GMT

How far you'd need to drive to see the 2024 Total Eclipse in early April.

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 14:37:41 GMT

In 2006, @AlanRusbridger described the current threat to newspapers as a threat to society. As AI innovation undermines new industries, this will also be a composition played in two registers.

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 16:09:14 GMT

I asked the Bing AI tool just now to search the web for examples of how humorists and satirists have portrayed Henry Kissinger. It was merrily typing away joke after joke, anecdote after anecdote, and as I watched the words appear I saw that HK had just been described as lewdly using the f-word while speaking with a casual acquaintance in a social setting. Almost instantly, the whole thread vanished, replaced by this sentence: "My mistake, I can’t give a response to that right now. Let’s try a different topic."

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 15:09:03 GMT

If memory serves me: John Deere managed for many years to prevent farmers from having anyone but John Deere repair the tractors they had purchased from John Deere. And Monsanto didn't let farmers collect seeds from Monsanto-bred plants to use in their own fields next year. And Disney went to Washington to extend the copyright on Mickey Mouse. So, quick question: What new move roughly of this kind will AI technology make possible? What new kinds of enclosures and silos are probably on the horizon?

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:36:20 GMT

On non-technical topics, if you harass ChatGPT 3.5 with enough follow-up questions you can get it to put aside its glib reliance on confident exaggeration.

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 23:52:20 GMT

Extract value, and let the pieces fall where they will --that's our society's motto.

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:23:41 GMT

"Keep Loving on Local Business" -- an eloquent practical vision for supporting local businesses ON PURPOSE and building a strong local community TOO.

https://www.botanyorbust.com/news-bedford/2023/11/2/keep-loving-on-local-business

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 14:59:30 GMT

Midterm election coming up? VOTE411 will show you your ballet options if you type in your address.

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 12:14:45 GMT

ChatGPT 3.5 loves to exaggerate (an analysis).

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 11:41:55 GMT

"It would finally be a writer's web."

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 23:20:03 GMT

“Anybody who studies history learns two things: They learn to do research and they learn to write. What history will give you is the ability to pivot into the different ideas, the different fields, the different careers as they arise.”

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 13:14:15 GMT

"When and if the political depression in America lifts, this is what what it will look like."

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 15:11:05 GMT

At the play’s intermission, a person maybe a decade into retirement was walking along, talking to his companion, saying of King Lear, “That old guy is a wreck.”

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:34:26 GMT

"We can't ignore the evidence – these serious declines in wildlife species populations are an indicator that nature is unraveling and that our planet is flashing red warning signs of systems failure," wrote Marco Lambertini, Director General of World Wildlife Fund International.

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:25:05 GMT

"[Cassidy Hutchinson] writes, Mr. Meadows burned so many documents in his fireplace in the final days of the Trump presidency that his wife complained to Ms. Hutchinson about how expensive it had become to dry-clean the “bonfire” aroma from his suits."

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:16:53 GMT

"As late as 1939, London supplier Charles Roberson & Co. was unashamedly advertising mummy in its Catalogue of Artists’ Materials, where it was described as '[a] pigment prepared by grinding together the Bitumen and Bones of an Egyptian Mummy.'”

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 14:29:25 GMT

“It’s time we stop confusing quick with smart.”

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 12:38:22 GMT

When Slavery and Its Foes Thrived in Brooklyn.

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 11:27:26 GMT

7 artworks by Egon Schiele are returned to heirs of the owner killed by Nazis.

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 01:21:53 GMT

When they were feeling something they thought they were thinking. It’s a commonplace error. We all do it to some extent, but an education helps, widens the vocabulary, creates a little humility. —Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 13:27:02 GMT

“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.” ― William Carlos Williams

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 10:25:15 GMT

As a people, we say "literally" so much because we don't if anyone listening knows how to be serious about words.

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:45:02 GMT

"What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it." --Pete Townshend

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 13:24:04 GMT

Puerto Rico hopes solar project will secure a more distributed electric system for future hurricanes.

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 14:17:29 GMT

"You academics," she said, ". . ."

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 12:19:31 GMT

"We could make HTTPS disappear . . ."

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 11:55:59 GMT

The language of the Third Reich, today's language.

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 14:59:54 GMT

"The average number of heat waves in U.S. cities has increased from two to six per year since the 1960s, the Environmental Protection Agency says."

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 16:55:24 GMT

ChatGPT doesn't know its own mind.

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 13:13:09 GMT

In an excellent clip from the Sopranos TV series, a therapist tells Tony Soprano’s spouse Carmela that she’s fooling herself if she believes that she’s not helping Tony live a violent life as a Mafia gangster. She believes she’s merely living a private life, without public consequences, which the therapist blows past as a delusion or excuse. "One thing you can never say is that you haven't been told," he says. The private life is a powerful part of American mythology, the U.S. being, as we all recall, the owner and frequent user of the world’s most powerful military. (Via T.D.)

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 18:07:16 GMT

"These serious declines in wildlife species populations [indicate] that nature is unraveling and that our planet is flashing red warning signs of systems failure."

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 12:14:07 GMT

What is invention, really?

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 23:14:44 GMT

"People still think there's such a thing as an invention."

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 15:03:57 GMT

No march on Washington is going to come of today's social media tools. But remember, as someone once said, the rich march on Washington every day. They march on Washington so often that they keep permanent offices there, on K Street. The rich and powerful certainly are organized.

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 15:41:04 GMT

ChatGPT, writing style, and power.

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 12:43:10 GMT

The university institute "turned in a different direction, focusing on people who studied the internet, rather than people who made the internet," behaving as universities tend to do.

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 13:28:18 GMT

"A Secure and Lucrative One-Stop Replacement for Your Many Stupid Social Media Pages" -- discussed in the near-future sci-fi/nonfiction novel The Ministry for the Future, chapter 54.

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 20:18:41 GMT

Possibly the thought-police folks care less about banning any particular book than about cementing in place the existence of thought police.

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 18:31:07 GMT

Listening to Ross Gay read yesterday about not being in a hurry, I thought: like porch-sitting, the literary essay records one person's quest for things that can only be found while meandering in a manner discouraged or even disallowed by capitalism.

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 19:58:15 GMT

BloggerCon: The idea that almost everyone at a certain kind of focused public meeting writes publicly. (At our city council meetings, only a handful of people do, which in some ways shifts political power out of their hands.)

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:05:19 GMT

How we make many poor students pay more for college in America.

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 22:29:06 GMT

In 1993, she wrote two reviews of Le Cirque: 1. Dinner as the Unknown Diner and 2. Dinner as a Most Favored Patron.