Something I read on Read Max a few months ago stuck with me. He wrote about how actually writing, or actually producing is what makes you better; what really matters is that you produce at all. I didn’t act on it at the time, but it stayed in the back of my mind, as I was thinking about (but not actually writing) my blog. The thesis of that post is essentially the rationale behind this blog, much of which I detailed here and here.
Last week, a friend and I attended PechaKucha night, which happened to be hosted by our favorite teacher. We didn’t know exactly what to expect – we had never before been – but were confident, at least, that we might be entertained for the few hours it occupied. It was great! From monologues on the “transformative power of music”, to orations on the power of reading and the danger of banning books, the passion in each of the six-minute, forty-second presentations was contagious.
Verizon is supposed to be the best, and the data supposedly backs that up. Their coverage is, in my convenience-sample1 backed estimation, the widest ranging. I’m ~never somewhere where I cannot make a call on Verizon. But I’m frequently unable to connect to the internet – on LTE! I prefer MVNOs They’re cheaper and easier to switch between, but the best plans (without considering price) are post-paid through the major carriers.
I’m a little late on this one – everyone else has already had their say. And, quite honestly, I don’t have much to add. LTT, and some of its sister channels, were hacked late last week by actor(s?) who transformed them into “Tesla” outposts, featuring Elon Musk giving away free crypto. I found the attack vector interesting – something I’m more used to hearing about on Security Now, than seeing actually happen.
Is TikTok anything more sinister than a benign waste of time? Why the outrage over TikTok? It seems that those who are outraged aren’t TikTok users, and to the extent they are, they’re sympathetic to a forced removal of their biggest time sink. Their appearance before Congress was riddled with near-incomprehensible questions and legislators thinking they were clever. The CEO was asked such ridiculous questions as, “have you directed them to change the source code,” and similarly absurd accusations that TikTok is spying through our phones' cameras to capture our facial expressions.
I was reading a recent issue of Bits About Money, where patio11 mentioned a post by Interfluidity. I was curious, and after poking around the website, I found his “drafts” site, where he’s a little more relaxed with what he publishes. Then I was listening to an episode of Ben Thompson’s Sharp Tech, discussing ChatGPT v4 and its ability to detect the author of one of Ben’s future (from the perspective of the AI’s 2021 dataset) articles; he joked about it finding his “secret blog”.