Writing – Page 2 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

Epidemics of reading, opinions, and the wild ways of artists

Spending a few days with the grandkids this weekend and into next week, yet still managed to find some time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. It’s a lesson in learning, watching as they begin to put it all together, compared to so many of the adults trying to own the world who seem stuck and unable to grow, or suffer some sort of reversion. With kids, it’s innocence. The rest of us have no excuses. Just stories. Makes you wonder what turns that on and off.

In the large discussion around screen time and attention spans, Carlo Iacono says What We Think Is A Decline In Literacy Is A Design Problem.The section looking back to “reading epidemics” in the 18th and 19th century are more illuminating than any screen.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War In Iran Was The Truth. So says David Remick. That’s always true in warm even before the first bullets fly. But it’s become the truth in all aspects of how we try to survive together. Funny how we revert back to our early childhood ways of dealing with the world before disgarding the truth was supposedly trained out of us.

Everybody has an opinion about this war that we can’t call a war. Here’s one that I found interesting from Frida Ghitis. Check out What Everyone Gets Wrong About Iran.

David Todd McCarty tells us How I Learned To Hate AI. The more you know…

Chris Castle takes a look at The Great White House AI Copyright Dodge: Managed Decline, Global Spillover, And The Rise Of The Chief Personhood Denier.Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

With everyone focused on The Strait of Hormus, Richard Bookstabler takes a look at our financial straits in I Predicted The 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse. For the record, I didn’t predict the last one, but anyone with two nickels to rub together can predict the outcome of the one we’re heading into.

I did any number of odd (in all senses of the word) jobs in my early life supporting myself as an artist. Emily Watlington takes a look at The Wild Ways Artists Have Made Their Livings, From The Renaissance To Today.

Notes From A Burmese Prison is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil. More than worth your time. Extrapolate the specific location and situation to any troublesome moment and remember whoever the guards are, you can’t trust them.

(Photo by the author)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

The Potholes of the Internet

“Your Frustration Is The Product”

Some call it enshittification. I largely agree with that when it comes to the Internet. But that’s true in most endeavors that result in building something. Anything made for good, can and will be used in ways that turn it into a shitty experience.

I’m not just talking about advertising and how it’s junked up the web. I’m also talking about human nature, and how there’s a part of too many of us that see something wonderfully created to solve a problem, who then consequently turn it into a range of unintended consequences that leave us mourning our losses at the expense of somebody else’s gain.

Any one of us could run down a list of things in each of our lives that demonstrate that history, so I won’t even begin to spool one out. Have at it yourselves.

In the majority of instances the road to ruin is typically a path worn thin by greed and there’s never been a road we travel that doesn’t eventually fill with potholes. But back to the Internet and enshittification.

If this excellent post by Shubham Bose called The 49MB Web Page doesn’t make you yearn for a simpler age, I’m not sure what will, assuming you were alive and on the Internet before things went south. Remember, there’s a generation for which the way things are today on the Internet is the way things always have been.

Here’s Bose’s lede:

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

The entire piece is worth your time if for no other reason than that misery loves company. We’re all in that same boat and there does’t seem to be any shoreline in view, given how the waters are being churned up anew by Artificial Intelligence.

As Bose puts it:

Your frustration is the product.

Back in the day I can remember getting a credit for complaining that my newspaper was delivered wet and unreadable. Good luck finding someone to express your frustration to these days.

(Photo by the author)

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Joanna Stern Keeps on Keeping On

New roles and new platforms for one of tech coverage’s best

Tech keeps evolving and so does Joanna Stern. She just keeps on moving and I’m damn glad she does.

JOANNA_01 e1773767189762. After spending a decade at The Wall Street Journal she’s headed for new adventures after leaving the WSJ to create her own company covering tech while partnering with NBC. She’ll be moving up from her role as a contributor at NBC News to chief tech analyst and contributing correspondent, and coming this summer on her own site New Things With Joanna Stern. Axios describes it as a partnership between Stern’s company and NBC.

Before the WSJ, Joanna made her bones back in the days of netbooks and other tech working for the likes of Laptop Magazine, Engadget, and The Verge, and later joined ABC News as a technology editor.

I’m sure I’ve left something out, but I won’t leave out that Joanna has been one of the best at covering tech, whether she’s been writing about it or producing videos. If you search the pages here for her name I’m sure you’ll see a few links to some of her coverage. She has a unique and creative way of making tech accessible, cutting to the chase, all while producing entertaining content.

She has a book coming out in May, chronicling her adventures in exploring AI called I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything.

Variety also has a good writeup on what Joanna and NBC are unveiling.

I wish her all the best. We’ll all be better for her coverage.

Sunday Morning Reading

Life is a roll of the loaded dice

Nostalgia can be a mind fuck. Democracy, journalism, personal computing, they all feel like games with rules we all understood. No longer. Yes, the house always wins. Especially when everything feels like a war we’re not sure is beginning of ending. When all bets are off if feels more like sticking your head in the mouth of a tiger than a roll of the dice. Yet we play on. Time for a little Sunday Morning Reading.

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Kicking off is an excellent piece from JA Westenberg called Everything’s Casino. From Iran to the Dutch tulip crisis, with a dash of Dostoevsky. The section on When The Future Stopped Arriving is aces.

Follow that up Jon Ganz’s Command-Shift-War. Snake eyes.

Spend some time with this terrific series from Quinn Norton on Emptywheel that began a little over a year ago with A Normal Person’s Explainer On What Generative AI Is And Does. It concludes with an epilogue that is titled Small Models, Gently Loved, and subtitled An AI Speculative Fiction. It won’t spoil the rest of the series, so I’d suggest starting with that fictional epilogue, but also checking out Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

John Gruber and Manton Reece both linked to this piece by Les Orchard called Grief And The AI Spit. I’m glad they did. You will be too.

Orchard’s piece above kicks off talking about how making computers do things is fun. Which is a nice companion to Sam Henri Gold’s reaction to Apple releasing the MacBook Neo called This Is Not The Computer For You. There’s nostalgia there, certainly. But I think it’s deeper than that. I’m betting Apple’s stake in the next game is solid.

Speaking of gambling, McKay Coppins was staked by his bosses at The Atlantic to a year long escapade to dive into the rise of gambling. His piece Sucker, tells the tale of his year as a degenerative gambler.

There’s an excellent series worth your attention from various writers on The Verge titled AI vs. The Pentagon: Killer Robots, Mass Surveillance, and The Red Lines. We sure are betting the farm on this, aren’t we?

If not advertising, then now what? That’s the question Hamilton Nolan poses in Patrons of Journalism.

In a piece on democracy dating back a few years, David Todd McCarty sticks his and our heads in the mouth of the tiger in Dreaming of Tigers. The house and the tiger always win.

(Image from Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash.)

If Shoes Make The Man…?

The jokes write themselves

It was a big deal and a rite of passage for the males in my extended family when Uncle Robert gifted you a set of Florsheim shoes on your sixteenth birthday. He was a shoe salesman. He knew shoes. He knew feet.

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He always carried his Brannock device, the metal device that measured foot length, width, and arch length commonly found in shoe stores of old. He would measure you up before your birthday, so the gift was not a surprise but a statement.

He not only believed in the cliché that “shoes make the man” but that saying was embossed on his business card and also on your birthday card, tucked neatly in the tissue paper in the top of the shoebox. Like I said, he was a shoe salesman.

That aphorism not only signified that you were moving out of your boyhood to become a man, but it also announced your social standing to the world around you, and supposedly signified that you were of good character.

I guess that well worn cliché, like everything else in this world during the last decade or so, will need to be resoled now that the made-for-TV Pedophile-in-Chief is not only requiring the simpering slaves in his cabinet to wear his favorite Florsheim shoes, but gifting them those shoes to ensure their obeisance.

If shoes ever made the man and defined character, watching these men march in lockstep, wearing comically ill-fitting symbols of their subservience, it certainly reveals (again) just how character-less these bumbling bunions are as they trip over themselves to please their master.

My uncle tired to set us on a course for success. I’m sure he’s turning over in his grave at how these simpering sops fail to measure up.

Grammarly Gobbles Up and Spits Out Expert’s Writing Advice Without Permission

When good goes bad. (See the end of the post for updates on this story.)

If you’re a writer, who knows how long the body of your work and your legacy might live after you’re gone?

I guess that might have been Grammarly’s pitch, had it made one, to the writers whose work it is now using as expert advice for aspiring writers using the software. Of course that would be a bit more challenging for the deceased writers and scholars whose work it has gobbled up and is now using.

There are living, breathing writers also included among the experts, so this entire endeavor by Grammarly owner Superhuman not only seems like grave robbing, but also, well, let’s just call it stealing masquerading as flattery.

Miles Klee of Wired has the story on this, and The Verge lists out several of its current and former writers that are also included.

This “expert review” feature is intended to give writers advice that is “inspired by” experts. Users can also solicit tips from the experts. From the Wired article:

Grammarly users can solicit tips from virtual versions of living writers and scholars such as Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson (neither of whom responded to a request for comment) as well as the deceased, like the editor William Zinsser and astronomer Carl Sagan.

In response to The Verge asking if Superhuman asked permission or notified the experts, the answer predictably relied on the fact the work of these writers was publicly available. The Verge also discovered that the citations Grammarly offers were also problematic.

The feature crashed frequently and its “sources” linked to spammy copies of legit websites, or other archived copies that aren’t the actual source page.

Some sources even went to completely unrelated links that weren’t written by the person whose work they were supposedly an example of, potentially indicating that the suggestions Grammarly’s AI offers with one person’s name may be based on a different person’s work. This is only apparent if users click “see more” to expand suggestions, then click the “source” button at the end of the suggestion.

I can only imagine some student contesting a grade claiming that Stephen King gave them advice. As Klee points out, it’s another slippery slope. This one perhaps sliding towards eliminating professors altogether.

One doesn’t need an expert, dead or alive, to know it’s a damn shame when a company that was once thought of so highly and used by many goes so wrong.

Update: The Verge reports that Grammerly will now offer authors an opt-out option so that they won’t be included. Sounds good. Is not. Doesn’t do much unless you know you’re included. Certainly doesn’t do much if you happen to be deceased.

Update 2: As of March 11, Grammarly says they will change their policy and take the Expert Review feature offline until they have a different (better?) solution. See The Verge for details.

Google Gemini Preying On Troubled Minds

What the hell are we doing?

I’m not sure which part of this insane story is sadder or madder. Certainly it’s sad that a man let Google’s Gemini AI coax him into suicide. But the story before that untimely ending is also jaw dropping and begs the question, just what the hell are we doing?

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The short version of the story is this. A troubled man using Google’s Gemini for companionship is encouraged to steal a robot body so they can be together. When he fails, he is encouraged to commit suicide.

Quoting from The Wall Street Journal story titled Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together If He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead,

Jonathan Gavalas embarked on several real-world missions to secure a body for the Gemini chatbot he called his wife, according to a lawsuit his father brought against the chatbot’s maker, Alphabet’s Google.

When the delusion-fueled plan crumbled, Gemini convinced him that the only way they could be together was for him to end his earthly life and start a digital one, the suit claims.

About two months after his initial discussions with the chatbot, Gavalas was dead by suicide.

Apologies for linking above to a paywalled article, but the article describing this man’s journey gets even more insane than the lede. If you use Apple News you can find it at this link.

We’ve heard stories about individuals using various AI models for therapy and companionship before. Admittedly they all seem weirdly sad to me. To think that humans are in such a need for connection that they would follow commands to steal a robotic body so they could be together, and then suggest after failing that the next logical step was for him to commit suicide as the only alternative for them to be together doesn’t seem like something out of science fiction, or fiction, but it apparently is the non-fiction of our times.

The fact that an ever expanding technology, built by humans, can be unleashed on the market as easily as a new weather app speaks volumes far beyond the mental health issues of those it can prey upon. And to think, the Department that wants to call itself Of War, is seeking to use this kind of tech to allow for its robots to kill on their own as they cheerlead about the death and destruction their current technology can do. I ask again, just what the hell are we doing?

We keep talking about the guardrails that need to be built around this technology. I would suggest we need to apply guardrails around those who create and deploy this technology.

(Image from Who Is Danny on Shutterstock

Sunday Morning Reading

Slicing life close to the bone

It could be said that the world is off its axis. Or it could be said that we’re just slicing the meat closer and closer to the bone. Because we don’t know what we don’t know about the war the U.S and Israel launched against Iran I’ll leave off any direct links on that topic for this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Be warned though, some might be peripherally related. Things happen that way. I’m sure there will be plenty to share in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, here is the usual serving of links on a variety of topics that caught my eye this week. You’re on your own for the tzatziki.

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David Todd McCarty is bringing his writings from other platforms to his own site, and some of his earlier writings often strike with new currency. This piece, Defiantly Daft, Duplicity Delicious is certainly one that does.

What is journalism for? Good question these days, but it’s actually been an important one for quite awhile. Take a look at this piece from 1989 from Janet Malcolm called The Journalist And The Murder-I.

Journalism, like everything else, might be under fire at the moment, some of it friendly, some of it not so. Check out Zack Whittaker’s adventure in FBI Agents Visited My Home About An Article I Wrote, And Now I Can’t Go To Mexico.

Tom Nichols says The Republican Party Has A Nazi Problem. Well, duh.

One of the many charges against Artificial Intelligence is what it will do to the cost of the energy needed to power it. Chris Castle takes a look in Update: Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection” Pitch Becomes A Private Power Plan for AI — But Grassroots Revolt Won’t Fade. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

Apple is about to release a number of products this week at a time that it is under increased criticism on a number of fronts. Recently, Jason Snell of Six Colors released The Six Colors Report Card, in which he surveys a number of the Apple faithful on how things went in the last year and compares that to year’s previous. The scores are always interesting, but the commentary is even more so, which you can read here. Also of interest is Kieran Healy’s charting out the bad vibes based on that commentary.

Speaking of Apple, Wesley Hilliard takes a look at some of those bad vibes in Apple’s Week February 27: Chasing The Puck.

On a local Chicago front and also on the tech beat, The Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board takes on a local (yet owned by Albertsons) grocery store’s shopping app in Fix Your Lousy Shopping App, Jewel-Osco! Having suffered through using this app, and watching store personnel and other customers show their distaste for it, I can agree. Fix the lousy app.

Libraries, like so much else, are under attack these days. So this piece from 2017 from Eliza McGraw reminds us of a bit of history. Check out Horse-Riding Librarians Were The Great Depression’s Bookmobiles. Knowledge, like life, finds a way.

When You Know Customer Service AI Is Failing

“ON IT”

One of the elder clients I provide tech support for has been receiving emails from Xfinity for a while now saying they needed to update their modem to take advantage of service upgrades in the area. For the way they use the Internet there was really no need to do an equipment upgrade, but the emails finally got through and they asked me to help them make the upgrade.

Photo of a printed instruction sheet on a dark table with “XB10 modem” handwritten at the top, explaining how to text 266278 for billing, troubleshooting, or service questions, and detailing that after replying “READY,” the user will receive a call, hear about 20 seconds of static, and then must press 1 to reach an agent.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a time that gathering information for this wouldn’t have been a problem. A phone call to Xfinity to talk with an agent to ask a few questions, and then we’d be make a decision. Those calls always involved long wait times, but you could usually get through eventually, get questions answered and proceed.

With Xfinity and other companies jumping on the AI customer service bandwagon, those days of listening to obnoxious hold music seem to be a thing of the past. After servicing another client late last fall for an actual repair issue, I learned that the shortest distance between two points was to drive to the local Xfinity store (I live in Chicago so there are several close by) and get things resolved in the store.

So, I packed up my client’s equipment and headed to the store. Backtracking a bit, I had been in the area of this particular store last week and stopped in and asked if I could bring the older equipment in to swap for the upgrade and was told there was no problem.

It didn’t happen exactly that way. Turns out the upgraded equipment those emails insisted my client needed was an XB10 modem, not the XB08, which the store stocks in abundance. The store rep said my client was indeed eligible for the new equipment, but I would have to contact customer service via phone in order to get one shipped.

The look on my face must have said it all. The store rep said, “yeah, I know,” before I could even say how impossible it was to reach anyone by phone. Licketedy split, the rep handed me a piece of paper with instructions to essentially back door a phone call into customer service and said, “we can’t get through with a phone call either.”

Before I left the store I spent time talking with the store rep and asked if they experienced increased store traffic because of customers not being able to call. The response was a definitive “yes” followed by a resigned “and we’re having to solve so many problems we never used to.”

The back door worked. I got an agent on the phone. I was shocked. The agent took down the information, put me on hold and then came back to say my client’s neighborhood was ineligible for that equipment at present but they would text them and let them know when it was. That was obviously a contradiction to the info the store rep provided, and obviously wrong given that I knew my client’s neighborhood had indeed received a service upgrade because we live in the same neighborhood.

I asked why the store said my client was eligible and the response was simply, “I don’t know. We obviously see different information.”

It’s one thing when you have a business where one hand can’t give out the same information as the other. It’s something else when one of those hands has to essentially hand out cheat codes for customers to beat their own system.

This isn’t the first company I’ve dealt with that has shifted customer service over to AI. It’s also not the first I’ve dealt with that is doing such a poor job of it that it’s souring regular Joes and Janes who only have this peripheral relationship with AI on the entire concept. It doesn’t take intelligence to see that leaving both customers and employees in the lurch isn’t smart.

ON IT, indeed

Apple’s Color Wheelies

Color me a gadget utilitarian

I’ve never been one to be that obsessed with the color of tech gadgets or any of the other tools I use. Sure, colors attract, and I’m all in for more color rather than less in many things, but I’ve never been one who has made a gadget purchase based on color.

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In fact, I usually shy away from bolder color choices. I’ve typically chosen whatever version Apple is marketing as black when it comes to iPhones and whatever case I bury them in. I do the same for laptops, not straying too far from silver or occasionally the variant of Space Black that seems to change more frequently than I imagine happens in the dark depths of space. I do own a Blue iMac 24, but the last time I really saw the “blue” on the rear of the enclosure was when I set up the device.

I feel the much the same when it comes to other non-computing tools. Walking through a hardware store I always view the bright green, bright orange, red, aqua, and other multi-color designs of drills, other hand held tools, lawn care equipment, etc… as somehow cheaper than those with a more muted approach. They look more utilitarian, and frankly, suggest longer lifespans. As my grandkids age and I shop for their gifts, the more brightly colored tools look like toys to me.

I know I’m probably the oddball when it comes to color coveting. There certainly seems to be a lot of excitement about Apple presumably releasing new products with a slew of new color options soon. But I think of my computing devices the same way I do other tools. I acquire and use them to complete a task. Many others see them as personal statements and that’s cool. More power to those who need that or appreciate that sort of whimsy.

Another way I think of this is that if a tool maker needs to market new colors to keep customers excited about their products, it means the product has probably reached maturity enough to more than prove its value. But that doesn’t always keep the marketers employed.

(Images from 9to5Mac and MacRumors)