On a whim, I decided to look up the case of Brian Lachlan MacKinnon, who went back to his high school 15 years after he graduated and posed as a 16-year-old pupil. I saw it on BBC Scotland’s Public Eye at the time (around 1995), though I think I had also heard of the […]
Category: media
Discussions about the media, journalism and news.
Company founders, talk about your businesses and the great work they do
When I launched Lucire into print in 2004, it brought with it some unwelcome elements. On the plus side, it raised the company’s profile and no doubt that helped sales. No one had ever taken a website into print before, with the exception of Yahoo Internet Life, as far as I know. Certainly no one […]
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The state of play of the internet
From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon): Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]
Paging Kiwi magazine licensors
I was surprised to learn that Lucire might be the only magazine brand being licensed from Aotearoa New Zealand at the moment. Unless the search engines are all equally poor at finding local colleagues doing the same thing. There are other publishers I know here—I had a great yarn with a Christchurch colleague in […]
Andrew Niccol’s Simone: I think we are now there
Anyone remember Andrew Niccol’s film Simone? It remains one of my favourites—I liked it so much I saw it at the cinema in New Zealand, a country which never gave it a proper release. (I still remember the media going on about how much we supported Kiwi filmmakers around that time. Evidently not all […]
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Sharkonomics 2 reviewed
I wanted to add a few words to Amazon for Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics 2, but it seems Amazon no longer lets me post reviews. I guess Jeff B.’s rich enough without needing my content. I thought some of the negative ones he got there were a bit rough, given that he’s not proclaiming that […]
Should I link back an “AI” or LLM-authored splog? I vote no
This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it. It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback […]
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ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has one of the clearest stories explaining ‘AI’, the misnomer used to describe the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT (which, I understand, is French: Chat, j’ai pété translates to ‘Cat, I farted’). Vaughan-Nichols explains that LLMs (large language models) simply rely on statistics, which is why they get things factually wrong. […]
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The summer of ’01: Connecticut
I relayed this to one of my editors after recalling an old colleague we used to work with. He was kind enough to put me up once, pre-9-11, when I was on the US east coast. I was meant to stay with him for a few days and work on some stories together. I envisaged […]
Go for it, Harry
Say what you will about Prince Harry making millions from his book and TV appearances. What if it’s to help fund the destruction of one Keith Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., and save the very fabric of democracy itself in the UK? It’s not going to be cheap, but the dude is out for blood. […]