I’m surprised that people are surprised that this is where Facebook is going. In the words of my friend Richard MacManus, in reference to this interview with Mark Zuckerberg in The Verge: ‘Mark Zuckerberg basically just confirmed that your feeds will soon be full of AI-generated content. Another reason the fediverse needs to exist: so […]
Read More… from “AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade
Here are January 2023’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month. Notes Rosa Clará image, added as I was archiving files from the third quarter of 2021. The Claudia Schiffer Rolling Stone cover came to mind recently—I believe it was commended in 1991 by the […]
Above: Vivaldi appears for less than a second; each entry then disappears. One of the bugs from last night. Vivaldi updated last night, and nearly instantly shut down. Sadly, there’s a bug which shuts the program down the moment you hit a form field (filed with them, and they are working on it), and […]
Read More… from Vivaldi 5.2’s bugs: time to go back to Opera GX?
That was confusing. Yesterday’s blog post was representative of my thinking: given that certain people were upset when Chromium took away the Directwrite toggle in 2016, and type rendering on Chromium-based Vivaldi deteriorated significantly for me with v. 2.10 (it turns out v. 2.9 was the turning-point), then did Chromium only switch fully to Directwrite […]
The 2009 Chevrolet Caprice SS, sold in the Middle East but made in Australia. I came across a 2017 interview with former Holden chairman Peter Hanenberger, who was in charge when the company had its last number-one sales’ position in Australia. His words are prescient and everything he said then still applies today. […]
Read More… from Peter Hanenberger’s unintended post mortem of Holden
Nadia has done it for ages, but I noticed Glamour did it for a while in 2018, and Wheels has stuck with it for its “new look”. What’s the deal with bordered covers? I still prefer them bled, especially as I remember the difficulties of doing them back in the old days, and print […]
Avira informs me that Ccleaner 5.51 is infected with a virus, called TR/Swrort.ofrgv. I haven’t come across anything online about this threat, except for reports in 2017 when Ccleaner was distributed with malware, eventually found to be the work of hackers who compromised the servers of the company behind Ccleaner. The Hacker News […]
Read More… from My Avira scan shows Ccleaner v. 5.51 has a virus
Elijah van der Giessen/Open Media/Creative Commons That’s it for ’net neutrality in the US. The FCC has changed the rules, so their ISPs can throttle certain sites’ traffic. They can conceivably charge more for Americans visiting certain websites, too. It’s not a most pessimistic scenario: ISPs have attempted this behaviour before. It’s another step […]
Read More… from The end of US ’net neutrality: another step toward the corporate internet
Foreign and Commonwealth Office Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance. I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests. There’s a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know it’s not an exclusively […]
Read More… from Is the death of expertise tied to the Anglosphere?
The late Prof Stephen Hawking’s interview with Condé Nast’s Wired UK is excellent, and a quick read. For those following me on the duopoly of Facebook and Google, here’s what the professor had to say: I worry about the control that big corporations have over information. The danger is we get into the situation that […]
Read More… from A quick read from Prof Stephen Hawking in Wired UK