As my seven or nine regular readers might imagine, I now have something of a backlog of articles about AI and machine learning, as, unlike a large language model, I’m not ingesting hundreds of articles a second and spitting out my pattern-recognized conclusions. So, with the news in the past week of AI companies buying tons of physical books to scan and destroy (in the process of that industrial-level scanning), I was reminded of another…
A few Mondays ago, I noted some novelists that hail from my particular vintage, and it made me think of Gen X a bit more and what hijinks our most invisible of living generations has been up to. On the one hand, separating people into neatly boxed “generations” based on a specific year range feels like trying to slice the river. Birthrates rise and fall across the globe, but people keep on being born day…
Continuing my series of posts about AI and machine learning, a big concern is AI taking people’s jobs. In fact, that’s how I first started posting about it, because AI was being touted as a replacement for writing and creating music and the many fun things in life… rather than AI helping do the dishes or laundry. But despite AI being cited as a reason for jobs getting cut, I have been coming across some…
The shadow of AI continues to loom over the workplace as the AI companies have their IPOs, but don’t worry, McSweeney’s has a handy guide to understanding the economics of the situation. Meanwhile, on a personal level, you might be wondering how your job may or may not be impacted or outright obliterated by the implementation of AI. However, thinking of my AI post last month, there are several people who are noting the sometime…
With another Father’s Day in the rear-view mirror, I happened across this older article by Brigid Schulte for the Washington Post about how dads also want to have it all. It’s from 2013 and a book of hers also delves into the modern overwhelm, which I should check out. But I also found myself wondering about what studies have happened since then, what the Pandemic did to help or hinder that quest for it all…
It’s Loving Day today, a relatively recent and unofficial day celebrating the anniversary of the 1967 decision in Loving v Virginia which struck down laws banning mixed-race marriages. I’ve been reading and watching more about the 1920s recently and this article by Bryan Green for Smithsonian magazine reminded me of how much class and race were very much on the minds of ‘proper’ folk then — to say nothing of eugenics. It’s well worth a…
As AI continues to tap-dance through the zeitgeist of society, I don’t have any family references this week, but I do have an Archer/Kenny Loggins reference, and isn’t that the same? An AI chatbot would say so… unless you correct it. Anyway, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all looking to have IPOs this year which has market musing being cranked up to 11 (if you want analysis in manic video style, Hank Green has your…
Discussions at the dayjob have included the both the risks of AI and the risks of not implementing AI. I mean, the problems of AI as an accelerator for cybercrime were already apparent and are now becoming iridescent (metaphorically). But my guess is that most of you are dealing with workplaces where there’s a cohort of people wanting to implement AI to do everything. They want a silver bullet. They really need to understand some…
One of the kids is currently studying World War II, so I reminded them that dads (not just Baby Boomers) are required to know all sorts of military history. It’s like a Dad Merit Badge. In fact, I think World War II is only the first one. Anyway, to help dads everywhere earn or maintain their Military History trivia bona fides, check out George Dvorsky‘s article on 8 low-tech weapons and tactics used during the…
Going through some of my old research on space exploration –because why shouldn’t one write science fiction of space explorers knowing some related science fact?– I came across this article by Denise Chow for Space.com back from 2011. It’s all about how people are practicing how to explore space while still here on Earth. And since it’s from 2011, I wondered how some of these projects turned out in early 2026, 15 years later. The…