Tag: AI

Last time on Phil’s Newsletter: It was my birthday, again

*bing bong* Service Announcement

Well, we did it, folks. If I haven’t messed anything up too badly you are reading this via email or my blog at extrafuture.com and we are done with Substack. The reasons I’m leaving Substack for greener pastures are many, but the big one is easy: I don’t tolerate bigots and I especially don’t tolerate Nazis, and Substack will happily give that hate a platform. So we’re taking our ball and going home, to the indieweb, and hosting this newsletter via the WordPress Newsletter plugin. We’re now running this on, mostly, open source software from top to bottom, and I like that. Hope you do, too.

So far, the main beef I have is with the poor quality of templates. What is available is kind of ugly and hard to read. I am working on fixing that for you. Bear with me. Thanks.

The Weather Report & Stamping The Date

I’ve started doing a couple new video projects every weekday on my YouTube channel. After the passing of David Lynch, I started thinking a lot about how I missed his Weather Report videos, and so I decided to fill that gap myself. The first several are way more Lynch-impression-heavy but I think I’m finding my own way to do it. Here’s today’s Weather Report video.

I’ve also added a second video, called Stamp The Date, where I take an old date stamp, adjust to today’s date, and stamp it on a sheet of white card stock in one take, no redos. So far it’s the most popular thing on my YouTube channel. Here is today’s date stamp. What will tomorrow look like?

Please check them out on YouTube and subscribe over there.

The Good Links

The Good Links provide. Formatting these in the Newsletter plugin editor fucking SUUUUUCKS.

• WikiTok takes all of the endorphin-flooding functionality of TikTok and replaces the silly dances with random Wikipedia pages
• Tim O’Reilly has a lot to say about Large Language Models and how they’re changing the job of being a programmer. “The End of Programming as We Know It“
• The UK is trying to force Apple to make their products insecure so the government can read your texts.
• San Francisco’s KCBS is being investigated by the FCC for *checks notes* being too woke
• “OpenAI Employees Say Firm’s Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims” it’s always religion with these guys. It isn’t enough to be rich. They need to give birth to God.
• After 75,000 attempts, game streamer Summoning Salt has finally beaten Mike Tyson in the game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out in under 2 minutes.
• Gonna be hard to spin this one.”Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”” 
• 54% of Americans think we’re in a constitutional crisis. No, we didn’t vote for this.
• Good Guy Valve bans all games that require watching advertisements in order to play from Steam
• Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance was not without controversy, but not the kind they expected. The Pro-Palestine kind.
• The “the puppygirl hacker polycule”  has leaked 8,543 files related to training, procedural, and policy manuals for police departments, fire departments, sheriff’s offices, and narcotics units
• Facebook is bringing down the Axe (body spray) and laying off 4,000 people today. Good luck out there.

That’s all for today. Take care of yourselves out there.