F L O T I S S E R I E

Finished reading: Hounding by Xenobe Purvis 📚

When AI meets IOT.

Deep dive on Marc Andreessen, including some exploration of his early life in Wisconsin and his new interest in “American dynamism.”

Discussion of ELIZA, computers and people, and how tech mitigates our relationships to ourselves and one another.

A deep dive and new reporting angle on reading programs in public schools from WIRED.

The art of complaint.

Has the creator window closed?

Octavia Butler, “Devil Girl From Mars”: Why I Write Science Fiction (1998)

First-person account of how one scientist uses AI in a research and academic setting.

MIT on AI and productivity and how it shows up in workstreams today.

New knitting stitch dropped — no pun intended.

Steve Albini on the problem with music, originally printed in 1993 in The Baffler, republished in 2007.

This one has been in the pile all summer, and I’m glad I set this one aside for now.

Payday Food Binge

Stanford Daily on the drop in Humanities grads, exploring some of the proposed reasons for the drop.

Why write?

Some blog notes: I’m doing most of my writing here via iPhone apps, and tinkering later.

A detail I find interesting about the education landscape are how many K-12 teachers end up in higher ed, as both professors and administrators.

Matt and Brad on the economics of Vox.

I’m not a terribly crunchy person, but an Aquarius, Leo, Libra, Gemini combo is unbeatable.

Currently reading: Black.

Reading about critical code studies and AI rhetoric.

🎵 : Pere Ubu - Humor Me I happened to catch an up-and-coming band called Yolk at a local festival, and it took me down some regional music rabbit holes.

Suggestion that silicon sampling is another layer of removal from the demographics they intend to survey.

Knowing what we know about LLMs and how they work today on the mostly-centralized web, I think the next few years are going to be an interesting time to be a writer with an independent website.

Micro.blog is now federating reax.

Finished reading: Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell 📚

AI and language approximation.

One more thing before I let this bone go.

Dave Winer on Twitter as a blog platform.

Within this report, the LLM reflected my concern about my old blog appearing to be the center of these old networks.

Reddit is ending RSS because it’s easy to scrape, which is a bummer.

History of the NWI “Hell is Real” sign.

A friend of the blog recently observed that consultants like Deloitte come to conclusions about technology at the same time as normies and practitioners - because their work is the same, only one is outsourced.

Why good memes are like mirrors.

🎵: Before the Water Gets Too High - Parquet Courts Access to tech: Enterprise level.

Creation in the age of AI.

On living through this long, slow boring.

Before enterprise CMSs, there were blogs.

Harvard Business provides a roundup of articles and research showing practical uses (or not) of AI in the workplace today.

Eve Ewing on the slow disaster encroaching on Chicago’s South Side, and a relevant companion to the NHJ piece circulating so widely this week.

Why cool is hard to imitate.

Garbage Day asks what all the new embedded AI agents are for.

Plain language guide on how LLMs are shifting the AI market right now.

Trend watch: Defanging consumer surveillance technology by emphasizing cuteness.

How highly formalized government processes are slowing down AI governance at the state level.

🎵: Let’s Dance - David Bowie I’ve spent the last few months annoyed with the incomplete retrospectives around writers and writing online and how we all got here.

Konstantinos Komaitis has started a ten-part series at Techdirt called The Metric Is Not the Mission.

🎵: A Thousand Mountains - Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist Yesterday I cut through Gary to get around a traffic jam on the toll road and picked up the Dan Ryan and the Skyway.

While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr.