We are only 6 months away from the 10-year (!?) anniversary of Vesper, an app that not only still works on iOS 16, but feels more at home there than on the iOS 6 it was made for. Kudos to @brentsimmons, Dave Wiskus and @gruber for seeing the future. Too bad iOS 7 overshot.

A phenomenon so common, it has its own Wikipedia entry:

Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address or becoming permanently unavailable.

Sifting through dozens of old blog posts as I transfer them to Micro.blog, a few things are becoming evident. Having a newborn in the household is not conducive to writing. The period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day is. And most of the internet I have linked to in the past no longer exists.

Take this short, 8-year-old text about vim. It mentions one podcast and two blogs; none are still around at their original location. The podcast was Technical Difficulties which, if memory serves, was a podcast of Gabe Weatherhead and Erik Hess that ran for 2 years from 2013–2014 before disappearing into oblivion. One of the two blogs was Dr. Bunsen by Seth Brown: also gone, but at least available through the Wayback Machine. The second was from Steve Losh whose website is either down or having temporary difficulties, but in any case unavailable on Wayback.

So this little expedition through just three links took me a good 15 minutes; updating all of the old posts with new links and explanations like this one would not be the best use of anyone’s time. But what are the alternatives?

Gwern Branwen’s website comes to mind, as he goes as far as hosting complete pages on his own server while using icons to point to the original URLs. The afformentioned Wayback Machine also hosts web page snapshots. Would a script converting original URLs to their archived counterpart be hard to find, if not make?

Those are not bad ideas — for a digital garden-type project. For an effemeral blog such as this one, the effort-to-benefit ratio leans the way of my learning to live with link rot. So it goes.

Dave Winer writes about textcasting, which sounds amazing. Meanwhile, sites like Serious Eats which used to be full on blogs — and sometimes still call themselves that — don’t have an RSS feed.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…

🎮 Finished playing Little Nightmares with my daughter yesterday and it is not what I expected a 5-year-old to be into but she ended up being in charge for most of it.

Survival horror: a great thing to do together as a family.

The older I get the more I appreciate anything in life that reduces friction. Yes, I could write a quick landing page myself and host it on Github pages for free. But for $5/year omg.lol makes it so much easier (and more esthetically pleasing than I could ever manage).

I logged in to LinkedIn for the first time in months and it looked like people were actually using it!

For self-promotion and networking, so I got what I needed and logged out before being swallowed whole.

LinkedIn: the Patrick Bateman Social Network.

Is it too early to start with end-of-year lists? Because I would like to share my disappointments of the year. Or, more precisely, disappointment (singular), as there has been only one: LG in general, and their HU810PW laser projector in particular.

It broke just a few months out of warranty (strike 1), they have no local authorized service shops (strike 2), and a week after speaking to someone from their call center I am yet to get instructions on how to send it to them for a $600 $100 shiping and $60 insurance not included. repair (strike 3). I do, however, receive half a dozen spam emails per day from LG now that they have my email address (not a strike, just completely shameless).

To be clear, it is a gorgeous projector with crystal clear picture even in daylight. LG’s WebOS is the best smart TV software out there. Yes, it is a low bar. Still… It has generous horizontal shift that saved me from having to drill holes in the ceiling. The remote control isn’t the sleek piece of aluminium Apple TV has, but unlike Apple TV’s it is comfortable to hold, glows in the dark, and actually works! ⊕ And to be clear from a different perspective — that this is my biggest disappointment of 2022 is a good indicator that the year was pretty decent for the Miljković household, all things considered.

Which makes its breaking just out of warranty and LG’s lack of customer service all the more grating.

To elaborate on the chatbot: it isn’t that it upgraded my view of how good artificial intelligence can be, but rather that it downgraded my view of human intelligence. ChatGPT is very good at stringing out empty phrases and filler words — in other words, at producing bullshit in the Harry Frankfurt sense. Its skill in writing plausibly-looking college essays, personal statements, and letters of recommendation reminded me, maybe even showed me for the first time, that most of those are bullshit too.

As someone who has spent the better part of the last 12 years drafting his own letters of recommendation, ⊕ Thank you, USCIS! it was demoralizing to be reminded to all that wasted effort. Worse yet was the stream of college professors lamenting the new reality of now and forever compromised term papers, decorated with screenshots of ChatGPT’s essays, blind to their own self-condemnation: if an unintelligent, unreasoning, letter-guessing algorithm can produce content to your liking better than your own students, then what kind of a class are you teaching there, Professor?

Instead of hearlding the rise of artificial general intelligence, ChatGPT showed me deficiencies of human intelligence by being a variant of the reverse Turing test: can a human write sufficiently well to be recognized as one? This is, of course, not my original thought but rather Taleb’s, who wrote about the reverse Turing test two decades ago in Fooled by Randomness, and mentioned it again in light of the ChatGPT screenshot onslaught. So am I failing the test too?

I consider myself a fairly rational creature, and yet…

• Mastodon out of the box: An eye sore! Unusable! What is this, Discord? Because I hate Discord!
• Mastodon with Light theme and advanced web interface on: Where have you been all my life?

There is a good overview of the two ways Micro.blog can interact with Mastodon, from @pmcconnell. I much prefer the full integration (Option 2 in the text), but it looks like only Option 1 completely matches the formatting. Is that a bug or a technical limitation?