An update on an update: the projector is en route to… Alabama, I think, leaving us without a living room screen for the next couple of weeks.

It is fun to not require any willpower not to plop down on the couch and watch something, and have every night be a board game night.

The headline: ChatGPT appears to pass medical school exams, educators rethinking assessments.

The article:

• They were mock, abbreviated exams,
• done incorrectly, ⊕ There are no open-ended questions on the real USMLE.
• which it didn’t actually pass,
• and which were reported in a pre-print. ⊕ Which isn’t a complete knock against the study per se, but even a glance at it shows that some questionable choices have been made regarding the scope — there were only 376 publicly available questions instead of more than a 1,000 on the real exams — and the methods used to ensure the publicly available questions hadn’t already been indexed by the ChatGPT training algorithm.

To be clear: this is my complaining about misleading headlines, not saying that predictive AI wouldn’t at some point be able to ace the USMLE, that point not being now, for reasons stated above. And let’s not even get into whether having a high USMLE score means anything other than the person achieving a high score being a good test-taker (it doesn’t).

And with that, the Twitter chapter of my life has closed.

May 2008 to January 2023. Not a bad run, considering.

Tech trouble update: LG’s only way of communicating is via phone calls at unpredictable times from unpredictable numbers without the option to call back. The projector repair is therefore still up in the air.

On the other hand, since I had to turn off silencing unknown callers, I have become exposed to the wasteland that is the American phone system. It is like a George Saunders short story: robots, aliens, and the ocasional lifeless middle-aged salesperson. LG, why do you torture your customers?

Things that the Arc browser does well:

• Mini-browser for opening URLs in other apps
• Built-in shortcut for copying current window’s URL
• Split-screen browsing
• Pinned tabs and Spaces instead of bookmarks

The one thing keeping me from using it full-time:

• Can’t open bookmarklets

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).