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?

So it looks like the new Pokemon game is buggy as hell. This brings back fond memories of TES II: Daggerfall which way nearly unplayable when it first came out but after a half-dozen or so patches became my favorite game of all time.

It is remarkable how quickly the new Verge homepage became my go-to for tech information. Nilay Patel’s introductory article from two months ago was prescient.

Eleven years have passed since the 11/11/11 release of Skyrim. Tempus fugit.

And the day is off to a great start!

I have heard nothing but good things about the Playdate, save for the screen not being viewable under direct sunlight. Good thing it will be a wet, cold October in DC.