Finished reading: How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia 📚
“Finished” as in read every word on the page, yes. But to actually finish this one will take a few years’ worth of listening, as you can imagine. At least I won’t be listening blindly.
If ChatGPT and other predicitive AIs kill Google, it won’t be because they are better at search, but because the loads and loads of inane content they generate make search results unusable.
Back to human-curated website lists it is.
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.
A lot of folks appreciated the visual design of our Twitter app. And we are proud of that.
We’re equally proud of the things you don’t see.
Which reminds me of why Frasier was so good: for all the jokes they didn’t make.
Finished reading: How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia 📚
“Finished” as in read every word on the page, yes. But to actually finish this one will take a few years’ worth of listening, as you can imagine. At least I won’t be listening blindly.
🍿 Three Thousand Years of Longing was an unexpected delight. If the theme of Fury Road, George Miller’s previous, was chase, the theme of Longing is story, within a story, within a story, masterfully weaved and presented without irony. More of this, please.
Finished reading: Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper 📚🗃️
There are two and a half books here for the price of one in this note-keeping samizdat:
The first one was spot on and valuable. The second needed an editor: repeated paragraphs were peppered throughout the chapters a few too many times for me to find it just charming. But an editor may also have cut the commentary, which ended up adding some sparkle — lacking in most other non-fiction books.
Better than expected, even after accounting for low initial expectations. See number 24 here
🍿 White Noise starts off as a Wes Anderson and almost finishes as a David Lynch before veering off to a Little Miss Sunshine finale. There are stops at Allentown, Hitchcock City, Bruckheimerville, and many others along the way. Enjoyable, if a bit too self-serving.
The headline: ChatGPT appears to pass medical school exams, educators rethinking assessments.
The article:
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).
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?
And with that, the Twitter chapter of my life has closed.
May 2008 to January 2023. Not a bad run, considering.