Over the weekend I went to a memorial service for a close friend of mine, got to see many people dear to me, and had remarkably smooth travel there and back, especially considering that it was Labor Day weekend. Also, I now have Covid. 😬
The Paw of Pleading
Via @manton I see this Netigen post from last September called “Publish Once, Syndicate Nowhere.” As it happens, five days earlier I had published a post making the same point called “POS, not POSSE.” People online are always looking for more readers, but that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes you find people reading your work who don’t understand it and respond out of ignorance. You get enough of those responses and you start wishing for what Milton called “fit audience, though few.” I’m not on the big social media platforms because I think it’s better to remain unread by the people who hang out there.
A very slight turning of the leaves in northern Illinois.
Me from 2019: “What if Fred Rogers was right about how people change?” I think about this often.
With unaccented American English spoken by a Caucasian male tester, Dragon was only 87% accurate the first time we dictated an email — the same email message that Word transcribed nearly perfectly on its first try. Dragon missed words including “on” and “make,” and it wrote “They could advance!” instead of “Thank you in advance.” With accented English, Dragon’s first try produced text entirely different from what our tester spoke.
There is no such thing as “unaccented American English.” There is no such thing as unaccented English. People at the NYT may think that their accent is normative, but even if one were to agree to that — I don’t — it’s still an accent.
Yours sincerely,
Alan from Alabama, currently living in Texas
A fascinating post from my colleague Philip Jenkins on how ancient “gospels” keep being found and lost and found again. “Perhaps amnesia really is an integral part of the popularization of scholarship.”
The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality: — something we’re suckers for because of what the philosopher Donald Davidson once called the “principle of charity,” that is, the assumption that our interlocutors are making sense. I wrote an essay a while back on how the principle of charity governs our responses to chatbots.
The AI business model: suicidal ideation as a revenue stream.
I don’t know which is worse, the belief that if you’re sounding off on social media you’re Doing Something, or the belief that if you’re not sounding off on social media you’re Not Doing Anything.
Convergence!
- Ted Gioia, “The Glorious Future of the Book”
- Austin Kleon, “Why Our House Is a Library”
Georgios Klontzas. What a painting.
I wrote a bit about being a supply officer.
It would be a tragedy if writers stopped using em dashes out of fear of sounding like AI, because em dashes are one of the best tools writers have for not sounding robotic in the first place. Their very potential to be irritating is a sign of what makes them so beautiful: Of all the forms of punctuation, the em dash is the one that most rewards tact, judgment, and taste. It has the closest relationship to the way we experience thinking—rushing forward, suddenly swerving, forking into different branches that eventually come together again. If chatbots copy our use of it, they do so for the same reason we need to protect it. It’s the most human punctuation there is.
I wrote about my irrelevance for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters — and of course for anyone who would like to become one of my Buy Me a Coffee supporters. And also for anyone else.
