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.
