Kings also sleep; but the clever ones, with one eye open, just like dolphins and whales
All aboard
‘This category contains people who are known by their reputation or acts, but their names have remained unidentified‘ / break out your Yamaha CS-80 (whether a pricey original or a plug-in) and delve into this tribute to Vangelis, Tears in Rain / from 1969, What is Electronic Music? / the Suzuki Omnichord is being reissued / ‘In 2001, Richard Ankrom installed a fake freeway sign in downtown L.A. in order to fix a real problem for commuters.’ / endlessly fascinated by the Burj Al-Babas / Hatch Heaven, ‘for the love of hatchbacks’ / a list of high-craft, high-design chocolate makers / Cruise Ship Invasion: ‘Take a typical Alaska cruise and see the damage in its wake’. All the sobering stats.
Simon Willison’s Weblog: “A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking it to make use of the content on that page in some way. One recent example: “List the processors on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-22h2-supported-intel-processors“. Try that in ChatGPT and it produces a list of processors. It looks like it read the page! I promise you ChatGPT cannot access URLs. The problem is it does an incrediblyconvincing impression of being able to do so, thanks to two related abilities:
- Given a URL with descriptive words in it, ChatGPT can hallucinate the contents of the page
- It appears to be able to make judgement calls about whether or not a given URL is likely to exist!
- …I do think this is an enormous usability flaw though: it’s so easy to convince yourself that it can read URLs, which can lead you down a rabbit hole of realistic but utterly misguided hallucinated content. This applies to sophisticated, experienced users too! I’ve been using ChatGPT since it launched and I still nearly fell for this.”
Publishers Weekly: “With a Kickstarter campaign now underway for the audio edition of his new book, ‘Red Team Blues,’ Cory Doctorow shares the mistakes of his past campaigns—and why it’s all worth it. My next novel is Red Team Blues.
It’s a major title for my publisher, Tor (which is part of Macmillan), and the first book in a trilogy. I’m touring the U.S, Canada, the U.K., and Germany this spring. And there’s going to be an incredible audiobook that goes along with it, read by Wil Wheaton (who is hands-down my favorite audiobook reader—don’t tell my other narrators! They’re amazing, but Wil’s readings are just…wow). And once again, I’m using a Kickstarter campaign to fund the audiobook edition.
This audiobook will not be for sale on Audible. None of my audiobooks are. Audible, the Amazon division that controls about 90% of the audiobook market, won’t carry them because, if you want to sell your audiobooks on Audible, you have to let them add Amazon’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) to them, and I refuse. I don’t let anyone sell any of my work with DRM. I know how big tech platforms behave when they use DRM to leverage their suppliers. And we all know what Amazon does with the power it wields over its suppliers. I believe we simply can’t afford to have all our audiobooks under the control of any single company, much less one that is as committed to wringing margin out of its suppliers as Amazon is…”
