Today was the day I removed the TNI (Telephone Network Interface) from my house. The last vestiges of our land line. The last outpost of a once vast network.
Figure 1: “This Phone Is Property of Ohio Bell” by George Jones is licensed under CC BY 2.0
So, life. Death. Taxes. Insurance companies and AI.
This is one very real, present way AI is going to kill people. Not by HAL-9000 or Borg malevolence, but with a heavy dose of group-think by insurance companies.
I’m going to subvert the system and try to connect with humans I talk to in call centers as humans … at least until they are all replaced by AI.
Figure 1: “No good deed unpunished, from Brazil” courtesy of MENTAL FLOSS may be copyrighted.
We’ve got to do better than this … https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Not sure what the answer(s) is(are). Decentralization? Required 2FA? Returning to the offline world?
This is a story about the similarity between finding good information to identify vulnerable devices on the Internet and finding the info one needs to sign up for US health care.
Hint: in one of these domains it’s possible to find facts. In the other there is a shifting maze of marketing, laws, partisan media coverage, and bureaucracies who’s goal is to profit from making it impossible to find facts and make decisions on your own.
Warning. First-world baby-boomer problem described here:
So, I'm stitting here on the group-W bench, I'm just sitting here...
OK. Really. Not trying to get out of the Viet Nam draft, just having another surreal interaction with the US Federal government 50 years later along the lines of:
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Ah, they really help themselves
But when the tax man comes to the door
Lord, the house look a rummage sale, oh yeah
John Fogerty/Credence Clearwater Revival
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/catpower/fortunateson.html
GoodRX may save my son $3,500 or more on his prescription meds. This is a large fraction of the income he’s earning on his first job.
Congress exempted “Big Phrama” from kickback rules in the 90s, the result seems to be that prices signals are allowed to work in the market to the benefit of people who would otherwise be made poor buying medicine they need at artificially high prices.
It is somehow fitting that the day I retire, the state of Ohio chose to unveil an historical marker outside the former headquarters of my first employer, CompuServe. I guess I’m history :-)
Figure 1: “CompuServe Historical Marker”
I started in June of 1985, and, looking back, what was going on there was world changing: the first commercial email, the first online banking, the first online shopping, the first electronic news wire feed, the first song released exclusively online (Arrowsmith 1994), online chat (CB), OS and compiler development, VPNs (X.25 !), data over cable in ‘82 …
In the course of my career, it turns out that many of the things that mattered wound up coming out of individual side projects, not grand corporate visions.
Ode to emacsconf 2023With apologies to William Shakespeare and actual odes.All the world’s a text, And all the men and women merely editors; They have their reads and their writes, And Emacs in its time plays many parts…
Figure 1: “2015-02-02 Making a virtual Emacs conference happen – index card #emacs #organizing-people #conference #planning #questions” by sachac is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse.
The chart below is a mental framework I’ve used to evaluate my work situation over the span of may career. The goal is to move as far up the pyramid as you can. Being at the top (interesting )is really a first or zeroth world problem. Insert discussion of human flourishing/εὐδαιμονία here. If you’re failing at a lower level, the upper layers really don’t matter. Figure 1: Maslow’s Heirarchy of Jobs © 2023 George M.
