Category: Technology
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The conversation.
Amy Welborn has posted some initial, if not “hot,” responses to Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical. One thing I learned from her take is the distinction between history and historiography! But I digress. Here’s what Amy did: Before last week, I had never, ever in my life used any kind of LLM or…
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Chatbot discourse.
Notice any changes? My apologies for all that mess that’s on the front page today (if you’re reading this much later, it might be gone by now). I’m going to have to gradually clean things up, but I can only do one thing at a time. Today I changed the theme and fixed my main…
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Blogging on the move.
Well, I haven’t made any posts since Christmas, and only a handful since the start of the pandemic, and here I am making three or four posts in the span of a day. Thanks, TypePad, for imploding and forcing my hand! It’s not that I haven’t had thoughts for the last five years or so.…
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Handwriting and script.
A perennial lament about modern education: kids don't write in script or learn cursive anymore. Must be all that texting! Here's an article from The Atlantic that argues, indeed, new technology had something to do with the decline of cursive — but it was technology of a couple of generations ago. It's entitled, "How…
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The next step of Kondo… where to start in the “household equipment” category?
More on Marie Kondo’s book can be found here, here, and here. + + + I’m now partway through decluttering the most baffling meta-category, what Marie Kondo (in her Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up) calls komono. I’ve already done several of the categories within it — the ones that were easiest to select items that belonged within them…
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The dangers of having “putting places.”
Look closely. There’s a baby in there: See him now? I have gotten more use out of this little bassinet, bought when I was pregnant with my oldest, than I ever did with the others. This guy? He is a napper. I have almost forgotten that babies can do that, after #3 (who gave…
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Service dog support.
Here's a little vignette that, I hope, will inspire you with gratitude and perspective. And perhaps some generosity. Share the link and enjoy. + + + My friend Cathie (who's also my three-year-old's godmother, by the way!) has recently turned to GoFundMe to beg funds for a peanut-sniffing service dog, ASAP, to protect her teen…
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Technology, productivity, and unemployment.
Interesting musing here at Engineering Ethics Blog. The ways that people make a living today are very different from what they were a generation ago. In 1970, Detroit was still a bustling manufacturing metropolis, thousands of women earned a decent living as telephone operators, and many newspapers provided employment to linotype operators who spent their days…
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More on “spiritual poverty.”
Melanie picked up my ball in the last post and ran with it: Especially in the online world it can be so hard to see others’ humanity, to risk being flamed at by approaching what seems like a scoff as if it were an invitation to a dialogue, to risk seeming like a fool for…
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It’s all Greek to an optical character recognition program. Well, Greek is, anyway.
A couple of days ago Melanie commented that she'd gotten a weird image in the anti-spam verification box here: Seriously, my first captcha had Greek letters! I don't know how to do that on my keyboard. Was I supposed to transliterate to English? I've never seen Greek letters, but the question led me to idly…
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Clearly I need more sleep.
My cell phone alarm goes off at six so that I can take my temperature. You know the drill. This morning, when the digital thermometer beeped, I took it out of my mouth and squinted at it, using the light from my cell phone screen to read it. (My last thermometer had a backlight, but…
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My gym bag.
A long time ago, when I was fairly new to regular exercise, I wrote a post entitled "My swim bag" in which I described, um, my swim bag. After I finished taking a year of swimming lessons a few years ago, and started trying to swim for fitness, I only managed to do it a…
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