Wordyard
Hand-forged posts since 2002
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Latest posts
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Glaze builds an archive
Here’s one user’s experience trying to get a little smidge of productivity out of generative AI coding. TLDR: it’s taken three years, but (one of) the bots has finally accomplished a simple task for me, so chalk one up for AI. I have largely been a gen-AI skeptic since ChatGPT’s…
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Well, hello. It’s been a while.
Last post… eight years ago. OK! Sorry about that. Much has gone down since then, to borrow a phrase I learned from a veteran writer/editor at the San Francisco Examiner who left us a while ago. When I joined Axios in March 2018 I pretty much abandoned this blog, though I have…
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Where did 2017 go? Into Backchannel
From July through Thanksgiving this year I worked with Steven Levy, Jessi Hempel, and their team at Backchannel as an editor — an opportunity that became available while executive editor Sandra Upson was on leave. I’ve been around enough online media shops to recognize the fine…
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Fall 2016 update, or: What I’m up to
Missed you! Here’s my latest news: (1) I continue to write features for Backchannel, which is still publishing on Medium but no longer owned by Medium, having been acquired by Conde Nast. Index of my stories is here. Some (relatively) recent stuff: This Company Kills Passwords —…
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Wordyard update
As you can see, I’ve suspended the link-sharing project. It’s not that there isn’t still an incredible flow of links on the subject of digital authenticity and “being yourself” on social media. (You could fill a whole feed just with links to think pieces on Trump.) But I’m not…
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What does it mean to build bots ethically?
From “How to Make a Bot That Isn’t Racist,” by Sarah Jeong in Motherboard (3/25/16): “Most of my bots don’t interact with humans directly,” said Kazemi. “I actually take great care to make my bots seem as inhuman and alien as possible. If a very simple bot that doesn’t seem very…
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People asks, “Who is the real Trump?”
Trump is said to be an effective campaigner because voters perceive his “I tell it like it is” persona to be real. Yet his coterie turns around and says that the shit-stirring, plainspoken, politically incorrect identity is the act, and the “real” Trump is a more thoughtful kind…
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“Our unique selves must live in some balanced state between overedited and underedited”
From “Runs in the Family: New findings about schizophrenia rekindle old questions about genes and identity,” by Siddhartha Mukherjee in the New Yorker (3/28/16): What is the nature of instruction that allows an organism to build a psyche, or a nose — any nose — in the first…
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“Always-on celebrities should not be surprised when their credibility is questioned”
Nick Denton in Gawker, writing on the jury verdict in the Hulk Hogan trial: Celebrities, especially ones as public about their personal and sex life as Hulk Hogan, have a narrower zone of privacy than ordinary people. Regardless of questions about Gawker’s editorial standards…
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“Mr. Bush was considered authentic”
From “Obama Privately Tells Donors That Time Is Coming to Unite Behind Hillary Clinton,” by Maggie Haberman and Michael Shear in the New York Times (3/18/16): Mr. Obama acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton was perceived to have weaknesses as a candidate, and that some Democrats did…