Forewarning: I touch on politics in this post, so if that isn’t your thing, go ahead and skip this. Author John Scalzi, whose work I’ve read a lot of this year, recently wrote a blog post called “Please Don’t Idolize Me (or Anyone, Really)” in response to people searching for a new creative person to look up to after several allegations of sexual assault surfaced against author Neil Gaiman. If you have a tendency to…
A couple of Sundays ago, Hubby and I went to hear Cory Doctorow speak. Cory is a prolific writer who writes at the intersection of technology and policy, excoriating corporations that harm society and the politicians who play to corporations at the expense of the majority of us. He keeps a link blog called Pluralistic (https://pluralistic.net) and has written both fiction and nonfiction related to tech and policy. Over the course of the pandemic, he…
Feelin’ cranky about tech tonight. Well, moreso about the way criminals use tech to take advantage of us. I attended a cybersecurity training today and the presenters explained how hackers are using ChatGPT to create phishing emails that can mimic the way a specific person writes if you train it on the previous writing of that person. From a hacker’s perspective, this is a great way to trap someone in a phishing scheme because the…
If you spend any amount of time online these days, you’ll hear about two things ad nauseum: The meltdown of Twitter and the wonders of AI (artificial intelligence), specifically text generated by tools like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard. I haven’t had a chance to use ChatGPT because it’s always overloaded with users when I try and I’m not inclined to pay a subscription for a service that I want to test. Google’s Bard has a…
Forms are on my mind recently, partially because I finished filing our taxes and partially due to a project at work. I have filled out a LOT of forms in my life. From tax forms to social services forms to grant applications to healthcare forms, all ask for some intensive and often highly personal information. After you’ve filled out the same information (name, address, phone, email … etc., etc., etc.) for the twelfth dozen time,…