history pragmatic historian technology writing

My Websites Are Being Used to Train AI – Is That a Good Thing?

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…

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music observations technology

Twitter Requiem – Join Me at Mastodon

When I pinned a portion of the lyrics to Duran Duran’s song “Future Past” on my Twitter feed on December 31, 2021, little did I know they would serve as a requiem for the site. If you’ve not been following the Twitter saga, gazillionaire Elon Musk, who seems to have more money than sense, purchased Twitter and has been burning it all to the ground in the course of a few weeks. I have been…

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