Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Trump vs Facts

    Fumbling around in a fog of vibes and misinformation and things you saw on Fox News is good enough for the president; why should the rest of us ask for anything better? Soon, no one will know what is happening—what the problem is, or what remedies to apply. What sectors are booming and which are contracting, whether interest rates should be higher or lower, whether it’s hotter or colder than last year, whether mortality has gone up or gone down. It will be vibes all the way down. Soon we will all be bumping around helplessly in the dark.

    Alexandra Petri

    Trump Gets Rid of Those Pesky Statistics (The Atlantic)

    In a different era, each of these stories would have defined months, if not more, of a presidency. Coming in such quick succession, they risk being subsumed by one another and sinking into the continuous din of the Trump presidency. Collectively, they represent an assault on several kinds of truth: in reporting and news, in statistics, and in the historical record.

    David A. Graham

    A Terrible Five Days for the Truth (The Atlantic)

  • You Should Use RSS

    Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows websites like blogs, newsletters, and news sites to make their content available in “feeds” for outside services called “RSS readers” or “feed readers”. Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years.

    …

    I’ve been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it’s a travesty more people aren’t familiar with it.

    Molly White

    Curate your own newspaper with RSS (citation needed)

  • Bandcamp Friday

    Bandcamp does a promotion called Bandcamp Friday where they waive their revenue in order to give more to the artists when you buy their music. Today is a Bandcamp Friday, so here are some artists that I think you should check out. I know I’ll be buying songs from a few of them today.

    Sylvan Esso: One of the localish artists that I found thanks to an article about Psychic Hotline. I bought What Now recently and it has been a pretty regular entry in my listening rotation.

    Daughter of Swords: Another artist I found through Psychic Hotline. I picked up their album Alex last month and have really enjoyed listening to it.

    Made in 1985: I went to school with Scott, and he’s a cool guy not just because he shares my name and we chatted in some art classes twenty-some years ago. I’ve bought a bunch of his music over the past few years.

    Rogue Radio: Louise Sugden is a former Games Workshop employee who has a hobby-focused YouTube channel called Rogue Hobbies. She also has made some music.

    neon shudder: neon shudder did soundtrack albums for the Hard Wired Island roleplaying game. That album is one of my daughter’s top picks when her and I are driving somewhere.

    Lofi Girl: This is actually a label with songs from a bunch of different artists. They do a mix of big and small albums. One of my favorite is chill beats for LEGO building, but I also enjoy their seasonal releases like Halloween 2023 and Christmas 2023.

  • How Do We Get Out of This Mess?

    Robert Reich shares 15 ways that he thinks we could improve things in the United States.

    How Do We Get Out of This Mess? (YouTube – Robert Reich)

  • Impeachment is a Duty

    Happily, it so happens there is a very specific remedy set aside within our Constitution specifically for the occasion of a president posing a threat to our democracy and its people and the Constitution itself. This process is known as impeachment. There is a new reason to impeach Donald Trump every day—one reason at least. And yet motions to impeach are few and far between. There have only been 14 attempts so far, and only 3 this year, which is amazing in a dismaying sort of way.

    A.R. Moxon

    Impeachment is a Duty (The Reframe)

  • Star League at 1,000

    Back in 2021, I was one of the founding moderators for a new BattleTech fan server. At the time, the big existing fan communities for the game tended to allow open bigotry and other unwelcoming behavior, and there wasn’t really much in the way of an alternative. After finding each other on twitter, three of us decided to set up a new server with the goal of being a welcoming place, particularly for LGBTQ fans.

    It’s been four years now, and the server recently hit 1,000 members. Over the years, it has grown into a great fan community. There have been growing pains along the way, and all three of us founding members have stepped away from moderation over the years – it’s a lot of work to keep a big community running smoothly, and we’ve moved on to other projects. I am really proud of what I helped build there though, and I look forward to seeing it continue to thrive.

    If you’re interested in BattleTech, here’s a link to the server: Star League.

  • AI, Search, and the Internet

    I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.

    Emanuel Maiberg

    Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain (404 Media)

  • Liberal Dissents

    But look closer at the dissents, and it is evident that, whatever their differences, the three liberals agree on an overarching theme: They no longer see the Court playing by the old game of constitutional law. Their dissents suggest anything but an assumption of business as usual. The three liberal justices are writing about a majority unbound by law and its tiresome technicalities—about a majority that is no longer doing law as that term has come to be understood.

    Aziz Huq

    The Court’s Liberals Are Trying to Tell Americans Something (The Atlantic)

  • Chatting into Dark Corners

    This is the sort of thing that should come as no surprise. Of course an LLM that ingests as much of the internet as possible is going to incorporate works of fiction, and these programs don’t have any way of separating fact from fiction. Then the chat interface and marketing are built to convince users that they’re chatting with an intelligence rather than a probability-based text generator. Despite all that, it is still a compelling example of the dangers of LLM chatbots.

    Social media users were quick to note that ChatGPT’s answer to Lewis’ queries takes a strikingly similar form to SCP Foundation articles, a Wikipedia-style database of fictional horror stories created by users online.

    “Entry ID: #RZ-43.112-KAPPA, Access Level: ████ (Sealed Classification Confirmed),” the chatbot nonsensically declares in one of his screenshots, in the typical writing style of SCP fiction. “Involved Actor Designation: ‘Mirrorthread,’ Type: Non-institutional semantic actor (unbound linguistic process; non-physical entity).”

    Another screenshot suggests “containment measures” Lewis might take — a key narrative device of SCP fiction writing. In sum, one theory is that ChatGPT, which was trained on huge amounts of text sourced online, digested large amounts of SCP fiction during its creation and is now parroting it back to Lewis in a way that has led him to a dark place.

    In his posts, Lewis claims he’s long relied on ChatGPT in his search for the truth.

    Joe Wilkins

    A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say (Futurism)

  • HTML Quine

    I saw this page shared on Mastodon, and it is an impressive showcase of some things that HTML and CSS can accomplish.

    Its title also meant that I had to look up what quine means:

    quine: A program that produces its own source code as output

    Wiktionary

    This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine. (secretgeek.github.io)