moon traveller herald

This is a lookback at recent AI activity.  On my technology job site Progressive Gauge.  Based on three years of research but condensed around 2025 stuff.. Gemini concludes Story concludes:  The current state of AI is like a lavish Hollywood movie trailer : while the promotional footage promises a world-changing epic of "civilizational" proportions, the actual production is struggling behind the scenes with a ballooning budget and a script that still has significant holes. [Re pick above [Wet lab feedback loop] - I specially asked "No Teal!"] jv https://progressivegauge.com/2025/12/31/multiglobal-hyperbole-engines-in-2025-pt-1/

   Bill Gates Source Code: Harvard Drop-Out Makes Good Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2025 With the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk dashing about, we crouch for shelter now in an era where well-funded high-tech bros can live a life that was once reserved only for Doctor Strange. That tends to make Bill Gates’ “Source Code: My Beginnings” a much more warmfy and life-affirming book than it might otherwise have been. In this recounting of his early days, and founding of Microsoft, he paints a colorful picture of a bright and excitable boy making good. Much of Source Code is set in “the green pastures of Harvard University.” [ story continues ... ] [I posted this on Amazon][But if they move the URL, note it is also on LinkedIn, Facebook, and ProgressiveGauge.]

  Appreciation: Neil Raden, skeptical data analytics and AI examiner, at 71 https://t.co/WpQo3iBHTB — Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) June 27, 2024

 1. I have been studying Disinformation since Journalism School. More and more the study of disinformation became a specific college study. [One of my professors back in the day, Larry Martin, had a full career as head of Intelligence in Czechkoslovokia during Communist Era. He could tell you how it was done before the Web.] 1.5 Weakly funded in the last two years the Important Cause of Disinformation Study has all been shut down. 2. This is how the Constitution Loving Dictator Works. The Mission: Spread Partisan Propaganda that He approves of. Harass others. 3. How? Set up pop-up groups with Right-Thinking Billionaire Funding capable of heaping subpoenas for emails, text messages, and other information related to government and social media companies. [This post was researched with the help of NYTimes and Bing AI.] 4. Complying with these requests consumed time and money. The threat of legal harassment also led to a decrease in funding from donors, including philanthropies, corpor...

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is right up there with the MidEast, Ukraine, Democracy, Inflation and Kim Kardashian among the memes that we see in our news feeds today. *On Wall Street, AI hopes drove a big boost in the stock market. People are going to lose jobs and machines are going to take over and we can rake in some bucks: Hurray!  *For my brother, it’s a quick “Belated Birthday Card source” [Hell with Hallmark]  *For headline writers, AI fever has been a chance to get clicks, hits and page views based on FUD - Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.  *For an older writer, [me] AI nudges one forward, raining down ideas when his own synapses are flagging .*&%!  I spent over 40 years in the computer trade ‘press’ – as the Web took over it was called ‘media’. I wrote was about what was inside these boxes. The Definition of computer is 1-input, 2-processing, 3-output – all of which is enabled by 4-memory. The last 5 years before I retired I had the Big Data beat. That w...

  Digital publishing has been and will continue to be a difficult to ride wave. Be prepared to act quickly, but deliberately. Ask the people with the new ideas if there is really a "there" there. Ask the Product Developer how certain/uncertain is the return on the investment in the new technology. Could we end up in the same place as where we started, with the exact same problems? How do you test out a choice to ensure it’s not just fodder for an engineer’s resume? Any project can come to naught, how deep is your investment in time, effort, ande money – and how long will it take to regroup/undo? Scaling cannot be built entirely on adding staff, even if - or especially if - they are all brilliant. If you are #3 in the field, find a new field. Important framing question: will Google win in AI? How will that affect ad dollars and strategy?

When I started out in high tech publishing, the head of the company was a well-mannered businessman - and, surely, salesman, who was glad to discuss his graduate business management thesis at a well known Eastern Ivy League establishment on the topic of 'how to manage creative people.' He like more than a few sales-publishing bosses that ran things in my stops on the way liked journalists and art dept folk (the latter, especially, if they wore miniskirts), but he was the only one that ever explicitly seemed to look at what was going on this way - that managing creative people was the task.  My recollection of the best stop with the most fun crew is that we would play, regale and generally show off and entertain each other through the day and would, many of us get to actual work around 4pm. It's still my notion of the creative process or part of the process. That's the background for posting this Google Talk with John Cleese, who was decided his topic for the Google Talk...

(THE JUGBAND SPECIAL - Onyx Water, Kansas) A guy reading a paper at a bar today is a slug from prehistory. But give that same guy a cell phone to read this paper and he melts into the crowd. That is how stupid civilization is, you know? I like to spread out the paper and eyeball the pictures, captions, headlines and pull quotes .. with a Bud. The conceit here is that I am a master of the universe in the world of ideas. If you keep up with the raw technology advances (and have to give eternal credit to Steve Jobs for all the 'small' advances he packed into the iPod) you can visualize a sheet of foldable paper something on the order of a kindergarten roll blanket that would be backlit and would receive the paper from the ether. It is the mass of paper that is challenging the news business you know. I bought some newsprint sketch pad at CVS and it cost about the same as a daily paper with all its content and advertising. It would not share the resemblance to a Faberge Egg...

David Brooks is one of the heavier denizens of the New York Times op-ed pages. And PBS convention coverage. And so forth. Very middle of the road; rightish, but not so that his veins bug out. He wrote an interesting piece on ‘when world’s collide’ On Friday, July 07, 2006, or thereabouts. Page One’s Missing Characters takes him back to his young career and the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago. “The golden age of Chicago journalism was just then coming to an end” he writes by way of exposition. [If this was still the golden age of the Internet I could link to it and you could see for yourself, but, alas, and, alack, the op-ed page is now premium content.] Different classes met. The reporters spanned all class, and had to misplaced sense of the noble poor. They probably worried about declining circ and agate dollars, but they didn’t blog in response. The Billy Goad scene described resonates for me because it is something of a world I’ve seen glimpses of …. Ben Hecht, who he mentions, after ...

Filene’s department store in Boston is going out of business, absorbed by a series of conglomerates until it became redundant. The song with different tenor has been sung in Washington [Hechts], Chicago [Marshall Fields], Racine [Zahns] and beyond. The local department store has given way, just like the local grocery store, the local appliance store, or local shoe store. The tipping point was a long time ago. Several years ago Filenes became part of Federated stores. The Filenes stores that survive will become Macy’s stores. The central HQ on Washington St in Boston will close. The caravan moves on. Just as surely, small bits and pieces of the world we grew up in fade away. Commercial mergers and bankruptcies happen – but, in turn, small parts of the civic fabric are rent. Does the manager of a national chain take less interest in the doings of the Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau or the Civic Improvement Association than does the president of the local department store?...