The next day NBC’s president decided to make an exception to the network’s ban on recorded sound in order to interview Morrison and play a portion of the recordings. (Yes, both NBC and CBS banned recorded sound over their air, and would continue to do so for another decade. […] ).
It’s telling that the lesson America’s big radio networks took from this incredible eye-witness recording was simply, “Nope, no more of that!” As sound scholar Michael Biel pointed out, “This is…the first time that a recording was allowed to be broadcast on NBC, and I can count on my fingers the other times that NBC broadcast recordings — knowingly and unknowingly — until the middle of WWII.”
As we gathered data, surveyed people and set up experiments, it became clear that those tiny shortcuts – sometimes hailed as a hallmark of efficient communication – undermine relationships instead of simplifying them.
After I thought about this a bit, this seems to be a clear benefit: We’re really good at trying to imagine (and predict) what other people are really thinking. We pick up subtle clues from body language and more, and we do it subconsciously. So why wouldn’t we also pick up subtle clues in a medium like text?
Only with Substack does anyone perceive creator branding as being subservient to the platform — something that ought to be seen merely as an interchangeable CMS — like that.
I’ve tried a few different things on Substack. (None of them ever took off, and each of them I subsequently moved to web sites I directly control.) I’ve always felt something was off, and lately I’ve been souring more on the whole platform. This piece by Gruber puts a clear, fine point on what I dislike about Substack.
This is what makes the LLMs feel different. So far, computers have always been perfect—except when they’re wrong/broken. That’s fundamentally not how people are. LLMs came along and they’re imperfect. Always. Just like people.
First — You can’t simply reply. I get it. It’s hard to have a mailbox on the Internet these days. So many bounces, to deal with (I’m serious.)
Second — So when you go to drag-select, copy and paste that “s.sampath@verizon.com” email address, you discover it’s not what it seems.
Pasting into your email client’s “To” field, you actually create a list of multiple recipients: The first recipient is “s”, then the second is “sampath”, etc—none of which are the email address you meant to copy and paste. So you have to type it into your email client. Not a big deal, but probably enough to stop most people. If they really cared, they’d just give us an
Okay, but why can’t we copy and paste? Because in the HTML source in their email, it’s actually:
If you can read HTML, you see there are HTML entities jammed in various places in that email address. I had to lookup the entity ‌ — that’s a Zero Width Non-Joining space. Meaning it’s not visible (“zero-width”) and it’s job is to keep whatever is left and right from “joining”… in the sense that complex characters can join to make a glyph— For example: An ‘a’ and ‘e’ can join to make the single character ‘æ’ if your language supports that. (But, of course, English does not have any joining characters at all.) I’m confident this is just an artifact of their bulk-email-sending composer software; it’s common for such things to “defend” an email address in the middle of text from harvesting looking for emails. So this wasn’t maliciousness on Verizon’s part.
Third — …but it’s ironic that, in a message that contains, “It’s not just better service — we are setting a new standard, beginning today,” I have to flip between windows as I retype that email address.
Fourth — Because I’m a level-39 nerd wizard, I do reply to these things. (I mean, I start a new email message addressed to that email address.) And because we (said wizards) are quick to anger and regular Internet users (ie, Sampath) are tasty with ketchup, I send things like this…
What does that mean? It means you can write a post that is directed within the network. If you want to get on the radar of a blogger – write about their ideas and reference them. The lowly hyperlink is a connective tissue that creates a network graph between the nodes.
Critchlow wrote that in 2018. 7 years down the road, all the technology (for the web and blogs) works great, it’s easier than ever to blog, and in 14 years / 5,000 posts I’ve never had anyone (an author of something I’ve linked to) reach out to me. I’m not complaining—I don’t blog as a way to fish for connections like that. (I blog as a way of working with the garage door up.)
slip:4utone1.
Also, how is this the first time I’ve used the tag “Blogging”?
How did these trillions of potent proteins, originating in thousands of human bodies, find their way to my son’s blood circulation? What historical, social, and economic conditions enabled this extraordinary exchange of substances?
With the passing years, I’ve come to recognize that this was Ballard’s true calling—not as a writer of imaginative works, but as a genuine futurist. This is even evident in his novels.
You could see artificial intelligence as a kind of frontier, then, which moves forward as computerized machines take over the tasks humans previously had to do themselves.
Those last few reps are the money makers — the best return for your effort you’re going to get, but many people don’t even know they’re possible. My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.
That is a critical life-lesson which I learned through Art du Déplacement. Therein we talk a lot about such things as sharing, being strong to be useful, and community. However, the biggest gains are in the personal development. It’s a journey of growth, yes, but more so it’s a journey of personal discovery. «Allons-y!»
