My high school was a small boarding school in New England. David Sheldon was the headmaster during my years there. He recently passed away but I wanted to share this scrap I unearthed from an old notebook.
I think it’s a snippet from a letter sent out when he was announcing his retirement. I was too young and restless to appreciate his wisdom and graciousness fully but this stuck with me enough to save it.
I have felt always that a headmaster required those traits identified as necessary for a successful Congressman:
the friendliness of a child,
the enthusiasm of a teenager,
the assurance of a college boy,
the diplomacy of a wayward husband,
the curiosity of a cat,
and the good humor of an idiot.
Those characteristics come more readily at age forty and fifty than at sixty-one and lead me to believe the School needs a fresh eye and new energy.
Rising star Kaoru Mitoma scored an amazing goal in the final minutes of Brighton’s match against Liverpool to knock them out of the FA Cup. What was amazing about his goal is that Mitoma had the presence of mind in those final minutes to bobble the perfectly placed cross just enough to throw off the goalie so he was not prepared when he ultimately slammed the ball into the net.
Such was the speed of the movement, and such was the quality of the execution, that the ball did not even make contact with the floor between those touches. A ‘keepy-uppy’ goal, against Liverpool, in the final minute of a thrilling FA Cup tie: Mitoma continues to go from strength to strength, from defining moment to defining moment.
Beware of claims that a generative AI can achieve a higher order of intelligence if you let it crawl the internet. Even with all our collective learning, humans still jump to conclusions and misinterpret each other. Is the drawing above from a child with a disturbed obsession with death or just an innocent rendering of a family snorkeling trip?
Maybe you remember this one from 2008 where a child’s drawing seemingly depicts mom as a pole dancer when in reality she was a Home Depot clerk trying to selling snow shovels before a blizzard.
Nothing is what it seems on the internet, there is inaccurate information everywhere, willfully created or not. Training an AI must be supervised on carefully curated data sets. Now more than ever we must heed the motto, Garbage in, Garbage out.
One silver lining in getting laid off is that you have time to meet people and learn about things that you may have not had the time or attention to pick up on while in the trenches of a full time job. During the first week of my new no-fixed-schedule life I learned about:
A company called Helios that uses AI to analyze the voice of the CEO on investor calls to measure the confidence of leadership. The company is offering a product described in their white paper as,
the first widely available data product that systematically assesses the tone of the voice of an executive during earnings conference calls to produce novel and meaningful sources of quantitative information
The search engine as we once knew it has become a thing of the past. Google, originally hailed for its simplicity and clean results has lost its shine. The ten blue links are crowded out by paid placement and other forms of sponsorship. The gradual infection of the open web with cheap clickbait has now ruined even the coveted “organic links” so that if you look for something like “Best Hotels in Osaka” even the non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads. It’s rotten all the down. For more on this, read Doctorow’s excellent enshitification
There’s something called a “small modular reactor” (SMR) which is basically a mini nuclear reactor. There are multiple use cases for such a small form factor including replacing old coal power plants but it is also timely for the power-hungry data-centers which have been accused of running dirty.
WebAssembly (WASM) has evolved to the point where it will not only replace the older browser-based code with something faster. It will also allowing for sandboxed applications to run, on-demand, within your browser heralding the age of truly write-once, run-anywhere applications. If my understanding is correct, this is one of the biggest enhancements to web development since AJAX programming back in 2005.
I turn to Crosby’s music when I am feeling melancholy. His sweet voice is like an old friend who had been there, understands, and tells you how events fit into the broader universe. His perspective came from a kind soul who was perhaps too trusting and suffered for it. “Honest to the point of recklessness” as the song goes.
If you want to listen to some pure Crosby magic, take a listen to this solo concert from a small theater in Berkeley in 1981 – it’s very intimate, just him with his guitar and about 100 people in a beautiful wooden building designed by Julia Morgan.
Now he is gone. I like to think of him soaring above us, finally free of the weights that held him down, like his mother in his song Carry Me.
And then there was my mother: She was lying in white sheets there and she was waiting to die. She said, “If you’d just reach underneath this bed And untie these weights, I could surely fly.
She’s still smiling but she’s tired, She’d like to hear that last bell ring. You know if she could she would Stand up, and she could sing, singing
Carry me, carry me Carry me above the world Carry me, carry me.
If Only I Could Remember My Name was on repeat when I was in boarding school, especially when it was rainy and cold outside, like is in NYC today. Press play and remember David Crosby.
FEMA fired a California company hired to translate disaster relief instructions for Alaska Native Americans when it was discovered the instructions included such phrases as, “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny”
An employee at a high school in Maryland accidentally emailed explicit photos to the entire student body. “I am asking that all students, as responsible online citizens, not share the photos by email, social media outlets or other avenues,” said the school principal.
And that’s going to do it folks. This Week That Was was a side project to highlight all the weird and wonderful stories that crossed my path over the course of managing the newsfeeds at SmartNews. As of last week, I don’t do that anymore so I’m going to give this weekly post a rest. Thank you everyone that followed along, especially Roberto, Ian, Todd, GreggMie & Dav. It was a blast!
I never got to say goodbye to my colleagues and friends. My Slack access was cut off just minutes after getting my severance notice.
I never had time to hand over any of my ongoing tasks to those left behind. I could also not inform any of the hundreds of partners that I’ve worked with over the years. I lost access to my email as well.
I think it could have been done more gracefully but what’s done is done. I’ve posted on the socials (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook) and will now turn my focus to the next thing. I’m open and interested in many things but here are three things I’m currently thinking of:
The online publisher subscription problem. Scroll had an innovative approach but they got bought up by Twitter and Elon shut things down. Apple News is doing this but it seems too much like a restrictive bundle (see below). There has got to be a way to build a more inclusive model for subscriptions that satisfies both users and publishers, It’s time for publishers to realize they can’t charge $25/month for their content and users need to realize they need to pay something to avoid aggressive surveillance capitalism.
Cable TV’s choke hold on local sports. I will not install basic cable & the extra YES network add-on just to watch local sports. It’s just not worth it just for one game every few days. I cut the cable years ago and would pay for a streaming service for local games alone without basic cable. Just as Kazaa and Limewire were used to allow music fans to pick and choose the songs they wanted from an album, sports fans are jumping through hoops to pick and choose what they want from the cable TV bundles. Why won’t the leagues embrace their role as media companies and sell direct to their fans?
ChatGPT and services like it are going to be transformational. Sure, it’s early days and there are obvious limitations. Ask it to tell you about Pelé and it will tell you everything except the fact that he’s dead. The algo is not connected to the news and I think that’s a conscious decision. I’m sure they are still supervising the training so the news needs to be filtered for quality, accuracy, and context, by knowledgeable humans. The intersection of generative AI services such as ChatGPT and the news is fascinating.
I have much to learn and I look forward to meeting as many people as possible to educate myself on the puzzles above and opportunities within.
Kevin McCarthy finally got his wish and was elected speaker of the House, after 14 failed ballots, in the early hours of Saturday morning. Here’s what he had to concede to get the required votes.
The Mega Millions lottery failed to find a winner so the jackpot rolled over to $1.1 billion, the third largest in history.
Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin woke up from a medically induced sedation after suffering a cardiac arrest on the field and asked, “Did we win?”
Adidas is scrambling to unload $530 million in unsold Yeezys following their cancelling of Ye’s contract after his anti-semitic pronouncements.
Rapper Antionne Brodnax, who used a photo of himself at the January 6th Capitol Riot for his latest album cover, was sentence to five months in prison for breaking into the U.S. Capitol.
A Colorado public library closed down for cleaning due to “higher than acceptable” levels of trace methamphetamine found in the air ducts. The source was determined to be from people smoking meth in the restrooms.
Two people in Florida were arrested after one of them made a 911 call to get help moving items from a home they were burglarizing. They also wanted to get a ride to the airport to spend the weekend in New York. “Deputies DID help them with their belongings, and DID give them a ride, but it wasn’t to the airport … it was to the Polk Pokey,” said the sheriff’s office.
