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Archive: March 2023
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 March! It's not a name, it's an attitude... oh, wait.
If you Google "March" you will find lots of pictures like this one, all Spring-y and flower-y and birds-and-bees-y. Nope. Not here in sunny California, it's still cold and rainy.
I think March *is* an attitude, through; it's the end of winter, the end of the end of last year / start of new year, and mentally now we are truly in a new year, with stuff to do, things to see, etc. It's a positive time.
Right?
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 One of the cool things that happened to me while I was out, not blogging, was a chance to compete in the 2022 J/70 Sailing World Championships, in Monaco.
It was an incredible experience which almost didn't happen; at the 11th nay 12th hour my crew and I were invited to participate - filling in for a better US team which couldn't go - and we overperformed, finishing 28th out of 92 and 3rd in the "one-pro" division. (Most of the four-person teams have more than one pro; many are all-pro.)
The regatta was scheduled for five days, but the first four featured no sailing due to lack of wind, so we became tourists. (Not too bad ... Monaco, Nice, Cannes, Menton, San Remo, ...) Finally on the last day there was wind and so it became a one-day three-race series for all the marbles.
I was recently asked to give a talk about this experience for the South Coast Corinthian Yacht Club in Marina Del Rey, and spent much of today going back through old pictures and assembling a presentation. Great run. I might post the whole thing here - stay tuned!
One of the great sub-plots was being able to use my friend Fede Madrid's J/70 named "Outlier"; he and it are based in Barcelona, a short drive across the South of France from Monaco. It was a great boat and facilitated a great opportunity, and of course the name was perfect!
This great little summary movie of the regatta was made by the Yacht Club de Monaco ...
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... and they all lived happy ever after, IRL!
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 Filter pass...
Heh, love this ...
 Now Iditarod minus two ... must get the tracker running again ... a nice little bit of ksh hacking ahead ... 
Scott Adams: Twitter users are addicted to being offended. Yeah, no kidding, and he would know :/ Though to be fair, he wants them to be...
 Official NASA replay of the SpaceX/NASA Crew-6 mission to the space station. Flawless! And maximally goose-bumpy!
Do you suppose there will be a day when these seem routine? Will I be looking at my blog in 20 years and think, "huh, remember when space launches were special?"
 Today was Tesla Investor Day; Teslarati gives their list of wants, and hosted a liveblog (reverse chrono, unfortunately). Seems like it was all about Master Plan v3, without too many near-term details.
Richard Dawkins: Why I'm sticking up for science. Via Instapundit, who note: "Richard Dawkins is not one of my favorite people, but he's right on this." He *is* one of mine (Selfish Gene, Blind Watchmaker), and yep he is right about science. It is not a religion.
Via ScienceRoll: Healthcare IT News: Most primary care telehealth visits don't require in-person follow-up.
Reid Hoffman: A few words on the promise of AI and my eight years on the OpenAI board. "AI, like most transformative technologies, grows gradually, then arrives suddenly. Headlines make AI feel abrupt and singular when it’s compared to a tidal wave, revolution or tectonic shift. In actuality, foundational work in AI has been going on since the 1950s."
Agree entirely with the New Neo: Unreachable Humans. Twenty years ago, tech made it easier to reach people, but now, not so much. So many people don't answer their phones or ever use them to talk.
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 Whew, exhausted from a day of single-handing Mojito in 15+ knots ... great fun and a great workout, but ... exhausting :)
PS yes, the Velocitek recorded 15.2 max - J/70s *can* plane :)
Marc Andreessen: The Waluigi Effect. "Forcing LLMs to play a given character may also make them more likely to play a near-opposite, more rebellious version of that character, due to LLMs being trained on the literary text where this is a common theme." As he notes: if this persists the consequences will be interesting.
 Scott Adams posted an interesting Quiz: How many of these do you believe are true? (Note, he casts them as hoaxes, but if you believe them to be true, then they are facts.)
Sad: a look at Belarus' once-vibrant tech startup scene. When I was at InTouch Health we acquired a company called TruClinic which had its entire development team in Minsk; a great group of people, highly motivated, and most efficient. My observation is the Belarussian people are strongly opposed to the Belarussian government.
 Wired review the Zwift Hub, a new smart cycling trainer. Looks nice. I have a Wahoo Kickr, which is pretty much the standard, and it's been great. But the price point here is most attractive.
 Ars Technica: fast-moving Musk makes very slow progress turning Twitter into "everything app". This is Ars' liberal and hence anti-Musk bias revealed; in actuality after years of stagnation, Twitter is changing. They might wake up one day and realize "wow, how did that happen?"
The pic is from the article, generated by Stable Diffusion, a generative AI tool; two years ago they might have noted how slowly AI is moving, and now "suddenly" wow how did that happen.
 The long, strange trip of 'Dark Side of the Moon', 50 years later. Wow, has it been 50 years? Amazing. And interesting that after all this time DSotM is the definitive Pink Floyd classic, not The Wall. I remember it was the first four-channel album I ever heard, and the sound quality was unbelievable.
Some think The Moon needs its own time zone. Yeah, probably, once it is inhabited. But Moon time will never correlate to Earth time, each Moon day is 29.5 days long...
 Of interest: how 'The Mandalorian' addresses Cara Dune's departure. Actually actress Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune. "Carano was dropped by Lucasfilm last February after she, in a quickly deleted Instagram Story, likened being a Republican today to being Jewish during the Holocaust." I'm a fan of the Mandalorian - just watched the S3E1 - and was also a fan of Cara Dune and Gina Carano. Too bad.
 Apropos and useful: Star Wars timeline: Every major event in chronological order. If you, like me, wonder where The Mandalorian fits. Turns out you have to watch Boba Fett, which came out after The Mandalorian S1 and S2, to understand S3.
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Hmm*, the Iditarod started today - the "ceremonial start", in Anchorage; the "restart" aka actual start is tomorrow. Some pics:
raring to go
and we're off!
many people on hand to watch
just like bike racing, anyone can stand by the side and spectate
such beautiful animals
Iditarod royalty
my favorite Mille Porsild and team ... bib #4 means she will be near the front
In other news, I was able to restart the Iditarod Flow Tracker after a couple of years off. This is IMHO the best way to follow a race which takes place over a week+, you can see the ebb and flow and runs and rests and truly follow the race. Watching the Iditarod's GPS tracker is all very exciting but it only shows points in time, and you need the first derivatives to actually follow the race.
 This *is* always a tough event to follow; the Alaska's News Source Live Blog is a good starting point. As of course is Twitter! (But there you have to dodge all the virtue-signaling PETA-people who want you to know the Iditarod kills dogs.... I view this as, sure, just like car racing kills people.)
 Wired suggest Climate Change is making Alaska's legendary Iditarod harder to run. Hmm. An attempt to explain why there are only 33 participants in this year's race, fewest ever.
The Iditarod themselves have a different take: economics. It's become more expensive to run the race, and many would-be mushers are unwilling or unable to afford it. The organization are thinking maybe the race moves to an every-other-year cadence. For me, I wonder why there aren't more sponsors involved. For a major sports event, it remains pretty "minor league"; part of the charm, for sure, but the times are a changing...
Onward! (And go Mille!)
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 Here's an idea: what if it were possible to resurrect dead links automatically, using the awesome Internet Archive?
Frequent readers know, I like going back and reading old blog posts; in fact clicking Flight while having my first cup of coffee has become a daily ritual, and often inspires me to keep blogging.
Many of those old posts are great, but many of those old links are dead! Either sites are gone entirely, or the URL scheme has changed, or the specific content I linked is no longer online. But many times the old site and old pages are in the Internet Archive.
Hmm, what if a simple background process runs and gardens the old links? Try to retrieve the content, and if you get a 404 or the content is missing*, then try to find the corresponding content on the Internet Archive, and if successful, substitute the archive link for the original. Maybe a little popup could warn the user this is what happened when the hover over the link.
Seems doable, right? And something which would be generally useful, not just for me and my blog, but for everyone and their blogs, and for the Internet in general.
Stay tuned :)
PS thought: this would be a nice service to embed in a link-shortener...
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It's been 24 hours since the "real" start of the Iditarod yesterday; thought I'd check in and see how it's going. The best way is via the Flow Tracker, which looks like this:
It's super early but at this point there are five mushers in the lead: Richie Diehl, Brent Sass, and Jessie Holmes, who are more or less on the same program - running until recently and now resting around mile 162 - and Ryan Reddington and Hunter Keefe, who are on a different program - have been resting in Rainy Pass for several hours now. Mille Porsild, Nicolas Petit, and Peter Kaiser are the next three; they're running and look like they're up there, but will have to rest soon. The Tracker makes this easier to see.
Biggest surprise for me is Wade Mars, a perennial contender who's pretty far back. He was bib #28 so started late, but still. And the other thing is the tiny field, it's weird not having 60+ mushers out there. A key point is that it makes logistics in the early checkpoints easier, and will make the trail better; both often-cited reasons for front running in the early days.
For me the favorite right now is defending champion Brent Sass, based on his average speed of 9.5, considerably faster than anyone else, and his run ratio of [a low] 65%. But it's only Day One, the tough pass across the Alaska Range lies ahead, including the difficult decent down the back, then the long reaches along the Yukon River, and finally the tough crossing of the ice in Norton Sound. A week or more in which everything can happen.
Brent Sass and team flying along
Stay tuned!
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 For you to know, and me to remember: curl is better than wget.
Both of these longtime members of the *nix utility world do the same thing: they retrieve files over the Internet using HTTP, thereby allowing a script to act like a browser. They both support HTTPS (encrypted connections). They both follow temporary and permenant redirections. They both allow user-agents to be specified, and a wide variety of HTTP headers to be provided. They both support saving and presenting cookies. They both support HTTP user authentication. But ... curl supports HTTP/1.1, while wget does not. This turns out to be important.
Bottom line, use curl. You're welcome.
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Hi all, an early update today as I'll be out working later (yeah, working as in an office, how weird :)...
Here's a look at the tracker* as of "now":
We can see Nic Petit has just made it into Nikolai after a long run through what most feel is the worst section of the trail. Congrats to him. It was a long run and he'll need a long rest, but it does put him in the [still early] lead. For me Brent Sass is still the favorite - he took a long rest around mile 216 and so he has more gas in the tank, his average of 9.0 is still the fastest, and his rest/run mix is only 59%. I would add Jessie Holmes to the leaders, based on the long rest he took at mile 221. Ryan Reddington is probably going to be next into Nikolai and he did take a rest at mile 207 so he's also in the mix.
Next group would include Kelly Maixner and Riche Diehl, both seemingly running well. At this point in the race the truism is true; you can't win it here, but you can lose it. Interesting to note the rest/run mix of the "leaders" is higher in the top 20, 60%+ instead of 50%+. That might mean their teams are in better shape, or it could be they're burning matches. I feel like Peter Kaiser and Mille Porsild have fallen back a bit. But stay tuned!
Some pics:
resting at Finger Lake
the lack of "crowds" in the early checkpoints is most apparent this year
Jason Mackey and team
from Mille Porsild - view of the trail from Rohn to Nikolai
"the first 20 miles out of Rohn has some of the consistently worst trail of the whole race"
* I've posted links to the tracker in a few places - if you're new here, welcome! - and thanks for your "thank you" emails ...
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Today was rather fun; spent it in a business meeting! In person! First time since ... well I can't quite remember. My then-company Teladoc stopped working in person in March 2020, and never really went back; there were a few in person meetings, but they were rather contrived. Anyway, it was fun. Definitely no longer the norm.
 Percent change in state populations, July 2021 - July 2022. Interesting. (Note: Don Surber headlines this "the national divorce has begun", which is perhaps a bit overblown. But no doubt there is a blue -> red migration under way.)
[I looked at this chart again and the colors are, um, backward; perhaps correctly the US Census didn't do politics, but the red shading indicates states losing people, and they're actually "blue" politically - e.g. California, New York, and Illinois - while the blue shading shows states which are gaining people, and they're "red" politically - e.g. Texas and Florida.]
In Los Angeles Speech, DeSantis Warns America Must Choose Between California and Florida. "Your governor is very concerned about what we're doing in Florida, so I figured I had to come by.'" Looks like some people are voting with their feet.
 Mathematicians roll the dice and get Rock-Paper-Scissors. I don't know about you, but non-transitive dice bother me. They should not exist :)
Dave Winer: new rule: idiots get muted. Assholes are blocked. Okay, but who decides? This is the problem.
Wow: Teladoc Health, which runs BetterHelp, settles with the FTC for $7.8M and agrees to stop sharing data with Meta, Snap, and other companies for ad purposes. Assume the data being shared were demographics, not individual patient records, but still...
 Liron Shapira: the goalposts are moving at warp speed. Note the things considered "nowhere near solved" in Jan 2021. Of course, one might argue something like "human-level general intelligence" will never be "solved", but at this point "nowhere near" does not feel correct.
A great example of slanted reporting: this algorithm could ruin your life. The city of Rotterdam is analyzing demographics to determine welfare fraud risk. Of course. And they're using AI algorithms to do so. Of course. And yes, some demographic categories have higher risk.
BTW Wired re-headlined this article "inside the suspicion machine". Better.
I'm unimpressed with Wired lately. They are entitled to their point of view, but it's often not deeply analyzed or supported, and hence, uninteresting.
 So impressive: Stolz speed. Yes, you must watch, and yes, you will not regret it. Speedskating has to be one of the most beautiful sports to watch.
Also: the thighs have it. Better longer video.
 Check it out: the Rogue Amoeba blog celebrates the company's 20th anniversary with the MacOS screenshot library. All those great UIs. Hen3ry will love it :)
As you know, I agree entirely with John Gruber: "I really miss UI design that made controls obvious. Clear affordances. All buttons obviously buttons, all text input fields obviously text input fields. Pop-up menus that are obviously pop-up menus (today’s MacOS 13 is chock full of pop-up menus that only reveal themselves at pop-ups when you hover over them). 20 years ago we bent over backwards to make the purpose of every control as obvious as possible; the style today is to make everything look like flat static text." Sigh.
Onward ... into a day of ... working from home :)
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It's day three of the 2023 Iditarod, which means ... it's time to take the day off! Everyone is seemingly taking their manditory 24-hour rest now (view of Flow Tracker):
Well everyone except for Wade Mars; he's shown as being in first, yay, moving from Ophir to Iditarod, where he will likely stop and take his 24. The strategies here are most interesting; Nic Petit is actually (I think) in first place moving from Nikolai where he has already completed his 24. (I highlighted him in the screenshot above by hovering over his name.) I think by the time he reaches Iditarod - likely, sometime late tonight - he will pass Wade and take over the lead. That's 70 miles for him - probably two runs - and will take him about 12 hours.
On the way he will pass Ryan Redington, Richie Diehl, and a host of others doing their 24s in Takotna, and then Jessie Holmes and Brent Sass, who are sitting 2nd and 3rd doing their 24s in Ophir. My prediction from speeds and timing is that when everyone is running through Iditarod, the order will be: Nic, Brent, Jessie, Ryan, and Richie, in that order. I think Pete Kaiser and Matt Failor are also in the mix, as are Eddie Burke (!) and Mille Porsild (yay), with Hunter Keefe in 10th. We'll check on this :)
The key factor seems to be the heat; many mushers are wanting to rest now with cooler weather predicted ahead. Trail conditions so far have been good. If it stays warm(er) it will make the Yukon River and then Norton Sound tougher, but we'll see. A lot of racing left.
Some pics:
Go Mille + team!
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Checking in on the 2023 Iditarod ... day four ... with everyone having done their "24s" and off and running. Well everyone among the leaders but Wade Mars. Here's the current situation as shown by the Flow Tracker:
Brent Sass is off and running in the lead, followed by Jesse Holmes. They are one-two on the trail, and also in the race. The next three in a close tie are Richie Diehl, Peter Kaiser, and Ryan Reddington. And the next group is Kelly Maixner, Eddie Burke, Matthew Failor, and Nic Petit. Note that Nic did not come out of taking an "early 24" at Nikolai as well as I thought he would. Wade Mars is still finishing his 24 in Iditarod, and everyone else is now out of it (I think!) Sadly this includes Mille Porsild who is running well, and is the top woman-led team.
Next bit of strategy is when to run and rest along the Yukon. It's "warm", and the trail conditions are slushy and slow, so running at night would seem fast. Every team needs to rest for 8 hours in a Yukon checkpoint, it may be that doing this early pays off, if the conditions get colder and faster. Stay tuned!
Some pics:
I think this guy's attitude speaks for many of us :)
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So we have reached the Yukon in the 2023 Iditarod - there are sort of five phases to this race: the Alaska range, the vast middle, the Yukon, the race to the coast, and Norton Sound. At this point we're passed the halfway point, everyone has taken their "24", and we can see the race shaking out. Here the view from the Flow Tracker:
Brent Sass appears to have a nice lead - he's the first one into Eagle Island, and is now resting 27 miles ahead of Richie Diehl, Ryan Redington, Kelly Maixner, and Pete Kaiser - but look at the 24/8 column - he has not taken his "8" yet. (Neither has Kelly, nor Mille Porsild who is 6th on the trail.) This means he's actually behind all of them except Kelly. He'll have to take his 8 in Eagle or Kaltag, and when he does, they'll pass him. Right now it look like a toss up between Richie, Ryan, and Pete, but don't count out Jessie Holmes or Nic Petit either (yes, the Iditarod tracker is having a problem, you can see the statuses for both of them are way old). So ... stay tuned!
Some pics:
This is Jesse Holmes, enjoying the five-course meal he earned by being "first to the Yukon"
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Not feeling that great today - even though good things happened - bear with me here...
 DuckDuckGo launches DuckAssist. "DuckAssist is the first in a series of AI-assisted private search and browser updates. It's free (with no sign-up required!) and available to try today in DuckDuckGo browsers and extensions." Huh. AI made Bing more relevant, and now it's making DDG more relevant also. I will have to try it!
TechCrunch: If you have more than one business model, you don't have a business model. And/or, you should figure out which one makes the most sense to your customers. (Which might mean, you should figure out who are your customers.)
I'm going to skip right over the release of the video footage from the Jan 6 "riots", which many have cast as an "insurrection". For me the videos speak pretty loudly. Equally evocative is those who drew different conclusions scrambling to explain.
New Neo: DeSantis and those book bans. "During a briefing on Florida’s supposed 'book banning,' DeSantis didn't just rhetorically defend his state’s measures to remove pornographic material from schools. He actually showed what was being removed on live television. That forced the same news organizations that have criticized him to have to cut their feeds." Love it.
 Daring Fireball: Jason Kottke: Augmented reality ski goggles. This makes so much sense because you're wearing goggles already. A great entry point. I guess cycling glasses will be next. (Oakley?)
 Interesting: what the Oscars can teach us about ranked choice voting. "This Sunday, March 12, millions of Americans will tune into the 95th Academy Awards. They may be watching for the red carpet fashion, or host Jimmy Kimmel’s stand-up, or to see whether “Everything Everywhere All at Once” or “Top Gun: Maverick” will be crowned Best Picture. They'll also be getting a lesson in better elections." Winner-takes-all can definitely be improved-upon when there are multiple candidates.
 Excellent: Lilium e-VTOL achieves new top-speed in test flight. (VTOL = vertical take-off and landing, aka, no runway needed.) Now that we no longer have to worry about 140 characters, can we now have flying cars?
 Elon Musk’s criticism about ChatGPT’s “woke” nature gets response from OpenAI co-founder. "We made a mistake: The system we implemented did not reflect the values we intended to be in there. And I think we were not fast enough to address that. And so I think that’s a legitimate criticism of us." That's a good answer, but will they change? I doubt it.
 Relativity Space scrubs first attempt to launch Terran 1. Rooting for them, space is hard. But so great to have multiple private companies building rockets!
 Yay: Ted Lasso returns with a stronger, more-focused third season. Well we'll be the judges of that, but we enjoyed season one a lot. Staying tuned!
 Big news! There is now a yellow iPhone 14! Boy, the innovation coming from Apple is breathtaking, right?
I did have a yellow iPhone X and loved it; was great having a phone literally nobody else had, and nobody else had even heard about. But that was then. Not sure I'm motivated now. I have a graphite iPhone 12 Pro... and no desire to upgrade. Not even for yellow :)
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Wow, when last we left the 2023 Iditarod we had Brent Sass leading the way at Eagle Island, followed by a big pack. I checked the status this morning, and as predicted Brent had been passed in Eagle Island, by Ryan Redington, Richie Diehl, Pete Kaiser, Jessie Holmes, and Nic Petit, all of whom were within a few miles of each other. Kelly Maixner and Mille Porsild were also in there - but without yet having taken their "8"s.
Brent Sass and team, happily mushing along
But weirdly Brent's rest was over ten hours! He needed to take an 8, but why was he still there? Turns out that sadly he had to scratch. Apparently he had a horrible toothache (!) and could not continue. A sad way for the defending champion to be out.
So where does that leave us now? Well let's check the Flow Tracker:
Ryan, Riche, and Pete are leading, with Jessie not far behind. At this point looks like one of them - and any one of them - is going to win. Yay, what a race! Kelly and Mille are in there too but still have to take their "8"s in Kaltag, which will cost them about 40 miles. No way they can win (remind me I said that). Matthew Failor is hanging in there, and Eddie Burke and Hunter Keefe are racing each other for rookie of the year and honestly not that far back. And then ... there's Nic. What's happening with him? He's resting right now while everyone is running - does that mean he'll make a big push and get back into it? Stay tuned!
A view of the Iditarod's GPS Tracker - click to enbiggen amazingly
The race is spread out pretty far along the Yukon, with the leaders about to "turn left" at Kaltag and head for the coast
Greg Vitello is definitely the red lantern, by more than 50 miles. He's been in Iditarod for 12 hours, and looks like he'll be the next scratch. If he does the competition for the lantern will be on, with six mushers hanging in between Shageluk and Anvik.
Jessie Holmes has run well - he's now my pick to win (although still rooting for Mille)
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 Hi all, checking in from the middle of watching the Oscars ... which strangely, we are enjoying! A minimum of politically correct crap this year, just a fun show with lots of stars and all about the movies. Jimmy Kimmel is funny without being controversial. How weird is that?
Earlier today had the great privilege of attending South Coast Corinthian Yacht Club's "Opening Day" - the declaration was, "the harbor is free of ice, we are open!" - which event featured this beautiful wooden Snipe, from 1923, the year in which SCCYC was founded (oldest yacht club in LA). Supercool.
And a bit later had the great fun of participating in Westlake Yacht Club's "Shamrock Regatta", despite an iffy forecast the weather was beautiful, and I was able to sail in shorts and no shirt, and feel that maybe - maybe! - winter was over and we were back to a SoCal spring. About time, we've had nothing but cold and rain since December. For those to the North and East, yeah, I know :)
The big news over the weekend was the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, amid speculation of what the Federal Government might do about it. As I understand the bank invested deposits in long-term bonds which could only be liquidated at a discount to face value, due to the rise of interest rates, and hence didn't have enough reserves to cover "a run". Given that most of its depositors were startups, and most of them have VC backers, and most of them are sheep, everyone decided all at once to withdraw their money, and this happened. Yikes. Of course other banks could have the same problem, and that is the real problem. Staying tuned...
Financial Times two weeks ago: Silicon Valley Bank profit squeeze in tech downturn attracts short sellers.
[Update: Annnd ... it's a bailout. The prevailing sentiment seems to be it was wiser to step in now than to let things fail. I'm so conflicted about this ... opposed to government intervention in markets, but maybe bank safety is the exception?]
 The previous big news was the release of footage from the January 6 "insurrection"; Elon Musk comments: free Jacob Chansley. I'm not sure about this; in no way was "invading the Capital" justified, but also, in no way does the behavior you see in the video seem like an invasion, and certainly not a riot. Perhaps we can agree either way it was misrepresented by the Jan 6 commission,
Powerline ask: Are Americans getting dumber? Sadly, the answer appears to be: yes. Although like many, this confuses education with intelligence. Perhaps the real question is "Are Americans getting more poorly educated?", and the answer to that is certainly (and sadly): yes.
 More big news: SpaceX's Crew-5 Mission is returning to Earth after undocking from the ISS. Wow. On any other day this would have been the lead story. But even today it is supercool.
Meanwhile: Relativity Space aborts second launch attempt of its 3D-printed rocket. Hopefully they'll keep trying; it took SpaceX a long time to reach the reliability they have today.
Seth Godin: revisiting stamps for email. I get it, charging to receive email would filter some degree of spam. But OTOH we get a great deal of junk paper mail, and it does cost money. So I'm not sure this is the solution; maybe there is no solution. At least [email] spam filters have improved! (Wish there was such a thing for paper mail...)
 Huh: When you could buy a monkey from Sears. An interesting slice from a different time. Is it possible to buy a monkey online today?
Miguel de Icaza: the thread you didn't know you needed about product design. About Apple Music's Classical app. It turns out classical music is pretty different from other genres, and hence this makes sense. The larger point is the difference between a specific solution for a specific market, and a general solution which doesn't quite meet the market need.
Onward ... to watch the rest of the Oscars ... doing everything everywhere all at once :)
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And so we're down to it now in the 2023 Iditarod; the decanting of the field out to Unalakleet has occurred, and we have two leaders left battling it out over the ice of Norton Sound. Here's what things look like right now (Iditarod flow tracker):
Ryan Redington and Peter Kaiser are now in the middle of Norton Sound, halfway between Shaktoolik and Koyuk. They're moving at similar speed although Ryan's line (black) appears slightly steeper than Peter's line (red), which means he's moving faster and opening up his lead. When they get to Koyuk, what will happen? Will they rest (likely) or take off for Elim?
Richie Diehl looks like a solid third, he's quite a ways back now and moving slower, so probably has no chance. (But remember the finish in 2014? - anything can happen, and sometimes does...) Hunter Keefe and Eddie Burke are not only racing each other for Rookie of the Year, they are both in the top five! Wow. Hunter seems to have the faster team, but Eddie is right there. Matt Hall is in 6th, currently resting between Unalakleet and Shaktoolik, and Mille Porsild has moved up to 7th, neck-and-neck with Mathew Failor. This is an interesting time for the mushers high up but no longer in contention; do they continue racing hard, or throttle back since victory is now impossible? Stay tuned!
And some pics:
Ryan Redington gets a prize for being first to the Coast in Unalakleet
Another view of Ryan, with his team, on Norton Sound
A shot from the restart a week ago ...
my favorite Mille Porsild with my previous favorite DeeDee Jonrowe
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Hi all ... just checking in on the 2023 Iditarod ... and we may have just passed the critical moment of the race. Here's the current view from the tracker:
As you can see, Ryan Redington and Peter Kaiser just reached Elim. They both traveled through Koyuk last night, stopped for a bit, and then continued on, within a few miles of each other. It's been quite a while since yesterday afternoon at Shaktoolik, where they each gave their teams a nice rest. So what will happen now? Ryan has taken off, after just a brief rest, and Peter has stayed. So now there are two possibilities: Ryan will keep going to White Mountain, take his "8" there, and then take off to win going away, or Ryan will have to rest his team, Pete will come charging up, and will pass him with a full head of steam. That seems less likely, but then maybe Pete sensed he wasn't going to win just racing Ryan head-to-head anyway.
The rest of the field is now resigned to being also-rans; Richie Diehl remains solidly in third - could come back into the picture depending! - Matt Hall has moved into 4th along with Kelly Maixner, and the second five are all resting in Koyuk: Matthew Failor, Eddie Burke, Hunter Keefe, and Jesse Homes, with Mille Porsild just pulling in. Stay tuned!
Pete Kaiser and team
Richie Diehl and team
Hunter Keefe and team
like that style of having the lead dog on a long lead
Eddie Burke and team
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Hmmm.... looks like the 2023 Iditarod is over, and Ryan Redington will win. He just pulled into White Mountain, the penultamite checkpoint where all teams are required to take an 8 hour rest. As the view in the tracker below shows, he's now 38 miles ahead - a good 6-7 hours of mushing - and barring any weirdness should finish comfortably in front.
His decision this morning to keep going after reaching Elim has paid off. Pete Kaiser decided to rest his team for six hours, and he's now fighting it out for second with Richie Diehl, who took a much shorter rest of two hours at Elim, and with Matt Hall, who didn't rest at all and caught both Pete and Richie. Matt might have the momentum to pass both of them, or might have burned up his team; time will tell. Anyway those three look to be 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.
View of Flow Tracker with predict times enables, and sorted by those times
Note prediction is Matt Hall will finish 2nd, ahead of Riche and Pete
Further back there's been a lot of action, too; Jessie Holmes has now moved all the way up into 5th (!) with long runs and short rests, passing Matthew Failor, Eddie Burke, and Kelly Maixnor. Just a bit further back are Mille Porsild and Hunter Keefe.
the finishing chute in Nome is locked and loaded
predicted finish for Ryan is 14:48 tomorrow!
(which will be a new record)
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 Hi all ... hope you enjoyed bank run day! Fortunately we have the government to save us, whew. I'm pretty conflicted because I think the SVB collapse was bad governance, not our nor the government's fault*, so part of me would like to see them fail. But confidence in our financial systems is important too. Onward.
* government *are* responsible for inflation due to spending more than we create - Covid recovery, "inflation reduction" (aka infrastructure spending), etc., and that caused rates to go up, but bank managers should see these things coming...
Check out the shadow cast on Superstition Mountain, at right. How cool is that? And more than a little spooky...
 Vivek Ramaswamy posted this list of working groups at Silicon Valley Bank. Note the "Risk Group" ... focused on ESG!
So you look at this list and think, "should we [the federal government] bail them out?"
Brent Simmons: "The complaints about the time change have for years been worse than the time change itself." Heh.
Philip Greenspun: how did Jamaica get to be so dangerous? "When Jamaica gained independence in 1962, the murder rate was 3.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest in the world. In 2005, Jamaica had 1,674 murders, for a murder rate of 58 per 100,000 people, the highest murder rate in the world." Yikes.
 This is awesome ... and scary: Whole Mars Catalog: Golden Gate Bridge on Tesla Full Self-Driving beta. It's speeded up, which makes it scarier, but overall quite impressive. Can't wait to have it myself!
 David Burge on Forbes: it's the Sports Illustrated curse, for con artists. It's not easy being so consistently wrong!
Interesting: Facebook and Instagram are officially done with NFTs. They were never that engaged anyway; there's just no there there.
Tomorrow is Pi Day ... we'll see what else happens!
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Welcome to day nine of the 2023 Iditarod; today we will have a winner, and unless something weird happens, it will be Ryan Redington, with 6 dogs left in his team! (the others have been left at checkpoints for the "sprint" to the finish...)
Congrats to him, that move to keep going right through Elim paid off. He's now through Safety and just a few hours from Nome:
note: predict times enabled, and sorted by predicted finish
I'm proud of the predict algorithm; it's had Ryan finishing in first at about 1:00PM today for several days. Looks like Peter Kaiser will outsprint Riche Diehl for 2nd. Matt Hall is solidly in 4th. And Kelly Maixner has pulled ahead of Jessie Holmes for 5th. Mille Porsild is in 8th right now, finishing her "8" in White Mountain, and the tracker predicts she will finish 7th, just ahead of Eddie Burke, who will be top rookie. The tracker predicts Jessie Holmes will finish 9th despite being the 7th to leave White Mountain. (Based on average speed and run/rest times.) And rookie Hunter Keefe with round out the top ten. This all will be fun to watch, early tomorrow morning...
Ryan Redington and team, in the Nome stretch
Heh ... from the Iditarod Outsider
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 Happy π day! Although it was not a happy day for me, bad things happened, and I feel bad about them. Sigh.
It's also Albert Einstein's birthday, quite a happy coincidence (what are the odds? 1 in 365 :), so we might call it e=mc2 day, too.
Looking back through old blog posts, this was an eventful date for me in many years. Beware the ides of March!
 Wired: Pi is hiding everywhere. It does show up in a surprising number of places, in math of course, but also physics.
I like the picture - and it does contain a circle - but what does it have to do with pi hiding? Anyway.
Jason Kottke: kottke.org is 25 years old today and I'm going to write about it. "When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely." Jason was one of the original bloggers - a co-founder of the blogger service, with his then-girlfriend and later-wife Meg Hourihan - and continues to be a great one.
I had a similar epiphany 'round about 1998, when I joined Digital Insight. It's hard to express today how different it was in that world, with dial-up modems etc., to be able to communicate world-wide simply by sitting at a keyboard. It's not hype to say the Internet has been the single most world-changing technology ever.
 Retweet fatigue: Robert Scoble is an interesting guy, a former blogger (he used to work at Microsoft, and used to give those outside of Microsoft great insight into what was happening there), sometime vlogger (he was early and big into video), and now a prolific tweeter. But he's also a too-prolific re-tweeter. Following him is like drinking from a fire house. It would be so much better if he selected the most interesting tenth of all that stuff...
This is one of the great things about Jason, he blogs only occasionally, but when he does, it is invariably interesting.
Well: Open AI released Chat GPT 4. How interesting that their description of this incremental advance is "safer and more useful. Safer. So apparently there was some feedback that Chat GPT 3 was somehow un-safe.
Time and experiments will tell if they've deprogrammed some of the political correctness that was so grating in the previous version.
Harsh Makadia: I did GPT-3 vs GPT-4 side-by-side comparisons.
How long before someone asks GPT-4 to do the comparison? :)
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 Do you have a stock "question you like to ask"? I do (but that's not it :); mine is "what's interesting?"
I've managed a lot of people over the years, and conducted a lot of one-on-one meetings, and it's good to have a way to get the conversation started ... :)
I asked DALL-E "create an image which illustrates the concept of interesting-ness; this is the result :)
I claim interestingness comes from surprise. We find things interesting if they contradict or modify our preconceptions, if they fill in the blanks between our defaults, if they expand our understanding, if they are unexpected. We are curious creatures and curiosity is that desire for interesting-ness.
Conversely, things which confirm what we already know are uninteresting. The expected is not compelling.
A related concept is attention. We give our attention to things we find interesting. Attention can be thought of as how we choose to spend time: We invest our time in interesting things.
For this reason, being interesting is a matter of communicating unexpected or contradictory things. This has to do with the audience; what do they know and expect. When you meet someone you don't know much about them and you have few expectations, so almost everything about them is interesting. As you get to know them better, their degree of ongoing interesting-ness will be related to their capacity to surprise you :)
I find the whole concept of interestingness to be quite interesting!
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 So, it's a wrap! The top ten mushers have finished, and the rest of the field are at various stages of making their way to Nome.
Congrats to Ryan Redington, 2023 Iditarod Champion, pictured at right with his lead dogs!
Here's the current situation, as seen by the flow tracker:
Following Ryan, Pete Kaiser opened up a lead on Riche Diehl for 2nd, and Matt Hall had a strong final run for 4th. Note Jessie Holmes run - he passed Kelly Maixner at Safety to finish 5th. Eddie Burke won the three-team race for 7th and also top rookie, outmushing Matthew Failor and Mille Porsild (who was top female musher). Wade Mars continued his late sprint to beat Hunter Keefe for 10th. The psychology for the remaining teams is interesting; with the top ten already in, many are taking long rests. At this point it's more about finishing strong than finishing fast.
At the other end of the field sadly Eric Kelly scratched at Shaktoolik, leaving a big group there "competing" for the Red Lantern. It might be a few more days before they make it to Nome. I'll leave the tracker running and you can check in on their progress.
With this post I'll end the 2023 Iditarod saga; here's an index of all my posts:
Just wanted to note an interesting story in GQ (!) about Dallas Seavey: The Saga of the World’s Greatest Dogsledder - and the Fight Over the Future of the Iditarod. The absence of Dallas and many other top mushers certainly hung over the Iditarod this year. Taking nothing away from Ryan - he beat Peter Kaiser, a former champion - the field was definitely much reduced this year, and sparked conversations about whether the race will continue in its current form.
Finally wanted to close with this pic, which captures the spirit of the race:
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 Big trends in healthcare are wellness, consumerism, and wearables. These things come together in various kinds of monitors which you wear, which tell you, as a consumer, how well your doing. These include smartwatches, various bracelets, and rings, and a leading ring monitor is the Oura. I've had one for about eight months, and after eight months ... meh, not sure what to think.
Yes, I did register a 98 sleep score once, but I actually did not sleep for 10h 26m and honestly didn't even feel like it was a great nights' sleep after...
The Oura "works": insofar as it measures various vital signs and tracks them, and let's you view the result. Heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, etc. And it's comfortable, has reasonable battery life - charge about once a week, for an hour or so - and it's attractive (I have a black one). It sort of makes a statement: I'm wearing a smart ring, I care about my wellness, I'm hip, etc.
 I do wonder about the value though, on an ongoing basis. I can't say that anything the ring tells me has changed my behavior. It's more like I check the ring scores to see if they're right :) If you took it away from me I wouldn't fight hard to get it back.
There is a preventative medicine aspect to these devices; if something changes or goes wrong, you will know sooner and can alert medical professionals to take a closer look. That might be valuable. And if a physician wanted to see my heart rate history or something like this, then I would have it, and that would be valuable.
I'd say this is a transitional technology. Someday we'll have implanted monitors and they'll be more comfortable, more accurate, and more useful. For now, they provide a reasonable excuse for a blog post.
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 So, the Ides are upon us. Did you know:
The Romans did not number each day of a month from the first to the last day. Instead, they counted back from three fixed points of the month: the Nones (the 5th or 7th, 8 days before the Ides), the Ides (the 13th for most months, but the 15th in March, May, July, and October), and the Kalends (1st of the following month). Originally the Ides were supposed to be determined by the full moon, reflecting the lunar origin of the Roman calendar. In the earliest calendar, the Ides of March would have been the first full moon of the new year.[3]
We of course know of the Ides via Shakespeare, who had soothsayer Spurinna warn Julius Caesar about them.
I've already had a terrible, horrible, not so good month, so the warning is late. Onward.
When you read about Chat GPT 4 and things like this, do you feel things are happening too fast? Jason Kottke notes Ezra Klein's use of the phrase "exponential time". There are more and more things happening faster and faster, it's hard to keep track. Best way I've found is to follow blogs as filters :)
 Reid Hoffman: Last summer, I got access to GPT-4. It felt like I had a new kind of passport. Huh, sounds interesting.
Powerline note: Biggest victim of SVB collapse? The Climate, of course. "What hasn't received as much attention is that Silicon Valley Bank was particularly important to the climate-tech sector. More than 60 percent of community solar financing nationwide involved Silicon Valley Bank." Hmm.
Scoble: Google should win everything. Are they victim's of the Innovator's Dilemma? Time will tell.
 xkcd: flatten the planets. "I don't know why NASA keeps rejecting my proposals to improve the Solar System." hehe :)
 Blackberry, the trailer. "Picture a cellphone and an email device, all in one thing." Supercool. Can't wait!
BTW, could YouTube be any more annoying? Just when you think they've reached peak cruft, they prove you wrong.
Onward, hope you have a good Ides!
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Huh, checking the archive I see I recently passed 3,500 posts. That's kind of cool. It's not exactly a "round" number, 5 x 7 x 10 x 10, but it's round-ish. For those of us with 10 digits it's sufficiently round to mark a moment and trigger some reflection.
 Back in January I marked the new year by checking in after 20 years; at that time, I had made 3,406 posts containing 10,771 images, and 24,965 links, of which 912 were back to blog content.
All through that time, as I've enjoyed blogging, I've reflected on why it is fun, and come up with various answers, including introspections on what it means for something to be "fun". It's definitely fun to look back and see what the world was doing and what I thought about it at previous points in time. For example, three years ago the world was shutting down! A time of big change, and who knew what was going to happen.
 (This infographic from Visual Capitalist remains interesting!)
So what comes next? We have AI coming to the forefront, a big political divide which seems to be getting bigger, concerning financial news, and big social changes partially caused and mostly exacerbated by the pandemic, like hybrid work. It does feel like things are happening faster; we live in exponential time, for sure.
Anyway I'm going to keep blogging for a bit longer, and hopefully you'll keep reading. Cheers and onward!
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(sigh ... bad thing about an offline posting process is when you forget to sync ...)
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Yay, it's St Patrick's Day, hope you enjoy it. I'm celebrating by recovering from a cold (cough, cough).
David Sacks comments on Bank of America's balance sheet: look what VCs did now!
Sarcasm aside, I think the key was not their balance sheet - it had problems, but so do many, many other banks - but rather the coordinated sense of panic on the part of their depositors. The vast majority of BofA depositors are blissfully unaware and will happily leave their money on deposit.
Vodkapundit: How to lose the entire Middle East with this one weird trick. Sigh.
 Shelly Palmer: Web3 is really here! Woo hoo, we have a new connection type, web3://. And so it's all decentralized and secure, right? Independent of Web2 infrastructure? Um, no. It's centralized, just as insecure, and dependent upon Web2. Do not ask and so then what are the advantages...
Elon Musk: It’s exciting to see more & more public figures engaging in active dialogue on this platform! (Referring of course to Twitter.) Indeed.
I've found myself on and following Twitter way more than pre-Elon.
Also Elon: Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31. Wow. Super transparent but also, a great way to improve the algorithm!
Also Elon: Engineering is true magic. Yes.
 Holy cow: landing an airplane on a helipad on top of a hotel. Do not try this at home.
Razib Khan considers Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate 20+ years later. A remember reading it with great excitement, but probably because I was already a student of Dawkins and Dennett, finding it a bit anticlimactic. I think their works were actually more groundbreaking, especially Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
 Clive Thompson: the rise and fall of dot-com foosball. Heh. Time was, whenever I joined a new company I would buy them a new foosball table. Did this four times. Not sure I would do it again - virtual foosball is not really a thing, right? I did find it great for team-building and breaking up a day sitting at a keyboard with a little activity.
 Berci Mesko on FDA regulation of AI/ML, "adaptive algorithms". This is going to be tough for everyone; the FDA regulates static systems and the processes for modifying them, in discrete increments. Regulating a dynamic process will be quite different.
Dave Winer: on reflection, it's amazing I wasn't killed in my teens. Heh. I have a great friend who was at one time a colleague, and another colleague asked him: "how have you managed to live so long?"
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  I spent this afternoon with my granddaughter (7) at the delightful Santa Barbara zoo.
It's not a big zoo, which makes it perfect for an afternoon with a little kid. You can walk the whole thing and see just about every animal in a couple of hours. They don't have every kind of everything, but they do have some kind of everything: the amazing staples like giraffes, leopards, gorillas, etc., plenty of beautiful and amazing birds, snakes (!), even jumping spiders (!!). And it's pretty; you don't get that "big animal in a small cage" feeling of sympathy for the residents.
  And also, lot of good signage, including detailed descriptions of each animal, where they are from, how they live, what they eat, etc. My granddaughter is a great reader and delighted in informing me of all the details of each animal, while I tried to find them. We made a great team.
Zoos are one of those things which bring up conflicting emotions; should we capture and display wild animals? Does this help us learn more about them? And does this help us educate each other about the wider world in which we live?
Those are tough questions; but an easier one is "do they make for a great afternoon"?
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Have you ever reflected upon bad product names? We are surrounded by them. Why is naming products so hard?
Especially bad are names associated with things that have variations. Like models of cars.
The product people know too much, and they assume we know more than we do. We barely recognize the name of the company, let alone the product, the model, or the latest variation on the model. I get it; you need to have differentiation. So do that, but don't hope that we are tracking every zig and zag of your development.
 Take Lucid cars. (Please!) The "brand" is Lucid - and you can be forgiven if you've never heard of them. They are an electric car company founded by engineers who used to work at Tesla. Their car model is the Lucid Air. They also have a Lucid Air Pure, a Lucid Air Grand Touring, and a Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance. And another model called Sapphire, which is a Lucid Air too.
They all look more or less the same, and are distingushed from each other by various features like battery capacity, engine power, and of course price. Lest you think the latter is a detail, the most expensive of these options is approximately double the cost of the least, even though they are for many purposes the same car.
From everything I've read, the Lucids are great cars and have a real shot at being Tesla competition. But they're too young and too unknown to have so many different models and names. Confusing.
Some companies give up on names and resort to numbers. The Nimbus 2000! I get it, names are hard, and numbers are easier. Also, numbers have a sequence, so perhaps customers can figure out that a Nimbus 3000 is a better or newer model.
But where do you go from there? You can add letters. The Nimbus 2000LX! The RX! The LRX! Not to mention the LRX+! It all gets very confusing very fast.
 Don't be afraid to keep the same name. Just because it's new, just because it's got a new feature, if it's the same product - the same value proposition - the same name is okay. In fact it's good, because it's stable, and people get to know it.
Tesla has had a Model S since 2012 but the car you buy today is pretty far advanced from the Model S of then. Yes, there have been a few variations, but Tesla have kept them to a minimum.
Apple are another company which have kept names simple. Macintosh. iPod. iPhone. iPad. Apple Watch. Etc. They have resisted the urge to rename with every new feature and version, and we their customers thank them. (Yeah, they do do that "Pro" thing from time to time...)
Concepts like "this is a product", "this is a new version of a product", and "this is a feature of a product" are helpful. But the real thing is to keep your customers in mind. Don't assume they know anything - they probably don't - and try to help them.
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 Yay, it's Spring! And I for one am ready. This has been a cold, wet, cloudy winter, and I'm ready for some dry hot sun.
SpaceX launches two space missions in one day. And of course, landed both boosters for reuse. So cool that this has become so routine.
In other news, I flew on two airplanes today, and both landed. Yay.
Seth Godin: Shields up. "What I want is a junkblocker. A big button on my browser that says 'shields up.'" Maybe AI will give this to us, but there will always be the problem of who decides what is junk?
Shelly Palmer: run 'ChatGPT' on your computer. "Here’s something you probably won’t do today: install a large language model (LLM) chat application on your PC. That’s okay, I did it for you – in about 10 minutes."
Microsoft-owned Nuance adds GPT-4 to its medical note-taking tool. This is a perfect application for GPT, I predict this will be huge. One to watch.
 Powerline: why wind and solar will never work. "They produce electricity less than one-half of the time, a fact that will never change." If you think batteries are the answer, they have some statistics which make you think otherwise.
So, what's the answer? Last Energy signs deals worth $19B for nuclear plants. Nuclear energy is the only one we have.
Kottke: The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are. The gap keeps getting bigger. My "how old you think you are" hasn't changed that much for many many years...
 Russell Beattie: Quick thoughts on Mark Twain's travelogues. "Seriously, if you haven’t read anything else by Twain except Tom Sawyer, you need to do yourself a favor and read his non-fiction. It's all truly fantastic. "
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The indispensible Visual Capitalist today have given us:
I don't know all the details but I do know their measure of "happiness" was as perceived by the people in each country. It may mean different things in different cultures! In some, being "happy" may not be as important as others, and in some, it may be more relative than others. But anyway it is a common concept, and an interesting measure.
I've mentioned before, I think happiness comes from liking yourself. Maybe if someone was asking about your happiness for a survey about your country, you would answer based on whether you like the country as a whole, not sure. But in some sense happiness is relative to your own expectations.
Does anything surprise you here? My biggest takeaway is continents: Seems like the ranking is:
- Oceana (Australia + NZ)
- North America
- Europe
- South America
- Asia
- Africa
I'm also surprised that India - the largest country by population - isn't happier. I think of it as a happy place, but clearly its people do not. China is the second largest country, not happy, but that's not surprising. Next in size are the US (happy), Indonesia (not happy), Brazil (kind of happy), and Nigeria (not happy). Lots of work to do.
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On my way home from a brief business trip to Atlanta - fun to be "on the road again"; much eating and drinking, and was treated to a nice Hawks game last night - and so I am blogging from 30,000'. You have been warned...
BTW was even colder in Atlanta than has been in LA ... brrr. Spring?
In re Global Happiness: GQ: we're thinking about Happiness all wrong. Are we though? I think they confuse happiness with contentment. True they are related, but I claim they are not the same...
 To be checked out: Microsoft bring OpenAI's DALL-E image generator to the new Bing. So now when I want an illustration for a blog post which doesn't have one, I'll just ask Bing to make one :)
Related: NVidia's big AI moment is here. Yep. They are the "Cisco during dot-com era" hardware of the moment.
Gratuitous plug for my posts about CUDA...
Related: NVidia partners with Google Cloud to launch AI instances.
 And so who ordered that? An aperiodic monotile! "The authors of a new preprint paper claim that they've discovered what’s called an aperiodic monotile, a single shape that can cover a two-dimensional space with a pattern that never repeats itself exactly." Penrose tiles were weird enough, this is beyond weird. And turns out they are an evolution in an entire family of such shapes...
 And finally, here's a cute animal you should know ... the ribbon seal!
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 Sitting in the United Lounge at Atlanta airport I came across this picture, of a United Boeing 377 Stratocruiser.
I didn't know what it was, had to Google (yay, visual search), but it struck a chord. All those years ago, maybe 60 or so, that plane existed, and flew, and was full of passengers; maybe on their way back to LA from a business meeting in Atlanta.
They would have been dressed differently - nicer no doubt - and would have been thinking differently about different things. Probably carrying books and newspapers. Not planning to watch a movie. Nor blogging while high :)
They would have been chauffeured to the airport and been dropped off at the entrance, porters would have taken their luggage, they would have presented paper tickets, and they would not have suffered needless security theater with long lines and luggage scanners and taking your shoes off. No taking your laptop out of its bag :)
The food would have been better, for sure! The service too. And the flight would have taken longer; Stratocruisers cruised at 350mph, vs 550mph for the jets of today. "It could carry up to 100 passengers on the main deck plus 14 in the lower deck lounge; typical seating was for 63 or 84 passengers or 28 berthed and five seated passengers." The whole experience would have felt more special.
Google tells me the average price of an airplane ticket in 1963 was $41, which equals $323 in today's money. I would gladly pay that amount for that experience. (Maybe with generative AI, soon I will be able! - I predict some of the first uses of a 'holodeck' will be time travel into the past...) Travel+Leisure tells us what flights used to cost in the 'golden age' of air travel. And they summarize: "Security risks are greater and security lines are longer. People don't wear their best suits to fly anymore. Deregulated, democratized, affordable air travel is very different from the glamorous air travel of those far-gone days, but at least more of us get the pleasure of complaining about it."
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 <musing type=optional>
Just sitting here thinking about entertainment. It's a bit related to interesting-ness; how do we chose to spend our time?
For much of the world, basic human needs like food and shelter are a given - sadly, for another much of the world, they are not, don't want to be callus about this - but for you, readers of this blog, this is largely true ... and I/you/we spend a lot of our money and time on entertainment.
In our world the most valued people are entertainers - actors, musicians, athletes, writers, etc. These are "hits" businesses - only the tip of the entertainment pyramid is so valuable - but they are broadly leveragable - a great actor, musician, athlete, or writer can entertain many many of us (indeed all of us) at the same time.
It was not always so. Before electronic communication the reach of an entertainer was limited, and hence, they were less valuable. (Writers had big reach earlier, with printing presses...) In my not-yet-written book Unnatural Selection I planned a chapter called "the piano player", in which I noted that in the recent past even a good player could be entertaining to many in a local community, while now you would have to be a great player, but could entertain everyone. Mass communication has fostered a global decanting. But that aside, entertainment was still valuable back then, maybe more so given its scarcity.
Clearly entertainment is a brain thing, so is wanting and liking entertainment a by-product of other selection, or fundamental to it?
Frequent readers know I postulate happiness comes from liking yourself; if entertainment makes you happy (it does) then does it make you like yourself (it must). So why would watching a great actor, or listening to a great musician make you like you? Maybe its by analogy, a sort of inspiration; if that human can do that thing, than I could too?
As a contra point to this: watching other species do incredible things is entertaining too. And what about humor?
It is a mystery. I will continue to ponder :)
</musing>
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 End of quarter, filter pass ...
I must tell you, this was not a great quarter for me. I am ready to turn a corner.
Today's picture: Titan! One of my favorite's, of all time; Titan silhouetted by Saturn, as taken by Cassini. This is a real photograph of a real moon of a real planet. Goosebumpy.
We keep reading about GPT and it's various chat brethren; the genesis for all was OpenAI's Codex, an AI system to translate natural language to code. As a coder myself, naturally this is of interest, and the tools now available are amazing. The big question is will computers replace humans? Or will there always have to be humans to train the computers?
Consider Wikipedia, one of the truly amazing human creations. Could it have been created by computers? I don't think so. But now that it exists, it can be used to train computers, for sure...
The New Yorker contemplates the End of the English Major. Really, the end of Humanities. Certainly Woke Politics are a part of this decline, but there's more to it than that: "During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade." Humanities score high on interestingness, but maybe increasingly lower on entertainment?
[Added: my daughter, a Gen Y who majored in Sociology, thinks students are more preoccupied with their future economics now than previously. How interesting, Millennials are often regarded as anti-capitalist.]
Also the New Yorker: Goodbye, my Funding. From 2017, pre-Covid. It's written as a humorous satire of course, but the underlying idea that "my funding" is somehow separate from "my activity" is an interesting observation, typical of many. Universal Basic Income is one manifestation. If we had UBI, would we have more English Majors?
 NASA wants new 'deorbit tug' to bring space station down in 2030. Huh. This seems like a perfect excuse to test new weapons systems! And if I could suggest, we should launch a new satellite to relay video!
Whenever I see pictures of the ISS, I have a Titan-like "wow, this is a real photograph of a real thing" moment.
 PSA: Did you know, the IOS Compass app not only gives you directions, but coordinates and altitude? Even works with airplane mode on ... I guess the GPS is still active regardless ... try it next time you're flying :)
Interconnected: My new job is AI sommelier and I detect the bouquet of progress. "I made an AI clock for my bookshelves! It composes a new poem every minute using ChatGPT and mysteriously has an enthusiastic vibe which I am totally into. Kinda."
 Not real - yet - the invisible superyacht. In my experience most so-called superyachts have a "me me look at me" design, so this would be welcome.
For superyachts? The lightest pain in the world. It uses reflective properties of materials rather than pigment. Cool (literally!) but also likely expensive...
The IQ Bell Curve for AI:
I keep going back and forth on whether I think AI is dangerous...
Novel drug makes mice skinny even on sugary, fatty diet. Huh. Glenn Reynolds thinks if drugs make it easy to be skinny, skinniness will be less-valued. I'd be happy to volunteer to find out :)
 Congrats to tortoise couple Mr. and Mrs. Pickles on the arrival of their three hatchlings, Dill, Gherkin, and Jalapeño. Hehe.
Note: the little Gherkin is actual size :)
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