Bill Bennett
I think we’ve all been there:
Evidence of ‘Negative Time’ Found in Quantum Physics Experiment.
Somewhat disturbed to learn multiple reminders for my company’s annual return all went through to junk mail and we are now past the deadline day.
If I offer an excuse, it’s going to sound like the modern version of “the dog ate my homework”.
Kim Dotcom's extradition
From the NZ Herald:
A survey collecting Kiwis’ thoughts on the fate of Kim Dotcom reveals 46% of more than 1000 respondents believe the Megaupload founder should be extradited to the United States.
It is possible to have a more nuanced view of Kim Dotcom.
There’s no question he did what he is accused of. His Megaupload site was all about pirated music or movies. Dotcom and his team deliberately encouraged people to contribute copyright material to the site.
That much is beyond dispute.
But although it was done at a huge scale, the ‘crime’ of copyright theft is relatively minor. It should not involve armed police. The raid on Dotcom’s home was out of proportion. He wasn’t running cocaine shipments or getting involved in shoot-outs.
The amount of resources squandered on this case is also disproportionate. It may amount to more than the proceeds of Dotcom’s offending.
Tech giants including Google and Microsoft were actively allowing similar copyright piracy on their sites at the same time. It appears Dotcom was singled out for severe treatment. He was a much easier target.
Of course we can have arguments about copyright law. But that’s neither here nor there. He broke the law as it stands. You may feel it is unjust, but the case is about law, not justice.
That said, Dotcom is a minor crook, not a master criminal. A suitable punishment would be 400 hours of community work, not rotting for decades in a US jail.
Yet, Dotcom is unlikable and loud mouthed. When he still had it, he flaunted his wealth. He snipes at politicians and the New Zealand public. That has made him unpopular.
If he had spent the last 12 years under the radar, he might have more empathy from the New Zealand public. The survey in the Herald story shows that’s not the case. People don’t like him and want rid of him. It looks like they will get what they want.
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One of the greatest ever newspaper headlines
Found this at Freelance Unbound - The charm of local newspapers.
In memoriam Twitter
So. Farewell.
Then.
Twitter.
Social networking
and
micro-blogging
service.
Whatever that’s supposed
to mean in English
Keith’s mum used to
Tweet things.
Like “I had
cornflakes
for breakfast”
And other
pearls
of wisdom
EJ Thribb age 17 1/2
(with acknowledgement to Barry Fantoni and Private Eye magazine.
Predictions for Premier League Match Day 6
Newcastle v Man City - Draw
Arsenal v Leicester - Home win
Brentford v West Ham - Home win
Chelsea v Brighton - Home win
Everton v Crystal Palace - Draw
Nottingham Forest v Fulham - Home win
Wolves v Liverpool - Away Win
Ipswitch v Aston Villa - Away win
Man Utd v Spurs - Home win
Bournemouth v Southhampton - Home Win
Week 5 predictions: 4 out of ten correct
Week 4 predictions: 6 out of ten correct.
Predictably dire consumer grade AI
As a test, I asked the three most visible AI chatbots to predict the results of next week’s English Premier League football matches. ,
Two of them did an awful job and we didn’t need to wait for the games to find out just how awful.
Gemini Google’s Gemini incorrectly tells me that the Premier League season hasn’t started yet. We just had week five and week six is coming up.
Chat-GPT Chat GPT tells me the job is difficult, fair enough, but then goes on to illustrate that it doesn’t have a clue. It mentions for example that Chelsea is inconsistent and could draw or narrowly win against teams like West Ham. This is four days after Chelsea thrashed West Ham 0-3 away from home.
Co-pilot Microsoft’s Co-pilot did the best job. It appears to ‘understand’ the question, although ‘understand’ is the wrong word to use when talking about AI.
Co-pilot then confidently gave me plausible win-probability odds for five of the next round of games. It showed images of the club badges for the predicted winning teams.
Of course this was a trivial exercise, but is a useful reminder that these chatbots should not be taken too seriously.
Predictions for English Premier League Match Day 5
West Ham v Chelsea - Draw
Aston Villa v Wolves - Home win
Fulham v Newcastle - Away win
Southampton v Ipswich - Draw
Tottenham v Brentford - Draw
Leicester v Everton - Home win
Liverpool v Bournemouth - Home win
Crystal Palace - Man Utd - Draw
Brighton v Notts Forest - Home win
Man City v Arsenal - Home win
Last week predictions had 6 out of ten correct.
Premier League Predictions - Match Day 4 2024
Southampton - Manchester United - Draw
Brighton - Ipswich - Home win
Crystal Palace - Leicester - Draw
Fulham - West Ham - Home win
Liverpool - Nottingham Forest - Home win
Manchester City - Brentford - Home win
Aston Villa - Everton - Home win
Bournemouth - Chelsea - Home win
Tottenham - Arsenal - Away win
Wolves - Newcastle - Away win
Facebook scrapes Australia, what about New Zealand?
The ABC’s political reporter Jake Evans:
He writes:
Facebook is scraping the public data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has acknowledged in an inquiry.
The company does not offer Australians an opt out option like it does in the EU, because it has not been required to do so under privacy law
In theory the 2020 Privacy Act means this should not happen in New Zealand, but it probably does.
The Act applies to overseas businesses like Facebook. If they do business in New Zealand they have to comply with local standards over data collected here.
If you’ve got any insight into this please share.
Fediverse update:
I’ve changed the settings so that if you comment on anything that arrives here from my Micro.blog site, the thread is archived under the original post.
You can see this in action at the bottom of A life’s work on that hard drive. Likewise if you want to comment directly on the page, you can use your Fediverse (Mastodon, BlueSky or whatever) account and the comment appears in both places.
This doesn’t work yet on my main site because that’s hosted by Ghost. For now, only subscribers can comment there. A subscription is free by the way and there are no strings attached, I’m not collecting or selling email addresses.
Ghost says the Fediverse ActivityPub features are coming, but for now all that travels between sites like Mastodon or BlueSky and the website are ‘likes’.
When Australian webpages downloaded faster in Auckland than Sydney
Ten years ago my other website had a story about tests showing New Zealand’s broadband network performance was pulling ahead of Australia.
It’s faster to download an Australian web page in New Zealand than in Sydney
There’s a danger that reporting this kind of story plays to base nationalistic instincts, but the reality is that it makes sense to benchmark local performance against Australia. Not only is Australia our closest neighbour in a geographic sense, but it’s the nation that’s more like New Zealand than almost anywhere else in other respects.
A life's work on that hard drive
There are 43187 Text, Markdown or word processor documents on my laptop’s hard drive. iCloud has another 10k or so documents that are not also stored on the laptop. Google Drive and OneDrive have around 8k and 4k respectively.
That makes a total of around 65k documents.
There are duplicates. Realistically there would be 45k unique documents or thereabouts.
Typewriter era
This is not a complete picture of my output over the years. I’ve been a journalist for 44 years. Much of my earlier output for newspapers and magazines was pre-personal computer, typed on manual typewriters.
When computers first entered newspaper offices, we typed on terminals connected to minicomputers. There are precious few files from that era in my collection.
Later I worked on publisher’s content management systems. Some of that work made it onto the hard drive, most didn’t.
In house and freelance
Roughly a third of my career was spent working in-house either full time or part-time.
There were freelance jobs that happened while I was in full-time employment. This wasn’t in any way unusual back in the early years of my career. I could write a story for The Dominion in Wellington, go home and type out a fresh version to sell to newspapers in the US, UK or Australia. The practice was not even remotely frowned on. Management saw it as being dynamic and enterprising.
Nobody does back-of-an-envelope calculations these days, but if we still did, we can see that my output works out at a shade over 20 items a week. That seems right.
High turnover
When I worked on newspapers it wasn’t unusual to file four or five stories a day.
Freelance journalists have to pump out lots of paid-by-the-word stories to earn a crust. I had a freelance job in Australia where I filled-in for someone who was on leave and I managed six a day for the first few days until the editor looked at his budget and told me to slow down.
This might not be high by modern digital journalism standards. I know of younger journalists who might deliver a story every hour, but a lot of my work was not based on press releases, but on getting out of the office and talking to people. For many of today’s journalists, it is an office job. I was initially drawn to journalism precisely because it was not an office job.
Fewer, longer stories
There would have been more, but shorter stories early in my career. For most of the last 15 years the number of items has fallen, but the individual stories are longer. These days I mainly write features.
There’s a life’s work on the hard drive. It’s archived on a NAS drive, a second external hard drive and a third Time Machine backup is locked in a cupboard. Then there is the iCloud back-up. It sounds excessive, even paranoid, but the collection is one of my most valuable assets.
My next challenge is to find a way to make better use of it. There may be a book in it or not. Either way, what happens next is another story and, most likely, another document.
Useful AI
I actually managed to use AI to do something useful. Not important or essential, but nevertheless useful.
It’s annoying that my phone company sends text messages to tell me what it has already told me in an email: that I don’t need to do anything because the bill is an auto payment. It is so annoyingng that I’m considering moving the account, but I fear an alternative company will be as irritating.
Everyday I get half a dozen requests from people wanting to post something on my website. Have foudn that the quickest way to stop them from coming back is to tell them the price is $30k per post.
Huawei plans a major launch
Why do so many online services, especially the AI things, want you to go through DIscord? Is there a business model in it?
Spent the morning doing urgent things for one client and totally missed another client (from the same company) had urgent things that needed attention, so wrapping it up at 8pm. 12 hour days are not unusual, but now I’m in my 60s I could do with fewer of them.
If I was a high net worth investor, I’d put some of my money into building more renewable energy in New Zealand. It might not give me the maximum return, but it would warm the cockles of my heart to know I was making the nation and the world a little better.
I’m not in any way saying it’s good that so many cafes and restaurants are going out of business, but it felt like there might have been too many even before the government got its economic wrecking balll going.