My sons (now seventeen and twenty) face
the precipice of manhood and career,
and I’m bewildered by the manic pace
of change, accelerating year by year.
My father’s father’s early days were like
his fathers’ from a thousand years before—
a horse, a wagon, sky, a singing shrike,
the edges had evolved, but not the core.
But now? The world I walk at middle-age
can’t fathom that of my own childhood,
and future-focused teens are forced to gauge
which non-existent living would be good.
A dad should help his children find their way,
but how, when future paths are nothing like today?
Category Archives: Technology
Bliss
When I was young, a tantalizing haze
of mystery hovered over foreign land.
No Google map or Wiki-on-demand
minute precision amplified my gaze.
A magazine bejeweled with Kodachrome
might testify of some exotic place,
but lacking tools condensing time and space,
imagination took me far from home.
What difference now. In lurid detail each
antipodean city street, hotel,
museum, restaurant, shop, and wishing well
(all with reviews!) is instantly in reach.
Much ignorance is certainly a curse,
but wonder is its blessing in reverse.
AI and the Death of Truth
Note: I first became aware of OpenAI’s language model development work in 2019. Even then, it was clear where their work would lead. In the aftermath of ChatGPT’s release in November of last year, it’s quite clear that the disruptions to work and truth that were envisioned in 2019 are simply inevitable. I am sad for my children. I added a follow-up to the initial post a day later. Both are provided below. (DL, June 11, 2023).
Feed it the first few paragraphs of a Guardian story about Brexit, and its output is plausible newspaper prose, replete with “quotes” from Jeremy Corbyn, mentions of the Irish border, and answers from the prime minister’s spokesman. One such, completely artificial, paragraph reads: “Asked to clarify the reports, a spokesman for May said: ‘The PM has made it absolutely clear her intention is to leave the EU as quickly as is possible and that will be under her negotiating mandate as confirmed in the Queen’s speech last week.’” www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction
And who will be able to tell the difference?
I spent ten years as an English teacher. Trust me when I tell you most people definitely won’t be able to.
The search for truth is about to die—shortly before the planet does.
Continue readingWhy I’m Leaving Facebook
Note: I first made the decision to leave Facebook and migrate my content to this site in 2014. It would be seven years after that decision before I actually got the blog set up in September 2021 and started moving content over. I left Facebook permanently in May 2022. Looking back, I still entirely agree with the rationale below (although I came to like the Messenger app as the best part of Facebook and hardest thing to leave in the end). I have not missed Facebook or the interactions I had there. (DL, June 13, 2023).
After many months of consideration, I have decided to begin the process of disengaging from Facebook.
The primary reason is that I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the way FB manipulates users: curating our news feeds, constantly inserting ads and links to third-party content, giving priority to paid posts, etc. I have ceased to feel like what I see on FB every day is an honest reflection of my friends’ activities and interests; it isn’t. It’s a revenue stream optimized by FB for me to get me clicking on things that aren’t first-and-foremost about my friends, but rather about making FB money.
Continue readingThe SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache Service: A Crash Course
Note: I wrote this on company time (I think; the learning was certainly done on company time) for a company-hosted SharePoint blog at my first IT employer. The blog never really went anywhere. The idea was to demonstrate our bona fides by providing top-quality SharePoint content on our own blog. I no longer have the image that was included in the original post, but you get the idea. I put this here as a record of some of the writing and thinking I was doing at the time. This was pretty cutting-edge stuff in March of 2013 (at least for SharePoint nerds). (DL, Sept. 7, 2021)
The Distributed Cache service is a new piece of SP 2013 architecture that has the potential to wreck your deployment. Here’s some helpful information I gathered while installing a six-server production farm for one of our enterprise clients.
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