Recent Comments

1. 5 days ago on Doonesbury

   Actually along those lines I’m more worried about designer diseases…

2. 5 days ago on JumpStart

   Not sure where you see the AI in it? The only relevance I can think of was something IBM was working on about 20 years ago. It was called Personality Insights and I think many of the dimensions of personality had been detected algorithmically. However what I am suggesting would not be AI evaluations, but basically just tallies of human reactions.

3. 6 days ago on Doonesbury

   And it runs on the road paved with the worst intentions. Not the road to heaven, just in case you thought the opposites worked like that. The suckers who voted for it deserve it, but the rest of us are being dragged along for the ride.

   Remembering what happened last time, I hope we’ll survive four more years.

4. 6 days ago on JumpStart

   I’m guessing you mean Facebook. I am pleased to have been assassinated over there in 2022, but your reply illustrates my point in a different way.

   If I could evaluate your comment with the kind of system I am imagining, I would rate it as something like “pointless” or “irrelevant”. Not evaluating you, but just the comment as it appears to me. (“Dislike the comment, not the commenter.”) If your overall public reputation had become low enough, you might even trigger a preemptive warning when you clicked Reply: “Your reply will not be visible to the intended recipient. Are you sure you want to reply?” In that case, if you insisted your reply would get an annotation about the situation—and maybe if enough other people added positive reactions to your new reply it would become visible (to me) after all.

5. 7 days ago on JumpStart

   I know it’s a silly quest, but I’ll go ahead and ask. Maybe someone has seen such a website? The basic idea would be two icons per identity. One basically like now, where you can say whatever you want about yourself, but next to it would be a second icon that would summarize the public reactions to your posts. Basic idea is to use the reputation icon to filter out people who waste my time. Any leads? Or even questions how it could work?

6. 17 days ago on Tank McNamara

   Shells, not the seeds.

7. 28 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   No, that would be a die-tie. To be a tie-die it would have to be a die made out of a tie. Maybe heavily starched and flipped like a coin? Or origami technique to make it into some shape?

8. about 1 month ago on Doonesbury

   NAK. No actual answer to my questions. I asked for data or your justified opinions. Not even convinced you think “we” includes yourself.

9. about 1 month ago on Tank McNamara

   Anyone know a single so-called social media website that isn’t antisocial? (I actually know a couple, but this is not one of the places where I might mention them… Too antisocial. So I should have qualified that question with “well known” or “widely known” or “older than six months” or something?)

10. about 1 month ago on Doonesbury

    What problems do you think Harris has? She seems like a normal politician. Are you hoping for some sort of saint to join the filthy profession?

    I can’t say I particularly like Harris, but neither can I say there was anything about her that particularly bothered me—notwithstanding all the random mud that was being slung in every direction. Near as I can tell, she would have won if the mud slinging had ended sooner. Or maybe if her campaign had started about a month later?

    I actually think she did make one significant mistake. When asked about disagreements with Biden, she should have answered something like “It is NOT the job of the VP to publicly disagree with the president. Nor am I going to tell you any details of private discussions where I might have advocated different policies. The VP’s job is to support the president’s decisions, NOT second guess them.”