Infinite Quack

Netflix's 'The Great Hack' Misses The Big Picture Fun fact -- my first Facebook post about Cambridge Analytica was back in February 2017. It was a link to an article by Carole Cadwalladr, who now features prominently in the new Netflix documentary "The Great Hack". Janus Rose of Vice.com argues the documentary doesn't go far enough. But some of the really important points are made along the way: "Data is now more valuable than oil." "We (consumers) are the product." You reading this, and I writing this, we give our information freely to these platforms in return for the cool toys they offer, and then they turn around and sell that information to rich asshats like Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon and Vladimir Putin, who use our data to influence voters to get Donald Trump elected, and Donald Trump's administration then throws little kids in cages. Or they use it to ensure Brexit happens, leading to chaos and financial instability in the...

Did We Change the Definition of 'Literally'? First I permitted smilies to appear in my informal online conversation. They felt strange to type. There weren't clear rules for where they could go in the sentence. Did they count as punctuation? But I had to admit, they sure were a compact way to convey a light tone. And it seemed to be expected of one. Then I picked up the habit of omitting periods from the last sentence of a line of informal online conversation. The netiquette dictated this as a more open style, signaling the conversation was ongoing; the final period was felt to be too final, like throwing up a "Stop" sign. I wasn't sure I agreed, but I went along. One doesn't want to be left behind as the culture evolves. (Posts like this one are formal, not informal like a chat session. That rule doesn't apply here.) I was informed I ought to drop my decades-long habit of typing double spaces between sentences. They're superfluous, now, and don...

In my mind, I've seen a glimpse of the future of entertainment through the prism of artificial intelligence. Let me paint you a picture. Take a popular show, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You can watch it in different languages, right? Humans have performed the translations, and they're rendered as subtitles, or by different voice actors. But machine translation is already a thing. It'll get good enough (firm understanding of idioms and metaphor and such) to where it's possible to pick any language on earth, and AI will do that translation for the whole show. Subtitles? Voice-over? No, it'll render the original actors' voices in those languages, even though the actors themselves don't know them. Are you learning a foreign language, and you'd like to hear it a little more slowly? Or perhaps you're in too much of a hurry to spend a whole hour on an episode? AI systems can already speed up or slow down an audio conversation, such as a radio broadcast o...