Tag: Pocket

“It is with a great appreciation and heartfelt emotions that we write to share some sad news,” editor Sandi Duncan and editor emeritus Peter Geiger wrote. “After more than 200 years of sharing a unique blend of weather, wit and wisdom, we’ve made the very difficult decision to write the final chapter of this historical publication.”

The almanac’s staff attributed the decision to the “growing financial challenges of producing and distributing the Almanac in today’s chaotic media environment.”

The Maine-based publication is sometimes confused with the Old Farmer’s Almanac, its longer-established and more widely recognized competitor that first published in 1792. The Old Farmer’s Almanac said in a statement this week that it “isn’t going anywhere.”
— Read on dcalrv8rg95znm.archive.is/

Amazon cut 14,000 jobs this week, citing, in part, efficiency gains from AI. But blaming AI for layoffs is like blaming the thermometer for the fever.

…

You can’t innovate in a climate of fear. And more than half of workers now fear losing their jobs in the next year. People stop taking risks. They comply. They play it safe. Ironically, at the dawn of the AI era, we’re engineering the conditions least conducive to innovation. At its highest and best use, AI could help us cure cancer, rebuild infrastructure, even reverse climate damage. But we may throw that future away. Not because machines failed us, but because we did.

— Read on www.forbes.com/sites/annkowalsmith/2025/10/31/ai-didnt-layoff-14000-people-amazon-did/

The job market continues to be a nightmare as layoffs haven’t slowed and almost every marketing-related job listing I’ve seen is either for some random AI-related startup or a legacy company claiming some vague AI-first angle, or better yet, it requires “expertise” with tools that are still relatively new and objectively mediocre to anyone with actual marketing experience.

Meanwhile, actual expertise continues to be devalued across the board. Intellectual curiosity that helps develop that expertise is steadily being devalued in favor of “productivity” hacks. And my absolute favorite, AI “solutions” to problems that were created by previous non-AI “solutions” that also didn’t understand the original problem they claimed to solve. (eg, practically every sales and marketing automation tool you’ve ever heard of, along with every “content generation” platform.)

— Read on loudpoet.com/2025/10/30/understanding-what-i-am-not-anti-ai-i-am-pro-craft-means-to-me/

In a landscape where text-based communication plays an outsized role in the search for love, it’s perhaps understandable that some of us reach for AI’s helping hand – not everyone gives good text. Some Chatfishers, though, go to greater extremes, outsourcing entire conversations to ChatGPT, leaving their match in a dystopian hall of mirrors: believing they’re building a genuine connection with another human being when in reality they’re opening up to an algorithm trained to reflect their desires back to them.

— Read on www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/12/chatgpt-ed-into-bed-chatfishing-on-dating-apps

“Very few companies are actually replacing people with AI right now,” Jessica Kriegel, chief strategy officer at executive advisory firm Culture Partners, told CNN. “What we’re seeing instead are preemptive layoffs… Leaders want the financial runway to explore how AI might drive efficiency, but the technology isn’t yet ready to take over most human roles.”

What Amazon’s mass layoffs are really about – CNN

“I can guarantee that he’s not part of the Sinaloa Cartel,” Scott Alati said of his son, Tyler, who was charged in state court in Franklin with a felony-level drug sale and immediately released without having to post bail. “He isn’t a high-ranking member of anything. He’s high-ranking dumb.”

DEA claims of 171 ‘high-level’ Sinaloa Cartel arrests in New England are overblown

It’s creepy to tell people they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t use AI. It’s weird to assume AI critics hate progress and are resisting some inevitable future. Luckily, most of my private conversations about AI with industry friends are neither weird nor creepy. Anil said it best: the majority of people who work with and in technology hold a moderate view of AI, as any other normal technology with valid use cases and real problems that need to be fixed.

That’s where I land. Generative AI and LLMs shouldn’t be as over-hyped as they are, forced on users, trained on content without creators’ consent, or used for high-stakes tasks where hallucinations and poor design can put people’s lives and work in danger. Generative AI output both feels magical and futuristic and gives people in photos three hands with seven fingers. It’s remarkable and so very bad at the same time.

— Read on notetoself.studio/post/measured-ai/

Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren’t the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech.
And what they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI, which can be pretty succinctly summed up:
Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

— Read on www.anildash.com/2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/

For three years, the UCSD and UMD researchers developed and used an off-the-shelf, $800 satellite receiver system on the roof of a university building in the La Jolla seaside neighborhood of San Diego to pick up the communications of geosynchronous satellites in the small band of space visible from their Southern California vantage point. By simply pointing their dish at different satellites and spending months interpreting the obscure—but unprotected—signals they received from them, the researchers assembled an alarming collection of private data: They obtained samples of the contents of Americans’ calls and text messages on T-Mobile’s cellular network, data from airline passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure such as electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and even US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities.

— Read on www.wired.com/story/satellites-are-leaking-the-worlds-secrets-calls-texts-military-and-corporate-data/

Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight? Sleep is about being invisible, private, not attracting attention, our secret, vegetal life, a pure existence outside the maelstrom of interaction. Not surprisingly, echoing Aristotle’s view of it as ‘a privation of waking’, sleep is typically defined by what it is not, rather than what it is. It is not moving, not acting, not responding, being disconnected from the world, doing nothing, at least from the observer’s perspective. When any organism sleeps, it takes a kind of leave of absence: it stops interacting with the environment, withdraws from action, and also gives space to others. Sleep, nightmares apart, is the only time when we are at peace with ourselves, forgetting pain and suffering, and the world outside, as we leave it alone to respite from us. A blessing for both the sleeping individual and for planet Earth.

— Read on aeon.co/essays/two-billion-humans-are-doing-something-bizarre-right-now-sleeping