Today I installed Windows 10 on the household's newest laptop. Said laptop has to run Windows so we can run Pyware, but I refuse to live with the billionaire-spyware that Windows 11 has become. I wanted to install Windows 7, but too many things are no longer compatible with it, so 10 it is. Rolling back to Windows...

Like many of my fellow Americans, I am currently buried under a lot of snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. I have been home since Wednesday afternoon, amusing myself during snow days. At some point, I thought it would be fun to write a little guide for people just discovering cyberpunk. Just a few lines. How hard...

A lot of unspoken assumptions underlie the whole "AI thing" right now. But I think the biggest is that LLMs think like we do. We jump to this conclusion almost immediately, because LLMs generate plausible-reading text. The LLM sounds like a person, so it must think like a person, somehow, right? We then end up...

My 2.3 devoted readers may remember how a deer totaled my 2009 Corolla, forcing me to purchase a replacement vehicle: welcome home, Car Car Car The replacement, a 2015 Prius, is working great, mostly. I'm never going back to a full gas vehicle again. The Prius offers a "best of both worlds" situation for winter...

Spending my work-adjacent time reading the Rochester Provocations, a series of eight statements about AI intended to provoke conversation about how schools respond to generative AI: the Rochester Provocations I feel provoked to converse. In conversations on the AASL listserv, I've come to understand that the...

You ever read one of those quotes that somehow doubles the size of the universe? This morning it was: “Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology *won’t*.” — Stephen Lea Sheppard of...

I’m currently reading Marion Nestle’s What to Eat Now and Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism at the same time (the former for enjoyment and the latter for research). The juxtaposition is convincing me of one thing: We live in a society whose sole imperative is mass resource extraction from the populace to...

Title says it: Over the winter break, I rewatched Season 1 of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers because my inner eleven-year-old wanted to, and I wanted something that required absolutely no thought or insight. Win-win. I was obsessed with this show when it originally aired in the US. More precisely, I wanted to be. We...

One of my students recently got into Fallout 4 (thanks, Prime), and they are talking my ear off about the game. It's actually fun to listen to. I don't play a lot of video games; instead I tend to find a game I like and play it to death. Break the hell out of it. Learn so much lore I qualify as Hopeless. In short, I...

It's a gross, rainy, wet, muddy day here on the World's Tiniest Farm. But I needed carrots and it's about to be a gross, snowy, icy, muddy night and rest of week here, so I picked up my spade and went out to the front garden to get some. (Yes, you can overwinter carrots in the ground. I try to have all mine dug by...

I'm reading back through my journal entries and blog posts for the past year, and two things stand out above all. 1. I really thought that switching to Linux/yeeting oligarch tech/etc. would protect my privacy and data security and generally free me from the broader trends in surveillance, data harvesting, AI...

One downside to working as a school librarian is that we tend to be siloed. I don't even see the other librarians in my district most of the time - let alone any other librarians. So when people hear I'm a librarian and say "yeah, makes sense" or "I would have guessed," I'm always a little bemused - it's not like I...