Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Trump's proposed triumphal arch will sit at a rotary on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

It obscures the Lincoln Memorial, built to honor the president who steered the country safely through the Civil War, but perfectly frames Arlington House, the mansion built by enslaved Americans and once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

William Gibson scares me a little bit.

The Sprawl trilogy predicted our deranged crop of tech billionaires.

The Bridge trilogy predicted our hellish media landscape.

The Blue Ant trilogy predicted the nihilism of modern consumerism.

He doesn't miss. The things Gibson writes, they have a tendency to come true. Which brings me to his latest, the Jackpot trilogy.

The Jackpot is a multi-apocalypse: economic ruin, world war, climate catastrophe, pandemic, Ai disaster...

...all at once.

Fuck.

I got a label maker and had the strangest experience. I opened the box, loaded the sample roll of label ribbon, inserted 6(!) AAA batteries, and it worked.

No apps to download. No account to log into. No firmware updates. No pop-over "helpful tips" about how it's "now enabled with AI" or whatever.

I just typed in the label I wanted and hit "print", and it did it. Astonishing. Nostalgic.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@matthiasott/116609310065016685

“One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “token auction.” In this model, advertisers don’t buy ad slots on a page. Instead, they bid, token by token, on the actual text the model generates. Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of competing interests, shaped by who’s willing to pay more.”