Mike Elgan

If you search for a specific phrase in quotation marks, Google News will spam you with social media garbage instead of news that's relevant to your search. If you remove the quotation marks, Google News will spam you with actual news stories, but ones unr

You know that scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest sees Lieutenant Dan on the shore and is so distracted by him that he jumps off and swims to shore, allowing the boat to crash into the dock? Yeah, that's Google News now. In this metaphor, Forrest is Googl

They want deliberately slow chatbot responses to make people trust the answer more. And it makes me trust the researchers less.

I don't know why, but creative thinking and planning with clarity and ambition are always helped by motion. Go for a walk. Hike on a trail. Take a road trip. Fly to another country. The act of moving helps you unstick yourself, and breaks you out of the d

Maybe 12 years ago or so, I enjoyed newsgroup-like mailing list thing with three other guys who were all former co-workers of mine. Basically, we just swapped funny current events (what we'd now call memes) we would write profane limericks, and generally

I'll start with the punch line: Good writing is an expression of individuality, and a communication of life experience and human thought. AI can't do it. AI will never be able to do it.The AI chatbots that people use to write for them tend to write bland,

The machine gun was invented to make war less lethal. The inventor, Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, patented the Gatling gun in 1862. By turning a crank, one operator could fire 200 rounds a minute. Gatling was inspired by the American Civil War, which starte

We're just talking apes, after all. Our ancient ancestors, living in nature with handmade tools, survived in part by learning everything they could about threats, food sources, the location of shelter, and how to maintain a fire. "Content creators" were j

You hear it all the time. The media lies. The media favors the powerful. The media are communists, fascists, or part of a global conspiracy. The media this. The media that. Trouble is, there is no "the media." Take a few seconds to consider this label, an

AI is eating the world. Most content online is AI-generated. And most human-generated content is helped by AI. While AI has its uses, it's nice to hear from actual people once in a while. Dave Winer, one of the original bloggers, and the guy who co-invent