BRUCEB NEWS
The Revenge Of The Ginger Man
The Olympia Press was a notorious Parisian publishing house that used a legal loophole to mass-produce cheap, pseudonymous English erotica for tourists in the 1950s. Olympia Press was owned by Maurice Girodias, a chaotic businessman who had an eye for avant-garde…
Lolita and the Art of Suitcase Literature
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Those are the opening lines of Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov’s dazzling literary masterpiece. Lolita was an…
AI Business News Roundup
New AI technology is transforming scientific research, drug discovery, education, software development, weather forecasting, robotics, energy, agriculture, transportation,…
AI Consumer Basics
Here’s your human-generated summary of the latest AI news. Mankind has never lived through a period of technological change like this. It arrived overnight, it is constantly…
The Greatest Signature Page Of All Time: Harlan Ellison & Medea
The signed limited edition of Medea: Harlan’s World has one of the greatest collections of signatures of all time. Sheets were circulated among eleven legendary authors, then…
The Patch Deluge: AI & The Race To Save The World
Don’t worry, be happy! I was just trying to scare you with all that doom and gloom. The same AI systems that can find vulnerabilities can also fix them. The same AI tools that…
Claude Mythos & Cyber Apocalypse
Last week Google said a criminal hacking group launched a zero day cyberattack created by AI. It’s the first known example of a zero day bug being put to malicious use by…
The Great Compression: AI & Cybersecurity
There used to be a pause in the rhythm of digital security. A software bug was found; the vendor created and tested and released a patch; and businesses had a comfortable few…
Anthony Burgess & The Flatulent Poet
Inside Mr Enderby is one of my favorite novels, written by renowned British author Joseph Kell and published in 1963. The book follows the life of F.X. Enderby, a dyspeptic poet…
DROP Promises Privacy But The River Still Flows
California has new rules – the DROP platform – that could interfere with the money being made by California data brokers. The data brokers will find ways around the rules . The…
Power To The Private: California’s Data Deletion Machine
If you’re a resident of California you can take control of your digital privacy. When you input some basic information about yourself into the DROP website (Delete Request and…
The Circus of Dr Lao: A Small, Strange American Masterpiece
Psst. Come in, come in! I’ve got a weird and wonderful book for you. There are books that feel like neatly arranged shelves. Then there are books like The Circus of Dr. Lao ,…
Chatting With AI: Synthetic Empathy
A lot of people talk to their AI buddies as if they have little friends that live in their phones. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve been using ChatGPT and Gemini as if they…
Isaac Asimov Tried To Warn Us
Isaac Asimov published the novella “The Mule” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1945. A few years later it became the second half of Foundation and Empire, the second…
The Claude Crisis: AI And The Presumption Of Regularity
It’s Anti-AI week! Protests and petitions and boycotts and resignations , oh my. OpenAI (ChatGPT) is the villain. Anthropic (Claude) is the hero, topping the download…
The $240 Question: Is Free AI Good Enough?
In the last article I ordered you to subscribe to a $20/month plan for ChatGPT or Google Gemini. I didn’t explain why and in hindsight I shouldn’t have phrased it as “Follow…