BRUCEB NEWS
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 , which feels more like someone opened a door in the back of the room and a carnival wandered…
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…
ChatGPT & Gemini: Field Notes From A Moving Target
Remember when I wrote disparaging articles about AI hallucinations and how Perplexity was doing a better job than ChatGPT or Gemini ? Forget all that. It’s ancient history….
Technology With Unexpected Dimensions
I watched Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at the Superbowl in 3D, sugar cane receding into the distance, dancers popping off the screen toward me. When I watched Alfred…
The Renaissance Of The Physical
Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince was massively popular when it was published in 2018 – New York Times bestseller, millions of copies sold. It became a sensation in the romantasy…
AI Pornography: Threat Or Menace?
AI is being used to generate explicit images of real people, celebrities, and minors. Nudity! Bikinis ! Sex, sex, so much sex! The use of technology to create pornography is, of…
Goodbye Wintel, Hello Winsnap: The PC Industry’s New Power Couple
My last article talked about a specific laptop with a Snapdragon processor, the Lenovo Thinkpad T14s Gen 6. For my needs, it stands head and shoulders above the otherwise…
Vive La Snapdragon Revolucion!
I’m typing this on my favorite laptop of all time. And I’ve used a lot of laptops. It’s a Lenovo Thinkpad. It looks just like a Thinkpad – matte black on the outside, lots of…
Days Of Future Passed: Bruceb Top Ten 2025
Click here for my 2025 Top Ten playlist. The wheel is turning. I’m 71 years old. Every future day lived is a day that has passed. Today is a fleeting moment with a challenge to…
Ace Doubles: Two Tales, One Spine
Philip K Dick’s first published novel was Solar Lottery in 1955. It was a thirty five cent Ace paperback. If you flip the book over, there’s no back cover, there’s a different…
Details Mattter: The Difference Between AI Hallucinations And Misinformation
Details matter. Here’s a detail about AI that matters: there’s a difference between hallucinations and misinformation. Seems subtle, I know, but the distinction might help…
Brown Stage Capitalism
Everything is getting worse. Cory Doctorow gave it a name three years ago: enshittification . Now he has written the best business book of the year, Enshittification: Why…
AI & Society: Messy, Complicated, And Uneven
AI & Society A series of articles about the most significant technology shift of our lifetime 1 Overview 2 The Case For Optimism 3 The Case For Pessimism 4 The Failure Of…