March 28th, 2026:
- Another Odd Lots, sure. And the oddest thing I learned today was that there is a website called foodpoisoningnews.com, which has some factual material, but appears to be a site for people who want to sue and need a lawyer after getting food poisoning somewhere.
- Great piece by Jamie Wilson about why AI-created fiction is, well, slop. NY publishers are not doing well, and yet they insist on imposing their culture on authors, from copy editing all the way down to outrageous contract provisions that pretty much amount to author slavery. Indie publishers are popping up and appear to be at least surviving.
- The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the IP industry may not hold internet service providers responsible for IP piracy committed on their networks. This is big, and I wonder if the IP industry is now going to focus on going after individuals doing the file sharing. And what about Usenet? I let my Usenet subscription expire 9 years ago, in part because the forums were mostly dead and file downloads were the bulk of what was left.
- Could AI cause software-as-a-service (SaaS) to implode? This article thinks so. I’m not as sure, but the piece makes a few points I hadn’t thought of before, mostly because I don’t contribute to open-source projects.
- Web publishers are having a hard time paying their bills, and are amping up their “reader as product” strategy. I’m pretty sure part of that is the growing use of AI in web searches, in which the AI presents the answers to the user without ads or anything else that the publishers can monetize.
- Supplementing B vitamins may help slow or prevent the progression of Parkinson’s disease. We take B-50s every morning, and this is yet another reason to continue them.
- I’m not sure why I never learned about Amazon’s Send to Kindle page until a friend told me about it, but it’s a simple way to sideload epub ebooks onto your Kindle readers or apps.
- While looking up a pop song based on Bach’s “Minuet in G” I happened upon a large list of pop songs based on classical melodies. I don’t listen much to pop radio anymore, so the items after the 1980s are mostly unknown to me.
