It's called "cord-cutting," and it means dropping your cable TV subscription, not doing without any cords (cable, optical fibre, the line to your satellite dish...) We cut the cord years ago (and the land line), and we get our Internet from a small provider. The big Canadian cable TV and comms packages were way too expensive, offered 500 channels with nothing on, and came jam-packed with ads. At the time, Internet streaming looked a lot better. Things have changed since then. Avoiding ads is back -- big time -- and prices are going up, and except for the occasional amazing thing (Breaking Bad, Adolescence) there's not actually much we want to watch. But at least you can pick and choose between Netflix, Apple, Disney, Crave, and so on, and not get locked into long-term contracts.

Oh, I thought AI meant "asshole idiot."

"Just change the data input." I have a feeling this is what Grok's upcoming "unhinged mode" is for.

Yeah, those videos just start. Nobody's fault, apparently. As they used to say on SNL, "I hate when that happens." It's too bad nobody knows how to prevent videos from running by themselves. Think of all the bandwidth we could save! Must be that darn AI.

The crew is jumping every 22 minutes instead of every 33 minutes -- possibly because between attacks, the Cylons are streaming half-hour TV shows with no ads.

Is this not a law of physics? Also, the Internet?

Earlier this year I took a skeptical look at the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer. It was some piece of work. I called my blog post "Dismantling Democracy, with George Orwell." Here's the link: https://staggeringimplications...

I live in Canada and I subscribe to magazines from the UK and USA. They always arrive at least a week late. Anything that went through our mail service to China is pretty much guaranteed to be sterile by the time it gets there. It would be interesting to see the postmark on that January 7 mail, but you can bet this won't be shared.

My home music studio runs on an IBM XP, using an older version of Reaper and two vintage PCI audio interfaces. I keep it off the Internet and I don't install anything new or perform updates. Unlike a typical Windows instantiation, it hasn't slowed down over the years. I suppose one day something will fail, but so far, so good.

"The way up and the way down are one and the same." -- Heraclitus

Seriously, social media need to require sarcasm, satire, parody, and so on to be labelled as such, so that no one takes it for news. There's no need for an "irony" label, because irony is dead.

A lot of pseudoscience is comparatively harmless, at least on the surface. If some people amuse themselves with Ancient Aliens theories, possibly even in an ironic this-is-fun-but-it's-all-crap kind of way, and someone wants to advertise an Ancient Aliens tour to them, then this is the category they'd pay for. But going a little deeper, it does present the danger of degrading scientific discourse among the general population, making it easier for people to believe garbage about more serious issues. Nobody was thinking about that, were they? Maybe now they will.

Coincidentally, last night I sent Google a snarky comment about Chromecast Ambient Mode. By default it uses about 6GB a month. By setting it to a 10-minute interval you can get it down to around 1.5GB. You can't do anything about the resolution, and there's no way to turn it off altogether. Unless you unplug the Chromecast device, it just downloads images all day, even while the TV is off.

Reportedly, Google is going to reduce the resolution and increase the interval -- temporarily. After that, it's back to wasteful stupidity as usual.

Professional technical writers have methodologies for creating documentation, and they also have plenty of blogs. You can start by seeing what they have to say.

People who don't like writing sometimes freeze up at a blank page. To get past this, just start writing any old explanation of your work, without worrying if it's good. You'll end up with a lot of garbage and some good stuff, but at least it didn't take long. Then go back and clean it up.

I like to use the DITA methodology. You don't have to work with DITA XML to use it; any writing tool is fine.

• Identify any unfamiliar CONCEPTS you need to introduce ('Foos', 'bars').
• Identify the TASKS your software will help users accomplish ('Fooing a bar' or 'How to foo a bar').
• Identify the REFERENCE material the users may need (tables, lookups, APIs).

Then write a short topic about each one, and assemble the topics into a document.

There's a lot I haven't said about editing for conciseness and clarity, but this is a good start, especially if you don't have a professional tech writer who can solve your problem for you.