BRUCEB NEWS
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 profile they put together by spying on you is a tiny twig carried in a rushing river of…
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 Opt-Out Platform), DROP automatically commands nearly 500 registered data brokers to…
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 are amazing upgrades to Google search. It doesn’t occur to me to open my phone for a…
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 book of the Foundation trilogy. Asimov’s Foundation books are among the most celebrated…
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 charts after a burst of headlines about AI and the Pentagon and are you kidding me,…
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 and obey me, you low-bandwidth peasantry.” That was rude. Let’s talk some more about that….
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. Those were written at the dawn of time, way back in (dismissive tone) 2025 , and now it’s…
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 Hitchcock’s classic 1943 movie Shadow Of A Doubt in 3D, it looked like the train was actually…
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 world of BookTok, the short videos that galvanized the publishing industry after 2020. So…