(The Guardian) “The US boss of PricewaterhouseCoopers has warned that partners who do not get to grips with AI have no future at the consulting firm. Paul Griggs said senior staff who were not “paranoid about being AI-first” would probably be replaced by others who were ready to embrace the technology. “I don’t think anyone gets a free pass here. Anyone,” Griggs told the Financial Times. An employee who thinks they have the “opportunity to opt out” of AI is “not going to be here that long”, Griggs added.”
Author Archives: Steve Mays
CBS News shutting down its radio division
(LA Times) In a stunning move, CBS News is shutting down its radio division, bringing to an end one of its most recognizable sources of news reporting after nearly 100 years on air. CBS News announced Friday it will stop offering its radio service to its 700 affiliate stations on May 22.
CBS sold its own radio stations in 2017, but continued to offer hourly network newscasts to affiliate stations, including “World News Roundup,” which has been on the air since 1938. Legendary CBS News journalist Edward R. Murrow — who would become a nationally recognized anchor covering the international battlefields of World War II and the domestic “Red Scare” of the McCarthy era — delivered his first report on the program.
Land Rover Farewell
Today we (George, Barb and I) bid farewell to my beloved Land Rover (YouTube). Next week sometime it will roll into Mr. Wolf’s shop to get prepped for sale (on Bring A Trailer).
It was 7 1/2 years ago —on this exact spot— that I first got to drive the Rover. And it has been my daily driver ever since. When the transport driver started it up I smiled with the knowledge that in all those years, the truck never failed to start on the first crank.
Mr. Wolf will prep the truck for sale and I’ll probably do a couple of posts on those efforts but then we close the book on this most wonderful adventure.
AI-chats vs. Artificial Intelligence
Consider this a “house keeping” post to explain some changes to categories and tags. (I let Claude.ai write this one.)
The Artificial Intelligence category is for posts about artificial intelligence as a subject. Additionally, I’ve had a tag (ChatGPT) I used for posts featuring the more interesting conversations with that LLM. Those threads often had nothing to do with AI. Furthermore, I posted a number of conversations with Gemini, Perplexity and Claude.
So I’ve created a new tag (AI-chats) I’ll use for chats with any of the models I’m using these days. And I’ve deleted the ChatGPT tag. If I want to find posts specifically about that particular LLM, I’ll search for “ChatGPT.” (Or Claude or Gemini)
The secondary observation: that corpus (the AI-chats posts), properly tagged, may be among the more historically interesting subsets of the archive. Not because of the AI side — future systems will be unrecognizable — but because it documents how one person thought alongside these early tools, in real time, before the medium found its shape. The tag marks the seam between the solo voice and the dialogic one.
The data center becoming dominant building type
From Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross’ newsletter:
“The data center is becoming civilization’s dominant building type. US construction spending on data centers surpassed offices for the first time in December, $3.57 billion to $3.49 billion, a shift that will accelerate as AI automates the jobs that once filled those offices.”
For all those workers who resisted attempts to get them to come back to the office…