Author: ljndawson

  • The Humans in the System

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    Computers are easy. People are hard. Because tech is built on binary code, it presents a pretty simple series of problems: on/off, yes/no, 0/1. People…are not binary. People are vast soups of insecurity, irritation, pride, integrity, curiosity, resilience, and terror. And they bring all of that to the desk with them. If you’re managing groups…

  • What I Saw at the Evolution

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    Thoughts on a career in data governance I started my career in publishing in 1987, as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. (I was really bad at it.) From there I moved into bookselling, and then databases about books and bookselling, and then…well, a bunch of different companies, some of which don’t exist anymore, some of…

  • AI Is Dumb

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    I don’t have a lot of patience for the claims being made by companies who are heavily investing in AI. It definitely has its uses – image recognition, mining through large repositories of text, etc. But one thing that AI has not yet perfected is decisionmaking. Computers – even sophisticated ones – are stupid. They…

  • It Just Gets Darker

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    The balance between keeping my sanity and being a responsibly-informed citizen is so incredibly difficult. The “flood the zone” approach – which has gone on much longer than this administration’s first week – leaves me exhausted, which is the point of it. The obtuse misunderstanding of the way language works depending on context – the…

  • You Know My Methods

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    Announcing the debut of exactly what the world needs right now: a new podcast, Good Night, Mr. Holmes! Every Tuesday, my partner in both committing and solving crime, Rachel Rushefsky, and I discuss the ITV Granada Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett and a pair of Watsons. Side discussions include, but are not limited to:…

  • The Erasing

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    Well, they haven’t got around to changing Denali back to McKinley, but the caving to fascism has, in a lot of ways, shot past mere capitulation into actual erasure. In NYC, there is a monument to Stonewall in Greenwich Village, which was where gay rights really began to kick off, in large part led by…

  • Bad Men Doing Bad Things

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    Recently, I was disturbed by a not-new paper about AI written by a woman who was fired from Google for questioning their AI program. Timnit Gebru used to work in Google data science labs and was on the bleeding edge of AI research, when she began to realize AI’s roots in eugenics. It fundamentally has…

  • There Was a Penis On My Car

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    Let me start by saying that I love New York City. Let me also add that, contrary to popular belief, Staten Island is not New Jersey – it is, despite its physical distance, very very much the fifth borough of New York City. Last week, it snowed. Now, I park on the main drag, right…

  • Therapy at Arkham Asylum

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    I started regularly going to therapy in August of 2015. My life had hit a crisis point, and it was clear that I needed an assist getting back on track. I called up the local hospital system and got an assessment appointment, and was directed to go to Bayley-Seton Hospital – which was in the…

  • I am not a replicant

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    New year, new…job-hunt! And boy, has the world changed since the last time I went looking for employment (2019). In five short years, the entire ecosystem has been overtaken by AI, bots, and virtual interviewers (also bots). It is very hard to find any signal in all the noise. Some things I’ve noticed: That last…

  • A Matter of Duty

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    To every, “What are your plans for the holiday?”, my answer was, “Spending time with family in Boston.” I don’t have family in Boston. I brought family with me, in the form of my portion of Mom’s ashes, as well as the old key to the church that Dad presided over from 1971 to 1995,…

  • Three Murders, One Conclusion

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    A lot happened the week of December 4. Luigi Mangione shot the CEO of United Healthcare. A day or so later, possibly even the same day (because nobody cares to understand the exact timeline), two teenagers in NYC were stabbed with what appears to be a screwdriver (and one was killed) for not being able…

  • The Adjuster

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    I’m obsessed. With several things – the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan; the assassin’s escape, particularly how he’s proven the NYPD to be rather inept despite over $5B in funding and cameras all over the city; the response of social media across the political spectrum (which is extremely rare,…

  • “[T]he Only Surprise To Me Was That the Rioting Had Not Happened Sooner”: A letter from my father

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    I really wish I had found this 1989 letter from my father earlier. It’s a problematic letter because it is truly from the past, where terminology is not at all carefully thought through. But I think it retains a level of truthfulness that increasingly we’re not going to be finding much of. Dear Laura Jo… [Responding…

  • De-Nazifying Blogging

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    Thanks to https://bsky.app/profile/loudpoet.com, who shared Anil Dash’s post about Substack with me on Thursday night, I came to the inescapable conclusion that I can’t blog/newsletter on a platform that is actively supporting hate speech – and using the content of non-bigots to provide cover for that hate speech. So I’m back to WordPress. I was…

  • When Money Ate Mike Tyson

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    In the 1970s and early 80s, Saturday afternoons before dinner were for Wide World of Sports with Jim McKay. That is, when we couldn’t get the Oklahoma University games – which was most Saturdays, because we were in Delaware. Dad would be freshly showered from whatever yardwork or workout he’d been doing, slumped on the…

  • Our Horror Is Their Oxygen

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    I went down the hole, this past week. Even before the election – I just became useless. Showed up and did my work. But otherwise, spent my time on…I can’t remember. TV is a good escape. I know that I devoured shows and documentaries. An “anywhere but here” moment. My brain, in an act of…

  • Dr. Evil

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    I knew it before it happened. Once the Trump campaign announced a rally at Madison Square Garden, my mind immediately went back to the 1939 Nazi rally, which Trump’s father attended. Ironically (or maybe not!) there were more cops at the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park. (Won, by the way, by a…

  • Women Are Not Scaffolding for the Male Ego

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    Your loneliness is not my problem The Discourse(TM) has been full of male loneliness. Young male loneliness, to be precise. If we’re defining “young” as the advertising demographic of ages 18-34, which is an advertiser’s Precious Precious, the concern seems to be that without corrective action, these lonely young men will be susceptible to Tate-ism…

  • An Inconvenient Woman

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    They want her dead When Princess Diana died, newspapers/the media made a LOT of money. Diana made the media a ton of money in life – I’m American, and in high school I worked at the public library; I sought out the endless magazines and newspapers from our collection to read about her. I watched…

  • Busted

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    I’m in a crunch at work. Basically, working 10-12 hours a day to meet various deadlines that under normal circumstances would be unrealistic, but we’re a startup with something to prove, and I’m massively invested – both in financial and emotional terms. I slipped right back into this rhythm upon coming home after Mom’s funerals.…

  • The Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity

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    https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479 I’m diving into fall with a vengeance. Ghost and witch movies and TV shows, roasts and veggies in the oven. Doing a lamb shoulder tonight. And prepping a past’alla norma for the week. It was 82 degrees outside today, and it’ll be 78 tomorrow. It’s only September 14th. I know something’s up. Mom died…

  • Men Don't Care

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    I’ve been thinking a lot about this Giselle Pelicot case in France – the woman who discovered, after thinking she had Alzheimer’s and other unexplained ailments, that her husband had been drugging her every night and inviting 70-some men to come and rape her over 11 years. The men who refused to participate…also refused to…