I only lie to you sometimes
My dad reads my writing. Well, some of it. He can handle the gay stuff okay, but the parts of my work which involve graphic werewolf maulings are a bit much for him. Anyway, he just got to the point in "Jay Moriarty Ruins Everybody's Childhood" where a device called a Pardella is used to intercept signals from a keycard reader, and asked me where I got the idea.
Here's the thing: the Pardella is real. Sort of.
It's based on a device called the ESPKey and its successor, Mellon. They function much like the Pardella does, by hooking into the connection between a card reader and its controller and recording credentials as they pass from one to the other.
The name "Pardella" is a deep cut reference to the movie Hackers, because I have a disease of the brain.
Podcast Appearance: Not If I Reboot You First!
I joined the delightful Tanner and Lindsay on the latest episode of Not If I Reboot You First!, pitching a contemporary reboot of the 1976 mystery farce Murder by Death. The words "do not put that twink in here" are eventually uttered, as well as "the Pope is not your Dark Blorbo."
You can listen to the episode here, or wherever podcasts are found.
(You can also listen to my previous appearance on the podcast, in which I propose a Kelvin Timeline version of Star Trek IV, here.)
New on Ko-fi: "Jay Moriarty Has Seen You Naked," Prologue and Chapter 1
The prologue and first chapter of "Jay Moriarty Has Seen You Naked" are now on Ko-fi and free for anyone to read. Subsequent chapters will be posted every Tuesday as supporter-only posts. You can also get the entire novella as an ebook.
This Week's Links
‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town
“The European Environmental Agency tells us that everything above 55 decibels is making us sick,” he says. The fact that the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis is “like torture,” he says. “The most spectacular cardiovascular diseases will develop. They have to stop the machines.”
Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable
“AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do,” [Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs’ head of global equity research] said. “People generally substantially overestimate what the technology is capable of today. In our experience, even basic summarization tasks often yield illegible and nonsensical results. This is not a matter of just some tweaks being required here and there; despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful for even such basic tasks.”
The Roomba That Screams When it Bumps Into Stuff
I'm not sure I really need to summarize this one.
Before you ask: yes, I do write every sex scene with the understanding that my parents might read it. At this point, I think they're just grateful that I'm not John Waters.
-K
