Terminal Colors; Dead Link Office; Authenticity in the Age of AI; A Sticky Situation

This is a slightly abbreviated Drop, as I spent far too much time this morning having fun at the expense of a cybersecurity company (as I am wont to do). Hopefully, none of you were impacted by the CrowdStrike thing or the Azure thing the day prior.

We’ve got a nice, random selection of items, with an extra section tossed in to try to ameliorate said brevity.

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TL;DR

(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop using Sonnet via Perplexity.)

Here’s a concise four-bullet summary of the blog post:

• Terminal Colors: A shell script called colors displays ANSI terminal colors and text effects, making it easier for users to remember and implement them [https://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/homedir/.local/bin/colors].
• Google URL Shortener: Google is discontinuing its URL shortener service, with goo.gl links becoming non-functional after August 25, 2025. Users are advised to expand and update their shortened links [https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/].
• Authenticity in the Age of AI: The rise of AI-generated content has sparked an “authenticity crisis,” highlighting the need for a balance between AI assistance and human creativity in content creation [https://almosttimely.substack.com/p/almost-timely-news-authenticity-in].
• ‘Stickiness’ Metric: A new measurement for heat stress has been developed, combining temperature and humidity to provide a more nuanced understanding of how different heat conditions affect human health [https://eos.org/articles/how-sticky-is-it-outside].

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Terminal Colors

This was almost the first item I saw as I opened up Mastodon today, and it’s awesome and very useful.

I have no memory for ANSI terminal colors (even before long covid brain), so it was nice to see I’m not the only one! Bill Mill came up with what one commenter called a “script quine” (which is an epic name!). colors, a shell script that prints out the basic ANSI colors and text effects and how to use them. Pass -v to see the 256-bit color table.

Super handy! Check out the whole thread for some other suggestions, too.

Dead Link Office

If you have any Google-shortened links, expand them now! Google is killing their URL shortener, and — unless they give the domain to the Internet Archive — any shortened link is going to stop working in the very near future.

If you’re an R user, you can use my {longurl} package to zoom through any links you have in your archives.

Authenticity in the Age of AI

Folks are using AI in content creation like crazy (perhaps I started this trend with my AI summary section?! — prbly not). It’s sparked a bit of an “authenticity crisis”, and this post does a pretty great job exploring many of the key issues surrounding AI-generated content, highlighting both its potential and pitfalls.

Our new overlords make text (et al.) generation highly “efficient”. This gives folks, like marketers, the superhuman ability to create large volumes of material quickly. However, this speed comes with some serious drawbacks. The article asserts that some of these challenges include:

• Lack of originality and authenticity
• Risk of generating duplicate or plagiarized content
• Difficulty in producing highly specific or nuanced information
• Potential loss of brand voice and human touch

If you’ve used any of these tools to construct some basic content, you kind of have to admit most of them do a pretty decent job; especially the “RAG” ones. Most — if not all — of them struggle with what we humans are pretty darn good at: the creative and emotional aspects of writing that resonate with audiences. We humans remain pretty crucial for crafting compelling narratives, injecting empathy, and ensuring truth/accuracy.

The article goes on to emphasize that the future of content creation lies in finding the right balance between AI assistance and human creativity. It suggests that AI tools are best used to augment human efforts rather than replace them entirely. This hybrid approach lets us lean on AI’s strengths in data analysis (which it is getting much better at) and task automation, while preserving the uniqueness and emotional connection that human writers bring to the table.

The author asserts that the content landscape will likely evolve to incorporate more sophisticated AI capabilities, including real-time content modification and improved creativity. However, this progress will also bring new challenges related to ethics, copyright, and the detection of synthetic media.

There’s an entire second part where Christopher goes into how the content for his post was made. If you aren’t interested in the blather, def check out the tech!

A Sticky Situation

Odds are that you, dear reader, were very likely one of the millions of humans who have been dealing with extreme heat + humidity over the recent weeks. I didn’t think there’s been a good enough word to describe what it was like to directly experience some of that until I came across a new one: “stickiness”.

This is a new metric developed to measure heat stress that takes into account both temperature and humidity. That link has yet-another link to a paper on the topic with tons of science to pore over.

The PhDs derive this new ‘stickiness’ metric — a thermodynamic state variable — from wet-bulb temperature, humidity, and dry-bulb temperature. It’s designed to quantify how heat and humidity contribute to humid heat, explaining why two types of heat that feel different can have the same wet-bulb temperatures.

There’s a fancy equation I’ll let y’all go fawn over vs. overuse the word “polynomial” here.

Ultimately, the measurement is in degrees Celsius, since it comes from temperature-based variables. However, the 0 °C point on the stickiness scale is arbitrary and set so that the mean value over all stations’ historical records is 0 °C. Positive values of stickiness represent higher than average humidity dependence. Negative values represent higher than average temperature dependence. And, the scale is designed to be most responsive to changes in humidity and dry-bulb temperature, and less correlated with changes in wet-bulb temperature.

Science folk worked on this to help address limitations in existing heat stress metrics like the WetBulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) used by the U.S. National Weather Service. It helps differentiate between different types of heat that may have the same wet-bulb temperature but feel different and affect the human body in different ways.

This ‘stickiness’ metric could help explain the disparity between physiological studies (which show humidity worsens heat stress) and epidemiological studies (which often find dry-bulb temperature as the main predictor of mortality). It may provide a more nuanced understanding of how different combinations of heat and humidity impact human health.

I don’t know about y’all, but it sure was sticky up here!

FIN

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