All of that brought me to a self-admission: while I love and value criticism of many kinds, I am not a critic, because criticism tends to be about current work, people, and goings on. It's not that takes on that stuff are wrong or bad. On the contrary (speaking critically), they can be very good. It's just that I'm a long-term / long-view guy. As i said in My Three Hooks, I have, and subscribe to, purposes that are (or I hope or trust will be) good for the world. I also like unanswerable questions. If there is life after death, were you alive before your current bodily existence—and shouldn't we have a word for that? What came before the Big Bang? What is eternity—and can we unbind it from the concept of time? Is life the exception to death—and can it be, if death is not a state but the absence of one? And…
These aren’t relevant to anything below. But they were tasty, two weeks and two thousand miles ago.
Clobbering tourism, sports, higher ed, and all tech conferences
Privacy International says “The U.S. Government intends to force visitors to submit their digital history and DNA as the price of entry.” The proposed changes are here. Particulars from the piece:
The changes include:
All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’
ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) applications will include ‘high value data fields’, ‘when feasible’
‘telephone numbers used in the last five years’
‘email addresses used in the last ten years’
‘family number telephone numbers (sic) used in the last five years’
biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris
business telephone numbers used in the last five years
business email addresses used in the last ten years.
All these travellers will now have to use an app provided by CBP (‘CBP Home’) and an app for their ESTA application (‘ESTA Mobile App’). The ESTA website is being decommissioned.
The ‘CBP Home’ mobile app will be used by people to provide biometric proof of their departure, to ‘close the information gap’. The app will disclose the user’s location once they have left the U.S. and run a liveness detection on the selfie photo.
If approved, this policy would apply to all visitors who currently travel without a visa. For the estimated 14 million annual ESTA travellers, CBP thinks that this will take the average visitor 22 minutes to submit themselves and their family members.
Netflix is pitching their new talk videos as “podcasts.” They are not. If you want to know what a podcast really is, go to the blogfather: Dave Winer. Says Dave, “A podcast is a series of digital media files made available over the open web through an RSS feed with enclosures.”
We need a word for what Netflix is pitching. When I posted Podcasts, Wallcasts, and Paycasts back in October ’24, audio that was also video wasn’t common. Now it is. We have almost reached the point where a podcast isn’t a podcast unless it’s also in video.
On that post, I said, “For subscription-only ‘casts, such as some on SiriusXM*, I suggest paycasts.” And, “Bottom line: It can’t be a podcast if you have to pay for any of it, including archives.” Netflix isn’t free. And it’s not on the open Web. I also don’t know if it uses RSS. But it still fails to fit the definition of a podcast.
My watch told me it was minus-1° when I woke up this morning, just like it was a year ago today. There’s 14.5″ of snow on the ground, and I need to go shovel a sidewalk that’s 200 feet from here. For footwear, all I have are a pair of old hiking boots, which only go up to the ankle. I unloaded my nice calf-high Columbia snow boots last Summer when I left New York, because I had to purge 95% of my accumulated possessions there, and just take what fit in my small VW wagon.
So, between the last paragraph and this, I waited until it was a balmy 9° and trudged up there. One of our kind neighbors had already cleared paths on the sidewalk and to the front porch. I widened the sidewalk, then tried to expose as much of the concrete surface as I could. Stopped when I couldn’t feel my fingers (the gloves aren’t great), and left satisfied. At 78, I’ve still got (some of) it.
Snow is the only thing I like about Winter. I grew up on a hill in New Jersey, and sledding down that hill while school was canceled was a huge thrill for me. I see by my stats that I've written 179 other posts about snow.
And it's snowing now. Forecasts say one to twelve inches. So far, we've achieved the former.
I'm alone here, but well provisioned. If the snow goes above eight inches, I won't drive on it, even though I have all-wheel drive and new Michelins that are good for snow. Last year, I gleefully plowed over and through the deep stuff, and misaligned the radar sensor, which is exposed low and inside the front grille. (See here.) Fixing that cost $1200.
Remembering Ransom Love
Steven Vaughan-Nichols on LinkedIn shares news that Ransom Love has died. Ransom was one of the kindest, sweetest, smartest, most helpful, good-humored, and humble sources I ever had during my 24 years writing for Linux Journal. And our connection went back farther, through his years with Novell in the early '90s. It was a blessing to know him in life and remains one to remember him now. My best to his friends and family.
What emerges?
You know how Google's original (and continuing) mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? It didn't happen with Google. Gemini gets closer. So I'm thinking, if search was the larval stage, and now Gemini is the pupal stage…
After I wrote the first item below, I did some digging and found some history. This photo is by Mike Fisher on Flickr. Thanks, Mike!
His story
A thousand years ago, when I was in college, there was a traveling museum of some kind, I forget what. All I remember was a pair of very large bronze hands, from a plaster cast. The hands were thick and plainly those of man whose work was heavy manual labor.
Then I looked at the plaque explaining them. The hands were Lincoln’s.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto: “And so, we find ourselves at this crossroads. Regardless of which path we choose, the future of computing will be hyper-personalized. The question is whether that personalization will be in service of keeping us passively glued to screens—wading around in the shallows, stripped of agency—or whether it will enable us to direct more attention to what matters.”
That sounds like computing is still corporate. Institutional. For us, but not ours. From Personal vs. Personalized AI:
Technologies extend us. They enlarge our capacities in the world. Intelligence is one of those capacities. So is memory. Your rectangles help a lot with both. That’s why those have already scaled to ubiquity, or close enough.
AI will do the same, but only if it’s personal. Not if it’s just “personalized.”
As Jamie Smith made clear here a year ago, “your personal AI isn’t really personal.”
Two years later, it still isn’t. Yes, there’s progress. And there are pockets. Companion Intelligence is one example. (Looks like a Mac Mini without Apple.)
We’ll see
Prophesy: Indiana in 2026 became to college football what Duke in 1991 became to college basketball.
This is a slash: / This is a backslash: \ One can call the former a forward slash, but when telling people a URL, for example, one would say “slash.” That’s two syllables less than “forward slash.”
I hope the answer is no
In 2006, when Twitter and Facebook came along, this blog (well, its predecessor, but it was my eponymous blog, and it rolled over to this one) had dozens of thousands of readers per day. Now it gets dozens. (And thank you!)
Here’s the thing. Twitter and Facebook didn’t just suck away attention and readers. It sucked away writers. So many great bloggers went over to those two social platforms, and abandoned their blogs.
Now, blogging (personal publishing, syndicated with RSS) is having a resurgence. But on Substack, not on personal sites like this one. Not yet.
I am sure my readership would go up into the thousands again if I blogged on Substack, but I don’t want to. Here’s why: this is a home. And it’s mine. I’m not in somebody’s walled garden.
Am I wrong to have faith that independence will, in the long run, have more appeal (and effect) than dependence?
But I wonder about revenue. Google’s cash cow is advertising, especially with the search engine, usage of which is being cannibalized by Gemini. Will the whole world start paying for commodity AI? Only if all of them put up a paywall.
An aurora I enjoyed on a flight between the US and Europe a few years ago.
Be ready the next time the Sun burps
It was overcast here in Indiana, but there is a good chance that auroras were visible the last couple of nights where you live, thanks to a big coronal mass ejection. Examples: Arizona, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Long Island, Texas, Brazil (see the “south Atlantic anomaly,” here).
Your irregularly nonscheduled blogging program will continue returning shortly. Or at length. We’ll see.
Woke up with a case of nausea and uselessness this morning. Took all day to get back to something like normal. And here we are, sort of. Cue Frank.
A great Masters of Privacy interview of Alan Chapell by Sergio Maldonado. While the focus is on universal opt-out of tracking (e.g. with Global Privacy Control), the dialog provides a great overview of developments in regulation, business, and practice. MyTerms also gets some flowers from Sergio.
Because depending on Big AI for privacy won’t work
You can read about it everywhere. Probably hard to escape, because it’s the best story in sports right now, or perhaps ever: how the team that had lost a record number of games went undefeated this season, going 16-0, a feat not achieved since Yale did it sometime in the 19th century. And they did it with a Heisman-winning quarterback who seems near-perfect as a human being as well as a football player.
I’m new to the possessive first-person pronouns here, having arrived in Bloomington only five years ago. I’ve been hanging out with people who have been Hoosier natives and fans for generations. To call this victory gratifying and uplifting for them is the height of understatement. This is a deeply personal moment. I’m just glad the Hoosiers won, and grooving on their amazing story.
However, while correlation is not causation, I would like to point out that sports success seems to follow me. During my two decades in North Carolina, Duke, NC State and UNC became big basketball winners. Duke became an overdog after I became a devoted fan living in California.
When I came to the Bay Area in the mid-’80s, the 49ers became something of a dynasty. The Giants and the Athletics were such hot shit that they played each other in the ’87 World Series, causing the Loma Prieta earthquake.
After we moved to Boston in ’07, the Patriots went undefeated*, the Red Sox won the World Series, and the Celtics won the NBA championship. And the winnings persisted.
My alma mater. I remember civil rights demonstrations on that walkway in front of Founders Hall.
And here we are.
I was completing my junior year at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. At that time, Greensboro was one of the main targets of the civil rights cause, and the site of much unrest. I was among those who marched and demonstrated. The antiwar movement was at high ebb at that time as well, because the Vietnam War was massively failing, and dozens of thousands of young male boomers were being drafted to die in it. Me included.
I remember saying, when we heard MLK was gone, that this would end the civil rights movement and delay its fulfillment for fifty years. I was right about the former (see that last link) and wrong about the latter. Fifty-eight years have passed, and the long road istill stretches ahead of us.
Back then I also had hope that nonviolence would at least persist as a value and a strategy for fighting war and injustice. I was wrong about that, too. Nonviolence didn’t die with Doctor King, but it lost its exemplar. None of his stature and weight have shown up since.
Joan Westenberg:The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack. Just one worthy pullquote: “The problem is structural. The total volume of things-you-should-have-an-opinion-about has exceeded our cognitive bandwidth so thoroughly that having careful opinions about anything has become damned-near impossible. Your attention is a finite resource being strip-mined by an infinite army of takes.”
Hope Spring trains eternal
Bummed to see the Mets tradeJeff McNeil to the A’s. At least he’s back home in California. But this move by the Mets looks like a good one.
Unrelated, sort of: After watching Brett Butler play for the Durham Bulls, I followed his major league career for all nineteen (!!) of his seasons as a leadoff hitter. Fun guy to watch.
Two pieces of interesting info from this clip on Reddit: 1) Don’t have any plane, much less another gigantic A380, take off into the wake another one like it. 2) LA Flights is an online YouTube channel doing live reporting of aircraft landing and taking off at LAX.
I’ve been young a long time. My chronometer says 78.4685 years, which is long for a human but short for a rock. I know a lot of rocks. It helps to have perspective.
I still work. A lot. I’ve outgrown getting paid, though my work is still valuable. (Or so I believe.)
But it’s hard to open jars now. Also to climb trees, but that’s an expired skill. Opening jars is not.
Oddly for an ordinary dude, I took pride for most of my life in my skill at opening jars. All one needs, I taught myself, is enough grip in each hand to lock onto the jar and lid, then using one’s fixed wrists and forearms like long-handled wrenches. Does the job.
I once mistook the old-fashioned crown cap of a beer bottle for a more modern twist-off one, and got the cap to turn in circles while perforating the web of my hand next to my thumb. Now, even for twist-off caps, I need a channel-lock pliers (recommended). My hands won’t do it.
So here’s how I loosen the metal lid of pasta sauce jar, especially when the running-hot-water-over-the-lid method fails:
Put a small metal pan on low heat.
Wait until the surface gets to about 130°, then turn it to simmer, or the lowest possible value, so it holds that temperature. To check, use an infrared thermometer laser gun-like gizmo. They’re cheap online: less than $20, tariffs withstanding.
Stand the jar, lid down, on the pan, while watching the temperature adjacent to it. Don’t let it get above 150° or so.
Allow enough time for the lid to heat up a bit.
Take it off, and use your thermo gun to make sure it’s cool enough to grab.
Now you can twist off the lid.
Works every time for me, and I am now certifiably weak. (But not too weak to type this.)
Bought a used Kodak 4200 Carousel projector for pocket change at a garage sale a few months back, so I could go through my large cache of slide photos shot between 1950 and 1972. Turns out the bulb was dead, so I bought a new one for $19.73 on (of course) Amazon. I could have bought a comparable one from Walmart for a lot less, but I would have had to pay for shipping too, which made the cost difference small. I pay for shipping with Amazon as well, of course, because $$$Prime. Every now and then I want to go through the math to see whether paying for Prime is worth it. But my time has value too, so I don’t. And I’m used to Amazon. Color me normal.
Mark Hurst in The upside of child sacrifice: “It appears, increasingly, that a primary goal of our interconnected digital system is to sacrifice as many children as possible, as fast as possible, with as little friction as possible.”
Ethical Marketing News says the number is $1.19 trillion, 71.6% of which is “algorithm-driven.” Of that $1.19 trillion, “Alphabet, Amazon and Meta take a combined market share of 56.1% excluding China this year – equivalent to $556.6bn – rising to 58.0% in 2026.”
Of course, we know when we are on any of those three companies’ platforms, or use any of their products, we are being spied on. But we may not know that nearly every website with a cookie notice is in the same business, and personal data about you is harvested there as well, regardless of what you click on in the subset of cookie notices that give you a way to opt out of tracking. See here and here.
As it says, “Advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely.”
The big dog is eating the new dog’s lunch
The two AI chat systems I use most are ChatGPT and Gemini. The results from both are about even. Both are good and getting better. Both keep a history, which is essential for me, because I often need to revisit and search old Q’s and A’s.
The main differences are rates of improvement in speed, quality, and service offerings. Gemini is much faster in getting me answers (it seems ChatGPT is purposely slow). Gemini’s rate of answer improvement is increasing faster. And ChatGPT’s desktop and mobile apps remember all my history. Not the case (far as I can tell) with Gemini. Not yet.
Alphabet was clearly on the path to providing useful AI services for everybody when ChatGPT suddenly jumped in front of it, and a pack of other AI dogs, in 2022. And in some ways, ChatGPT still has the edge. That’s why I pay for ChatGPT and not the others. But there are trends to weigh here, and resources to consider. Some numbers from Gemini:
“Microsoft’s CEO admitted GPUs are sitting in warehouses unplugged.
Not demand. Not defects. Power.
Transformer lead times: 4 years
Grid interconnection queues: 8 years
NVIDIA backlog assumes: 18 months…
$4.5 trillion valuation depends on infrastructure that does not exist.
The chips are ready. The grid is not.”
Logisms
I like “everwhat” and “everwhen.” Just wanted to say that.
Still trying
“Life is a casino with no house, so go ahead and influence your own bets. The future is a black swan hatchery that will produce colors other than black and white. Every species is a mistake that works. Best to make new ones.” —The Intention Economy
Scott Adams’ brilliant take on old skool Unix geeks. For a long time I thought the bearded dude was my old boss Phil Hughes (who gave us Linux Journal), but am convinced now it was Jon Maddog Hall.
Remembering Scott Adams
Scott Adams understood business, and especially its innate absurdities, better than anyone else in the world. That’s why his Dilbert comic strips were so right-on and popular. He also correctly predicted the results of the 2016 election (as did I), but I think he was off-base on why. I think he was also wrong about a lot of other stuff, which was why I stopped paying attention to him (although I did read and enjoy his book Win Bigly, even though I disagreed with some of that too). From what I’m now reading about his health, the last year or more of his life was almost pure misery. His passing today, while in some ways a blessing (he had earlier talked of taking suicide drugs), is a huge loss. He was a one-of-one, and there will never be another.
Divide and —?
Axios: “The nation is splitting into three distinct economic realities: the Have-Nots (stalling) … the Haves (coasting) … and the Have-Lots (rocketing to greater wealth)…This shift, if it holds, will rattle economics, politics and AI throughout 2026 and beyond. We’re already seeing it in rising inequality, pessimism about the future and AI opposition.”
So mark me down as doubtful.
Facebook invites me “to start making money with our new content monetization program.” Guess that means their AI hadn’t been trained on the large corpus of things I’ve written about creepy adtech and why it needs to die.
Mortal words
Thousands of years ago, in the late ’80s, President George H. W. Bush was a guest on Rush Limbaugh’s talk show. After a caller criticized Bush and his policies at great length, Bush didn’t defend anything. He just said, “Guess I’ll mark you down as doubtful, fella,” and moved on to the next call. Hence the subhead for the item above.
