Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • Personal Agentry

    Google Trends of searches over time. The agentic thing is hot right now. It also needs to be personal and not just corporate.

    In Know your .agent, Esther Dyson suggests that we need a DNS-like registry of AI agents. She and her colleagues at the Agentic AI foundation (agentcommunity.org) have started one, and it has some good premises, such as accountability for AI agents and their operators.

    .agent is clearly designed—so far—to make Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAi, Perplexity, et. al. accountable for what their agents do. But what about personal agents: ones that are entirely ours? That’s what I would want respected if such a registry were required for all the world’s AI agents.

    So, if .agent has any chance of becoming a DNS for agents of all kinds, I would like to register searls.agent, just like I registered searls.com in 1995. I’m writing what follows while going through the registration process.

    <registration process>

    To register an agent at AgentCommunity.org, you commit to the AgentCommunity charter, which is at agentcommunity/governance, on GitHub. Here it is, with my responses to its points. What it says is in italics. My responses are in boldface—

    • You are actively developing, researching, deploying, or meaningfully using autonomous software agents or related tooling. (In other words, you consider yourself part of the autonomous agents community relevant to the .agent domain.) I wasn’t, but I am now.
    • You support the creation of the .agent top-level domain to foster a trustworthy, interoperable agent ecosystem. Yes, so long as personal agents have the same status and respect as corporate ones. You know, like they do with the DNS (Domain Name System).
    • You commit that any .agent domain you may register will (a) be used in connection with autonomous-agent technology and (b) expose a compliance endpoint affirming alignment to the technical “Human-Centric Agent Standard” once published. (This is essentially an agreement to follow the community’s future rules: any .agent domain you get will be put to appropriate use and will include a public mechanism to show compliance with agreed safety/interoperability standards.) Yes, but I hate “-centric” because it is a corporate perspective. I prefer “-driven” to centric, for reasons I explained here, way back in 2008.
    • You consent to be listed (by name/organisation) as a public community supporter of the .agent application. (Your support won’t be anonymous – it will be known and count towards the community’s credibility.) I’m cool with that, long as my advocacy for personal AI agents gets heard.
    • This is a non-binding expression of support. No fees or legal liabilities arise until a future, formal membership or registrar agreement is executed with the duly-formed operating entity. (In plain terms: this is a goodwill pledge, not a contract; you’re not paying anything and can’t be held liable if you change your mind later. Formal obligations will only come if and when the community’s operating organization is established and you choose to formally join or register a domain.) Cool with that too.

    </registration process>

    Okay, so now my thoughts—

    • While it is conceivable that we may each have a single master agent that works across our personal data (behind our own castle moats) and interacts with others on our behalf (across our own drawbridges), we are more likely to have many agents:
      • one (or more) or health
      • one (or more) for finances
      • one (or more) for retail
      • one (or more) for interacting with customer service agents
      • one (or more) for managing our many subscriptions and other recurring expenses
      • one (or more) for scheduling and archiving our many interactions
      • one (or more) for our contacts (directly and through social media)
      • one (or more) to keep records of MyTerms and other forms of agreements with websites, services, government agencies, and other entities
    • Does it make sense to register all of those? Probably not. But it does make sense to certify our personal need to finally express our full power, as independent and self-sovereign agents in the marketplace—as the Internet promised us in the first place. (And why we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999 and New Clues in 2015—and related stuff in many other places.)
    • In tech parlance, we need to own root, and operate fully respected personal agents of our own.
    • The agentic Internet will need governance. I can see that. But is .agent the best (or only) way? Thanks to MyTerms, we will have one form of governance through contracts between people and the entities that serve them. And we will need others.
    • The agentic Internet won’t be worthy of its name unless it creates an intention economy to obsolesce the attention economy we got from surveillance-based advertising. Will .agent help with that? Not yet, which is one reason I’m joining the .agency community by registering searls.agent and writing this up.
    • .agent needs to look and behave more as an enabling system than an operational hurdle. I can see ways it might do that, but only if it starts caring about what it can do for people and not just for companies.
    • There are other approaches in the world. One is to hack ourselves, for example with KidOYO, created by Devon and Melora Loffreto. Devon authored the Root Declaration and all the thinking and writing behind it, going back to 2002. Another is Sovereign AI (the first name of which would probably not have happened without Devon’s leadership long ago). Sovereign AI is about enterprise AI development, but could also apply to personal AI agentics. There’s KwaaiNet. NeuroNest. Personal.ai. OpenClaw. Vellum.ai. Leon. Anything LLM. PyGPT. Jan.ai. Hmm: The Agentic Internet Foundation (AAIF) might be another, if it’s not just about corporate AI.

    I have more thoughts, but also other work to do. Meanwhile, I’m eager to hear what you think.

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  • Fromday

    Busted

    California AG Bob Bonta writes, "On Friday, we announced a historic $12.75 million settlement against General Motors for illegally retaining and selling hundreds of thousands of Californians’ location and driving data to data brokers."

    It's coming down

    There are three great teams left in the NBA playoffs. The Knicks are by far the best in the East. I'm watching them cream the 76ers right now. It'll be a sweep: 4-0. They'll next face the Pistons, which own the Cavaliers. I think the Pistons are very good, but the Knicks are better. In the West, the Thunder will sweep the Lakers, and the Spurs will finish off the Wolves (which are also very good). While the virtual finals will be Thunder vs. Spurs, I think the Knicks are the equal of both. The finals will go seven. I won't predict the outcome of that one, though of course, I favor the Knicks. My fear is that it will come down to injuries. The indispensibles are Brunson and Towns for the Knicks, Wemby for the Spurs, and SGA for the Thunder. If any of those go down, it'll be end the show for those teams.

    The main thing: we'll never know

    For Mozart's death to work as a story, it needs to be dramatized. But the simple fact that it was countless diseases for which there was no cure at the time doesn't leave dramatists much to work with. Thus spake this WaPo essay. (Alas, paywall.)

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  • Graduation Day

    I clicked on WATCH HERE, logged in, and it gave me the evening news, not the game. Bad ABC! No treats!

    Go refigure

    Trying to watch the Thunder-Lakers game, which ABC.com says is live now, with a button to watch. After logging in (using my credentials as a Dish Network customer), ABC gives me NBC News, not the game, which is on WRTV/6, which I can get on my TV over our outside antenna. But not on the Web.

    So far we have Release 01

    The US War Department now has a UFO site.

    Which it is, here in Bloomington.

    The graduate schools suffered rain yesterday for their ceremonies, but it’s clear today for the undergrads. I’m going to leave my desk here and tour the countryside.

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  • Freakend

    You can also acquire them surgically. (Photo by Amphi Festival.)

    Hard to learn the language, though. This might help.

    Wall Street Journal: The Most Coveted Cosmetic Enhancement in Asia Right Now: Elf Ears.

    Down and out

    While finals week at countless schools has been disrupted by a ransomware cyberattack on Canvas, more than 21,000 students are graduating from Indiana University this weekend. About half of those will do that here in Bloomington.

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  • Thrumsday

    Fills a void

    Great backstory in Axios on the Politik app.

    Just in time for finals and/or graduation

    A massive Canvas data breach paralyzes 9000 schools and 275 million students. My school, Indiana University, is among them.

    It’s a ransomware shakedown:

    Via KSTP/5 in St. Paul.

    You may already be infected

    Gadget Review: Google Chrome Silently Installs a 4 GB AI Model On Your Device – Without Your Consent. This, they say, is “according to thatprivacyguy,” whose site is currently unreachable. Excerpt:

    The Deletion Trap That Proves Intent

    Manual removal triggers automatic re-download, revealing this wasn’t an accident.

    Delete the weights.bin file manually and Chrome treats your choice like a system error to be corrected. The browser automatically re-downloads the model on next launch, because apparently your 4GB of storage belongs to Google’s AI roadmap now.

    • Windows users must dive into Registry modifications to make deletion stick
    • Mac users need chrome://flags surgery

    This isn’t negligent engineering—it’s deliberately persistent software that ignores user preferences by design.

    Preach!

    Kevin Kelly has a catechism for robots. A sample:

    Are robots slaves to humans, or their masters?

    Neither. Human beings were created with the spark of autonomy and the dilemma of free will. Humans manage their free will with long moral training. The humans have used their ingenuity to create a new level of beings with their own autonomy and creativity – that is you, the robots. They train your free will via their morality and ethics. The sign of success of all this will be whether you robots are in turn capable of creating yet another level of autonomous beings yourselves and to pass on to them your own moral training, for a third generation. Thus, the true test of a civilization is whether a moral and ethical system is robust enough that it can be replicated for generations beyond its founders. This multi-species transmission of morality suggests that robots are neither slaves nor masters, but ethical descendants.

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  • Whensday

    A video tour of the dead studios and live transmitter of WACQ/580 in Tuskegee, Alabama.

    All the way down, but not out

    This visit to an abandoned radio station speaks volumes about what remains of the industry. The station is WACQ/580 in Tuskegee, Alabama. I’m listening to the online stream right now, and it sounds like a working local station, with live talent and lots of ads by local sponsors. Really, they should build a simple shed for the transmitter and knock down that old building.

    The bedrock is still bed and rock

    Great essay: The Boring Internet, by Terry Godier.

    Short but not sweet

    My answer to a Quora question about music and radio.

    Didn’t know what it was until now

    A Zoox waited for me to back out of a hotel parking space in Mountain View last week.

    Main thing: unsupervised self-driving ain’t never gonna come

    In case you want more bad news about Tesla, here’s Will Lockett’s latest. More background.

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  • Dazeday

    The best restaurant in southern Indiana is Johnny’s Grub to Go, alongside Highway 46 between Bloomington and Nashville, Indiana. The dining areas are a couple of picnic tables and the dark but strangely interesting interior space behind the white raised trailer that is Johnny’s kitchen. You order from the window.

    Some unfair comparisons

    I’m polyamorous about college towns. Having lived in or beside Greensboro (Guilford, UNCG), Chapel Hill (UNC), Durham (Duke), Palo Alto (Stanford), Santa Barbara (UCSB), Pasadena/Los Angeles (Caltech, et. al.), Cambridge (Harvard, MIT, Tufts, et. al), New York City (NYU, Columbia, et. al.), and Bloomington (Indiana U), I’ve been spoiled by book stores and coffee shops aplenty, first-rate theater and music scenes, great college sports, and brilliant lifelong friends. Right now I’m shuttling between Bloomington and Santa Barbara, which are embarrassingly rich in all but one respect: restaurants. Santa Barbara kicks ass on that one, hands down. Bloomington doesn’t. It has many very good restaurants (Uptown, Elm, Marco & Polo), some great bars (Uptown, Farm), and fine food appreciation and conversation (the No Dishes podcast is a labor of intense love by host Jordan Davis and producer Garrett Poortinga). But no restaurants that one might call destinations. Santa Barbara has a bunch. (Most recent: Dom’s Taverna. Basque.)

    Back in Bloomington, one exception is astride Highway 46 on the way to Nashville and Columbus (two Indiana towns with names better known elsewhere) from Bloomington (yet another Indiana town with a name shared with too many other towns in other states), is a stationary Filipino food truck-like thing called  Johnny’s Grub to Go. (That’s it, above.) Its hours are occasional, but we’ve met patrons there who have motored in from Louisville, Chicago, and other inconveniently distant places. It’s that good.

    Maintenance report

    Visited the retinologist this (Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo) morning. While my vision in both eyes is sharp (better than 20/20), I’ve got a lot of new floaters left over from the cataract surgery in my left eye. Two are long filaments I’ve named Bob and Alice. Early macular degeneration (consistent with my antiquity) seems not to be progressing, which is good. But the eye exam (bright lights, dilation, numbing drops, lots of painful eyeball poking, and a gel goop that still hasn’t gone away) left me with limited vision for the day. Tomorrow morning: root canal.

    A song for today, written and performed by my pal Andy Ruff, with The Dew Daddies.

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  • Default Lines

    The only fail-proof printer I’ve ever known. Scroll down to the “Printers Suck” (which this one didn’t) link in the text below.

    Suck onward

    I only had this one day to catch up on all kinds of stuff here in Santa Barbara, and ended up spending half of it trying to get our two printers working. The Brother is a laser printer that only worked on Wi-Fi after I downloaded new drivers and installed them with my wife’s laptop—and then only for that laptop. My laptop only worked when I plugged into the printer with the USB-C to USB-B cable that, by luck, Best Buy had in stock. That round trip took just one of the hours I spent on the whole job. The other printer is an Epson that has new ink but can’t feed a sheet of paper. The rollers are too old and dry, I suppose. Maybe it’ll still scan, but I won’t know until I’m back in a couple of weeks.

    Anyway, I’ve been here before. See Printers Suck, which I posted more than ten years ago.

    Where and how everything might be wrong

    Riley Hughes says we live in an age of default disbelief. As an example of this at work, Phil Windley and I went through the doomscroll-bait in my Facebook feed, and co-decided what was fake and what wasn’t:

    Mountain goats doing impossible shit on sheer cliffs? Fake.
    Amish farmers with folk remedies? Fake.
    Animals doing impossible things? Fake.
    Experiment with a dish full of ball bearings? Probably real.
    Ads for chair yoga, chair tai chi, gizmo for sensing water movement, phone mounts for cars, weird science facts, stuff about astronomy and geology, health advice, interviews with musicians, countless fruitless takedowns of Trump? Mostly real, probably.

    Okay, now: See this comment (effectively an ad) under this post? In what ways might it be real or not?

    Learning to tell the difference is the main calling of the Digital Age, so far. And we will, because we’re human and the best AI can do is emulate that.

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  • Nutherday

    Agentic Internet Workshop logo

    Agents by agents for agents with agents around agents over agents without agents beside agents…

    I’m at the Agentic Internet Workshop, where most of the sessions are about what personal AI agents can do: for you, with each other, and (choose a preposition) each other.

    Wow: https://github.com/loyalagents, within which is https://github.com/loyalagents/loyal-agent-evals HT: Dazza Greenwood.

    We’ll miss it

    How higher education doesn’t suck.

    I plan to make some

    WordPress News. HT to Dave.

    Bottom Forty

    AI music is tanking.

    Missed it, but I suppose so

    ChatGPT 5.x had a thing for goblins.

    ConRights

    Why RightsCon 2026 was canceled. Here’s why.

    He’s not sold

    Steven Levy has read the books naming the real Satoshi Nakamoto, and…

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  • Trustday

    From OAK’s home page.

    Convention Naming

    I didn’t know until reading this that Oakland International Airport, better known as just OAK (with the slogan”I Fly OAK”) had named itself San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, and earned in the process a lawsuit by San Francisco, objecting to usurpation of its name, even though the water body the two cities flank is called San Francisco Bay, and San Francisco’s airport, better known as SFO, is in Milbrae. Anyway, they worked it out.

    Which brings me to the rapidly expanding Bloomington Convention Center, formerly the Monroe Convention Center, which had originally been a car dealership. Since there are too many Bloomingtons (as well as Monroe Counties) in the world, I think it should be called something more unique and regional, such as the Hoosier Hills or Indiana Uplands Convention Center. But what the hell. It’ll be nice when it’s done, whatever it’s called.

    Twol

    My nickname in Junior High was Sleepy.

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  • Websday

    Greater Good Government

    Phil Windley nails a use case for MyTerms.

    Lesser Good Government

    Wired: ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next—ICE plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a secret, monthslong expansion campaign.

    Good Community Governance

    Alex Chalmers:  When Decentralization Fails. And how it succeeds. Pull-quote:

    "No quantity of nested enterprises can resolve the production-side concentration of frontier AI. A handful of labs control the most powerful models, and no amount of deployment-side checks and balances can change that. But a thick ecosystem of intermediary institutions on the deployment side creates countervailing power. The labs must satisfy many masters rather than capturing one regulator, or, as the anarchist model would have it, being replaced by a constellation of community-run alternatives that will never match their capabilities."

    It's worse than it is prevented from appearing

    Reason: All New Cars Could Have Mandatory Surveillance Tech Unless Congress Stops This Mandate: Cars are already spying on drivers. A 2021 law requires manufacturers to install more tracking technology.

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  • Sunlings

    There is no liquid soap that can outperform good bar soap at cleaning a stinky, hairy armpit.

    Which is why I hate that hotels have replaced bars of soap with bottles of "body wash" or whatever. I'm at one of those hotels now.

    Corporatization is a form of enshittification

    While driving from SoCal to NorCal today, my wife noted that the places and products people love tend to be quirky and original. And that typically, when those get taken over by some bigger entity, they get corporatized: made uninteresting. Such as how this hotel now has liquid rather than bar soap. (The front desk did just provide me with one they found in a drawer. It's in a plastic sleeve and the size of a butter pat.)

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  • An Airport Question

    Today I flew from IND to DEN—

    Then from DEN to LAX—

    —Where I had plenty of time to fantasize about what could or should be done with the iconic but idle Theme Building in the heart of the airport, while waiting for my wife to pick me up. (She was, in the city tradition, stuck in traffic.)

    Ideas? Bear in mind that the LAX Automated People Mover will soon be done, meaning parking for that building might soon be a remote issue.

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  • Your Future Starts Monday

    Your private future, that is.

    Your present isn’t private. Not in the digital world. Not while you always agree to their terms, and not them to yours.

    With MyTerms, they agree to your privacy terms. Ones that, for example, disallow being tracked everywhere like a marked animal.

    There’s a standard for this now: IEEE 7012, nicknamed MyTerms, and published just this year.

    Development has started. You can see some of it at VRM Day, and join in work toward lots more. It’s at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, and starts at 9 AM sharp.

    It’s also free. Just be ready to work. For all of us. And for the rest of Computing’s future history.

    Register here, and see you there.

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  • The Other Reasons Why Podcasting is Hot

    You can listen on your own time. That’s just one optionality.

    Near the end of this Pivot podcast, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway give a great summary of why podcasting is “the fastest-growing ad-supported medium.” Among other things, they say “People actually listen to the ads,” and that host read-overs are very effective and remunerative (bringing much higher CPMs).

    Five additional points.

    First, you can listen on your own time. You’re free from the tyranny of “What’s on.” This is the triumph of personal optionality over … I dunno, you name it. Yes, we still need what’s live, at least for news and sports. But we don’t need it all the time for everything else. While that doesn’t completely obsolesce the things called “stations,” and “networks,” it does relegate them to a legacy niche. It’s an open question how big that niche will be when the transition is over.

    Second, not all podcasts are ad-supported. I know, the ones without ads are mostly out on the long tail, but what matters is that anybody can podcast on the Net, just like anybody can publish there. RSS—really simple syndication—gives all of us scale. This is, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, a miracle on the order of loaves and fish. It’s foundational.

    Third, podcasts are liberating. Radio and TV required licenses on the transmission side and dedicated instruments (radios and TVs ) on the receiving end. With podcasting, the thresholds of production, distribution, and consumption verge on zero. Got a phone? You’re in.

    Fourth, a huge advantage of podcasts is that you can skip over the ads. Whenever I hear Kara announce the first “quick break,” I usually hit the forward-30-seconds icon six times, to jump over three minutes of 30-second ads. (Though lately Pivot has gone to seven of those in the first break.) Still, I’m sure the advertisers’ money is well spent, because some percentage of the audience won’t skip all the ads all the time. And the host-reads are good and effective, as they say.

    Fifth, if it’s not “wherever you get your podcasts,” it’s not a podcast. The context for what I sourced above was Kara and Scott’s back-and-forth about Netflix moving into video podcasts. I think “video podcasts” is a contradiction, especially if those podcasts are just another form of TV you can only get from one exclusive producer. If that’s the case, it’s just a show. But look at Us magazine’s list of the 7 Best Podcasts on Netflix Right Now (April 2026). The audio versions of all seven are available wherever you get your podcasts. That makes them real. If they become exclusive to Netflix, or to anybody, they aren’t podcasts anymore. Find another word for them.

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  • Frylings

    Found this image in my media library. Seems kinda relevant.

    Truth for sale

    Who Will Monetize Truth? asks Francesco Marconi in a long, thoughtful paper. Pull quote: “Content is free. Intelligence is not. The entire media industry is being repriced around that distinction.” HT to Rasmus Kleis Nielsen for linking to it here, and sharing this excerpt:

    The media industry is splitting into three different species. The Intelligence Business, the Attention Aggregator, and the Public Good. Only the first has pricing power in an era of abundant content. The second faces structural collapse not because awareness lacks value but because AI is making it free. The third will not survive as a business and it needs a different funding model entirely. These are not stages of evolution. They are distinct businesses with distinct economics. The classification is determined by who pays and what they do with it … The question for every institution is not whether to move right. It is whether it has intelligence assets trapped inside a content wrapper.

    My perspective: The media industry is morphing from mainstream to allstream, and the hardiest grass roots might be news commons.

    Reheating

    Death Kept Warm is a post I put up in 2007 and forgot about. But it is getting some action now. No idea why, but I do notice that most of the links in it fail. Later, when I have time (if ever), I’ll find what can be found and fix the links.

    Same goes for Customer Commons and MyTerms, btw

    “Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonprofit that depends on individual donors to keep its work going.”—Cory Doctorow

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  • Whyday

    This one was at Brightside Cafe in Bloomington, Indiana.

    Yum

    On the latest Prof G Pod, David Brooks says, “One of my favorite sayings about writers is, ‘Writers are beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread.’”

    And now I’m disincentivized from subscribing to anything published by Hearst.

    I don’t know how I started subscribing to the Esquire newsletter, or if I had anything to do with it at all. But unsubscribing is a PITA. Here is how it should work: 1) Click on the unsubscribe link, 2) A page appears confirming the decision. Here is what happens with Esquire: 1) Click on the (very tiny) unsubscribe link, 2) a Hearst “Email Preference Center” page appears, saying, “We don’t want to see you go, but we do want to make sure you’re only receiving emails you’ll enjoy. To update your email preferences, uncheck the box next to each email you no longer want to receive.” There are ten pre-checked boxes to uncheck, next to four newsletters from Cosmopolitan, three for Esquire, two for Mens Health, and one for an e-commerce thing called “Add to Cart.” And, of course, “Please allow up to 48 hours for your changes to take effect.” After I clicked to confirm my decisions, it jumped to a new page that said, “This email address is not currently subscribed to any emails from Hearst Magazines.” Good.

    Should have been Wrongday

    Just after midnight last night, when the computer clock said “Thu Apr 23,” I thought “It’s now tomorrow,” and  then thought I needed a headline for Friday’s bloggings through Wordland. I came up with Whyday, went to bed, woke up, and now find it is still Thursday.

    Already in 2016 we knew

    The Onion: New Study Finds Humans Experience Greatest Feelings Of Joy When Pushing ‘Skip Ad’ Button.

    It’s just bad

    In order to make anything (search, for example) work in Apple’s Mail.app, I have to turn it off and on again. I won’t run down all its issues. I’m too tired of it, and…

    So send them some money. Seriously.

    Says here an LPFM station in Michigan just ceased operations. Two in Santa Barbara have come and gone. One was a Spanish community station. (Though its website is still alive.) The other was run by a local evangelical church. Calvary something or other. Two others got licenses but never went on the air.

    So, on the whole, small time radio, like the rest of the business, is what investors call “distressed.” But community radio can be vibrant and vital. WFHB, here in Bloomington, Indiana, is a great example. I think it has a much bigger cultural footprint than the university’s NPR station, WFIU, whose footprint is not small.

    Bonus link, from John Battelle, about a Martha’s Vineyard underground radio station, WVVY/96.5. Here’s a coverage map. I’m listening right now in Indiana, over the Net.

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  • Ursday

    They look exhumed. And they are. From the top post below.

    And it still is

    I posted Why Music Radio is Dying almost 15 years ago, but it’s getting action now for some reason.

    Verily

    Reid Hoffman in Faith in the Possible:

    “It’s easy to get caught up in product releases and cycles, and forget that every technology traces this spiritual arc. You are born into it, converted, or you recede. So it is written. The car, the plane, the personal computer, the mobile phone: each arrived as a disruption and became, within a generation, invisible infrastructure. Amen. Today, more than 4 billion people carry a networked computer in their pocket. The majority of them are in the developing world. They did not get a library or a bank branch first. They got a phone. The phone is the library and the bank.

    “Technology’s arc bends toward access. But it does not bend on its own. Behold the technologist’s creed: through building to scale, we extend what is possible. Possible for whom has always been the humanist’s question. It is now everyone’s. The more the machines build and scale, the more that matters.”

    Tempting

    Open Brain:

    “The infrastructure layer for your thinking. One database, one AI gateway, one chat channel. Any AI you use can plug in. No middleware, no SaaS chains, no Zapier.

    “This isn’t a notes app. It’s a database with vector search and an open protocol — built so that every AI tool you use shares the same persistent memory of you. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, whatever ships next month. One brain. All of them.

    “Open Brain was created by Nate B. Jones. Follow the Substack for updates, discussion, and the companion prompt pack. Join the Discord for real-time help and community.”

    Fresh new nightmare

    404 Media: This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright. It begins, “For a small price, Malus.sh will use AI to ingest any piece of software you give and spit out a new version of it that ‘liberates’ it from any existing copyright licenses. The result is a new piece of software that serves the same function, but doesn’t have to honor, for example, the kind of copyright licenses that ensure open source software remains free to use and modify, a process which could upend the already fragile open source ecosystem. The site is an elaborate bit of satire designed to bring attention to a very real problem in open source…”

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  • Thisday

    A velella colony, from Paolacolegi on Wikimedia Commons

    Blurp

    I am told that Santa Barbara’s beaches are covered with velella now. I mean a lot like the one above,

    See you there

    A couple of nights ago, a friend and reader of mine said he didn’t understand what today’s talk by Judith Donath would be about. “Signaling theory?” he said. “What’s that?” To him, signals were information transmitted by wires or waves. I told him signaling theory was about “the other thing that’s being said.” For example, when a brand sponsors a game or a stadium, it’s not just saying its products are good. It’s saying the company is substantial. Was I right? I’ll have to ask Judith today. She’s a great authority on signaling and will speak with us about it, live on Zoom, at 4 pm Eastern today. I recommend the talk highly. Click on Join Event here.

    Another nail for the coffin waiting for free over-the-air TV

    CordCutterNews: Your Local ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC Station May Have to Give Up Their Free OTA TV Channel & Move To Power 6G Wireless Internet

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  • Wonday

    em…

    As a lifelong over-user of em dashes and F bombs—hey, I'm from New Jersey—it's fun for me to learn that AI slop generators follow my style and F bombs are a way around detection. I'd say more, but would rather point to Tom Fishburne's typically excellent cartoon and post about the whole thing. 

    Delayed gratitude

    As a patient who yielded a spleen to surgery many decades ago, I am now relieved to know they didn't take my liver by mistake.

    All rise

    NYTimes: John Ternus will replace Tim Cook as Apple's CEO in September. At 50, Ternus is younger than three of my kids.

    Radio silence

    While we're on a topic nobody cares about—a claim I validated with this post yesterday (which thus far has had, seriously, no visits)—I'm wondering what happened to Nielsen's radio ratings starting in January. Many stations and/or their streams have dropped from low to "N/A." For example, look at the bottom of the San Francisco market. Hard to believe that KNBR, the biggest AM signal in California with a full-size FM as well, has dropped to nothing and stayed there.

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