Adrian Gropper in the AI corner of the New England Journal of Medicine:The Medical AI Assistant as Publication, Not Device — Why Peer-Reviewed, Open-Source AI Belongs in the Standard of Care. From the abstract: "I argue that when a physician publishes a MAIA’s architecture, retrieval methodology, and validation results in a peer-reviewed journal, the published MAIA enters the medical literature as any other clinical methodology would. Physicians who subsequently adopt this methodology are not operating a medical device — they are practicing medicine informed by the published literature."
This Knicks NBA championship run is the greatest of all time. Reasons:
They won sixteen of nineteen games through the playoffs, including two sweeps. They only lost the first two games in the first round, each by one point, and then one game in the Finals by not much, and their city blames Trump for jinxing them for that last loss—one where his presence was hugely inconvenient and distracting, for which he was clearly not interested (except in self-aggrandizement), and during which he fell asleep.
They are The Formerlies. Except for Mitchell Robinson and some benchwarmers, they were all acquired off the Used Player market.
They played in the East, considered the weaker conference, and won only 53 games in the regular season. Detroit, Boston, and Cleveland all won more. But the playoffs are clutch time, and nobody has ever been more clutch when it mattered most than these Knicks.
They have no top-tier stars. Only Jalen Brunson is all-NBA, and he’s on the second team. They also have no “big two,” or “big three.” They have a big ten: Jalen Brunson, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges. Karl-Anthony Towns, Miles McBride, Landry Shamet, Mitchell Robinson. Jordan Clarkson, and Jose Alvarado (in declining order of minutes played in the playoffs).
They are best team of the modern era, exemplifying what Bill Simmons calls “the secret.” Specifically, “The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball.” It’s about players caring more for each other, and for the team, than for themselves. It helps that three players (Brunson, Hart, Bridges) won championships (plural!) at Villanova, and call each other “Brothers for life.” Watch them for a while, and it becomes clear that the team is like a family. It also helps that Rick Brunson, Jalen’s dad, is an assistant coach with the team, and that the coach, Mike Brown (another Formerly) seems more like an uncle.
In the playoffs, they became all but unbeatable. Losing is out of character for them. They could fall behind by any number of points, and their eventual victory still seemed inevitable. In the final game, when the Knicks were within seven points, it looked to me like the game was over already: the Knicks would close the gap, take the lead, and win. They know how to do that, over and over. They are glued, experienced, determined, and locked in. You can see the other team start to melt.
Jalen Brunson, Captain Clutch, proved he was the real league MVP. By miles. None of his moves look especially slick or athletic, but he is so good at getting open, slipping past defenders, shooting fallbacks, and getting layups no matter what, that it’s crazy to think the guy is just 6’1″ (okay, with a 6’4″ wingspan) with no shoes on. He is a great leader, an unselfish teammate, and very dependable in the clutch. OMG, and tough. I just heard Bill Simmons call Brunson the toughest guy in the league. Who’s tougher?
In the Finals, they beat the best collection of players in the league, starting with Victor Wembanyama, who will likely go down as the greatest player of all time if he stays healthy, learns from his failings, and wins a bunch of rings.
New York showed it’s the Greatest City in the World. You could feel the love the team and the city have for each other. I grew up a Knicks fan in New Jersey, across the river from New York. Used to go to Knicks games for $5 a ticket, many decades ago. But I’ve also spent a lot of time in Boston, San Francisco (where I had season tickets to the Warriors), and Los Angeles. Among major cities, only Boston compares to New York for the level of civic devotion to the team. Both also share a subway culture, which heats up fandom, heart-to-heart, despite all other differences. But New York is a lot bigger. (And yes, San Antonio is a great basketball town too. But it’s a town. A great town. But not New Yawk.)
The Knicks victory was great for basketball. This year’s Finals was hugely popular. Ratings across the four-game series averaged 19.6 million viewers, +116% over 9.1 million for last year’s Thunder-Pacers series. This was the most-watched Finals in the current millennium. There was also a spike in younger demographics. Viewing among teens (12-17) jumped by 138%, and young adults (18-24) spiked with 147% compared to last year.
All this is debatable, of course. Just not right now.
I started to write something here, but turned it in to a whole post on its own: Customer Service Sample of One. In response to that, Don Marti pointed to Skylabs Audio and its YouTube channel. As it happens I was an audiophile many decades ago. Worked weekends at an audio salon in Chapel Hill. Had some good gear, all bought cheap or built from a kit. Anyway, I got over all that stuff long ago, but I still care a little.
But mainly I live in the now, when things are a lot more complicated, and customer service is kind of a ballet in which both customers and companies dance with a character named Murphy.
Edit
I moved my Knicks post to its own page, titled The Formerlies.
Our Samsung TV* and our Samsung soundbar/woofer no longer connect over bluetooth. Well, they do connect—both displays say they are connected—but the TV only plays through its own speakers. I called Samsung for help with this, but the phone maze robot said only texts would work at that time. Here’s the text monologue from Samsung:
We will get you to the next agent as soon as possible. Your wait time is 27 Minutes and there are 90 customers ahead of you.
Apologies, due to abnormally high volumes, it is taking longer than expected to connect you to an agent. As soon as someone is available, we will connect you.
Thank you. You are connected with Theo James S from Samsung Care
Hello! Welcome to Samsung Technical support, This is Theo and I’m here to assist you. What can I do for you today?
It looks like you may be away. If you’d like to continue, simply send me a message, and I’ll be here to help.
Hello! Your support case is scheduled to close soon. If we have not resolved your issue yet, please respond to this message. Our Samsung Care Pros are available 24/7!
Survey has expired – Thank you for your feedback. Any time you need assistance, simply respond to this message. We’re here to support you, 24/7!
I gave up in the middle of that by getting help from ChatGPT that isolated the problem: The Bluetooth radios have successfully negotiated identity and relationship but failed to agree on purpose. In other words, they’re married but not speaking.
It suggested that I make an optical connection and give up on Bluetooth. Specifically, If optical works, I’d call the matter settled. If it doesn’t, then I would start suspecting the soundbar itself rather than the TV, because you’ve already done more systematic debugging than most first-line Samsung support agents would attempt.
*This is the only link online to the TV we have. We bought it from Amazon about a year ago, for less than the $849 Walmart is asking at that link. We got is slightly old (2024) model because for the space where we wanted it, 43″ was the right size, and for picture quality we wanted 4K OLED. Samsung no longer offered 4K OLEDs in sizes under 55 inches. (Here’s their current product spread.) Nor does anybody, I think. Wall-sized TVs are now The Thing.
†It doesn’t. The $6.29 optical cable bypasses the Bluetooth problem. The soundbar and the subwoofer both sound good, so that problem is solved. Display is a minor issue. Where the numerical volume level used to appear on the TV screen when you pushed the control up and down, it now appears only in small print behind the soundbar grille, where it can’t be read from more than two feet away. We can live with that.
Unless I write something new and provocative enough to generate fresh traffic, most visits to this blog come from searches on topics for which Google believes something I've written is relevant. Such is the case with a 2015 post called What are the balls on Prague’s spires called? I have a better answer now than my readers and I did then, and in the years since, mostly from Towers with Golden Orbs. Motif of CupolaedSpires with Spherical Supports, by Zygmunt Łuniewicz, of the Faculty of Architecture at Wrocław University of Science and Technology in Poland. I have not yet found evidence that any of the balls in question contain mercury, but I have found plenty of mercury glass finials (which contain no mercury) that resemble those on the spires of Baroque buildings in central and northern Europe. So I suspect that this may be where the claim that the architectural balls contain mercury may have originated. But I'm open to whatever.
Worth early rising
This Washington Post story lays out exactly why, in summertime, and year-round in tropical settings, it is best to fly in the morning. The simple reason is that thunderstorms are the enemy of commercial travel, and they typically build up during the day. By late afternoon and evening, flying becomes bumpy, delayed, and otherwise difficult. I call early morning flights "clear-eye," because that's when skies are clearest.
The Chicago skyline, shot through haze on approach to O’Hare, a couple of hours after I wrote the first item below.
Sigh high
Nearing the end of my current travels. Sitting at Logan, about to board for O’Hare, and then the hour flight to Indianapolis, during which we will be in the air for nineteen minutes. Looking out the windows at planes taxiing, landing, and taking off, while container ships slide in and out of the Bay: the many-hearted drummings of commerce and transport. Civilization’s thrum and hum. I love it. And it will be good to get home.
Thanks to her wise, literate, grounded, and funny videos (plus her music and much else), I have fallen in like with Elle Cordova. She's brilliant. Casually so, which makes her even more brilliant.
In The World has Moved On, Cory Doctorow offers a vigorous and well-sourced take-down of conservatives. I still prefer George Lakoff's take in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't. It's not a stretch to say that George got Obama elected. I have many more thoughts about all this, but I won't go there, because algorithms.
Another pull quote: "The biggest risk of all is only talking about the risk."
In her lunch interview at ODR2026, Beth Noveck just used the term "expertocratic" to label the way culture elevates academics (such as the many who are gathered here in a nice new building at Harvard). She also reminds us that "democratize" refers less to the democratic electoral process than to empowering individuals. She also just quoted somebody calling social media "democracy's dumpster fire." Dunno what of this I might bring up when I talk later, but I don't want to forget them.
Beamforming, as introduced in WiFi 5, requires clients to broadcast observations of their channel characteristics. This introduces a new information source for WiFi sensing with privacy threats that have not been explored, so far. With WiFi networks being ubiquitous in our everyday lives, the impact of unknown privacy threats is likely severe. To investigate this concern, we introduce BFId, the first identity inference attack using BFI-based sensing and evaluate its efficacy on a novel dataset containing WiFi recordings of 197 individuals. We show that we can infer the identity of individuals with very high accuracy, across different walking styles and perspectives, even with large sample sizes.
This isn’t a fen, but it is an antenna growing in the wild.
Digressing we shall go
I find myself in Boston, home of Fenway Park, in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, half-named after The Fenway, now a parkway that runs along the Back Bay Fens, which is a jewel in the Emerald Necklace of Boston parks. I arrived at this digression while thinking of a title for today’s bloglings while housed for the moment in a subterranean studio apartment in Boston’s North End. I can’t yet find a direct connection in all these writings, but I presume the Fens of Boston were somehow given that label by a person recalling the fens of England, which are a form of “transitional” wetland. (They transist into peat bogs, agricultural land, landfills, suburbs, or shopping centers.) Anyway, this all has me reading interesting shit rather than working on interesting shit. I shall now transist into working shit.
The Knicks, down 29, came back to win by one: The biggest comeback/choke job in playoff history. What an exciting game. They were getting creamed. Hugely creamed. They were buried, deeply buried, from the end of the first quarter to the start of the fourth. But they cannot be buried. Simple as that. They are all but unkillable. And now they lead the finals 3-1. Was there a hero? Yes: the team. The winning basket was an amazing from-nowhere put-back by OG Anonoby, the third, fourth, or fifth-best player on the team. And that was on a miss by their best player, Jalen Brunson. And the goat on San Antonio was their GOAT-in-the-making: Victor Wembanyama, missing two free throws that would have saved the game. But the unkillable Knicks came back.
The next game is in San Antonio. If the Knicks don’t win there, they will win Game 6 in New York. Count on it.
On the right, Starlink Group 17-43 Falcon 9 Block 5, burning toward space southbound out of Vandenberg SFB. On the left, the Beehive Cluster.
Still a wonder to watch
Just took in this Starlink launch from Vandenberg. Got a lot of pix. These things are common now, but I’m still a big kid, and space stuff excites me. I also seem to be here when launches aren’t happening, so it was great to catch this one. What you see above is the Starlink rocket, with the Beehive Cluster, ~600 light-years away, kinda faint, on the left. It contains over a thousand stars.
For a sense of how much this mattered to my eight-year-old son and me, twenty-one years ago, watch this video.
Also, a CME—a Coronal Mass Ejection—has been burped from the Sun, is headed our way, and is likely to cause auroras. More at SpaceWeather.com.
How a Big AI says, “That’s a good question.”
Actual dialog.
Me:
This thread will be about the Digital Omnibus proposal and 88b within it: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52025PC0837. For now I’ve parked work on my blog post at ProjectVRM, awaiting more input: https://projectvrm.org/2026/06/05/88b/ But that piece does express my thinking at this point in time. What I want now is a better understanding of the state of play with Digital Omnibus and the European Commission, and how we might get through to them how important MyTerms and contract as a lawful basis for processing personal data are to, well, everything. Our group here is also a bit torn about whether or not to blame consent (inferred and extracted) for what Shoshana Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism and I call the surveillance fecosystem. I’m on the side of making it as clear as possible to the EC that consent is the problem, and that trying to obtain personal privacy through improving consent still dismisses natural persons as mere data subjects: pinballs in as many pinball machines as there are companies presuming or extracting consent. So I am looking for guidance on both understanding the 88b situation and making our case.
Big AI Chatbot (which I pay):
• Connection interrupted. Waiting for the complete answer
The bullet (•) is still throbbing. To be fair, I’d throb too.
Later, I gave it another chance, and this time it gave me a good answer.
The odds went from shitty to certain, to toss-up, and then the better team won. Again.
They know it, and they won’t blow it. Knicks in four.
The Knicks take Game 2. In San Antonio. I only had a few very brief feelings of doubt. I was sure they were going to win, even when they fell behind, and even after the Spurs caught up and went ahead. Because the Knicks are more clutch than the Spurs.
A thought. The Spurs should use Kornet and Wemby together. Kornet is a good center, and a great shot-blocker. Wemby is a natural guard-forward who happens to be seven and a half feet tall, with an eight-foot wingspan. He’s got a great handle, can shoot from anywhere, and defends like there’s a tree in front of the basket.
The next two games are in the Garden, which is the best home floor in the world. The Knicks are a machine, and the Spurs are not. If the Knicks sweep, this will be one of the greatest stories in the history of sports, and not just basketball. They’ve won thirteen straight in the playoffs, which are the most difficult and competitive games of the year. They’ve swept the last two series, and are perfectly positioned to sweep this one. At home.
New York will go nuts. Wish I was still there.
Check it out
Watching a presentation by SwissVault right now. Looks cool.
Both the Travel and the Retail sectors face an advanced bot problem, with bad bots making up 41% and 59% of their traffic respectively. In 2024, the travel industry became the most attacked sector, accounting for 27% of all bot attacks, up from 21% in 2023. The most notable shift in 2024 is the decline in advanced bot attacks targeting the travel industry (41%, down from 61% in 2023) and the sharp increase in simple bot attacks (52%, up from 34%)
BBC will be shutting off its Radio 4 service at 198 kHz longwave (LW) on 27 June. Being old in age and fashion, I travel with a radio and have always loved listening on the LW band, especially to hear Radio 4 on 198. (For example, here. In that post, I pointed to a Guardian piece saying the signal would continue until they burned out the last vacuum tube required to produce the signal—a kind no longer made. That was in 2014.)
A gigantic advantage of LW is its extreme range across the ground, day and night. Radio 4 on 198 covers all of the UK, Ireland, and the northwest coast of mainland Europe. I just checked on a bunch of scattered SDRs (software-defined radios). You can too, here. I’m even listening right now to Radio 4 on 198 across the pond in Prince Edward Island.
But the band is being abandoned. So is mediumwave (MW), called AM in North America, though more slowly. I also just learned that Canada’s CHU, the shortwave time signal station to which I set clocks for much of my life, will also shut down. CHU will go away on 26 June, a day before Radio 4 on 198 vanishes forever.
I expected the Knicks to win tonight. I also expect them to win the NBA championship. Two reasons.
One is what I said about the Cavaliers ten years ago: they’re a better story. And something I said about the Warriors in that post applies to the Spurs now: they feel entitled. They just beat the reigning (and favored) champs in the Western Series finals—a series most NBA watchers considered the real finals, because the West is so much better than the East.
The other reason is that the Knicks are a better team. They may be the best basketball team to come along in many years. Their chemistry is epoxy. The cliché they keep repeating is “We play for each other.” This is what Bill Simmons calls The Secret. The Knicks have it. So do the Spurs, but not to the same degree. Three of the Knicks—Brunson, Hart, and Bridges—won college championships together at Villanova and have a real brotherhood: one with a gravity that pulls in the rest of the team.
They also have the real MVP: Jalen Brunson, Captain Clutch, who is historically great under pressure at the ends of games. Karl-Anthony Towns is finally turning into what he promised to be when he went first in the NBA draft, eleven years ago. Once regarded as a weak defender, he all but owned Victor Wembanyama tonight. He’s also a great shooter and passer. Josh Hart couldn’t shoot for shit tonight but had fifteen rebounds.
I could go on about the other players, but that would be beside the point, which is that the Knicks are the best team in the game, and not just a great collection of players.
If Wemby stays healthy for the next decade or more, he will go down as the greatest player of all time. He’s that good—and that tall. He will also come back with a vengeance in the next finals game, and maybe the ones that follow. But that may not be enough. The Knicks are the better team.
As for Knicks fans, what Landry Shamet says above. Also this.
I spent the last 12 hours talking to 10 different law firms, to evaluate who should handle our day-to-day legal work. I walked away with a strange realization ➙ Legal AI may be one of the most overfunded and underfelt categories in tech right now.
Read the whole thing.
Now, a word from the blogosphere: Writers, please don’t post your good stuff only on Linkedin. Yes, I know there are good reasons for posting on Linkedin. But if you do, make it a duplicate of what you put on your blog, your Substack (also a blog, really), like Jamie Smith does. Here’s his blog. Here’s the same on Linkedin. I never point to his Linkedin, because the former is his, and he latter isn’t.
While trying to do actual work, I got distracted by an email from a sane friend who is co-trying to understand wtf this is about, guided by this. An excerpt from the latter:
The National Design Studio is not a successor to DOGE. It is DOGE with a better logo and a design philosophy.
Now, back to TrumpRx looking at you.
Every webpage you load is making phone calls. Not to people, but to servers around the internet, dozens per second, all invisible to you. When I opened TrumpRx, I right-clicked the page, opened the browser’s built-in inspector, and started reading the list. Mixed in with the routine traffic was a name I recognized: PostHog. PostHog is a Silicon Valley analytics company whose entire business model is recording what visitors do on a website and reporting it back to whoever owns the site. Mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, keystrokes. I had not typed anything. I had not clicked anything. I had just opened the page, and it was already on the phone with PostHog telling them about me.
The recordings are not anonymized. IP addresses are not stripped. And the way it is configured, the data looks to your browser like it is going back to TrumpRx, but it is actually being forwarded behind the scenes to PostHog. That is a technique used to slip past ad blockers by disguising where the data is really going, and it is not something I expected to find on a federal health website. So I went and looked at the other sites the studio had built. Real Food, the federal food policy site. Trump Accounts, the children’s savings program. The studio’s own homepage, ndstudio.gov. All of them had the same vendor, the same setup, IP addresses not stripped, the same forwarding trick. And on ndstudio.gov alone, running alongside PostHog, was something someone had built entirely by hand. Five hundred and forty lines of custom JavaScript with a name embedded directly in the code: AutoMonitor. What it appears to do is rewire the part of the browser that handles how a page talks to the outside world, so that every conversation the page has with any server gets copied and forwarded to a private backend with no public presence. The studio has the structural ability to keep a copy of every recording as it passes through their infrastructure. I cannot prove they are keeping one. The pipe is built that way on purpose, and that is the part that matters.
When the federal government collects information about citizens, the law requires specific things first. Privacy disclosures. Notices in the Federal Register. Published contracts with outside vendors. I went looking for all of it across twelve National Design Studio programs and found none of it, not a single required document filed across any of the twelve. Every missing document is, by itself, a violation of federal law, and these are the laws Congress wrote after Watergate to make sure the federal government could not run secret surveillance programs on its own citizens. The only document they did publish is a privacy policy on TrumpRx, and it contradicts itself two paragraphs apart. The first paragraph says PostHog records the pages users visit and the medications they view. Two paragraphs later, it says they do not collect health or medical information. A federal health website is lying to the people using it and cannot even keep the lie consistent.
In other words, it’s just like surveillance-based adtech, against which I have been inveighing since the last millennium, through at least 161 posted utterings compiled here. To little effect so far, but I won’t stop.
Wandering about geology
In the vastness of John McPhee‘s writings on geology (within which he is the field’s Shakespeare), he writes (in Annals of the Former World and earlier works),
If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.
Elsewhere, he writes:
“For another example, the last Pleistocene ice sheet loaded two miles of ice onto Scotland, and that dunked Scotland in the mantle. After the ice melted, Scotland came up again, lifting its beaches high into the air. Isostatic adjustment.”
Then,
“Let go a block of wood that you hold underwater and it adjusts itself to the surface isostatically. A frog sits on the wood. It goes down. He vomits. It goes up a little. He jumps. It adjusts.”
Look at how McPhee turns glacial isostatic adjustment into a story simple enough for Sesame Street. Scotland isn’t “depressed by glacial loading”; it is dunked. The crust isn’t warped by viscoelastic compensation; it floats like block of wood with a barfing frog on top. Great stuff.
This whole digression began when I wondered to myself about the exact elevation of Loch Ness above the sea at Inverness. Because that’s how far (or high) the land under the Scottish Highlands has rebounded since the ice melted. While the ice was melting, Loch Ness was a fjord dug by glacial ice scraping out the Great Glen Fault, and at sea level. Or something like that. The Loch Ness Projecthas thoughts about it.
I am not calendar-blind, but I am disabled around dates. I frequently get today’s date wrong, and dates for future stuff tend not to stick in my mind—or I have them wrong. But I am accurate about days of the week. So I know today is Tuesday. I also know Tuesday is Pre-Election (Primary) Day here in California. I just didn’t get that it’s this Tuesday. Today, when I don’t have a car. So I’ll walk a couple of miles to the nearest drop-off. En route, I will pass the slimmed-downfrog shrine. Hence the subhead.
Update: Got a ride, a coffee, and great conversation with Bruce Caron, who read the above and texted me to offer a ride. Blogging works after all!
Mark that word
Human AgenTcy, by Keith Teare. I’ve capitalized the T in the latter so you don’t miss it. I did at first. Easy to do.
Political Appointees Take Control of Grant Awards (§200.205)
Peer Review Is No Longer Binding (§200.205(d)
“Gold Standard Science” as an Undefined Political Test (§200.205)
Active Grants Can Be Terminated at Any Time, for Any Reason (§200.340)
DEI, Gender Research, and Related Topics Banned as Grant Conditions (§200.300)
Broad Prohibition on International Scientific Collaboration (§200.220)
“Domestic-First” Framework for Research Awards (§200.202(e))
Applicants Can Be Denied Based on Organizational “Affiliations” (§200.206)
E-Verify Mandated for All Grant Recipients (§200.303)
OMB Claims Direct Binding Authority Over All Agencies
Conference Attendance Now Requires Express Agency Pre-Approval (§200.432)
Professional Memberships Require Prior Approval and Must Be “Necessary” (§200.454)
Publication Costs and Open Access Fees Presumptively Unallowable (§200.461)
Public Communications and Outreach Severely Restricted (§200.421)
New “Issue Advocacy” Prohibition (§200.450)
Program Goals Must “Align with Administration Policies and Priorities” (§200.202)
Agency Heads Can Exempt Grant Competitions from Public Notice (§200.204)
Agencies Can Restrict Eligibility to Specific Nonprofit Categories (§200.202(d))
OMB Gains Direct Oversight of Which Institutions Receive Grants
She begins her summary,
What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.
2 CFR Part 200, the regulation being rewritten here, is not the science grants regulation. It is the universal legal framework governing every federal grant to every recipient across every agency in the federal government. When OMB rewrites it, they are rewriting the rules for all of it.
According to the Congressional Research Service, in FY2024 the federal government sent $1.1 trillion in grants to state and local governments. That money is what funds: Medicaid — more than $600 billion, with the federal government covering between 50 and 77 cents of every dollar states spend on health care for their most vulnerable residents Transportation — $95 billion for highways, bridges, transit systems, airports, and ports Education — $65 billion for Title I schools, special education, Head Start, and workforce training Food assistance — $51 billion
and much more
Every single one of those programs operates under 2 CFR Part 200. Every one of them is now subject to the same provisions I described last week.
Consider what that means in practice. Political appointees who can override expert judgment and block science grants that don’t advance the President’s priorities would have that same power over transportation awards, and housing funds, not just NIH applications. Any active grant could be canceled mid-project because it no longer serves ‘the national interest.’ A highway already under construction. A tribal health program mid-delivery. A city still rebuilding from a flood. And every new grant program must align with administration priorities before a single application is even solicited. Entire categories of funding can be quietly discontinued without a public announcement or a vote.
She concludes,
**How to write an effective Comment. Make it completely unique! Do not cut and paste.
**1: Say who you are and why you are qualified to comment. You do not need credentials. Being affected is enough, and simply being a concerned citizen is perfectly fine. 2: List the exact provision #s [PICK ONE or TWO FROM LIST ABOVE] that concern you, and explain what they would do. You do not need to quote the rule directly. Just explain what you understand it to mean in plain terms. 3: Explain the concrete harm. What would happen to you, your community, or your state if this provision takes effect? 4: Closing: State clearly what you want OMB to do. This can be as simple as: “I urge OMB to withdraw these specific provisions: §200.340, §200.202, §200.205.” or “I urge OMB not to finalize this rule.” Submit your comment in opposition here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001The deadline is July 13, 2026.
Who wants to own this position while Google moves on from it ?
In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,Al Ries and Jack Trout said, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” So consider what’s happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has always been—a search engine for the Web—when they consider what they’re seeing from Google now, and reading in stories such as these:
By forking itself away from search, Google is also forking over the Web—and creating a giant opening for somebody else to grab the Web Search position.
Who would that be?
Microsoft’s Bing is one candidate, but Bing’s UI is a NASCAR of promotional jive. (See what Steve Jobs says about Microsoft here. Cuts like a scalpel.)
DuckDuckGo is the other. Its position is privacy. That’s good, but Web Search is better now, because the position is available. Google isn’t abandoning search, but now they’d rather be “your helpful assistant” and “personal shopper” than the Web’s “librarian.” (Source: Google Gemini.) To make that shift, Google has compromised Web search, and the Web with it.)
Conveniently, DuckDuckGo already has a search engine for the Web. They can sharpen that position while keeping—or even expanding —their privacy one. And help save the Web in the process.
Best I can find. Vultures on a fence. Works a bit, metaphorically. And it’s not AI art.
A plan to enclose the public Web
The Web is a public commons made of links. There is stuff at those links, almost all of it open to everybody, by design.
The main way we see and use that stuff is with a browser. But what if your browser has AI of its own, and that AI stands between you and what’s at those links? Your Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or DuckDuckGo browser won’t just fetch and display pages. It will interpret, summarize, filter, and answer, using whatever AI its maker chooses to provide. And those AIs, even if they operate locally rather than in distant data centers, still come from silo’d vendors.
Think about what happens when browsers become AI intermediaries rather than ways to access sources directly. Imagine Chrome relying on Gemini, Firefox on Claude, Safari on Apple Intelligence, and DuckDuckGo on ChatGPT.
In that world, your browser becomes an interpreter of the Web rather than a way to navigate it. What was once primarily a world of links increasingly becomes inventory for competing AI systems. The Web remains underneath, but no longer as a place through which you browse and surf from source to source. Instead, it becomes a substrate from which AI systems gather, summarize, and present information.
If that happens, it’s a form of enclosure. The commons will still exist, but access to it will be mediated by private systems operated by a handful of vendors. That’s the danger here.
Being old, I get lots of ads for Chair Tai Chi, Chair Yoga, and other positional challenges toward staying alive, limber, and not much closer to dead than you are without them.
So this one occurred to me yesterday. And, since I can no longer draw (arthritis, talent), I handed illustration over to ChatGPT.
