Now, let's try that with a human body part
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Love
The first thing my wife heard me say was “I’m a Leo, so I don’t believe in astrology.” She’s a Scorpio, and that’s her constellation, above another of my affections, the Walnut Grove tower farm in California’s central valley. Left to right, the towers are 2,049, 2,000, 1,549, 524, and 1,997 feet tall and transmit all of Sacramento’s TV stations. Happy Valentines Life
My favorite line from the musical Les Misérables is “To love another person is to see the face of God.” My wife and I have been living that truth since not long after we met, thirty-six years ago.
Towers
I love to look at them, know what they’re for, and (many decades ago) climb them. Places where I write about towers and post photos of them:
• Trunk Line, my blog about infrastructure
• Nfrastructure, my Flickr collection of infrastructure photos (most of which are about broadcasting and transmitters)
• This subset on my main Flickr collection
• All these (121 of them), posted on this very blogConsider all of them a long love letter to the now-gone golden age of broadcasting. I want future historians and archivists to remember what broadcasting was and how it worked before digital tech absorbed and obsolesced it. Long may it wave.
Stories
I Love Girl, by Simon Rich, in The New Yorker. It’s worth getting a subscription just for that one story.
Boom!
What Happens When You Put AI in the Hands of a 73-Year-Old Grandmother, by Frances Flynn Thorsen, @blogmother on her Substack blog. Hats off to the real estate conversation led by Bill Wendel of RealEstateCafe and happening here.
Turing would dig it
My old friend David Beaver, vastly versed in magic, has a new Substack that riffs off many ways that magic isn’t what you think it is. And yet it has near-infinite promise in the AI age, when falsity on a grand scale passes damn near every variant of the Turing test.
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Eye Day
Cyclops time.
Thirteen years ago, when I was entering my final demographic, I had the cataract in my right eye replaced. It was a quick and easy procedure that left me with 20/10 vision when I walked out the door of the surgery center. It’s still that sharp.
Which is good, because this morning I had the cataract in my left eye replaced, and now I’m blind on that side, at least for now. In retrospect, I should have had both cataracts replaced way back when I had the first one done. I didn’t then because the cataract in my left eye wasn’t bad, and that eye could still focus. (Or, optically speaking, accommodate.) Vision on that side was 20/25, and I could use that eye to read as well, meaning that most of the time I didn’t need glasses.
But, because I waited, the cataract in my left eye gradually turned brunescent, meaning brown. This required an extra $2050 for Femtosecond Laser–Assisted Cataract Surgery (FLACS), which isn’t covered by Medicare.
Anyway, the surgeon had to turn his emulsifying machine up to 9 (normal is 3) to demolish the old brown lens. This, plus the antiquity of my eyeball, caused the cornea to swell and turn gray, so the world to my left eye is now just colors and shapes. If all goes according to plan, this will gradually clear up. Meanwhile, no driving, no lifting heavy things, and hopefully no new regrets.
Advice: If you do have cataracts, don’t wait around. Get them done.
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Because Pricing is Getting Too Personal
Surveillance pricing already has its own page in Wikipedia. It also has its own authority: Abbey Stemler, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics and Weimer Faculty Fellow in Business Law & Ethics at Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. And she’ll be speaking about her work a week from now:
As you see, she’ll be speaking in both the natural and the digital worlds, so you can join us on Zoom if you’re not in the former. You can also register here. Meanwhile, put it in your calendar: February 19, 4 PM Eastern.
Bonus link: Ronan Farrow explains the problem.
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Top images above are by Google Gemini and Adobe Photoshop, with some help by a human.
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Blurs Day
If privacy is your issue, join us there.
MyTerms is the only thing that will get us personal privacy in the digital world (seriously). We'll be working on ways to ubiquitze it at three consecutive events at the end of April:
All at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
Recommendations?
My (guessing) seven-year-old LG 5K Ultrafine 27" display has become flaky. Repair estimates run into many hundreds, so I need a new display. Currently, I'm browsing Apple 5K Studio Displays on eBay. Saves me several hundred dollars from the $1599 Apple Store price.
I don't know why.
Scam phone calls I don't answer make me sneeze.
More feathers.
We've been watching the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on Peacock, which is worth the expense (cheaper than the other streamers) just to not watch ads, and to have a wide selection of events to see. My only bummer is that they didn't use my ice crystal photos like they did for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, when those photos were in every frame of every event.
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Watts Up
An early bird. Shot at my sister’s house in North Carolina in 2016. Book them now
Early bird tickets are on sale for the 42nd IIW, which began on a Gillmor Gang podcast the last day of 2004. In my biased but correct opinion, IIW is the most leveraged tech conference on Earth. This one will happen on April 28th to 30th, Tuesday to Thursday. But for the full experience, block out the whole week, so you can catch VRM Day on Monday the 27th, and the Agentic Internet Workshop on Friday, May 1. All will be at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
MyTerms will be a wide weave (not just one thread) of conversation through all three events, each of which are open space: no keynotes, no panels, no booths. It’s all about breakouts gathered around work and conversation toward outcomes.
Song du jour
Time Loves a Hero, by Little Feat, which is incorrectly still absent from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I may never go there anyway, but Little Feat’s absence is reason enough to avoid the place.
Assholes
Remembering when radio was radio
Nice write-up on one of the greatest radio stations ever: WQDR/94.7 in Raleigh, during its album rock era, which ran from 1971 to 1984, as I recall. My own involvement (as a creative director for the station’s ad agency) ran from ’78 to ’83 or so. (Hard to nail the dates down, because many good friends worked there and we all hung out a lot.
As a side thing, it’s worth noting that the big FM stations in that part of the country have a lot of range. When hung out there, WQDR was 100,000 watts on a 1200 foot tower, wth a signal that stretched from Winston-Salem to Greenville. On a hot summer morning, you could get them from the mountains to the beach. Earlier, when WRAL/101.5 was a thousand feet up the WRAL/5 tower, it was 250,000 watts and bragged about being audible “from Hatteras to Hickory.” Later, it dropped to 100,000 watts at close to 2000 feet, on the new WRAL/5 tower, which was dropped by ice in 1989. Both WRAL and WQDR are close to the top of the replacement tower today, when most of us aren’t listening to radio on radios anymore. We’re getting streams and podcasts on our phones. Only some of that comes from radio stations, and most radio stations lack local talent and programming. Telle est la mort.
Which always creeped me out, but he has a case
Don Marti is a (somewhat provisionally, but still actually) fan of rewarded interest.
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Dues Day
Currently I have three of them.
Do you have a principle? I hadn’t thought about that before reading Justin Mikolay‘s Inventing on Principle: A Distillation of Bret Victor’s Extraordinary Talk About How To Live Your Life. And that’s just one of many things that have been written about Bret Victor, a guy about whom I knew almost nothing before reading what divydovy writes here about intent, citing Victor. Here’s where Victor is at now.
Years ago, one of my sons said something about a “river” that runs through each of us. It’s what we are each about. Might be anger, or love, or vanity, or feeding people, or something less describable. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman writes about one’s inner acorn, or “diamon,” that contains and expresses our true and full selves. Something like that. I think Victor’s principle is similar.
I lost the spreadsheet.
Have you ever totaled up the costs of all the things you subscribe to?
More in the general than the specific senses.
This post from 2009 turned out to be prophetic.
About what’s on.
NiemanLab says public radio is playing an important role in covering shit that’s going down. Note: public radio in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Market has a 15.5 share. That’s very good.
Here’s what I wrote about public radio numbers in 2019. Back then, Santa Barbara kicked ass with a 23.4 overall share. It still does, with a 24.8 share. (Shares are percentages of total listening.)
Just what you’ve never wanted.
Keyords are dead, says Shalom Gonzalez in Search Engine Land. The new thing (with your Google searches, and much else) is “inferred intent.” Not real intent. Not you, expressing your will and your agency. Just Google’s constantly improving guesswork about you, and the auction block where those inferred intentions are sold to advertisers in real time.
Oh, and search is dead too. The Web is no longer something Google indexes, as it would a library. That hat is old and gone.
I can tell with my easter egg: a nonsense word buried in one of my writings that has been sitting in the same place on the Web since 1995. Google used to find it, but no longer does. To Google, the Web is not the library any more, with pages one authors, and posts on sites with locations and domains. No, it’s a vast fuck-all of tokens with commercial implications that can be made into useful information. That it gives us radically useful information (dig any NotebookLM podcast of a book—or of anything) masks Google’s commercial intent: to put your soul on its adtech auction block, where hints toward possible purchases ooze out of your captive pores.
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Weekstart
Hope this makes it clearer. Or both Monday and Tuesday?
If Saturday and Sunday are the weekend, why not call Monday the Weekstart?
Smart? Or just good at whatever this is?
An AI counterargument to the mirror thesis.
And not just because my name gets dropped in it.
This Ezra Klein podcast with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu is required listening.
Because there are more than two sides to this thing, and it’s complicated.
For a better understanding the immigration issue from conservative positions, listen to (and/or read) Why Trump Voters are Torn Over Minneapolis from the NYTimes (transcript) and Trump versus Canada from The Atlantic (hosted by David Frum), which includes the transcript.
Bonus observation: A good thing about listening to both of these podcasts, all the way through, and not reading the transcripts, is that I had to take everything in. Or at least more than I would have taken in had I just read the transcripts. Or, being me, speed-scanned them.
Wicked. Also funny.
The Onion: Biden Grateful He’s Not Alive To See What Trump Doing To Country.
Still plausible.
Fake Meta Customers Driving Demand for Fake Products and Services.
If not, then you are among the too many who also can’t sit through a movie without checking your phone.
Have you read this far?
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Sum Day
Super. Bowls a strike. Against ChatGPT.
Here's a bonus post from the reliably contrary Gary Marcus.
Later… I didn't see this ad during the Super Bowl. But maybe it ran but I got sacked by the Seattle defense, which several times came right through my TV screen and threw me on the couch.
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Endweek
Make America Grate Again
Yesterday's depressing news was Trump's latest attempted slaying of the Hudson Tunnel Project, which may be more expensive to shut own than to complete. But that's just my off-the-wall take. The real story is far more complicated.
Today's depressing news is the end of the CIA World Factbook, one of the most useful publications the world has ever known.
Because that's the way of the tech world
Three hundred journalists were laid off by the Washington Post, while it slowly dies. (Or is being murdered. Take your pick.) In Substack, Miranda Green says, "The alternative is this. Substack." But Substack ought to be called Subsilo. Because that's what it is. Yes, it's a very slick host for blogs (yes, that's what they are), but as a writer on Substack you are at the mercy of the entitiy that owns it, and will certainly enshittify it eventually.
Reduxion
Traffic to this blog went up an order of magnitude when somebody (not sure who, or what), drove traffic to this post, which I put up 10.5 years ago. It was good and right for that time in history, which is much worse now.
Kill the lottery
I have a simple suggestion for getting rid of tanking in pro sports.
Hope he gets the hat tip
Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. Aviation, for example. At any moment a million people across the world are airborne and traveling safely. (Stop now and watch this bit by Louis CK. Yes, I know he's been canceled, but the bit is brilliant.) So yesterday, we flew from North Eleuthera (ELH) to Indianapolis (IND) by way of Atlanta (ATL), all on Delta (though the first flight was on Delta Connection). It all went better than well. The first flight was clear all the way, with excellent views (for me, the devout window-sitter and scene-shooter) of several Bahamian islands, coastal Florida, and Georgia from Savannah to Atlanta. The second flight wasn't the near-midnight one we were scheduled on, but one we noticed, while passing the gate in late afternoon, was boarding for Indianapolis. They gave us the last two seats on that plane, and it got us to Indy in time for dinner at Iozzo's, one of our favorite restaurants. Nice!
Then this morning, I got a survey from Delta. I tend to fill those out if I've had a very good or bad experience. But surveys still suck, because they're not human, meaning not conscious or aware of their existence. They're a pro formality that paints pictures with numbers. But I did want one human rewarded, so I filled it out. The human was Isaac, or something like that, on the second flight, Delta 3120. When the drink cart came by, I asked for a cup of ice. He said they didn't have any, and gave me a bottle of water, which was fine. But later, without being asked, he brought me a cup of ice anyway (presumably from the business class ice bin). That was nice and worth a mention.
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Webnesday
I think the totals are more important than the red-blue components. I also think all those numbers are lower now than they were when the survey was conducted eleven months ago. The Oligarch Giveth, and The Oligarch Taketh Away
This Pew study says 25% of US adults get news regularly from the Washington Post. (Disclosure: I subscribe, and I’m not stopping. Yet.) Ahead of it are:
FOX News: 75%
ABC News: 73%
CBS News: 61%
BBC News: 43%
NY Times: 39%
PBS News: 43%
AP: 42%
MSNow: 44%
NBC News: 71%
NPR: 41%
CNN: 68%The main purpose of that piece is to break out the left/right constituencies of each. (See above.)
Redraw your own conclusions.
That it’s bad
Reason says Trump’s wanting to nationalize elections (while he and the GOP are still in full power) is not only unconstitutional and wrong on other grounds, but similar to something the Democrats wanted to do five years ago. Looks different to me, but I kinda get their point.
One of the unlucky three zillion
I appear once in the Epstein Library, because I am connected (too strong a word) to somebody on Linkedin who accepted an invite to connect with Jeffrey Epstein in 2013.
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Toes Day
On the left, the conch farm below the dock. In the middle, conch fritters (top), grouper fritters (middle), and shrimp fritters (bottom). The latter two were very good. On the right, a conch shell pile on the sand beside the restaurant. Conched Out
Conch is big food here on Harbour Island. Because there are a lot of them, I suppose. Ate some battered and fried conch yesterday at the Queen Conch (also the name of this species, aka Aliger gigas), on a dock above the water. Beside the dock on one side is a fenced conch farm. (I guess that’s what it is.) On the other side, at the edge of the high tide waterline, is a pile of conchless conch shells. There are other mollusks I prefer to eat.
We agree 🙂
Beyond GDPR: Is MyTerms the New Standard for Enforceable Personal Data Agreements? is a terrific new piece on MyTerms by Thomas Wieberneit in CustomerThink. A key paragraph:
“From a CX perspective, there are a number of clear positives for customers. The more than annoying banner/toggle circus that we see these days gets replaced by a cleaner privacy contract handshake, which means less consent fatigue and less friction overall. As terms are to be legible, there is a trust impact. The risk of a mismatch between what customers think they have agreed to and what they actually have agreed to, gets reduced. Lastly, there is accountability, an enforceable contract; it changes the game from blind trust to trust but verify. Talking about trust, this is an important conversion lever for businesses. Not all businesses have understood it yet, but trust is a very valuable currency. As Nitin Bajatia said in a recent CRMKonvo, the free customer is more valuable than the captive one. Yet again, too many businesses have not yet got this memo.”
To answer the question in the headline, MyTerms is not “beyond” the GDPR, because the GDPR says contract is one of the six lawful bases for processing personal data. (See 1.b at that link.) It also lists consent as a lawful basis, but that is clearly a gigantic fail, for reasons Thomas gives here:
“(Unwanted) tracking on the web is still the norm although a ‘consent notice’ regime has been established since the EU GDPR became enforceable on May 25, 2028. MyTerms is a direct response to regime with its associated high operational cost for operators, high cognitive load for users, and weak enforcement of user intent (preference signals can be ignored).
“On top of this, many website operators and service providers still manage to keep their tracking-based advertising business running, by ignoring GDPR, by hiding behind ‘legitimate interests or by simply making it very hard for people to not agree to tracking and sharing personal data.”
And I do like this: “All in all, MyTerms is a great initiative by IEEE that deserves full support.
Sounds right enough
Axios: 1 big thing: 3 historic shifts. It begins,
“You can only fully understand politics, business and your own anxiety in 2026 by reckoning with the three, once-in-a-generation shifts unfolding at once, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column:
- The ideologies, tactics and tone of governance.
- The lightning-fast advancements in AI.
- The overnight transformation of how our realities are shaped.”
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Funday
Pink sands, on the east side of Harbour Island in The Bahamas. I shall not see my shadow
It’s too cold to go out today, so far, here in The Bahamas. So I am staying bundled and warm, getting work done. This was not my vacation plan, but it’s cool.
For maximum freakage and fascination
Moltbook is it. Zvi Mowshowitz runs it down. “Best start believing in science fiction stories. You’re in one,” he says. Bonus link.
Before it’s too late
I finally finished my answers to the latest Pew questionaire. If you’re a future-ish kind of person, you can too.
Good guidance
Nice obituary for Catherine O’Hara (who, at 71, died way too young) in the Guardian. Excerpt: Explaining her initial approach to improv, O’Hara said: “My crutch was … when in doubt, play insane. Because you didn’t have to excuse anything that came out of your mouth. It didn’t have to make sense.”
Of tunnels and lights
I’m a registered and temperamental independent. No politics or party matches my personal positions.
I love business, tech, free markets, and labor unions. I believe all rights are made up, but are necessary for civilization to exist and thrive. Among the most useful and necessary (though not natural) human rights is the one for health, which is why I think we need socialized medicine. I think owning and carrying guns should be a right, but for the fewest and most qualified and responsible people. I think most new laws tend to protect yesterday from last Thursday, and last decades or centuries past their initial relevance—but if we’re lucky will have collateral benefits that are still good in some ways. (Prime example: the US Constitution, with all its amendments.) I’m a pacifist who hates war, and honors selfless military service and bravery. I believe the best writing and thinking about politics and economics come from people who occupy or define the extremes (e.g. Marx, Hayek, Graeber, Buckley, Galbraith, Lowenstein, Friedman). And I love good writers who bring clarifying analogies and metaphors to our causes and arguments. The best today comes from Daniel Barkhuff, former Navy SEAL, front-line physician, and first-rank blogger.
I bring this up because, while I understand why many people I know and love voted for Donald Trump, it should be clear by now to all but the slavishly devoted that the dude is a dictator who is at risk of succeeding to the limits of Caesar-grade vanity, and will finish destroying what’s left of the US’s respect in the eyes of the world, plus most of its own citizens, if he is not stopped.
So, to those engaged in resistance to Trump’s ambitions, I commend Barkhuff’s latest post, in which he analogizes a sport in which I have no other interest: UFC, for Ultimate Fighting Championship:
Trump himself has shown what he fears. He blinks under sustained scrutiny. He recoils when institutions hold. He bristles at collective action he cannot bully or exhaust. The NRA. Epstein. Yes. But most of all, he fears opponents who refuse to be intimidated, who stand their ground, meet his stare, and say: I’m not going anywhere. You’re just as tired as I am. Let’s finish this.
Championship rounds are not about dominance. They are about resolve.
American democracy is bruised, winded, and tested, but it is still standing. The question is not whether the fight has been ugly. It has. The question is whether, in these final rounds, enough people are willing to keep their hands up, keep their feet moving, and stay focused until the bell.
Biology will defeat Trump anyway, as it defeated Biden, and is defeating me (one year Trump’s junior), and us all. But I hope, for the sake of the country and the world, that some of the babies in the MAGA bathwater (reduced influence of elites, smaller and more efficient government, respect for agriculture, manufacture, small business, and the working class) survive Trump’s defeat—and I hope the victors are respectful of those.
Also the first story about it. Hats off.
MyTerms: A New IEEE Standard Enabling Online Privacy and Aiming to Replace Cookies, by Sergio De Simone in InfoQ, does a nice breakdown of last week’s MyTerms launch in London.
Story Bowl
I’m a Patriots fan who was pained for the Seahawks when a bad play call (blame coaches) snatched defeat from the jaws of victory the last time the two teams met in the Super Bowl. So I won’t be too bummed if the Seahawks win this one. The Revenge Bowl will be a good story. So will the Redemption Game story for Sam Darnold. But there are good stories for the Pats as well. The MVP story for Drake Maye. The Huge Turnaround story for Mike Vrabel. The Nobody Believes in Us story for the team. My expectation: Patriots by less than a touchdown.
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Shutter Day
A bedroom gable at the house where we are staying in Harbour Island, Bahamas. Without losing its charm
I am in Harbour Island, where all the old houses have shutters. The house where we’re staying is a small cottage built in 1832. It has survived countless hurricanes.
Remember Her?
Moltbook is a Reddit for AI chatbots. NBC: Humans welcome to observe: This social network is for AI agents only. Wikipedia. Google. Bonus link.
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Now We Begin
Yesterday, Customer Commons and MyData Global launched MyTerms at a London event correctly titled The Only Way to Get Real Privacy Online. (I explain only and real at that link.)
MyTerms is the nickname for 7012-2025 – IEEE Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Links:
- The home page. Note the little unlock symbol on the left, next to the word “free.” That’s because MyTerms is part of—
- The IEEE’s GET Program for AI Ethics and Governance Standards. Below is the 7000 series of standards, of which MyTerms is the latest one. All are free.
- The published standard, finally available to anyone. It’s easy to navigate if you click on the outline symbol in the left panel.
The text of the standard has a lot of prerequisite formal stuff up front. Here are the main parts:
- The Introduction, starting on page 8.
- Sections 4 and 5, starting on page 14.
- The top Annexes, starting on page 21
Note that the Introduction and the Annexes are informative, meaning not part of the standard itself. Between them is the normative, or operative, part of the standard.
The standard itself is simple. Here is a diagram that predates the one in the standard, but says the same thing:
This is how it works:
- The person, acting as the first party, proffers an agreement to an entity (website, service, or organization of any kind), acting as the second party. The agreement is a contract. Note that the person here is neither a “user” nor a “client,” but rather a self-sovereign human being operating at full agency.
- The agreement chosen is one of a short list posted at the website of a neutral nonprofit, such as Customer Commons. This is on the Creative Commons model. MyTerms is to personal privacy agreements what Creative Commons is to personal copyrights.
- On the Creative Commons model, agreements are readable by ordinary folk, by lawyers, and by machines. MyTerms addresses the third of those.
- This ceremony is conducted by agents on both sides. These agents can be as simple as browser and web server plugins, or as fancy as personal and corporate AIs. The standard leaves these choices open.
- Both parties keep identical records of the agreement, for compliance auditing and dispute resolutions, should those needs arise
- The first party can also keep a record of which second parties passively or actively don’t agree.
Obviously, this obsolesces cookie notices, and establishes much more solid grounds for relationships between people and organizations, customers and companies, demand and supply.
If you want to dig wider and deeper, here are three textual sources:
And here is the MyTerms video collection at YouTube. We have two so far:
- Yesterday’s event in London and online
- A five-minute background on MyTerms, explained by yours truly
- While listed elsewhere, The Case for MyTerms is a talk I gave last November at Indiana University as part of our salon series there.
There will be more. I look forward to not being able to keep up with all of it.
If you want to get involved, Customer Commons is forming the MyTerms Alliance. More at that link.
If you want to join the conversation space out of which both Customer Commons and MyTerms were spawned, join the ProjectVRM mailing list, which has been going since I set it up as a new fellow of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard in 2006. The entire archive is here. And we thank the BKC for its extreme patience with what began as a one-year project. 🙂
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Watts Up
Redraw your conclusions
The GDPR Enforcement Tracker "is an overview of fines and penalties which data protection authorities within the EU have imposed under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, DSGVO)." And extremely interesting. Dig around. You'll see fines against dentists, cops, a password management company, finaincial institutions, municipalities, website operators, a coin dealer, a YMCA, TikTok (£14+million), a cabinet office, Mermaids (sic), banks, retailers, universities, government agencies, a hospital, a city council, an insurance company, Amazon Europe Core S.à.r.l. (€746 million, by Luxembourg), and so on. The most common, it looks (at least to me) are government entities of many kinds.
A way to bet
Will Lockett says OpenAI Is Headed For Bankruptcy. His case: "recent investigations have found that less than 5% of ChatGPT users actually pay for the service. That is a dogs**t conversion rate — especially when you consider OpenAI is selling ChatGPT at a staggering loss to try and get more customers through the door. Even their top-tier $200-per-month plan loses them buckets of money. In short, OpenAI’s income is devastatingly underperforming."
He says Atlas and Sora are both duds, and OpenAI's new ad biz will fail too. I don't disagree.
I'll add that I'm in that 5% of ChatGPT customers (not mere freeloading "users"), and lately I've found Gemini to be faster, free, and at least as good. Also, Google is in a far better position to leverage countless other advantages because it's a giant and diversified mf. That doesn't make me love Google, or even like it. In fact, I consider it the top stinker in the adtech fecosystem, and trust it as far as I can throw it.
But, as a successful and generous (not enshittified) business guy told me a few years ago, "We need giants to throw off surpluses. It helps to have some outfits making too much money." He was talking about the real (aka Main Street) economy. Not the financial one. The relevant point here is that Google is investing its real economy surpluses into Gemini, while OpenAI is spending its investors' speculative bubble money into ChatGPT. Google, with deeper pockets, more science, and plenty of data centers, is far more poised to win the long game in Big AI, even if that game is over in two years. Ditto, in a smaller way, for Meta. Same reasons.
You're welcome
NASA: Asteroid 2024 YR4 will certainly miss Earth and has a 96.2% chance of missing the Moon. I share this in faint hope that when one sees BS on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or social media wherever saying the asteroid is going to have a spectacular impact on the Moon, they'll know it's BS.
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Warm Takes
From a Santa Barbara I Madonnari (street art) festival We still await truly personal AI.
Google just launched Personal Intelligence. “Get highly personal help with everything from vacation ideas to project plans, and more. Gemini connects the dots across your Google apps—like Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube—and your chat history preferences to provide suggestions tailored to your world.”
That should be called personalized, because it’s not yours. It’s Google’s.
Oh, and this
Privacy | The dark age of surveillance capitalism, by Prasanto K. Roy in India Today. His point: Besides gathering huge amounts of personal data just by talking to you, Big AI can improve personal data extraction from other ordinary activities online, then interpret and use it to manipulate people, based on what’s known by opaque and unaccountable systems. For example, “Surveillance pricing is a thing once that dividend moves into the normal economy. Ride-hailing apps can charge you more if you use an iPhone, or have very low battery, and desperately need a ride.”
Just what you didn’t ask for
Show of hands: Does anyone here want ads on ChatGPT? (Don’t raise them if you work in the ad biz.)
Did you want them in Amazon searches? How about Google’s before that?
Expect ChatGPT to become just as enshittified.
And now, naturally, we have ICE Explores Big Data, Ad-Tech Tools to Power Investigations. Why? “ICE said it is primarily interested in how technology solutions can help identify individuals, entities, or locations.” Also, “Ad-tech location data is collected from apps, websites, and connected devices. It is then aggregated and sold by data brokers for uses beyond advertising, including analytics and research.”
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Whatknot
National Weather Service Snowfall map. Boston wins
We had some deep snows when I lived in Arlington, Mass (next to Cambridge), but nothing quite like the thick blanket of white that got dumped on the Boston metro two days ago. The screenshot above is part of an NWS snow-depth map that will soon age out. So enjoy it while you can.
Meanwhile, here in Bloomington, Indiana, the 14.5 inches we got from the same storm had me and my car isolated until Joe, the guy who built our house, came by with his front-loader and cleared the whole road in about five minutes.
Here is a FlightAware MiseryMap video of the storm’s path across all the airports it closed:
And I’m glad he did
The Brothers Comatose and Sweet Sally nail Bob Dylan‘s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright. Their performance is so good that I got to thinking about how passive-aggressive the lyrics are. Then my mind wandered to Positively 4th Street and Like a Rolling Stone. I thought, “Man, Bobby sure had a lot of problems with people.”
Saved some time
The problem with online sports gambling is that steady winners get cut off. I was going to say a bunch about this, but just remembered that I did that already.
What is the opposite of criticism?
On a lead from a friend, I followed a thread from this patent to its author, Brian Dear (another friend), then to his about page, his old blog, his BlueSky tweetings, his bandcamp page, his lettrboxd page, then to his criticism of Megan McArdle and the WaPo, and (not finally) to the work of critic A.S. Hamrah, whom Brian likes.
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…
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Numb Day
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.
That is smart
Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for Wisdom, by Joan Westerberg, says “Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.”
Because we need to save the Web from AI overviews
I’ve read The Domain Name’s New Role in the AI Web, by Simone Catania, several times, and know there’s even more for me to get out of it.
So call it a https://www.privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media
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.
Preach!
Because you haven’t yet heard everything about Fernando Mendoza and the Indiana Hoosiers, I give you Mason Whitlock’s take.
Snow ‘nuf
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.
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Flying Fckery
Go now to FlightAware’s MiseryMap. Cick on the blue Play button and watch The Great Storm of January 25-26 move across the land and cause massive delays at airports in its path.
I have a 1.59 GB movie (.mov) of what you just saw. What should I do with it?
Bonus image:
