It's personal. Again.
Esther Dyson's Know your .agent suggests that we need a DNS-like registry of AI agents. This suggests to me that it's 1995 again. That's when I registered searls.com and started collecting other domains.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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…
-
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.
-
Websday
Greater Good Government
Phil Windley nails a use case for MyTerms.
Lesser Good Government
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
-
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.)
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
“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…”
-
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
-
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.
-
For broadcasters, digital tech isn’t a lifesaver. It’s a new land for fish with legs and lungs.
Not that crawling ashore is easy or smooth. Eric Nuzum says public radio isn’t interested in saving itself. He’s actually quoting somebody else, but saying there’s a case. Specifically,
When I hear public media leaders talk about the state of audience, ratings, and legacy platforms, I hear a very strong decline-centered narrative, with one station CEO infamously saying that “radio is dead.” Really?
When you look at audience behavior—and the attitudinal markers in dozens of qualitative studies—a somewhat different story emerges.
Public radio isn’t dead to them (though, arguably, public radio is pretty much the last radio they listen to any more). Public radio is a part of their lives, still. It and its mission are still deeply important to them.
Do they listen less? Yes. But that’s more because public radio has been stagnant–largely unchanged in any meaningful way–for a generation, not because the audience are no longer interested in listening.
Radio isn’t dead, it is evolving. But public radio, in real and meaningful ways, isn’t.
So why did I stop writing about public radio? I stopped writing about this not because it’s hopeless—but because the answer hasn’t changed. Yet that doesn’t mean the opportunity is gone.
I wasn’t being flip when I mentioned that what I’ve written still holds. If you are reading this and wondering, “Okay, well, what should we do then?” Read. The. Linked. Posts. Above. It’s all there, the entire playbook–from national organizations all the way down to production assistants at local stations.
The links go (in chronological order) to here, here, and here. All good stuff.
Meanwhile, let’s look at the ratings for public stations in the top ten markets:
- WNYC and WQXR in New York.
- KPCC and KCRW in Los Angeles.
- WBEZ in Chicago.
- KQED (#1) in San Francisco.
- KERA in Dallas.
- KUHF in Houston.
- WABE in Atlanta.
- WAMU in Washington (strong #2).
- WHYY in Philadelphia.
- WBUR and WGBH in Boston.
They are all holding steady or going up.
Looking down the market list, I see—
KNOW is #1 in Minneapolis.
KPBS is #1 in San Diego.
KUT is always #1 or #2 in Austin.
WUNC rules in Raleigh-Durham.In Santa Barbara, public radio (including classical stations) collectively gets around a 25 share, which is enormous—as it has been for years.
What’s the problem?
Alas, radio itself. Listening is moving from narrow-purpose instruments called radios to universal instruments called phones. Last night at a party, I asked a bunch of people what radio stations, if any, they listen to. All of them said they listen to podcasts and streams, some from public radio sources (shows more than stations). And most of these people were retired or close. (One was 20. To her, podcasts and streams are radio, like Netflix and TikTok are TV.)
My point is that public radio has a growing wedge of a shrinking pie, and it’s a pie that tastes like death. But of broadcast. AM is in hospice. Over-the-air TV is on death row. FM is terminal, but in denial. (Give it time. I’d say about a decade.)
The only hope for statons is with engagement. People, digital tech, and the Internet are perfect for that. AI and transmitters are not.
