The skip-back, pause, and skip-forward buttons on Apple’s podcast app.
Also, it’s not podcasting if you can’t skip ads
Spotify is reportedly improving what we do anyway on podcast apps: hitting the 30-second skip-forward button when the host says “we’ll be back after a quick break.” (On Pivot, I might hit the +:30 button six or seven times, because that first “quick break” is up to three and a half minutes.)
I get why some podcasters and their networks are splitting a gut about this, and I know the lengths some hosts go to make the ads as low-pressure, personal, and appealing as possible. I did that when I hosted FLOSS Weekly on the TWiT network.
Still, that skip-forward button is a feature, not a bug.
For what it’s worth, I am not a Spotify customer and don’t use their service. So I won’t be seeing this feature. I am, however, a Dish Network customer, and have been since it was Echostar, back in the last millennium. My set-top box (which dwells in a cabinet, since we don’t want to see it and TV sets now have edges, not tops) is called a “Hopper,” because it’s supposed to be able to hop forward across ads on the box’s DVR. It has never worked. Maybe commercial podcasters will get lucky, and Spotify’s new ad-skipper will fail just as well.
The chat window era just ended. This week, AI agents got hands — Cloudflare shipped a browser built for software instead of people, Meta dropped a coding agent into the terminal, and the Pentagon put autonomous agents to work for 9.2 million soldiers and veterans. It reminds me of 1995, when the browser went from research curiosity to the way everyone touched the internet — except this time, the humans aren’t the ones doing the browsing. The same week the agents got hands, the regulators and safety teams showed up with the rulebook.
Zuck wrote a thing
It’s called The Future is for Everyone and weighs in at 6538 words (about as long as Meta’s privacy policy, I’d guess. How can a guy get a perfect SAT score and still use “incredible” as an adjective? Or at all?
Just not saying
Says here the Nicene Creed doesn’t quote Jesus. Does it need to? Asking for a religion.
They will also spend a lot more time with you, and answering your questions
The data centers rising out of the desert didn’t create the water crisis. They did something arguably more useful: they made it legible. A 200-megawatt facility asking a small county for eight million gallons on a summer afternoon is a question the 20th-century water grid cannot answer without revealing exactly how thin its margins already were — margins eroded by a century of pumping from ever-more-distant rivers, using each drop precisely once, and calling the result waste.
What’s replacing it is a shift in scale of attention. We are moving out of an era of bulk extraction and into one of molecular management.
You might care if you know it’s being displaced by a data center
Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other offenses, wastes the many talents of Sasha Baron Cohen) when a bat flew across the screen. This indoors, far away from any open door or window. We went to bed with all lights off and our largest doors and windows open to allow the bat to leave. We'll see how that goes.
A crude visual representation of what Jefferson called “the combustive power” of an idea, explained below.
Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where that writing still sits, waiting for me to make all of it https rather than http. This is one of those pieces, published on December 1, 1995, six days before Bill Gates’ “Pearl Harbor” speech to his Microsoft troops. I’ve made minimal edits to add links and correct punctuation.
The import of the Internet is so obvious and extreme that it actually defies valuation: witness the stock market, which values Netscape so far above that company’s real assets and earnings that its P/E ratio verges on the infinite.
Whatever we’re driving toward, it is very different from anchoring certainties that have grounded us for generations, if not for the duration of our species. It seems we are on the cusp of a new and radically different reality. Let’s call it Reality 2.0.
The label has a millenial quality, and a technical one as well. If Reality 2.0 is Reality 2.000, this month we’re in Reality 1.995.12.
With only a few revisions left before Reality 2.0 arrives, we’re in a good position to start seeing what awaits. Here are just a few of the things this writer is starting to see…
As more customers come into direct contact with suppliers, markets for suppliers will change from target populations to conversations.
Travel, ticket, advertising and PR agencies will all find new ways to add value, or they will be subtracted from market relationships that no longer require them.
Within companies, marketing communications will change from peripheral activities to core competencies.New media will flourish on the Web, and old media will learn to live with the Web and take advantage of it.
Retail space will complement cyber space. Customer and technical service will change dramatically, as 800 numbers yield to URLs and hard copy documents yield to soft copy versions of the same thing… but in browsable, searchable forms.
Shipping services of all kinds will bloom. So will fulfillment services. So will ticket and entertainment sales services.
The web’s search engines will become the new yellow pages for the whole world. Your fingers will still do the walking, but they won’t get stained with ink. Same goes for the white pages. Also the blue ones.
The scope of the first person plural will enlarge to include the whole world. “We” may mean everybody on the globe, or any coherent group that inhabits it, regardless of location. Each of us will swing from group to group like monkeys through trees.
National borders will change from barricades and toll booths into speed bumps and welcome mats.
The game will be over for what teacher John Taylor Gatto labels “the narcotic we call television.” Also for the industrial relic of compulsory education. Both will be as dead as the mainframe business. In other words: still trucking, but not as the anchoring norms they used to be.
Big Business will become as anachronistic as Big Government, because institutional mass will lose leverage without losing inertia.Domination will fail where partnering succeeds, simply because partners with positive sums will combine to outproduce winners and losers with zero sums.
The Web is the board for a new game Phil Salin called “Polyopoly.” As Phil described it, Polyopoly is the opposite of Monopoly. The idea is not to win a fight over scarce real estate, but to create a farmer’s market for the boundless fruits of the human mind.
It’s too bad Phil didn’t live to see the web become what he (before anyone, I believe) hoped to create with AMIX: “the first efficient marketplace for information.” The result of such a marketplace, Phil said, would be polyopoly.
In Monopoly, what mattered were the three Ls of real estate: “location, location and location.”
On the web, location means almost squat.
What matters on the web are the three Cs: content, connections and convenience. These are what make your home page a door the world beats a path to when it looks for the better mouse trap that only you sell. They give your webfront estate its real value.
If commercial interests have their way with the Web, we can also add a fourth C: cost. But how high can costs go in a polyopolistic economy? Not very. Because polyopoly creates…
The goods of Polyopoly and Monopoly are as different as love and lug nuts. Information is made by minds, not factories; and it tends to make itself abundant, not scarce. Moreover, scarce information tends to be worthless information.
Information may be bankable, but traditional banking, which secures and contains scarce commodities (or their numerical representations) does not respect the nature of information.
Because information abhors scarcity. It loves to reproduce, to travel, to multiply. Its natural habitats are wires and airwaves and disks and CDs and forums and books and magazines and web pages and hot links and chats over cappuccinos at Starbucks. This nature lends itself to polyopoly.
Polyopoly’s rules are hard to figure because the economy we are building with it is still new, and our vocabulary for describing it is sparse.
This is why we march into the Information Age hobbled by industrial metaphors. The “information highway” is one example. Here we use the language of freight forwarding to describe the movement of music, love, gossip, jokes, ideas, and other communicable forms of knowledge that grow and change as they move from mind to mind.
We can at least say that knowledge, even in its communicable forms, is not reducible to data. Nor is the stuff we call “intellectual property.” A song and a bank account do not propagate the same ways. But we are inclined to say they do (and should), because we describe both with the same industrial terms.
All of which is why there is no more important work in this new economy than coining the new terms we use to describe it.
The best place to start looking for help is at the dawn of the Industrial Age. Because this was when the Age of Reason began. Nobody knew more about the polyopoly game — or played it — better than those champions of reason from whose thinking our modern republics are derived: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
As Jon Katz says in “The Age of Paine” (Wired, May 1995 ), Thomas Paine was the the “moral father of the Internet.” Paine said “my country is the world,” and sought as little compensation as possible for his work, because he wanted it to be inexpensive and widely read. Paine’s thinking still shapes the politics of the U.S., England and France, all of which he called home.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the first rule of Polyopoly in his letter to Isaac MacPherson: “He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
He also left a live bomb for modern intellectual property law: “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” The best look at the burning fuse is John Perry Barlow’s excellent essay “The Economy of Ideas,” in the March 1994 issue of Wired. (I see that Jon Katz repeats it in his paean to Paine. Hey, if someone puts it to song, who gets the rights?)
If Paine was the moral father of the Internet, Ben Franklin’s paternity is apparent in Silicon Valley. Today he’d fit right in, inventing hot products, surfing the Web and spreading his wit and wisdom like a Johnny Cyberseed. Hell, he even has the right haircut.
Franklin left school at 10 and was barely 15 when he ran his brother’s newspaper, writing most of its content and getting quoted all over Boston. He was a self-taught scientist and inventor while still working as a writer and publisher. He also found time to discover electricity, create the world’s first postal service, invent a heap of handy products and serve as a politician and diplomat.
Franklin’s biggest obsession was time. He scheduled and planned constantly. He even wrote his famous epitaph when he was 22, six decades before he died. “The work shall not be lost,” it reads, “for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and edited by the author.”
One feels the ghost of Franklin today, editing the web.
Combine Jefferson and Franklin, and you get the two magnetic poles that tug at every polyopoly player: information that only gets more abundant, and time that only gets more scarce.
As Alain Couder of Groupe Bull puts it, “we treat time as a constant in all these formulas — revolutions per minute, instructions per second — yet we experience time as something that constantly decreases.”
After all, we’re born with an unknown sum of time, and we need to spend it all before we die. The notion of “saving” it is absurd. Time can only be spent.
So: to play Polyopoly well, we need to waste as little time as possible. This is not easy in a world where the sum of information verges on the infinite.
Which is why I think Esther Dyson might be our best polyopoly player.
“There’s too much noise out there anyway,” she says in ‘Esther Dyson on DaveNet‘ (12/1/94). “The new wave is not value added, it’s garbage-subtracted.”
Here’s a measure of how much garbage she subtracts from her own life: her apartment doesn’t even have a phone.
I wouldn’t bother to ask Esther if she watches television, or listens to the radio. I wouldn’t ask my wife, either. To her, television is exactly what Fred Allen called it forty years ago: “chewing gum for the eyes.” Ours heats up only for natural disasters and San Jose Sharks games.
Dean Landsman, a sharp media observer from the broadcast industry, tells me that John Gresham books are cutting into time that readers would otherwise spend watching television. And that’s just the beginning of a tide that will swell as every medium’s clients weigh more carefully what they do with their time.
Which is why it won’t be long before those clients wad up their television time and stick it under their computer. “Media will eat media,” Dean says.
The computer is looking a lot hungrier than the rest of the devices out there. Next to connected computing, television is AM radio.
Think of the Industrial world — the world of Big Business and Big Government — as a modern Roman Empire.
Now think of Bill Gates as Attilla the Hun.
Because that’s exactly how Bill looks to the Romans who still see the web, and everything else in the world, as a monopoly board. No wonder Bill doesn’t have a senator in his pocket (as Mark Stahlman told us in ‘Off to the Slaughter House,’ (DaveNet, 3/14/94).
Sadly for the the Romans, their empire is inhabited almost entirely by Huns, all working away on their PCs. Most of those Huns don’t have a problem with Bill. After all, Bill does a fine job of empowering his people, and they keep electing him with their checkbooks, credit cards and purchase orders.
Which is why, when they go forth to tame the web, these tough-talking Captains of Industry and Leaders of Government look like animated mannequins in Armani Suits: clothes with no emperor. Their content is emulation. They drone about serving customers and building architectures and setting standards and being open and competing on level playing fields. But their game is still control, no matter what else they call it.
Bill may be our emperor, but ruling Huns is not the same as ruling Romans. You have to be naked as a fetus and nearly as innocent. Because polyopoly does not reward the dark tricks that used to work for industry, government and organized crime. Those tricks worked in a world where darkness had leverage, where you could fool some of the people some of the time, and that was enough.
But polyopoly is a positive-sum game. Its goods are not produced by huge industries that control the world, but by smart industries that enable the world’s inhabitants. Like the PC business that thrives on it, information grows up from individuals, not down from institutions. Its economy thrives on abundance rather than scarcity. Success goes to enablers, not controllers. And you don’t enable people by fooling them. Or by manipulating them. Or by muscling them.
In fact, you don’t even play to win. As Craig Burton of The Burton Group puts it, “the goal isn’t win/win, it’s play/play.”
This is why Bill does not “control” his Huns the way IBM controlled its Romans. Microsoft plays by winning support, where IBM won by dominating the play. Just because Microsoft now holds a controlling position does not mean that a controlling mentality got them there. What I’ve seen from IBM and Apple looks far more Monopoly-minded and controlling than anything I’ve seen from Microsoft.
Does this mean that Bill’s manners aren’t a bit Roman at times? No. Just that the support Microsoft enjoys is a lot more voluntary on the part of its customers, users and partners. It also means that Microsoft has succeeded by playing Polyopoly extremely well. When it tries to play Monopoly instead, the Huns don’t like it. Bill doesn’t need the Feds to tell him when that happens. The Huns tell him soon enough.
No matter how Roman Bill’s fantasies might become, he knows his position is hardly more substantial than a conversation. In fact, it IS a conversation.
I would bet that Microsoft is engaged in more conversations, more of the time, with more customers and partners, than any other company in the world. Like or hate their work, the company connects. I submit that this, as much as anything else, accounts for its success.
In the Industrial Age, a market was a target population. Goods rolled down a “value chain” that worked like a conveyor belt. Raw materials rolled into one end and finished products rolled out the other. Customers bought the product or didn’t, and customer feedback was limited mostly to the money it spent.
To encourage customer spending, “messages” were “targeted” at populations, through advertising, PR and other activities. The main purpose of these one-way communications was to stimulate sales. That model is obsolete. What works best to day is what Normann & Ramirez (Harvard Business Review, June/July 1993) call a “value constellation” of relationships that include customers, partners, suppliers, resellers, consultants, contractors and all kinds of people.
The Web is the star field within which constellations of companies, products and markets gather themselves. And what binds them together, in each case, are conversations.
What we’re creating here is a new economy — an information economy.
Behind the marble columns of big business and big government, this new economy stands in the lobby like a big black slab. The primates who work behind those columns don’t know what this thing is, but they do know it’s important and good to own. The problem is, they can’t own it. Nobody can. Because it defies the core value in all economies based on physical goods: scarcity.
Scarcity ruled the stone hearts and metal souls of every zero-sum value system that ever worked — usually by producing equal quantities of gold and gore. And for dozens of millennia, we suffered with it. If Tribe A crushed Tribe B, it was too bad for Tribe B. Victors got the spoils.
This win/lose model has been in decline for some time. Victors who used to get spoils now just get responsibilities. Cooperation and partnership are now more productive than competition and domination. Why bomb your enemy when you can get him on the phone and do business with him? Why take sides when the members of “us” and “them” constantly change?
The hard evidence is starting to come in. A recent Wharton Impact report said, “Firms which specified their objectives as ‘beating our competitors’ or ‘gaining market share’ earned substantially lower profits over the period.” We’re reading stories about women-owned businesses doing better, on the whole, because women are better at communicating and less inclined to waste energy by playing sports and war games in their marketplaces.
From the customer’s perspective, what we call “competition” is really a form of cooperation that produces abundant choices. Markets are created by addition and multiplication, not just by subtraction and division.
In my old Mac IIci, I can see chips and components from at least 11 different companies and 8 different countries. Is this evidence of war among Apple’s suppliers? Do component vendors succeed by killing each other and limiting choices for their customers? Did Apple’s engineers say, “Gee, let’s help Hitachi kill Philips on this one?” Were they cheering for one “side” or another? The answer should be obvious.
But it isn’t, for two reasons. One is that the “Dominator Model,” as anthropologist (and holocaust survivor) Riane Eisler calls it, has been around for 20,000 years, and until recently has reliably produced spoils for victors. The other is that conflict always makes great copy. To see how seductive conflict-based thinking is, try to find a hot business story that isn’t filled with sports and war metaphors. It isn’t easy.
Bound by the language of conflict, most of us still believe that free enterprise runs on competition between “sides” driven by urges to dominate, and that the interests of those “sides” are naturally opposed.
To get to the truth here, just ask this: which has produced more — the U.S. vs. Japan, or the U.S. + Japan? One produced World War II and a lot of bad news. The other produced countless marvels — from cars to consumer electronics — on which the whole world depends.
Now ask this: which has produced more — Apple vs. Microsoft or Apple + Microsoft? One profited nobody but the lawyers, and the other gave us personal computing as we know it today.
What brings us to Reality 2.0 is the Plus Paradigm.
The Plus Paradigm says that our world is a positive construction, and that the best games produce positive sums for everybody. It recognizes the power of information and the value of abundance. (Think about it: the best information may have the highest power to abound, and its value may vary as the inverse of its scarcity.)
Over the last several years, mostly through discussions with client companies that are struggling with changes that invalidate long-held assumptions, I have built table of old (Reality 1.0) vs. new (Reality 2.0) paradigms. The difference between these two realities, one client remarked, is that the paradigm on the right is starting to work better than the paradigm on the left.
Paradigm
Reality 1.0
Reality 2.0
Means to ends
Domination
Partnership
Cause of progress
Competition
Collaboration
Center of interest
Personal
Social
Concept of systems
Closed
Open
Dynamic
Win/Lose
Play/Play
Roles
Victor/Victim
Partner/Ally
Primary goods
Capital
Information
Source of leverage
Monopoly
Polyopoly
Organization
Hierarchy
Flexiarchy
Roles
Victor/Victim
Server/Client
Scope of self-interest
Self/Nation
Self/World
Source of power
Might
Right
Source of value
Scarcity
Abundance
Stage of growth
Child (selfish)
Adult (social)
Reference valuables
Metal, Money
Life, Time
Purpose of boundaries
Protection
Limitation
Changes across the paradigms show up as positive “reality shifts.” The shift is from OR logic to AND logic, from Vs. to +:
Reality 1.0
Reality 2.0
man vs nature
man + nature
Labor vs management
Labor + management
Public vs private
Public + private
Men vs women
Men + women
Us vs them
Us + them
Majority vs minority
Majority + minority
Party vs party
Party + party
Urban vs rural
Urban + rural
Black vs white
Black + white
Business vs govt.
Business + govt.
The Plus Paradigm comprehends the world as a positive construction, and sees that the best games produce positive sums for everybody. It recognizes the power of information and the value of abundance. (Think about it: the best information may have the highest power to abound, and its value may vary as the inverse of its scarcity.)
For more about this whole way of thinking, see Bernie DeKoven’s ideas about “the ME/WE” at his “virtual playground.”]
This may sound sappy, but information works like love: when you give it away, you still get to keep it. And when you give it back, it grows.
Which has always been the case. But in Reality 2.0, it should become a lot more obvious.
Audacy, by far the most stressed-out owner of too many radio stations, is killing off another big old signal: KXNT/840 in Las Vegas. I dug into that, and wrote about it on Trunkline, my neglected blog about infrastructure that will soon get a big facelift.
Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other offenses, wastes the many talents of Sasha Baron Cohen) when a bat flew across the screen. This indoors, far away from any open door or window. We went to bed with all lights off and our largest doors and windows open to allow the bat to leave. We'll see how that goes.
We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis.)
Of course, Internet routing (what happens in the middle) isn’t stupid. It’s just smart about routing.
The same is now true for shipping. Some of its movements are easy to see when an Amazon truck arrives, when we find ourselves on a highway with more trucks than cars, or when we see containers being hauled on railroads or stacked onto cargo ships. But how goods flow through this whole system isn’t much clearer to us than how what I’m writing on this laptop appears on your screen.
Surfacing those mechanisms is important because your smarts are far less involved in The Internet of Stuff today than in the Internet of Bits. And getting involved will give you far more agency in the marketplace than you have ever had before.
Imagine being in charge of your privacy, your identity, the prices you’re charged, the services you’re offered, your terms of engagement—all of it—for the benefit of both you and the services you engage. This will happen, sooner or later.
Of course, there will be a fight (just like phone and cable companies fought the Internet until they saw there was more money in it than in their legacy businesses). Today, both business and government are infected with the belief that surveillance is the best way to know people and what they’re about. This has given us an online economy far too informed by surveillance, and it’s getting worse in the offline world. Your phone apps spy on you. Your car and TV spy on you.
In fact, you can do far more with the information that spyware collects (where you go, who you meet with, what you’ve watched and when) than the spies can—for their good as well as yours. When the market equips you with those abilities,the companies you engage can enjoy trusting, useful intelligence that flows both ways—among much else that I’ve been writing about here for the last twenty years. Plus everything else I laid out in The Intention Economy.
So I want to explore that, in hope and faith that the fight might be over before it starts.
A whiteboard on which notes were made about AI writing and related issues at IIW 41 in October 2025. Not the best art, but at least not generated by an AI.
On AI wronging and writing
I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It’s not just the excess of one-line paragraphs, the contrasty “not that, but this” argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It’s a tone that sounds like the average of a million well-put hunks of text published by competent writers of opinion columns and advertising copy. In other words, a lot like my own writing.
Also (again like my own writing), AI writing is good, but not good enough. Unless you’re Shakespeare, Vonnegut, or McPhee, writing can always be better. If you use AI to write, be sure to re-write it. Seriously.
Like most people who research and write for a living today, I make heavy use of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I am also a paying customer for two of them. While I may not like all their writing, I like their help with—
Research on anything
Any health issue that takes longer to explain than the five minutes my doctors give me once a year
Tech support
For example, ChatGPT last week helped me get two laptops to connect with two difficult peripherals (a printer and a batch photo scanner) at my sister’s house, and to expose the inadequacies of the software tools involved (such as Epson’s crap scanning tools, and a sneaky feature in Apple’s Image Capture that pretends a saved (and presumably uncompressed) TIFF scan was not a wrapper on a compressed JPEG one. (The file sizes were small and identical.)
And now it’s helping me write my next book. More on that later.
To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is consistently delivering Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake”), with pointed ends, indicative of healthy rectal function, he told me. “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”
“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”
In his book Hopeless but Optimistic, Douglas Wissing shared this interesting fact: members of rural Afghani tribes living on rocky terrain go to hillsides to squat, and wipe their butts by rotating smooth rocks through their cracks. If I had the book with me, I’d share the text. Lacking that, however, I have found corroborating sources:
National Geographic, in What did people do before toilet paper? says Archaeologists … have uncovered samples of pessoi, a humbler, ancient Greek and Roman toilet paper equivalent. Consisting of small oval or circular pebbles or pieces of broken ceramic, pessoi have been uncovered in the ruins of ancient Roman and Greek latrines. They’re even immortalized on a 2,700-year-old drinking cup that shows a man squatting and making use of his stone. Pessoi even rate a mention in the Talmud.
During the Greco-Roman period, a sponge fixed to a stick (tersorium) was used to clean the buttocks after defecation; the sponge was then replaced in a bucket filled with salt water or vinegar water.3 Another technique was to use oval or circular fragments of ceramic known as “pessoi” (meaning pebbles),4 a term also used to denote an ancient board game. Aristophanes referred to the use of pessoi for sanitary purposes in Peace (5th century BC):
“Arms dealer (displaying a cuirass): And what, alack, shall I do with this rounded cuirass, a beautiful fit, worth ten minas?
Trygaeus: Well, that one will not make a loss for you, anyway. Give me that at cost price. It will be very convenient to crap in . . .
Arms dealer: Stop this impudent mockery of my goods!
Trygaeus (placing the cuirass on the ground like a chamber pot, and squatting on it): Like this, if you put three stones beside it. Is it not clever?”5
Using a combination of shock, shame, pride and disgust, families are encouraged through peer pressure to build a latrine and commit to using it. The process usually lasts three to six months until an entire community has given up defecating in the open, contributing to a healthier environment for everyone.
That was in 2017. The Taliban took over in 2021. Think they kept that shit up? If you have an answer, it might help to know that the village was Chaw, in the Ghazni region. You can zoom into it here.
Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we’ve ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other offenses*, wastes the many talents of Sasha Baron Cohen) when a bat flew across the screen. This was indoors, far away from any open door or window. So we went to bed with all lights off and our largest doors and windows open to allow the bat to leave. Today we’ll sit away from our largest doors (sliding glass walls, essentially) with our lights off, to watch, if we can, to see if a bat leaves.
I think this notice I just got at Autonocion.com means the privacy signals my browser sends are being respected at that site—and have been in the past. That’s good, I guess, because there is no way I can easily audit website obedience to my personal privacy choices. The larger problem is that if one’s privacy is entirely in the hands of “Privacy Centers” such as this one, we don’t have any. But we do have a fix. Read on.
Working to kill off cookie notices
The IEEE’s cookie notice says, “This website utilizes technologies such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as for analytics, personalization, and targeted advertising. Privacy Policy.”
Its privacy policy, at that last link, says it collects eighteen kinds of personal information, and says one of the purposes for collecting it is—
To serve personalized advertising to you. We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements, and we may use any of the non-personally-identifiable attributes we have collected to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. When you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement, there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and that your attributes meet the criteria the advertiser selected.
If you want to make cookie notices go away, start or support work toward making MyTerms happen, and help us make that work cooperative by joining that group.
I’m no fan of trial lawyers but, like it or not, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta and perhaps every Chinese open-weight AI model may already be covered by common-law fiduciary responsibility. We’re a few court cases away from finding out. They need to start acting that way or their trillion-dollar valuations may become a target much larger than the tobacco companies in the 1990s.
I am a heavy Photoshop user, and recently upgraded to Photoshop 2026 at Adobe’s robotic insistence. But, when I went to do a “generative fill” on an old photo (in the outlined area above), I was met with this:
Fuzzed by that, I hit the View my balance button and got this:
This shows I’m almost out of something I didn’t know I had. So I hit the Buy now button to get to the bottom line. This appeared:
I’m not going to subscribe to any of those. But I do want to understand what’s going on.
I assume that credits are for tokens, but don’t know what a generative fill will cost in tokens, or credits, or whatever. I assume bigger ones will cost more, but how, and how much?
I do get that intelligence is a commodity and for sale. What I need is a sense of how this commodity (in tokens, credits, or whatever) is metered, and how I can easily see it.
One clear thing to me, at least emotionally, is that Adobe is enshittifying Photoshop here, because it is starting to charge for something that had been free.
Look, I get why they’re doing it. But I also believe there have to be better ways to create this new AI economy.
Shot Monday in San Francisco at Howard and 2nd by Mary Hodder
Elemental differences
Look up graphite,graphite company, or graphite the company, and you’ll mostly get geological and industrial answers. (Unless, of course, your search history suggests the company signing the billboard above.)
The easy way to find out, of course, is to ask your friendly AI. It will tell you the company behind the billboard above is Graphite.com, formerly (and still) Graphite.dev. They are an AI code review platform. Your AI will also tell you that kind of billboard is called a “wallscape.” Didn’t know that until I asked.
The billboard copy is a play on Marshall McLuhan‘s most-quoted one-liner, The medium is the message. What McLuhan meant was that the character of the medium matters more than the content it carries. He also doesn’t confine the meaning of “media” to the communicative kind. He means all forms of tech. For example, he said that trains made farms as much as they made cities. Eric McLuhan, Marshall’s son and collaborator, writes, “People don’t want to know the cause of anything. They do not want to know why radio caused Hitler and Gandhi alike. They do not want to know that print caused anything whatever.”
So: What does AI cause? The glib answer found in many news stories is “job loss.” Graphite is saying it gives you a new job.
The McLuhans might say that’s small beer. Because every new technology doesn’t just cause widely different outcomes (such as radio did for Hitler and Gandhi). It creates new environments, new ecosystems. Old jobs will be lost and new jobs found, but in service of many radically changed and new forms of work, play, and everything else.
I think the main question is whether AI, or the environment created by AI, will enlarge or shrink human agency. Of course, it will do both. But I’m betting on more of the latter. So is Graphite, I suppose.
Thinkings out loud
Overheard: “In tech, every bit of progress makes something easy obsolete.”
Further evidence that advertising corrupts and digital advertising corrupts absolutely
Joe Mandese in MediaPost: Why Malvertising’s New Vector May Leave A Sour Taste In Your Mouth. Excerpt: “Advertising — or more explicitly, ‘malvertising’ — has long been a vector for distributing malicious software, but a new, insidious exploit utilizes an innovative model for distributing it. Instead of utilizing a single malvertisement to install malicious code on a user’s device — usually by redirecting the user to a landing page that automatically download pre-compiled malicious code — SourTrade does it in clandestine installments, treating the user’s browser as a passive file receiver that functions as an active local compiler or assembler launching the code when it is completed. You can read more about it in this post by the team at cybersecurity firm Confiant…” Which is here.
I also learned the term “wallscape” from the same AI that told me who Graphite was.
WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands in a field on Burlington’s north side:
Amazingly, WBAG is still using the same tower, manufactured by the Wincharger company, which continues to do what it did before and after its broadcast tower phase: make windmills. Here’s one of their ads from back when AM radio ruled the airwaves, and the company answered growing demand:
As it happens, I document broadcast towers and antennas (which on AM are the same), for two reasons. One is that I love broadcast engineering. The other is that I know many or most of these old towers will disappear in the next decade or two. For both reasons, I shot WBAG’s tower in 2015 and again a few days ago. It looked rusty as hell the first time, and it looks even more rusty now. Kind of like me.
But the station itself is quite the opposite. Live jocks host shows and spin records, there are nine local talk shows, and they have an abundance of local advertisers. While sitting here, I’ve heard ads for Franks Jewelry, Bulington Alamance Associate of Realtors, Little Donny Walker’s Car Wash, Sam’s Factory Outlet, Suretop Roofing, Always Best Care Senior Services, and Fisher Wealth Management (which also has its own talk show on the station). This things are rare in local radio today. Most stations have long since been bought out by giants (now bankrupt or headed there), and run canned content from elsewhere.
WBAG’s main format is oldies, with a focus on Carolina Beach Music. I grooved on this genre as a student at Guilford College from ’65 to ’69. Being of a geeky bent, I listened a lot to FM radio, which was still struggling then. My fave tunings were to jazz and blues from WAAA-FM on 107.5 from Winston Salem, and top 40 from WBAG-FM on 93.9. Both of those FM licenses were bought out when FM got hot. (WBAG’s 93.9 license now belongs to WNCB in Cary.) And while WAAA went through many call letter and facility changes (it’s now WTOB, the abandoned callsign of a former top 40 station in town), WBAG has remained itself continuously, eventually adding a small FM signal on 105.9 that covers Burlington, Graham, and Alamance County well enough. Here are its day/night AM and FM coverage areas:
Unlike most radio stations, WBAG doesn’t stream online. Instead, it lives in the natural world, where we still have distance, and the inverse square law applies, meaning the signals only go so far. That’s a charm of local radio.
Here is what I wanted (and got) from Southwest: a clean window on a comfortable plane that i could find, board, and fly in easily. Most of that is not about flight attendants.
Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight:
And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking:
I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one doesn’t have a way to report that the Southwest app sent me to a gate far out in one concourse—
Screenshot
—when it had been moved to another concourse:
I can say that one difference between United’s app and Southwest’s is that I have not yet had the same experience with United’s.
But both have the same long surveys for making me report on flight attendants.
Mozilla’s The State of Open Source AI is required reading. It makes a great case for open source (and open weight models). This is essential in the current political, economic, and development battles between those and the big closed US-based companies and models. We will see the earlier open source battles (geeks vs. IBM, then Microsoft, et. al.) play out again, only faster.
I also love what he says about the browser as an agent. Good stuff.
But the word personal doesn’t appear. Local appears twice. User appears seven times, all inside the section titled The agentic harness is another user agent. Again, great stuff in that section.
Still, it’s like we’re arguing about democracy in feudal Europe or Japan.
Haven’t figured out lighting yet, but I like the idea
After struggling for days to make my new Epson FF-680W photo scanner, which does a much poorer job of scanning photos than my iPhone 16, I’m ready for one of these.
On your Outage Information and Troubleshooting page, just @#$%^ tell us where your @#$%^ outages are. Don’t require an account holder’s zip code and phone number first. When you’re just a friend trying to help the account holder over the phone (still working over the cell system), that information isn’t always available. Or necessary. Out is out. You’re a @#$%^ utility. Your outage is public information—or ought to be. Thank you for your service. When it’s back.
OpenAI put the fire alarm on payroll, borrowed its medal for the pitch deck, and called the whole thing responsible AI…
BigMac did not create cheaper intelligence. It found the GPU waste inflating its price, and gave token economics a reason to fall by multiples…
Kimi did not reveal a Chinese threat. It revealed Silicon Valley has no shared answer for AI except that somebody else should pay more for it…
Gemini’s 950 million users do not prove Google built the best AI. They prove the best AI loses when it asks people to go somewhere else…
We’ve helped promote over 500 Tech Brands. Will yours be the next?
In May of 2018, I posted GDPR will pop the adtech bubble. It didn’t. The bubble is now bigger than ever. My mistake was assuming that there was a policy answer to a morally awful business that paid well. In retrospect, it’s a humbling reminder of how long one can be wrong about something—and that maintaining a wrong doesn’t make it right. That’s why we were already working on MyTerms (IEEE 7012) at the time. It’s done now, and ready to rock what’s overdue to pop.
And this subscription cancellation was made by a human being
In tech journalism’s golden age, when mags were thick and slick and hot, and covered world-changing work like a swarm of noisy bees, the most readable, annoying, hated, and loved writer of them all was John C. Dvorak, who died three days ago at just 80.
In Quaker meetings, the rule is not to speak until you can improve on the silence. In tech journalism, the rule is not to speak until you can improve on the cacophony of good things others are saying and writing, while not knowing if what you’re writing works or not, but you can’t stop doing it anyway. I learned a lot about all that from John. Hats off.
Coffman has described his overnight stays as a form of quality control, allowing him to evaluate whether Aurora’s incentive-based model is helping residents move toward stable housing. He plans to continue sleeping at the shelter every Friday until the program reaches its full potential. His goal is to create a model that other cities can follow.
Nitin Badjatia has been laying out more and more reasons—and ways—that enterprises will adapt to customers, rather than the reverse. More at ProjectVRM.
