I'm in Santa Barbara now, and it is typically perfect outside. Love living here, even though I mostly don't.
Talk about dumb
Last Thursday's post, titled Person Networks, was occasioned by outreach by a friend who urged me by email to join Intelligence.com, a slick new-ish thing with LinkedIn-like ambitions. Since then, others in my real-life circle of friends have received the same invitation. Turns out the invitations were not made with the permission of the putative source. Talk about dumb: the friend in question—the one who did not send the invite—is one of the world's top cybersecurity experts. He complained loudly to the company, which said it would stop. Meanwhile, their excuse to him for creating these fake emails was basically, "Even LinkedIn does it." The expert is wisely not on LinkedIn. Or on Intelligence.com, we presume.
The first version of this post became Snucked and sucked, but never mind that. I'm also packing to fly early tomorrow, so for now I'm just blabbing an annoted link pile during what's left of today. In other words, sort of like the usual but without subheads.
I didn't know we were in an Axial Age (it's a thing) until I read We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age, in Noēma. The subhead lays it out: "The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude." I agree with the headline, kinda, but not with much after that. But it's a good read. Makes ya think.
CJ Shivers in SeO What?—"A new algo dropped from Google and it appears to have the world of SEO in a tizzy…There are a few notable new challenges that have arisen with this update, in combination with industry deals, that should have bloggers and newsletter publishers more concerned than usual." He has suggestions. I'm exploring some.
If you want stories that aren't from the amen corners of the left and the right, Reason is useful. Examples:
While I avoid politics, I am interested in why Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire are said to be tanking. So I listened to Taylor Lorenz's podcast interview with Will Sommer. It's a good unpacking of the whole right-wing talker scene; but I was amazed that Taylor said of George Will "I don't know who that is," when she and will had both been columnists at the same time for the Washington Post. (She for two years, Will since the Pleistocene.)
I shot this at DEN five days before a Frontier plane at the same airport ingested a trespasser during takeoff on Runway 17L, aborting the flight and causing news.
Emergency crews responded to the scene and bussed passengers to the terminal. 231 souls were on board. Emergency response and investigation are ongoing. The NTSB has been notified. Runway 17L will remain closed while the investigation is conducted. 2/2.
The story continues with this:
The Airbus A321 had begun accelerating down the runway for takeoff when the pilots reported to air traffic controllers that they’d hit someone, officials said. The pilots aborted takeoff as smoke began filling the cabin, and passengers evacuated the plane via slides, Frontier Airlines said in a statement to USA TODAY. The identity of the pedestrian was not immediately released.
PYOK stands for Paddle Your Own Kangaroo, and is at paddleyourownkanoo.com. Its About page is, like everything else at the domain, by Mateusz Masczcynski. (Took a few tries to write that correctly from memory. Need to keep stretching those neurons.) There is only one of him, but he occasionally writes in the plural:
It all started back in 2017 when I managed to achieve my dream yet again. The same dream as yours; to become a flight attendant.
We devote huge amounts of time, effort and money to achieve this dream. The world of cabin crew recruitment is tough and ultra-competitive. Getting through this ruthless process can sometimes seem like an impossible task.
That’s certainly what I felt when I was knocked back time after time by airline recruiters. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong but I was determined to learn from my mistakes. paddleyourownkanoo.com was borne out the information and knowledge I gained in achieving my dream. This works – I’ve been invited to numerous cabin crew Assessment Days and I’ve been offered jobs from a number of major international airlines.
Today, I continue to send applications and attend Assessment Day’s. My mission – to help you through the process. There’s no secret, checklist formula or 100% guaranteed promise. But I hope that what you read here will prepare you for your journey.
Cabin crew recruitment is never going to be easy but I hope the PYOK website helps you on your journey!
And that’s not his only thing. There’s also Crew Insider (“the airline industry explained”), Cabin Crew Forum (“Demystifying the ultra competitive world of cabin crew recruitment”), Points and Miles, Offers, accounts on Facebookand Xitter, and a newsletter. I just followed and subscribed to all of them.
This is the first of two Internet Identity Workshops last year. The First Person Network, below, was one of many projects in the works there.
I’ve been invited by a friend to join Intelligence.com, which “helps you reach the right people, through those who know you best. It’s simple, thoughtful, and built on trust, just like the best introductions.” The inveterate among us will recall that this is what LinkedIn tried to do in the first place, before it turned into 1.2 billion business cards and 19 corporate acquisitions in a blender.
The first two say nothing about who they are. The third goes to collectivei.com, where the heading (across most of the visible page) says “AI that studies how the world does business.” Click on the Company link in the menu on the left (in the computer screen view), and (below several pages of downward scrolls) you’ll find the Leadership Team’s six heavy-hitting members above a star chamber of advisors.
Below that is a crawl of Webby Awards, and this:
Build what’s next, with the team that’s already ahead.
Whether you’re a sales leader looking for better outcomes, a partner wanting to deliver transformation, or a developer interested in embedded intelligence, there’s a place for you in the Collective[i] ecosystem.
So clearly, Intelligence.com is less for you and me than for our large corporate employers. IMHO. Feel free to convince me otherwise. I’m open.
The First Person Network is not another Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter/X. **It is not a social network; it is not centralized; and it does not belong to any company. **In the same way the Internet allows any device to connect with any other device, the First Person Network lets any member connect with any other member. Directly. Privately. Personally. With no intermediaries. No platform. No surveillance. No advertising. The First Person Network is about trust. It is a trust network that exists only in the individual digital wallets of all the members—the way many of us keep our own address books on our own smartphones today. Building this trust network as a global digital utility is the goal of the First Person Project. We’ll have much more to share as the initiative grows.
For the first time ever, a call to AppleCare got me an AI agent rather than a human being. The agent solved my problem, but made me feel sad, because AppleCare’s people provided a human connection, just we get from the people behind the Apple Stores’ Genius Bars. Are they the next to go?
Works in progress
The RSL (really simple licensing) standard is out there. In this section, it says,
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an evolution of the early ideas behind the widely adopted RSS standard, which provided a machine-readable framework for publishers to syndicate content to third-party clients and crawlers in exchange for traffic.
The RSL standard extends and generalizes these concepts to include explicit licensing terms, enabling publishers to define machine-readable compensation and usage conditions for crawling and processing their content. The RSL Technical Steering Committee leads the evolution of RSL in collaboration with internet publishers, technology companies, industry associations, and other stakeholders.
One problem with the RSS comparison is that RSL is not simple. Here’s the 1.0 draft of the standard. Copied into Microsoft Word, it weighs in at 16,928 words. Compare that to the RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard Law (where it has lived as a finished thing, since 2003).
It also creates yet another namespace: a consent ID.
Clearly, it comes from the entertainment industry (see RSL Media), and works to solve a serious problem: massive unpermitted harvesting and repurposing of copyrighted works for AI training and commercial re-use purposes by parties other than the rightsholders. If RSL succeeds, it will join Creative Commons and MyTerms as tools in the private rights protection box.
So why have the AI bigs shut down their ethics teams?
Building that trust pays off: companies investing in AI ethics reported 22% improvement in customer satisfaction and retention, 20% better incident prevention and 19% higher AI adoption rates. A majority (59%) of executives say their ethics efforts delivered results.
I’ve been throwing away leftunders, a word I just made up and then found in the Urban Dictionary.
Speaking of worse
Axios says we’re scaling sin. They are correct, at least in the sense that anything in excess can be bad for you, and doing costly and unnecessary things, en masse, is very bad.
They talk about weed, gambling, and porn: weed because it has been widely legalized, gambling because anyone with a phone can do it, and porn because AI is exceptionally good at it, and there are boundless sources for it.
I think gambling is the worst of those. For two reasons, beyond being costly and addictive.
One is that college and pro team sports have become addicted to it. I’ll bet (without money) that half the money spent on flagship sports podcasts is spent by FanDuel, DraftKings, and other sportsbooks. The percentage on live games is less, but I’ll bet close to 25%.
The other is that the sportsbooks fuck you in ways Las Vegas does not. As I wrote in Online Sports Betting is for Losers, Soon as you do well, they cut you off. Really. If you lose money, you’re golden—for them. If you win money (meaning you bet better than the house), you’re gone.
That this is called “gaming,” and “fun” is just nuts. With real games, you can win. With online gambling, you have to lose.
He likes it
Most of this post by @kixelated (Luke Curley) is over my head, but I was sent to it by one of the Internet’s parents, to whose head I bow.
All that gold has lasted half a century. With one exception.
Death to #2
Dentistry numbers your teeth. Number one is the top right back tooth. If you’ve got one, that’s a wisdom tooth, one of the four that erupted last through your gums. Your other top wisdom tooth is number sixteen. Below it, your bottom left wisdom tooth is number seventeen. The numbers continue around your jaw to complete the count at your bottom right wisdom tooth, number thirty-two.
I learned this stuff at the University of North Carolina Dental School, where I was a patient fifty years ago. And patience was required, because the students moved very slowly and under close observation. Amalgam fillings were free. Crowns and other restorations, gold or not, were $25 each.
Both my student dentists, Dr. John Berry of Durham and Dr. Steve Herring of Fayetteville, had long careers and are now retired. Their supervising instructor was Dr. Clifford Sturdivant, an eminence in the field who died in 2008. Great guys.
Steve took me as a passenger the first time he flew solo, in a rented Cessna out of RDU. He didn’t tell me this was his first solo until we were airborne. After practicing some figure-eights, he landed us in Chapel Hill, but not on the runway, missing it to the right by a few feet. We pushed the plane back onto the pavement manually, taxi’d to the terminal, said hi to Frank McGuire, who just happened to be standing there, got back in the plane and flew back to RDU without incident. It was fun.
All but two of my natural teeth are still in my head. Number five cracked in two when I bit down on a hard seed at a restaurant in Palo Alto, and was replaced by a fake tooth screwed into my skull: an implant. Number seventeen was saved by a root canal in Boston, but fell apart later in New York, where it was yanked, leaving an empty space in the back. If you’ve had that same wisdom tooth yanked at some point, we’re even.
Up for another root canal is number two. That one gets its nerve killed and replaced an hour from now, here in Bloomington, Indiana. I like to space this stuff out geographically as well as chronologically.
I learned a lot in dental school, including the six districts of each tooth. Mesial is the side facing incoming food. Distal is the back side. Occlusal is the top side that occludes with teeth on the opposite side of your mouth. Facial is the side facing outward. Lingual is the side facing your tongue. The restoration that cracked in number five was an MOD, meaning mesial, occlusal, and distal. The natural ivory of your teeth holds together better than amalgam, so that one was vulnerable.
The crown on number two covers all sides, and is called an MODFL (I don’t recall the correct order). Caries (decay) developed under the crown near the gum line on the distal side, and has almost reached the nerve. That’s why it hurts. After the root canal, my new dentist will either extend the crown or have the tooth extracted by a dental surgeon. I’ll get a new fake number two or live with a gap. I’ll opt for the fake. We’ll see. And feel. The total cost will likely exceed $5000. I have Medicare and a supplement, but no dental insurance.
Postscript: The endodontist says the rot in #2 goes all the way to bone, so the tooth has to go. That will happen after I’m back from some trips, in June. I will then live for four months with a gap between #1 and #3, so the hole heals. Then the oral surgeon (my extractor) determines if the gap, and my skull, will support an implant. If so, work on that will begin. The crown itself will be installed by the dentist who launched this journey. A circle of life.
A moment at Day One of the 7th Internet Identity Workshop, in November 2008, almost eighteen years ago. The question on the wall is still unanswered, which is why the next IIW will be #43.
Better late than later
I just found that a number of IIWs that I photographed never made it online. I’m fixing that, starting with IIW #7, from November 2008, one sample of which is above.
School’s out. 50,000 students and their families are gone from Indiana University this morning, and Bloomington becomes, relatively speaking, a ghost town.
Grabbing your ground
Identity as Root is getting some action. In a time when maximizing personal agency is a critical requirement for civilizing life online, it’s more relevant than ever.
.agent is clearly designed—so far—to make Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAi, Perplexity, et. al. accountable for what their agents do. But what about personal agents: ones that are entirely ours? That’s what I would want respected if such a registry were required for all the world’s AI agents.
So, if .agent has any chance of becoming a DNS for agents of all kinds, I would like to register searls.agent, just like I registered searls.com in 1995. I’m writing what follows while going through the registration process.
You are actively developing, researching, deploying, or meaningfully using autonomous software agents or related tooling. (In other words, you consider yourself part of the autonomous agents community relevant to the .agent domain.)I wasn’t, but I am now.
You support the creation of the .agent top-level domain to foster a trustworthy, interoperable agent ecosystem. Yes, so long as personal agents have the same status and respect as corporate ones. You know, like they do with the DNS (Domain Name System).
You commit that any .agent domain you may register will (a) be used in connection with autonomous-agent technology and (b) expose a compliance endpoint affirming alignment to the technical “Human-Centric Agent Standard” once published. (This is essentially an agreement to follow the community’s future rules: any .agent domain you get will be put to appropriate use and will include a public mechanism to show compliance with agreed safety/interoperability standards.)Yes, but I hate “-centric” because it is a corporate perspective. I prefer “-driven” to centric, for reasons I explained here, way back in 2008.
You consent to be listed (by name/organisation) as a public community supporter of the .agent application. (Your support won’t be anonymous – it will be known and count towards the community’s credibility.)I’m cool with that, long as my advocacy for personal AI agents gets heard.
This is a non-binding expression of support. No fees or legal liabilities arise until a future, formal membership or registrar agreement is executed with the duly-formed operating entity. (In plain terms: this is a goodwill pledge, not a contract; you’re not paying anything and can’t be held liable if you change your mind later. Formal obligations will only come if and when the community’s operating organization is established and you choose to formally join or register a domain.) Cool with that too.
</registration process>
Okay, so now my thoughts—
While it is conceivable that we may each have a single master agent that works across our personal data (behind our own castle moats) and interacts with others on our behalf (across our own drawbridges), we are more likely to have many agents:
one (or more) or health
one (or more) for finances
one (or more) for retail
one (or more) for interacting with customer service agents
one (or more) for managing our many subscriptions and other recurring expenses
one (or more) for scheduling and archiving our many interactions
one (or more) for our contacts (directly and through social media)
one (or more) to keep records of MyTerms and other forms of agreements with websites, services, government agencies, and other entities
Does it make sense to register all of those? Probably not. But it does make sense to certify our personal need to finally express our full power, as independent and self-sovereign agents in the marketplace—as the Internet promised us in the first place. (And why we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999 and New Clues in 2015—and related stuff in many other places.)
In tech parlance, we need to own root, and operate fully respected personal agents of our own.
The agentic Internet will need governance. I can see that. But is .agent the best (or only) way? Thanks to MyTerms, we will have one form of governance through contracts between people and the entities that serve them. And we will need others.
The agentic Internet won’t be worthy of its name unless it creates an intention economyto obsolesce the attention economy we got from surveillance-based advertising. Will .agent help with that? Not yet, which is one reason I’m joining the .agency community by registering searls.agent and writing this up.
.agent needs to look and behave more as an enabling system than an operational hurdle. I can see ways it might do that, but only if it starts caring about what it can do for people and not just for companies.
This is the title image of an outstanding report by Mozilla on how cars today are built to spy on you. Great to see California (below) clamp down on that.
That number is way too low
California AG Bob Bonta writes, “On Friday, we announced a historic $12.75 million settlement against General Motors for illegally retaining and selling hundreds of thousands of Californians’ location and driving data to data brokers.”
It’s coming down
There are three great teams left in the NBA playoffs. The Knicks are by far the best in the East. I’m watching them cream the 76ers right now. It’ll be a sweep: 4-0. They’ll next face the Pistons, which own the Cavaliers. I think the Pistons are very good, but the Knicks are better. In the West, the Thunder will sweep the Lakers, and the Spurs will finish off the Wolves (which are also very good). While the virtual finals will be Thunder vs. Spurs, I think the Knicks are the equal of both. The finals will go seven. I won’t predict the outcome of that one, though of course, I favor the Knicks. My fear is that it will come down to injuries. The indispensibles are Brunson and Towns for the Knicks, Wemby for the Spurs, and SGA for the Thunder. If any of those go down, it’ll be end the show for those teams.
The main thing: we’ll never know
For Mozart’s death to work as a story, it needs to be dramatized. But the simple fact that it was countless diseases for which there was no cure at the time doesn’t leave dramatists much to work with. Thus spake this WaPo essay. (Alas, paywall.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.)
