Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • Hey Europe: Make Privacy a Contract

    Anu Bradford‘s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially in respect to personal privacy. And for that we should be grateful, because the US and China mostly don’t give a shit.

    On the other hand, every cookie notice you hate is a stain on the EU’s reputation as a protector of personal privacy in the digital world. They know that, of course, which is why the European Parliament is working on fixes.

    They want their regulations to actually protect personal privacy, rather than just serving as ideals that the adtech business—which relies on tracking to personalize its messages—nods toward while violating the spirit of those regulations with impunity.

    Naturally, pro-tracking lobbyists in the advertising industry and its dependents (such as publishing) are working overtime to preserve easements that allow tracking to continue.

    On the other side—the one that includes most of online humanity—an estimated 1.77 billion people block ads and the tracking that guides them. I called this the biggest boycott in world history way back in 2015, when the number was just 200 million.

    EU lawmakers need to listen to those people and not just to lobbyists who euphemize the failure of “consent” by calling it “cookie fatigue” and “consent fatigue.”

    Cookie banners grew out of compliance with the ePrivacy Directive, especially its 2009 amendment requiring consent for storing or accessing information on personal devices, subject to limited exceptions. Their use surged after May 25, 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became enforceable. Neither law requires that every website display a banner. Even where cookie information is required, it need not take the form of a pop-up. Italy’s privacy regulator explicitly makes that distinction. Yet banners became the standard interface for a vast consent-management business.

    Here is a key fact that the EU (and all of us) need to keep in mind: To the adtech industry, personal privacy is a bug, not a feature. They are rewarded for surveillance, not for regulatory obedience. So they feign obedience to regulatory requirements while circumventing them. Their recommendation for the Omnibus is to eliminate their need to circumvent regulations by changing those regulations to support continued surveillance, under the guise of “improving” consent mechanisms.

    Here is another key fact: So long as only the web server side sets all the rules, provides all the mechanisms, and keeps all the records, consent itself is meaningless. Persons interacting with these mechanisms can do no more than what the mechanisms allow. Again, they aren’t meant to work for the person. At all. They are completely one-sided, unfair, and broken by design.

    All this matters right now because the EU is working on a new Digital Omnibus, which was proposed in November 2025 and remains unfinished. Parliament’s legislative record lists it as awaiting a committee decision. The separate AI Omnibus has already been adopted, which can make headlines confusing. The legislation we are concerned with here is COM(2025) 837, procedure 2025/0360(COD).

    For a while, there was an anti-tracking section of the Omnibus called Article 88b, which would have required sites and services to recognize people’s automated, machine-readable privacy choices. It would also have let people express those choices through their own software, instead of repeatedly confronting interfaces biased to allow rather than prevent unwelcome tracking.

    Alas, the Council presidency removed 88b from the Omnibus’ compromise text in June. Its explanation cited concerns about evidence and technical challenges.

    Max Schrems and noyb (which means “none of your business”) challenged the deletion of 88b:

    As part of the ‘Digital Omnibus’, the European Commission now finally wanted to get rid of cookie banners and replace them with an automated signal. However, Google and some of the very EU Member States that are actually calling on the EU to “simplify” and “cut red tape” – including Germany and France, for example – are now standing in the way. In the Council’s latest position paper of 18 June, the plan to abolish the cookie banner has been scrapped. This baffling outcome is likely to continue to cost European users a great deal of hassle, frustration and billions of clicks per year.

    That paragraph is followed by links to Google’s (formerly) secret lobbying paper and four other helpful documents:

    Added Max,

    Cookie banners are not an invention of data protection, but of the tracking industry. Without consent, there is no snooping online. Now there are fears that a simpler way of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will result in a loss of revenue for Google and the like. That is why the tracking industry is currently lobbying as hard as it can to keep the cookie banner. Clearly, it wants to retain the ability to directly manipulate users’ choices.

    On September 10, a coalition of nineteen organizations, businesses and academics, including noyb, the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), and European Digital Rights (EDRi), called for restoring a strong 88b. Their Kill the Cookie Banner campaign adds public pressure to their legislative work. Customer Commons

    noyb and the Sustainable Computing Lab are also working on a browser signal called Advanced Data Protection Control (ADPC) that goes farther than Global Privacy Control (GPC) in communicating detailed privacy choices.

    Customer Commons, which I co-founded, and on the board of which I serve, published a 7900-word submission to the EU Parliament arguing for retaining 88b and supporting contract as a lawful basis for protecting personal privacy.

    As I said in this earlier Customer Commons post, 88b by itself is not enough, because it still operates inside the old and broken consent framework. Also, from The Only Way to Get Privacy Online: No regulation to make organizations respect personal privacy will work…The only way we will get privacy is with contracts, which are laws that two parties make for themselves.

    Those contracts would also be backed by standing contract laws everywhere. No need for even more regulation.

    The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) also support automated choices as a way to make people’s decisions effective.

    It helps that we now have a standard for establishing contract-based personal privacy: IEEE 7012-2025, the Standard for Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Terms, nicknamed MyTerms. It was published in January (after nine years of work), and is available to read and download for free.

    Here is how it works:

    The possible agreements are all contracts posted on the website of a disinterested nonprofit (such as Customer Commons and MyData Global)— much as a choice of personal copyrights are posted at Creative Commons. (Which we thank for serving as a model.)

    The person, acting as the first party, proffers their choice of an agreement to a site or service (broadly called an “entity” in the standard), acting as the second party, both using agents. (These can be as simple as browser and web server plugins, or as advanced as AI agents on both sides.)

    If both sides agree, they keep identical records of their agreement, to support later auditing and support dispute resolution, if necessary. (This would typically be done using ODR: a mature discipline already working in the world.)

    If the second party declines to agree, the first party is free to keep a record of that.

    The first small collection of draft agreements is described on the MyTerms Alliance site. The alliance was created by a partnership of Customer Commons (based in the US) and MyData Global (based in the EU).

    The most basic draft agreement is SD-BASE, which stands for “services only.” This is what any of us expect when we walk into an establishment (store, church, government office) in the natural world. In none of those places do we expect to walk out covered in tracking beacons. Nor should we expect to do the same online.

    With a clear contractual commitment to personal privacy, trust becomes a cooperative fact rather than a corporate promise.

    The commercial possibilities are substantial. Companies can learn directly what customers want and what kinds of relationships they are willing to enter. Customers can express demand without submitting to surveillance. Corporate offerings can be based on first-hand knowledge rather than surveillance-based guesswork.

    We can have market intelligence that flows both ways, based on genuine rather than coercive relationships. To look down future paths MyTerms opens up for business (and much more), read what Nitin Badjatia, Iain Henderson, Jamie Smith and I have been writing about.

    The difference between what’s possible in the surveillance economy and what MyTerms enables is like the difference between mainframes and PCs, LANs and the Internet, landlines and smartphones. Or, at the most basic level, freedom and captivity.

    We will also get what I predicted in The Intention Economy: working proof that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to businesses, and to society.

    As of today, there is technical work to build on. Advanced Data Protection Control, developed by noyb and the Sustainable Computing Lab, provides a way to communicate privacy choices automatically. We can also start fitting ADPC and MyTerms together.

    The initial parliamentary amendment deadline passed in July, but Parliament has not adopted its position. The Parliament and Council must now develop their respective positions and ultimately agree on a text. There is no final adoption date (that I know of anyway).

    Our submission to Parliament and the Council makes a detailed case. We urge the co-legislators to:

    • Restore Article 88b and make individuals’ automated refusals effective.
    • Protect people’s ability to choose the software that represents them.
    • Require accountability for how signals are received and honored.
    • Ensure the framework can accommodate person-originated privacy agreements, drawing on existing work that includes MyTerms.

    If you are in the EU, find your MEP, share our submission, and ask them to support a strengthened Article 88b, while also welcoming person-originated contracts that protect privacy.

    There isn’t a better way for Europe to use its regulatory powers for the good of us all.

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  • Splatterday

    Meteor Crater in Arizona. Shot on a flight from Newark to Los Angeles in 2016.

    They need more.

    Smithsonian Magazine: An Amateur Astronomer Using Google Maps Spotted a Strange Indentation. It Turned Out to Be a Meteorite Crater From 390 Million Years Ago. That one has been added to the excellent Impact Earth crater map. I’ve shot three of those: Manicougan, Upheaval Dome, and Meteor Crater.

    No doom, no utopia

    In Jeff Jarvis’ They’re covering the wrong AI story, he says some anti-AI-doomers to trust are:

    1. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, who gave us The Weak Foundations of AI Doomsday back in May, and followed that with First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority. Excerpt: “AI doomerism borrows religious structure while denying religious content. It offers ex-believers a replacement meaning system with cosmic stakes. Now, it reconnects with organized religion in seeking broader moral authority. But this is an old playbook: a small group of believers claims it alone understands the coming apocalypse, then asks everyone else to hand it centralized control.”
    2. Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, who wrote The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence in First Monday. TESCREAL is “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism.” They also say, “the current push for AGI is driven by a set of ideologies which we label the ‘second wave’ of eugenics.” I have some thoughts about eugenics as well.

    You  tell me

    Friends and organizations I know are involved in the Pro-Human AI Coalition, which was just announced. It’s “a global effort that brings urgently needed infrastructure and resources to the work of keeping AI under human control and prioritizing public interest over corporate profit.” Should we join?

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  • Reanimating a Corpus. Or Two. Or More.

    For many years, I have despaired of ever saving the contents of my old blog (1999-2007), my writing for Linux Journal (1996-2019), and countless other articles, essays, and posts, published mostly on the Web—which looks and sounds like a permanent place (“sites,” “locations,” domains”), but in fact is a whiteboard.

    Then, last week, I asked Claude for help. I pay Anthropic $20/month* for Claude’s services (Sonnet 5 at the moment), and it successfully rescued both my old blog and every item I ever submitted to Linux Journal. They are now at searls.com

    Here’s the blog.

    Here are my Linux Journal submissions.

    There is still some missing stuff in the Linux Journal corpus, and a lot of lint to pluck out as well. But the fact that this got done at all is, for me, a freaking miracle.

    Yes, it took a lot of work, but I learned a lot of skills that I’m now leveraging on new projects that will make a future and not just re-make the past.

    I also want to thank Dave Winer for providing a .zip of my old blog (and for both inspiring and hosting it in the first place), and Jake Savin for keeping a copy of the old blog running on an old server while I kept putting off my rescue efforts.

    *I only started paying for Claude in July. I have been paying the same to OpenAI for ChatGPT’s services for a lot longer. While ChatGPT has been very helpful for many things, I’ve been told that Claude is better on projects like these two, so I gave it a whack. So far, so good.

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  • A Wham on the Moon

    The Moon has a new crater, called McGetchin. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera people have the story here. (That’s their before and after view.) NASA calls it a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Specifically,

    Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
     
    The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
     
    Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.

    So the perpetrator here was roughly the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which made a great show in the sky, caused some havoc on the ground, and left a widely scattered shower of meteor chunks.

    The atmosphere is a pretty good shield. For Earth. The Moon isn’t as lucky.

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  • Why Charlotte Should Build a Museum of Broadcasting in the Antenna Age

    WBT’s three Blaw-Knox towers and nineteen-acre transmitter site, looking toward Uptown Charlotte. Google Earth imagery: Landsat/Copernicus.

    In the foreground are three towers standing on nineteen acres in Charlotte’s south side. They transmit the signal of WBT/1110 AM, a 50,000-watt giant, with a signal that stretches from Canada to Cuba at night:

    Source: https://radiostation.info/am/north-carolina/WBT/

    WBT was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land under its towers is worth more than the signal. The property is for sale, pitched as a site for apartments or townhouses. The broker does not publish an asking price.

    As of today, programming consists of nonstop music interrupted by requests that listeners tune instead to the station’s FM signal on 107.9

    I think Charlotte should buy the WBT property and its towers—or find the persons and/or foundations that will, and make the WBT site a Museum of Broadcasting and the Antenna Age.

    Broadcasting shaped civilization for the century before we all turned digital. Nothing has both enabled and symbolized broadcasting more than antennas: towers for AM, FM, and TV, and metal whips and stubs on the receiving end.

    AM transmits using whole towers, and the most historic of those are the Blaw-Knox diamond design, emblematic of the art deco age.* Only eight still stand. Three of them are WBT’s. Built in 1934, here is how they looked when I shot them on a flight out of Charlotte in 1985:

    Two of those towers were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989—

    Source: Wikipedia

    —and replaced with identical ones, because these kinds of towers are like old lighthouses: they are too attractive and iconic to replace with structures that are merely functional. Also, like lighthouses, they deserve to be kept up after technology has moved on.

    Here is how those towers look today on Google Streetview:

    The transmitter building is also legendary, having contained, among other things, a Cold War bunker. Dig this 2013 report by WFAE, Charlotte’s public radio station:

    In fact, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, WBT was beaming pro-American propaganda to Cuba with a program called “Radio Liberty.” 

    WBT Chief Engineer Jerry Dowd has preserved that original bomb shelter with the care of a museum curator. He keeps a picture from 1963 on hand to prove it. With that photo in hand, we head downstairs into a chilly basement with government-issue green walls.

    “As you can tell, not a lot has changed,” he chuckles. “The clock has stopped.”

    Literally. At just after 6 – a.m. or p.m.? Would it even matter if an atomic bomb went off?

    Everything else still works. And the emergency supplies to keep some poor engineer alive and broadcasting for up to 60 days are still here, too.

    “We have a leftover can of survival crackers that were date coded from April 1963,” says Dowd, with a gesture to the can. “We had drinking water. The most important thing we had was the sanitation kit.”

    He picks up a cardboard bucket with a plastic donut-like lid: “It’s a porta-potty.”

    And there are giant turntables poised to broadcast the most natural of things for the end-of-times. 

    With a photo:

    I’ll bet that stuff is still there, museum-ready.

    Yes, there are good broadcast museums out there. This one could be much bigger, better, more broadly focused, and more fun. To compare—

    PlaceWhat it preservesWhat WBT would add
    National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting, OhioAn original shortwave relay-station building and transmitter, dedicated only to American shortwave, with no towers.An intact antenna field, with historic (and hopefully working) towers.
    WLW transmitter plant, OhioA historic high-power AM plant and Blaw-Knox tower, but not yet a museum.A museum designed for public access, education, and celebration of a great age
    Armstrong Tower facility, New JerseyArmstrong’s FM laboratory and towerThe broader story of AM, FM, and television broadcasting
    Texas Broadcast MuseumAn extensive collection of broadcast equipmentLand and infrastructure on which broadcasting history happened

    A museum at WBT could begin with Charlotte’s own history and grow outward to encompass all of AM, FM, and TV broadcasting. The original building could explain (and perhaps demonstrate, if it keeps the signal going) WBT and high-power AM. Its emergency facilities could tell the Cold War story. As other stations retire equipment, the museum could give some of it a home.

    The whole thing could (and should!) be interactive: the kind of place kids and scholars of all ages won’t want to leave. Models include St. Louis City Museums, Minneapolis’ Mill City Museum, Pittsburgh’s Carrie Blast Furnaces, Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, Los Angeles’ new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Detroit’s Motown Museum, Boston’s Museum of Science, among others.

    We’re talking here about a destination museum. Let’s give people a reason for coming to Charlotte that isn’t business meetings or ball games.

    The towers would be the biggest and most obvious attraction, but there is room enough in nineteen acres for a park where kids can run around, and everyone can appreciate why broadcast radio needed so much room. And for parking!

    Charlotte’s N2-B district allows multifamily housing. A museum would be classified as a cultural facility and require a change in the property’s permitted uses. A buyer could ask for a conditional rezoning that spells out the museum, park, parking, educational work, and preservation work. Since this would be a major Charlotte Thing, it’s a challenge worth taking on.

    The main challenge is finding funding for purchase and development. My own guess is that the property would go for a few million dollars. There are countless pockets and purses much deeper than that, in the pants of people and institutions that value history and like to preserve legacies before they are lost forever.

    Charlotte has long been one of America’s top banking centers. There also isn’t a shortage of civic-minded philanthropies: Foundation for the Carolinas, The Leon Levine Foundation, the Arts & Science Council, Duke Energy Foundation. Foundation For The Carolinas seems most relevant to me. Its Inspiring Places (see the home page) should include the new Broadcasting Museum.

    Charlotte can build another apartment complex anywhere. Here it can stand up something found nowhere else: a museum where people can experience the scale and importance of broadcasting, the dedication of its pioneers and workers—and the fun one can have understanding it—before it falls into digital dust.

    The time to do this is now. Towers are falling everywhere. (WMAL in Washington. WKIX in Raleigh. WECT-TV in Wilmington-Fayetteville. WMVP in Chicago. WMID in Atlanic City. KHJ in Los Angeles. WKRG-TV in Mobile. And yesterday, WSLC in Roanoke. Among countless others.) Unlike the rest, WBT’s towers are museum-quality treasures, worthy of preservation and celebration. Just for starters.

    Oh, and we have a working model of a legacy station that’s a museum on the air: WSM/650. The station that gave the Grand Ole Opry to Nashville and Country Music to the world persists today as a working example of Radio Done Right. When you visit their website, note how the main animated background image is their own Blaw-Knox diamond tower. WBT has three of those, and can stay on the air as a living historical beacon of good radio—however one chooses to define it. The possibilities are endless, and the opportunity is huge.

    Take it, Charlotte.

    *Art Deco was expressed in bold, geometric forms: chevrons, rhombuses, zigzags, tapering pyramids. The Blaw-Knox double-conical diamond tower profile, with narrow points at both ends, uses Art Deco visual vocabulary to express what lattice towers, whether guyed or self-supporting, cannot. Like the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, these towers spoke of power and optimism: Eiffel-grade expressions of the best industrial aesthetic of their time.

    Art Deco was also as much an embrace of machine-age industrial technology as it was an architectural and artistic expression. Structures from the era were styled to look like machines, while machines were styled to look dynamic and futuristic. (Recall how steam engines were for a few years wrapped in smooth metal cowling to appear “streamlined.” That was Art Deco too.)

    Blaw-Knox diamond towers were all commissioned during the height of Art Deco’s expression in American public life and architecture. All were built as high-profile flagship investments by major broadcasting entities (chief among them WSM, WLW, and WBT) to project a modern image while maximizing technical achievement. (It was thought at the time that diamond towers radiated waves more optimally than straight guyed or tapered self-supporting towers.)

    In newspaper stories, posters, and other visual media of the 1930s, radio was symbolized by lightning bolts, concentric geometric waves—and stylized diamond towers. Blaw-Knox towers, including WBT’s, were the real-world embodiment of those graphic design motifs expressing what radio was, and meant. (Find many examples in Broadcasting Magazine and Broadcasting Yearbook in the 1930s and 1940s.)

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  • Linkalongday

    War prep redux

    Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since then, while flying overhead, usually en route from Los Angeles or Santa Barbara to Denver or other places on the far side of the desert southwest. I'll look for some and see what changes have developed.

    As you've noticed

    Business Insider: The streamers that make you watch the most ads — and the ones with the fewest. Excerpt:

    Ad minutes per hour rose 18% on top streamers in the US from January to August, according to data from entertainment research firm Ampere Analysis shared exclusively with Business Insider.

    Move along. Nothing to see here.

    Steven Vaughan-Nichols in Computerworld: Judge spares Google’s ad-tech business from a breakup. Excerpt:

    To quote Laurel Kilgour, research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly, nonprofit group: “Judges keep finding Google guilty, but Google keeps walking away with both its ill-gotten gains and its empire intact. Without actual structural remedies, antitrust rulings are just inconvenient speed bumps that allow Google to lock down search and ad tech markets today while using that same unchecked power to monopolize tomorrow’s AI frontier.”

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  • Nextings

    The three towers of WBT/1110 in Charlotte, which I shot on departure from CLT in 1986. They were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and rebuilt with the same design. Today the station and its land await buyers, and the towers are the subject of preservation efforts.

    See them while you can

    As I’ve been writing about at length on my Trunkline blog, broadcast towers are both a lifelong preoccupation of mine, and (like all of us) doomed in the long run. That’s because high-bandwidth wireless digital tech doesn’t require them. (Yes, over-the air broadcasting may be with us forever, but on the long tail of an asymptotic curve.)

    But a few are beautiful enough to preserve. Specifically (and perhaps exclusively) deserving of preservation are Blaw-Knox “diamond” towers: ones that are wide in the middle and pointed at the ends. Designed and built in the 1930s, they are contemporaneous with, if not exemplary of, the art deco movement.

    Tallest of the survivors is the Lakihegyi tower in Hungary. It is also preserved. The famous ones in the US transmit the signals of WSM/650 in Nashville, WLW/700 in Cincinnati, and WBT/1110 in Charlotte. WSM and WLW are both functioning stations, and their towers are too iconic to lose. But WBT is now just broadcasting music interrupted by announcements that its programming is now only on FM. The transmitter site is for sale, and presumably its three Blaw-Knox towers with it.

    Preservation efforts are in the works. See here. I think it’s a long shot. The owners have made clear that the signal has no economic value. That it covers the whole east coast at night is interesting, but with AM being abandoned by listeners, no longer useful. The towers will need to be maintained (preservation isn’t cheap), and with no use other than standing as landmarks, a cost for whoever or whatever maintains them. Even if only one of them stands, the cost is still there. So I’m betting they will be gone not long after the land sells.

    Others diamond towers still standing are WBNS/1460 in Columbus, Ohio, and WFEA/1370 in Manchester, New Hamphire. My guess is that neither will outlive their licenses.

    My shots of WLW and WFEA are here and here.

    On AI building us, and maybe killing us

    I posted What does the Internet make of us? seven years and one day ago. I’d be inclined to write a new one about what AI is making of us if I could see AI’s full import better than I could see what the Internet was doing to us in 2019.

    But I can’t. None of us can. We are boating on the AI tsunami and can’t see solid ground in any direction. But we can build bigger and better boats out of stuff we find floating on the surface. And some of what we can do is freaking miraculous.

    For years I have put off rescuing eight years of writing on my old (1999-2007) blog, which would require turning it, by hand, into thousands of pages of static HTM. But yesterday Claude converted all of it in minutes, and together we’re standing it up again on my own server at Searls.com (which also needs work with which I am getting AI help).

    In a similar way, I am standing up browser, server, and website products and services required to make what I have been waiting here since 2006 for others to build. (Many have tried. Hats off. Now it’s my turn.)

    But maybe AI really is an apocalyptic threat, and we’ll never find solid ground if we’re always floating on it. The Daily podcast today is an interview with Jacob Coxon, who just got instant fame for posting a warning about the future of AI. If you want to skip forward gto the scary part, start listening at around 19 minutes in.

    Oliver Willis has a good Q&A explaining what Coxon is talking about.

    None of that visits who Coxon is, other than a young former employee of OpenAI and Anthropic. His accent sounds Oxbridge to me (but not “received pronunciation“), run through some kind of auto-tune. It’s interesting.

    Anyway, his case is better than I expected. Worth a listen.

    Catch it while you still can

    Of likely interest only to Santa Barbarians is news that Roy is closing. For many years Roy has been the good restaurant that stays open to midnight. Food was good too. Still is.

    Reason for smiling

    A thousand Internet years ago, perhaps as far back as the last millennium, I was walking to my hotel room at an event (in Monterey, I think), when on the opposite sidewalk walked a young woman carrying a violin case and wearing a huge smile for no obvious reason. Later she performed, and knocked the audience out. she was Ann Marie Calhoun, and I recommend checking her out.

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  • Boomerangday

    There were whole forests of these, along the Wabash River in Southern Indiana. So, of course, humans harvested all of them.

    Just the Anthropocene, rolling along

    The photo above was shared in a group I’m in. It  was photographed by ornithologist and naturalist Robert Ridgway in November 1875. The tree is identified as an American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) in the lower Wabash River bottoms of Gibson County, Indiana, across the river from Mount Carmel, Illinois, Ridgeway’s home town. He recorded a diameter above the trunk swell of 10 by 15 feet, a height near 160 feet, and a crown spread of over 134 feet. This made it one of the largest trees recorded in North America outside of California.

    While the land under this tree and others like it was likely cleared for farming, the ~7.8 million board feet of lumber consumed per year at its peak by the Showers Brothers Furniture Company (largest of its kind in the world, it was claimed) here in Bloomington also contributed mightily to deforestation of southern Indiana in the early decades of the last century. Here’s how Showers Brothers looked in its prime:

    Bloomington’s City Hall is in what’s left of this vast building. If that’s the railroad in the foreground, I believe it is the right corner, above the red dot. Our house a bit behind the aerial point of view.

    Bayard Rush Hall describes the before-and-after of forest clearing in his time. So does this.

    By the way, we support the Sycamore Land Trust, which is restoring and protecting these kinds of trees, and much else.

    That was quick

    Techcrunch says Matt Mullenweg is back in charge of Automattic. That’s behind a trackwall, so I’ll go with Mary Hubbard’s tweet:

    I’m relieved and pleased to see Matt Mullenweg return as CEO of Automattic, the largest financial contributor to the WordPress project. Having WordPress’s Co-founder and Project Lead at the helm gives me confidence that their support will remain strong. Matt has my support.

    Good cure for optimism

    Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, is shorting a bunch of AI stocks. On September 5th, he wrote, “Today is the AI extended version of the bubble that did not burst like it should have in 2021. It will be a doozy when it comes down.”

    Axios: AI’s most powerful CEOs hit the brakes. Led by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.

    Cory: LLMs are real, AI is fake.

    Or just read anything by Gary Marcus.

    The anti-AI (and especially anti-data-center) narratives (the new word for stories) are many and widely held, while the guys (they’re all guys) running the shows have no counter-narratives. And the only person who seems to be for endless AI progress is Donald Trump.

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  • AI as a Teacher of Athletes

    A violinist entertains Linus Torvalds and Paul Kunz on the Linux Journal Geek Cruise where I shot this photo 23 years ago. Linus and Paul are two athletes whose work has taught the world well.

    On the whole, AI writing is good. Yes, I’ve called it “AutoTune for the human kind” and “fancy blah.” Claudio Nastruzzi called it “semantic ablation.” But Big AI’s grammar, styling, and prose still tends to beat the shit out of the ways most people write. Does that have to be a bad thing?

    Nearly all of what ChatGPT and Claude write for me (usually without my asking first) isn’t as good as what I write on my own. If I use any of it, I completely rewrite it. But once in a while one of the damned things will produce a sentence that is clearly what I mean, and says better than what I was about to say. I don’t like that, but I do appreciate it.

    There are a few vivid lines in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself that I think describe what Big AI does for everyone’s writing—and we do for its writing as well:

    I am the teacher of athletes.
    He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
    proves the width of my own.
    He most honors my style
    who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

    Big AI’s writing style in some ways resembles mine: contrasty prose, one-line paragraphs, clever headlines, em dashes, blurb-ready one-liners. It also spreads a wider breast than mine—and of every other professional writer—by many miles, because it is trained on damn near everything we’ve ever written.

    The other day Claude came up with a better headline for what we’re trying to do with MyTerms than any I had been generating with my own head. You can see it atop the MyTerms page on this blog, and on the one at Customer Commons. Here it is:

    We can’t not use it, because it does the job too well. When I show either page to people I’ve meet at social gatherings who want to know what we’re up to, they get it, instantly. 

    Am I destroyed by that? No, but I’m improved. AI’s instruction by example (in this case) or in procedural ways (such as by walking me though a tech support challenge—usually better than the product’s maker) have improved me, every damn time.

    And who is being destroyed here? Is it me teaching an AI that honors my style, or an AI that learns better writing constantly from the humans who train it?

    Or how about the old educational system? The old tech support system? The old business office system?

    In Laws of Media, Eric and Marshall McLuhan teach that every new medium (including every new tech) does four things: retrieve, enhance, obsolesce, and reverse. They call this a tetrad, which they illustrate this way:

    Big AI retrieves all digitizable (and already digitized) human expression, enhances what we do with it, obsolesces much of it, and reverses into semantic ablation, fancy blah, hallucination (better word: bullshit), fakery on a grand scale, giant unwelcome data centers, vain oligarchs who can no longer read the world’s rooms, and much else.

    I think one challenge (among many) for us is making the most of how Big AI mirrors (also distorts, amplifies, and other-verbs) our collective whole. Maybe the challenge for both humanity and AI is to leverage Whitman in our time. From the concluding passages in Song of Myself:

    Each man and woman of you I lead upon a knoll.
    My left hand hooks you about the waist,
    My right hand points to landscapes and continents,
    and a plain public road.

    Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you.
    You must travel it for yourself.

    It is not far. It is within reach.
    Perhaps you have been on it since you were born
    and did not know.
    Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

    Shoulder your duds, and I will mine,
    and let us hasten forth.

    If you tire, give me both burdens and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip.
    And in due time you shall repay the same service to me.

    Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams.
    Now I wash the gum from your eyes.
    You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

    Long have you timidly waited,
    holding a plank by the shore.
    Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
    To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again,
    and nod to me and shout,
    and laughingly dash your hair…

    Do I contradict myself?
    Very well then. I contradict myself.
    I am large. I contain multitudes…

    The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
    He complains of my gab and my loitering.

    I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
    I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

    The last scud of day holds back for me.
    It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any
    on the shadowed wilds,
    It coaxes me to the vapor and the desk.

    I depart as air.
    I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.
    I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift in lacy jags.

    I bequeath myself to the dirt and grow
    from the grass I love.
    If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.

    You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
    But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
    And filtre and fiber your blood.

    Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged.
    Missing me one place search another
    I stop some where waiting for you.

    All of humanity, in addition to Walt Whitman, is now under AI’s bootsoles, and ours as well.

    But we, not AI, are human. It is humans that Whitman calls to be wild, free, and untranslatable.

    Eric McLuhan one told me that almost nothing is ever completely obsolesced. We still have steam power. We still have handwriting. We will always have music, and other arts that only humans can create and re-create.

    Last Wednesday I went to hear Mark Kaplan, Kyung Sun Lee, Atar Arad, Stephen Wyrczynski, and Brandon Vamos play Beethoven’s String Trio in E-Flat Major, Op. 3 and Mozart’s String Quintet in C Major, K.515 in Auer Hall at the Jacobs School of Music here at Indiana University. The experience wasn’t just perfect. It was amazing, transcendent.

    No AI, and no robot (no matter how human it appears) could ever be those musicians, or do what those musicians do. It also cannot be or make any of their instruments. Nor could any AI give us a better Beethoven or Mozart. But could it help students of those musicians? Or luthiers wishing to become another Stradivari or Guarneri? I think probably.

    I’m not a writer whose skills approach the ever-perfecting levels of those musicians, or of the great writers whose works improve me every time I read them. But I do learn from Big AI, constantly. And I look forward eagerly to when all of us have personal AIs of our own that we can teach, while they teach us as well.

    Context: We are all both biological and digital now.

    As biological beings, we are mortals whose best loves and works outlive us whether we know it or not. Fr. Seán Ó’laoire, my old friend, priest, and shrink, calls us spirits in space suits. I share his optimism—for both ourselves and for what we make, including AI.

    While we have been biological for the duration, we have been digital for not very long: maybe since we started being copeless without our phones. How long has that been? Less than two decades, tops. (The first iPhone and Androids came out in 2007.) And we will remain digital for many decades, centuries, and millennia to come.

    The older I get, the earlier it seems.

    I’m a born optimist, and have been one for going on 80 years, which it turns out is a very short time. (I’m still shocked by that. Bodies shouldn’t wear out, should they? But they do. Biology wins, and that’s not a bad thing.) I’ve seen and participated in many tech revolutions: automatic transmissions, air conditioning, FM radio, personal computing, the Internet and the Web, Smartphones and tablets, digital photography and video, fiber and Wi-Fi, cellular telephony and data, ubiquitous connectivity.

    Now it’s AI, and soon—inevitably—we will have personal AI that is entirely ours and not provisioned through suction cups on corporate tentacles.

    After that happens, I expect that The Cluetrain Manifesto, ProjectVRM, and The Intention Economy will all prove out, though likely not in the ways I’ve imagined or forecast. Same with MyTerms, which I expect will activate all three of those. But I don’t know. Faith is evidence of the unseen, St. Paul (or somebody) said. So I go on that, or change my mind. (I contain multitudes, and they argue.)

    I do know that all forms of tech, from stone tools to AI, are genies that grant uncountable wishes. They also, as Marshall McLuhan taught, shape us after we shape them. Digital tech plus the Internet are the greatest shapers of humanity since whatever evolutionary circumstances made us walk upright, think, speak, and make tools. AI is the latest and greatest family of products and services engendered by digital tech and the Internet.

    Let’s be athletes who make sure our best wishes for AI are the ones that win.

    , , , , , , , , ,

  • Fraturday

    Via Jane Baines on Substack.

    John Venn has the perfect historical marker.

    Cory Doctorow makes sense of wtf is happening with AI.

    The Indiana Hoosiers football team, still-undefeated national champs (17-0 including last year and this one) take on the Howard Bison today at noon. I’ll be watching. (It’s on Fox One.)

    How Tony Pierce’s busblog took off on 9/11.

    I just added my thoughts to these thoughts by Eduardo Ordax. Said he,

    My biggest concern about AI? That we all start sounding and thinking exactly the same.
    We spend so much time talking about AI alignment. I worry about how much we’re aligning ourselves with it.
    Same words. Same ideas. Same “unique perspectives.”
    And scrolling through LinkedIn, I feel like it’s already happening. 😂
    I want AI to help me develop my thinking. I’m less excited about outsourcing what makes it mine.

    Commented I,

    How services trained on everybody and everything make everybody sound like everybody and as if they know everything about everything.

    , ,

  • The Day After

    USGS: “This true-color image was taken by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensor aboard the Landsat 7 satellite on September 12, 2001, at roughly 11:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time. A day after the attack, smoke continues to billow out of the collapsed Twin Towers.”

    There was far more, and often better, processing of what we hadn’t yet named 9/11 in the days that followed. Here is my own blog, twenty-five years ago today. Again, this is reverse-chronological. My learnings and writings that day go from bottom to top.

    Wednesday, September 12, 2001

    Blog bloat

    Up to almost 4400 visits today. Wednesday is usually the peak day of the week, but is way past the average — and almost a third what it hit when I got Slashdotted.

    Anyway, thanks.

    Living up to his nickname

    As soon we saw the news yesterday morning we began to worry about our friend David “Save” Alper. I knew he worked somewhere in one of the World Trade Center towers, but we hadn’t talked in a couple months and I wasn’t sure. Joyce and I began to worry when calls to his apartment in New York kept going to a machine. His wife Susan (an old and dear friend through whom we met and got to know Save) seemed to be out too, and their absence began to acquire ominous significance. (Though not so much for Joyce, whose intuition told her Save was safe.)

    This afternoon while I was out on errands, I became increasingly sure David had been in one of the buildings. But was he safe?

    David/Save is one of the most alive people I know. He a big, loud, passionate, lovable, larger-than-life New Yawk kinda guy. It’s almost impossible to imagine him gone.

    When I got home a few minutes ago, Joyce said she finally got a call from him. His story, which I would love to put up here later in long form, was amazing.

    Here’s the short version… He worked on the 84th floor of Building Two. When the plane hit Building One, he and his co-workers began to work their way down the stairs, including stairs through the floors that were destroyed when the second plane hit that very building. By that time, however, they were out and blocks away. Apparently the evacuation was as orderly as a fire drill — until the worst finally happened.

    I just did a search of my own email archives and came up with a perfect picture of Save, looking like the fun guy he is:

    [photo: lwe2001.jpg — Doc and Save]

    That’s me on the left. (By the way, we’re both Davids with nicknames whose wives call us David.)

    Anyway, this is just tremendous news.

    But it’s far from over. I still have other friends whose silence gets more eerie by the minute.

    Dysconversation

    I won’t point fingers, but I will observe that petty rectitudes are starting to jam the flow of altruistic conversation and useful information that might save lives and change minds. So here’s an appeal to give a smaller shit about whatever it was that bothered each of us before the hate hit the buildings — and whatever politics and moral defaults we may have had before we were hit with a flash flood of fresh information and unwelcome questions.

    And yes, I am speaking about my own (privately much-criticized) Pacifism along with everybody else’s Whatevers.

    Just one New York state of mind

    David Williams writes (and I reprint with permission):

    I live/work on the Island (Long) and luckily, no one that we know of was lost…

    I am reminded of an old friend, David Dellinger (Chicago 8/7 conspiracy trial-1969)… He is a pacifist… He understands that there are evil people who do evil things… but could never bring himself to raise a gun and take another’s life. He spent one year and one day in a maximum security prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces… (Is this courageous? At any point, he could have said “yeah, I’ll go” and been out of it. He wasn’t afraid of dying, he was afraid of what killing another would do to him.)

    I am a young man, but I have seen how history is recursive, and how our actions sometimes come back to haunt future generations…

    A caller on the radio station which I listen to in the mornings on the way to work said (paraphrased)

    “We never were so intentionally cruel to the innocent, so joyful in their pain”… I begged to remind her of My Lai (spelling?), and the rape and pillage of Vietnam villages, under order, by US soldiers…

    Our country has been so intentionally cruel.

    I hear the “we took precautions in Iraq” line, and I remember a few facts:

    – We put Saddam Hussein in power.

    – We did nothing to prevent the genocide of the Kurds during or after the war.

    We, too, can be evil.

    Does that mean that I am not devastated by this loss?

    Fuck, I’m angry.

    But what is justice? With all of our “smart-bombs” and initiatives in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is still in power. All of the people we killed, all of the country’s infrastructure that sustains life destroyed, and we MISSED him.

    What are we going to do? Attack the Middle East, with a rightful vengeance that only a wronged people can muster? Attack them, and kill them, and show them what real terrorism is? Show them how it is done, and why not to “fuck with us” anymore?

    And meanwhile, let’s make sure that we show them “Business as usual”, flights in the air the next day…

    “You don’t scare us”… We should be scared. 4 Airplanes were hi-jacked with the same cardboard box opening knives that I was issued when I worked for the Wholesale Club…. It could have been 20, if they had wanted… Without some effective thought on whether we can prevent it again, we are going to launch X number of bombs back into the air, with the hopes that we catch the hijackers this time? All so that they realize that our “dicks” are bigger than theirs?

    It is assinine.

    Anyway, there’s my .02

    Worth a bit more than that, I’d reckon.

    Pictures speak clearer than words

    The clearest multimedia depiction of the terrorist flight paths and impact angles is in Spanish. Gracias to Kottke for the link.

    Thoughts

    From Peter Kaminski’s Wiki:

    Here’s a long piece by R.W. Apple Jr. in the New York Times.

    Also a good piece by David Beers, in Salon. The next feeling, after I was sickened by watching the WTC collapse on live TV yesterday, was the loss of what Beers calls “the psychology of immunity.” With that psychology, I gladly fly. For now, I’ve lost that. So have uncounted others. Terrorism at work.

    Here’s more from my sister, excerpted from an email:

    As our parents came of age with the Great Depression and were tempered into adulthood by the Second World War, we were born into the world of Nuclear destruction, came of age with Kennedy’s assassination, and were tempered into our adulthood by Vietnam, will today’s youth see this as their crucible? Or is this just a turning point into the world they are inheriting? Is this the Pandora’s box for them as the Bomb was for us? Once opened, it can never be closed; it is a reality that they will always live with?

    Oh God, I hope not. I pray not. But I fear so.

    But may this also be the fire that fuses us into the nation we can be, the world we can be. Like it did after the Depression and WWII, strength can come out of strife, heroism out of horror and hope out of Hell. May we be up to the test. May the world be with us.

    And the always vivid Michael Moore, with a dozen quotable lines.

    Meanwhile I wonder how much of the news isn’t getting out because Reuters had a Data Center in the WTC. Much, perhaps most, of the raw news that goes out on the world’s media comes up through Reuters or the Associated Press.

    Maybe with a la carte micropayments for streamed content, we could get this kind of stuff full time

    Adam points out that yesterday’s attack knocked Entertainment off the air, at least in those media that retain a sense of Serious Responsibility. I have to say it was comforting as well as informative to watch coverage from the major networks that not only displaced entertainment programming, but was uninterrupted by advertising.

    Surreality check

    Here’s Eric Norlin on the delta between war rhetoric and tactical action:

    …the response will be swift, distributed and — if my hunches are right — nothing like a war. People are taking this “act of war” statement as some indication that we’re deploying, etc. It could mean something entirely different (my opinion). It could mean a return to certain Cold War tactics within the covert operations of the intelligence community. It could mean rescinding Reagan’s Presidential decree that made it illegal for us to assassinate foreign leaders. It could mean a return to power for the CIA — an organization that had lost most of its muscle to the NSA as of late. Just a thought…

    Guess I’m one of those “people.”

    Expressing appreciation

    RageBoy reports: “Dunkin’ Donuts has made its entire product line available at no charge to the U.S. law enforcement community.” RB will be on NPR’s Marketplace tomorrow morning, by the way. Talking fashion, of all things.

    Opposing views

    My most persistent correspondent sends a story from the Jerusalem Post titled Sephardi chief rabbi to Muslims: Rescind suicide ruling. It begins:

    Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron today called on the Islamic clerics who have published fatwas (religious rulings) ordering suicide-bombings and declaring the bombers shahid (martyrs), “to rescind the order and to call on the world to preserve the sanctity of life, and to forbid large-scale attacks on innocent civilians,” in a statement released this morning.

    He adds:

    Are these the Palestinians that you love.

    You maybe looking for peace, but they are looking for war.

    Appeasing terrorists and people who support and harbor them does not lead to peace, it leads to war.

    Think in terms of life and death and not war and peace.

    We want to promote life, sometimes that involves declaring war on those who support death.

    He also writes, You should consider whether your implied policy of appeasement is not in fact helping their cause. Doc, please think before you post.

    I do think. I just don’t think the same way as those who conflate terrorism with entire countries or faiths. We can thank that kind of thinking for what happened yesterday.

    I also thank this same correspondent for sharing this story from Yahoo Asia about a Cairo citizenry apparently approving of yesterday’s attack: “The Americans are cowards. They use other countries to hit us. They don’t have the courage to meet us face to face,” said Khalil Matar, 43, who works in a state-run soap factory. “The myth of the indestructible United States has gone up in smoke.”

    In that context war came home to us in the U.S. for the first time. If we think of the Gulf War as one that started under Bush the Elder and continues under Bush the Younger, yesterday’s destruction in the U.S. can also be seen as vengeance for allies’ “Highway of Death” strike against the Iraqi retreat near the end of the war. For the opposing view on that matter, see the links here and here.

    Are we ready for more terror? Do we have any faith it can be prevented? Do we trust an administration so pickled in cold-war thinking that it would put billions into missile defense against unexpressed threats, rather than more thinking into why expressed threats are all too real — and backed by popular support, even among the populace of “moderate” countries like Egypt?

    These are times when the easy answers are also the most suspicious. This isn’t a “war between good and evil,” or between “those who love freedom” and fill-in-the-blank. It’s the hostile expression of collapsed distinctions, mostly between innocent populations and a hated few.

    Yes, let’s think before we post. But let’s also urge our leaders to think before they act, and to listen before they think — and to listen with extra attention to the unwelcome and unfamiliar voices.

    It’s the only way we will ever learn the whole reason why so many of our friends and loved ones died yesterday.

    One degree

    Now the silences take ominous meaning. We leave messages with friends in New York and hear back nothing. Understandable, we think … but the worst possibility is far too plausible.

    We’re all waiting for the dead, for passenger lists that consist of entire companies: law firms, brokerage houses, trade organizations, investment banks, technology shops…

    And we watch the talking heads on television, talking about “the need for disproportionate response” as the “only way to respond to terrorism.” Even Colin Powell.

    Terrorism isn’t war. Terrorism is few against many. War is tribe against tribe, nation against nation. Lately — certainly since World War II — whole cities have become legitimate targets in the mathematics of war. London, Dresden, Hiroshima. Persuasive disproportion.

    Are we at war with Afghanistan, then? For our disproportionate response will we kill thousands in the world’s most wretched country, where a million children are dying already, just to waste a few dozen or hundred sneaky terrorists? This is what we contemplate when we talk about war.

    One sigh, one life

    Our cousin who works for the Pentagon is okay. She was out of town. That leaves dozens of others we know. Perhaps hundreds. Joyce’s sister just returned from a meeting with investment bankers in the World Trade Center. She now assumes that most or all of them are gone.

    Well, we’re not ready for him to die

    Here’s Kevin Jamieson on his own Big Question. Among others.

    I first met Kevin on the Cluetrain list, where he was a wise voice of reason, equanimity and good humor. Until I gathered otherwise, I thought he was a grizzled old dude like myself. But he isn’t.

    With guys like Kevin around, the country will be in good hands for another generation. But for now those hands are, like all of ours, gripping the tops of our own shaking heads.

    What happened?

    President Bush called yesterday’s events “an attack on freedom.” His statements throughout the day, like those of many I heard on the news, were full of patriotic bluster and promises of vengeance. Of course this is pro forma stuff, required to “reassure the nation” and all that. But can we trust the premises?

    We don’t even know who did this stuff yet. We also don’t know what motivated them. Whatever it was, I’ll bet it didn’t have jack to do with “freedom.” It probably had everything to do with America’s support for Israel, which has always had its dangers.

    One email I received yesterday said this:

    I am curious about one thing, at any time today, did you ever hear anyone say anything as to what is it that the American people have done to incur such hatred, etc? What policy, what goal, what course have we followed? Did anyone attempt to hold a mirror up for us to reflect on our behavior and whether we contributed at all to this madness?

    I have this fear that we will pursue a course of right wing extremism that will ignore the underlying causes that seem to feed and support Mr. Bin Laden. Instead we will increase security, buy more cops, more laws, fewer civil liberties, maybe an anti-missile defense, and do nothing for hunger, suffering, health care, housing, etc. I have always figured that if the Palestinians all had three bed room two bath houses and cars they would be throwing far fewer rocks, and not providing suicide pilots.

    But we don’t know.

    What we should know is that this thing has a context. What is it?

    Like many who have written to me, I also fear we’ll slip into a fortress mentality without any idea exactly what or who we’re defending against. Today some chesty official on TV said “Your military is ready!” And I thought, “For what?” As Daniel Shorr put it on NPR, the attack on Pearl Harbor “had a return address.” This attack was bigger, and didn’t.

    Yet it was highly effective. Our country was all but shut down, our president was on the run and everybody was talking about war without knowing who the enemy was.

    The President’s eventual words of assurance and steely resolve didn’t convince me of anything other than his need to express them — and our need to hear them as well.

    As my sister put it, yesterday’s events call for us to be leaders of the sane world. To be sane, you have to be in touch with reality. If we think this is another Pearl Harbor, we’re not even close to it.

    Rational reactions

    I’m impressed at the level-headedness and rationality of the ex-military and ex-national security folks I know. My sister, a retired U.S. Navy commander, wrote me an email this morning that contained many wise words, including one of the best lines I’ve read on this whole matter: We have been called the leaders of the Free World. We now must show ourselves to also be the leader of the Sane world. I’m not sure Eric Norlin’s response to ESR’s “First Lesson” falls in the same category, being a rant and all, but I trust that he knows what he’s talking about, having served for years as an NSA spook of some sort.

    And if you can’t give blood (or already have), give money

    Amazon has made it easy to donate to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. Thanks to RageBoy Himself for both links.

    Afterwords:::

    Lots of link-rot in a quarter-century. On behalf of reality, I apologize for those. We didn’t think the Web was a whiteboard back then. Now we know. When I have time I’ll dig down in the Internet Archive, and replace the dead links with resurrected ones. Alas, my own original blog, which ran from 1999 to 2007, is not in the Archive.

    Nice to see Chris Locke, aka RageBoy, mentioned often in this. We lost him in 2021 and I still miss him today.

    ,

  • Remembering 9/11

    My original blog on 9/11/2001, twenty-five years ago. In the tradition of that time, the chronology is LIFO. I started writing after midnight at our home in Montecito, California, hours before the planes struck the buildings. I woke up when my sister called a bit before 6 AM Pacific, right after the first plane struck the North tower. She said, “Turn on your TV. Now!” I watched, and blogged the below as the day went on. My first entry was A time for love and mourning. Read up from there.

    Tuesday, September 11, 2001

    Stars. Just stars.

    Walking back from a meeting at school this evening, the kid and I looked up at the sky, as always. But it was … different. What was that behind the high branches of an Oak tree? A star or an — no, it couldn’t be an airplane. There were no airplanes in the sky tonight. Only stars: a condition we haven’t seen in nearly a century.

    “Why aren’t the planes flying, Papa?” he asked. I explained. He asked again. I explained again. I stopped the questioning when the count got to four.

    But it won’t stop.

    What’s down?

    I get a steady flow of email, up to hundreds per day. But after 5:13 tonight, nothing. Is it just that everybody’s watching CNN now? No idea. Seems creepy.

    More perspective

    Here’s Morgan Stanley, which had 3500 people working in the World Trade Center:

    Because of the enormous emotional and physical toll that these events have taken and will take among many of our employees and their families…

    Close to home

    We just lost power for a few minutes. No idea why.

    One answer

    Here’s Eric S. Raymond on our “First Lessons” about terrorism.

    Ironytrack

    Dean points out that today the United Nations opens in New York on the International Day of Peace.

    Blogtracks

    Here are Blogger sites mentioning “World Trade” or “terrorist.”

    How?

    BBC says the pilots would surely have been killed first, since they would never follow orders to fly into a building. I notice that all four planes involved were 757s and 767s, which have roughly identical cockpits.

    Odd how we mull details like these to get a small grip on an immense tragedy. Right now I don’t even want food. Just details.

    Now it gets personal

    Our West Coast family members check in fine. One is in Ohio, and will probably drive home to L.A. So far we’re lucky. East Coast, not so sure. I have a cousin who works in the Pentagon. My sister is a retired Navy officer, recently moved from Arlington to North Carolina. “I lost friends today,” she tells me. But who? So far we also don’t know very much about who lived, who died, who’s lost, trapped or worse.

    Dave points to a press release reporting the death of Danny Lewin. He was on the American flight from New York to Los Angeles that crashed into the World Trade Center. I didn’t know Danny, but I’ve met him. He was a good guy. According to his bio, he was also a member of the Israeli Defense Forces. I imagine he would have done his best, as a passenger, to stop this thing.

    And there were so many others lost today. So many families waiting, right now, for loved ones to call, to show up at the door.

    The deepest human substance

    Now is the time to give blood, not take it. Wherever you are, please give some. For New York, call 1 800 933-blood or visit http://nybloodcenter.org/.

    Declaration of Peace

    One of the surprising things to me about blogging is how much I don’t say. I tend to be a very disclosing guy, but if anything I tend to disclose less personal stuff than I ever thought I would have when I started this thing in 1999.

    But today I’ll tell you where I come from on the matter of war.

    I am a pacifist. I applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, and I would have served in that capacity if I hadn’t received a medical deferment.

    I went to a Quaker college, and have always felt most at home, philosophically and morally, with the Society of Friends. Although I currently attend a Catholic Church, my beliefs are the same.

    What happened today brings out the pacifist in me, and the linguist as well. Just about everything we believe, and say, is framed up by conceptual metaphors. In the words of George Lakoff, written at the height of the Gulf War, metaphors can kill.

    We have a choice about the ones we use. For the sake of those still with us, and the souls of those we’ve lost, choose your conceptual frameworks carefully.

    Perspective

    We hear that 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center alone. Consider these numbers:

    4,435 U.S. soldiers died in the Revolutionary War, and another 2,260 in the War of 1812. Including civilians, 373,458 died in the Civil War. 53,513 combat deaths in World War I, plus 63,195 “other.” 292,131 combat deaths in World War II, plus 115,185 “other.” 33,651 combat deaths in the Korean War (no “other” listed). 47,369 combat deaths in the Vietnam War, and 10,799 “other.” And for the Gulf war, the respective numbers were 148 and 145.

    Here’s another summary.

    Loverolling

    Zeldman. Dean. Adam. Dave. Cam, Eric, Akamai. Richard. Brent. Susan. Grant. East/West. Ultrasparky. Queso. Kottke. Meg. Metafilter. Ev. Glenn. Scoble.

    I need to pick up the kid from school soon. This morning he wanted to know why his parents were crying. We couldn’t begin to explain.

    Open choices

    What happened today may have been an act of war, but it was also an act of insanity.

    Many people we know are dead. Many more are dying. This is a time to open our hearts, our homes, our wallets and our minds.

    There is only one sane choice open to us all: What can we do to help?

    If there is anything you think I can do, let me know. I just added AIM instant messaging to my suite of contacts. My handle, no longer a joke, is “Celeprosy.”

    A time for love and mourning

    Pray, find your loved ones. Give help.

    And God help us all.

    Maybe because I have it

    Wanted to test out the latest AOL Instant Messenger today, so I downloaded it. But first I had to come up with a name. Searls, Dsearls, Dsearls1 and Zdilmidgi were all taken, by me, in the past. But AOL wouldn’t make them available to me because they had to clear it with the now-dead email address I used when I registered those identities. So I gave up on those and tried all kinds of names, finally going with “Celeprosy.” It took. Haven’t installed it yet, though.

    What’s the commercial model for your toilet? Your light socket? Your floors?

    I was asked today what the ‘commercial model’ was for a blog hosted on a home computer. It amazes me that the Net is still being asked to justify itself commercially.

    But as long as it is, we need Larry Lessig to rant about it. (Thanks to Tom for that link.)

    And while we’re on the blog subject, check out the Lockergnome interview with Evan Williams. I ran into Chris Pirillo at TechTV when I was up there recently. Great guy. And he really does look like that Lockergnome dude in the illo.

    Well, obviously

    Says here I’m infatuated with Google search results. Actually, amazed is a bit more like it.

    Curious: what real competition does Google have these days? Looking here, it’s as if nobody has even bothered reviewing the matter in almost a year. At this point Google rivals the browser itself as a Web interface. It’s a portal that doesn’t act the part.

    Is it making money yet? I have no idea.

    Because smart people don’t always do that

    Eric Raymond: How to ask questions the smart way.

    BTW: I just noticed that the date atop this post is September 10. That’s because the blog was set to UTC -8 rather than -5, for Eastern time.

  • Lureday

    This is the image Apple uses to show how the iPhone Duo, turned sideways, has twice the screen size of the iPhone 18 Pro Max. I think it shows how shooting photos in portrait mode, which smartphones have taught us to do, kinda means that the old upright phone format is good enough.

    You can buy a new Duo 18 folding iPhone with max storage (2 TB, which is what I have in my iPhone 16 Pro Max) for the low-low price of just $3199. For that you get bigger display but a lesser camera on the back side (two lenses rather than three in the Pro series, lacking the 8x telephoto). You also get a second screen on the face of the phone when it is closed, but a form factor that is shorter and wider than a non-folding phone. So, what you might have with the Duo is an iPhone/iPad hybrid that’s not as good as either at what those older non-folding designs do best.

    Phil Windley: My twenty-five-year-old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, so I used Claude to write one in a morning. When an app takes a morning instead of two weeks, software can stop being a product and start being personal. Very cool.

    danah boyd, whom I mentioned two posts ago, is probably now the leading authority on the American Census. She just posted American democracy depends on the census. Trump is undermining it. In The Guardian.

    Matt Mullenweg is on a leave of absence from Automattic, says 404 Media.

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  • Fearday

    So much doom and gloom about AI. Lordy:

    And I'm exactly at the expected age:

    Not good

    Seems

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  • Readings and Leadings

    Dig your way through Bye Bye Workforce. Read all the links. Strong stuff. One sample:

    On a musical note, I want to hear the rest of this Connor Morrison piece.

    I’ve ordered danah boyd‘s new book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, from the University of Chicago Press. danah, who is brilliant, teaches at Cornell these days, but will also be on tour. A schedule is at that last link. So is this:

    This book is an ethnography of the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge—ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts—and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what I call “Jenga politics,” weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements.

    Because, as Phil Windley explains, Authentication Is Largely Solved. Authorization Isn’t, his new book is Authorization in Action.

    In Marxism and Randism, Dana Blankenhorn explains how Ayn Rand is the Karl Marx of our time. I’ll say they do rhyme, in a way.

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  • Pre-Labor Day

    I can’t legally use a published shot of Josh Hoover, so this ChatGPT facsimile will have to do.

    Yesterday I was working in my office when I suddenly remembered that the first IU football game of the season was on. So I went downstairs, turned on the TV, found the Indianapolis station carrying it (we still use an antenna here, 60 miles away), and started watching in time to see what I thought was the worst thing I have ever seen on a football field: a quarterback’s head being rotated 180° by a face-mask grab. The quarterback was Josh Hoover, a top-ranked transfer from TCU. I thought he might be dead, face down on the grass while his helmet was elsewhere. But he got up, bleeding from the face, and stayed in the game. Three plays after the penalty, he threw a perfect touchdown pass. Indiana went on to win, 52-16.

    Michael Elliot has an excellent recollection of WQDR, one of the best rock radio stations of all time. In its prime, QDR was a client of my ad agency, and many of its personalities became lifelong friends. (Most of those friendships date back to their time at WDBS, a tiny competitor about which I’ve written here and here.)

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  • Free-Range Childhood

    Me, age 4, at Easter, in Maywood, New Jersey. I turned 5 in July, and in September I began walking to school alone. Legally. The year was 1952.

    Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond is a story in Reason, which adds this subhead: “The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.” The distance to the Pond was half a mile.

    I turned five in the Summer of 1952, and started kindergarten that September at Maywood Avenue School (where Mom would later become a beloved third- and fourth-grade teacher for many years). The walk from our house on Edel Avenue to the school was .7 miles:

    Source: Google Maps

    On the first day of Kindergarten (Mrs. Roth’s class), Mom walked me the whole way, noting landmarks I should remember, because I couldn’t yet read. Over the first week, she would walk me progressively less of the way, so I could walk the rest alone. At the end of the week, I walked the whole way myself, sometimes alone, sometimes with other kids. (This was early in the Baby Boom, and there were a zillion of us. We often moved in herds.)

    In 1953, we moved to Woodland Avenue, on the right side of the map above. I walked from there too. After school we’d often go play in Borg’s Woods, on the right edge of the map. It wasn’t a nature preserve then; it was just the Borg family’s woods, and they liked to let kids play in it. Mr. Borg lived on Summit Avenue in Hackensack and ran what was then the Bergen Evening Record, our region’s newspaper. (It’s now just The Record.) The Borgs also let kids sled on their steep backyard, which sloped down into the woods.

    My point is that kids then were raised to raise themselves, kind of like wild animals. Parents were attentive and caring, but valued freedom for, and from, their kids.

    It wasn’t much different when my oldest two kids were small in the 1970s. We lived in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, mostly). When they were small and could walk to places alone, they just did. Nobody freaked out. (We lived out in the country, so I did drive them to schools.)

    It’s different now, in too many ways to describe. We live in a far more information-rich environment: one in which there is much less privacy, and an infinitude of digital distractions. Parenting is much more of a project. Schooling is almost totally different, except that most schools still sort kids by age into grades and test the shit out of them.

    I don’t have a lesson to impart here. I’m just noticing the changes, the differences, the way lives knit together, then and now.

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  • Undeadlines

    If you’re in chair, in the sky, look out the damn window. Some of the stuff out there is amazing. Shot this three sunsets ago over Ohio with my iPhone 16 on a flight from Newark to Indianapolis.

    Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random):

    1. Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. We (or our ancestors) saw this happen with telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, tape and digital recording, and now recording and sharing events using a pocket phone. Photography and videography are both now so easy, high-quality, and widespread that old purposes such as art and archiving are mostly sidelined. Apple and Google, our primary providers of pocket tech, mostly want you to shoot the shit out of everything, and to store and share the results using their software. Doesn’t stop me from putting my own stuff up where it might last, however. My latest photo album is here. The shot above is one sample from it. Eleven views so far.
    2. Apple is not so much taking the early lead in personal AI as it is creating the category of personal AI devices, starting with the Mac Mini. Please note that “local” is not personal. It’s yours in the sense that you have it, but it’s still a suction cup on the tentacle of a corporate overlord. This video by Nate B. Jones explains it a bit.
    3. Just heard about Olivia Dean from The Wall Street Journal.
      She and her song “Man I Need” remind me of Lianne LaHavas and “What You Don’t Do.” I wrote about Lianne and that song here ten years ago. Both ladies are from London. But the roots of their music mostly come from across the pond.
    4. Since border blasters mattered a lot for a few decades of the last century, and the Wikipedia page for them (that last link) is sub-minimal, I decided to make research into them a little easier with this post on my Trunkline blog.

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  • Blame Canada?

    I shot this image of the great Leonard Cohen on the side of a building in Montréal in 2019

    Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains,

    Canada is offering me and my lab sufficient funding to support a core team of students for 8 to 12 years. That’s a level at which I’ve never been able to even dream, never mind plan…

    Meanwhile,

    The Canadian government saw an opportunity to recruit academics at the precise moment when the US government is making life difficult for universities in two big ways. Cuts to NSF, NIH and other grantmaking agencies are making it hard to build research teams in the US. Most of the support for my work has come from generous private foundations. that funding, which has always been highly competitive, has become exponentially more so as federal support has evaporated.

    Second, the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants have made coming to a US university a risky proposition for international students. At schools like UMass, international students are both an important part of our community and of our economic picture. As we lose students who cannot get visas to the US – or choose not to study in a country that appears actively hostile to them – our enrollment shrinks, and we’re left with another set of financial pressures.

    The hostility to international students also creates a moral risk: can I feel good about inviting students to study with me, knowing that we take on controversial topics and methods, and that I cannot guarantee that their work won’t have consequences for their immigration status?

    This mirrors what some colleagues are saying at Indiana University, where I currently hang. Here’s one story. Another. Another. Another. Another. Another.

    I wish Ethan and other northbound academic migrants well. And I wish stateside universities luck.

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  • What next for Hugging Face?

    Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters says The Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it.

    In The Price Of Independence Was $5.9 Billion, AI Secret says,

    🌍 How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation. The stated reason was protecting the community from a single company’s influence. This month, Nvidia offered $12.9 billion for the whole thing. Hugging Face said yes. The principle did not change. The price did. Every speech about community independence has a number. Hugging Face just found it. The open-source AI world now has a landlord, and the rent was $5.9 billion above the original offer.

    🛎️ Key takeaway: Hugging Face said no to Nvidia at $5 billion. It said yes at $12.9 billion. The difference is not a change of heart. It is a reminder that every community’s independence is for sale. The only question is the price.

    Sounds like Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub.

    GitHub is a place where developers put code, while Hugging Face is a place where developers put models. If that’s not an exact analogy, it’s close enough, or Hugging Face wouldn’t be called “the GitHub of AI.“

    Microsoft seems to have done a good-enough job of keeping GitHub independent, or GitHub wouldn’t continue to grow. Will Nvidia do the same with Hugging Face?

    What do ya’ll think?

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