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Just trying to make stuff happen

Saturday, 5 July 2025

Examples abound. I like Nicolas Gruen's conversation with a silicon friend. A pull quote, and part of Nicolas' argument (as reflected by silicon): "institutions blend power and purpose." Think of how new power today is trashing old purposes.

As if a panel full of unwanted designs in PowerPoint wasn't annoying enough. Ted Gioia shares my irritation at seeing Microsoft's Copilot provided as unwanted help for everything I do with one of its products. 

I was tempted to say 1776. Just went to Meta AI, which I've used before, and it stopped me with this: "Providing your birthday helps make sure you get the right experience for your age." The answer field only wanted a year. I see the reason for asking that, if you're protecting children from porn or something. What if it asked what your race or gender was before answering a question?

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One response to “Saturday, 5 July 2025”

  1. Laurence Brevard Avatar
    Laurence Brevard

    Ah… Ted!

    I subscribe to him on Substack but he sure is GRUMPY! Even more so than you! 😉

    Being both in Austin, I’ve reached out to him a couple of times about an in-person visit but I think he’s too “important” for that. Or, more likely too busy.

    While being an extremely long time user of Word (dating to taking live meeting notes on a early MS-DOS laptop), I find myself mostly using Google Docs now, with Google Sheets for spreadsheets. [Being paranoid about cloud-only documents, I export important ones to .docx and .xlsx where my local backup picks them up.]

    While not as full featured as the Office apps, they are both “good enough” and significantly less annoying. Also access from multiple machines works drastically better than Office with OneDrive (which is use in other ways).

    At this point the Google ecosystem is massively useful to me.

    In particular it replicates nicely what I once had in a corporate environment with BlackBerry. By that I mean access to email, calendar, and contacts across all my devices (including iPhone) which required Outlook, an Exchange Server, and the BlackBerry add-on to Exchange ($$$) to work.

    I must be awfully contrarian in that I just don’t see Google as “evil” which is apparently supposed to be my attitude these days. OTOH, I’m a guy with 27 networked cameras in his home and both Alexa and Google listening for commands!

    It probably helps that I don’t give a damn about tracking.

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