Business
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Cluesdays
Riding wide On the road for a while. Above is a storm coming over Elk Country in north-central Pennsylvania. After that, Elk Country, Ohio, and back to Indiana, by RAV4. Didn’t know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against fast-food drive-thru AI trend. Maybe Is doomscrolling doomed? Continue reading
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The Mentat’s Method of AI
This is the flyer for the next talk in our speaker series at IU. It’s on Tuesday, and a can’t-miss event. I explain more below. I know a lot of people who know a lot about AI. Or seem to. Or say they do. But Pete Kaminski is the real deal. More importantly, he knows… Continue reading
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Enjoying the Shows
The idea was to get my photos from the latest Lotus Festival up right after the three-day event ended on Sunday the 4th. I had too many other things to do, so a week went by. But at least my shots of the last two performances are up. This one is for Nikki D &… Continue reading
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Time to book your rides
AI isn’t just a “surf’s up” moment. It’s a tsunami. You have to surf that tsunami, just to keep from drowning. Using your time. Your calendar is your surfboard. What’s your best beach for riding that calendar? Well, right now there are countless conferences with “Identity,” “AI,” or “Agentic” in their titles. Yes, they’re beaches.… Continue reading
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Cluesday
Closer to homes Tornado Alley moves east. Here’s one I recorded live on my phone in February here in Bloomington, Indiana. Here is the trench of destruction dug by a later tornado that went through thick woodlands about twelve miles north of here. Didn’t know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against… Continue reading
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Don’t fall in
AI shit gets so weird. For example, the fake golfer Grace (aka Gracie) Brooks appeared in the midst of my Facebook doomscrolling (above) to say something to me (scrolled across her boobage) about “an older guy” watching her. Never saw her before, or cared to see her. But I am curious about “her” business model.… Continue reading
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Performing a pooplic service
When a whole business category is fubar, and its members together exemplify enshittification better than each does alone, I suggest we speak of their collectivity as a fecosystem. I’ve been using that word since 2016, and bring it up now because these two posts about the subscription industry‘s fecosystem have been getting action lately, and I… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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Why Charlotte Should Build a Museum of Broadcasting in the Antenna Age
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: WBT-AM was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land under its towers is worth more… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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Boomerangday
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… Continue reading
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Undeadlines
Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random): Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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Pryday
Because “consent” is a fiction Pre-consent tracking is the norm. Prophesy When MyTerms succeeds, CMP—Consent Management Platforms—will mean Contract Management Platforms. These will be contracts you and I proffer and sites and services accept. I look forward to CMPs having a new job. From the Annals of Enshittification Seth Godin on The Amazon Tax: “Amazon… Continue reading
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You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing
How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Gary Isaac Wolfe (who contributes a comment below): “Anthropic watermark scheme appears as a comic policeman blowing his whistle while his pants fall down and Mark Pauline loads a cannon with rotting fish.” But maybe that’s… Continue reading
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Shots and Misses
There is a meteor impact crater in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. It’s called Upheaval Dome, because that’s what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn’t. When I visited the place with my teenage kids in the late ’80s, all the placards along the trail explained that the circular canyon was what… Continue reading
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Whetherday
Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other… Continue reading
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The Web and the New Reality
Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where… Continue reading
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Local radio lives in Burlington and Graham
WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands in… Continue reading
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Earth to Southwest (and every other service company): make your surveys about your service, not just personnel facing customers
Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight: And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking: I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one doesn’t have a way… Continue reading