Journalism
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Tornado Spotting
I left dinner at the Uptown to stand at the corner of Kirkwood and College in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, to shoot the tornado my phone just told me had formed eight miles west of there. That’s where I was facing when I shot this video, from which I pulled a bunch of screen grabs in Continue reading
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Webless Day
Perspective 10 Largest Things in Nature That Will Make You Feel Incredibly Small. The only one I didn’t know about was Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. It covers 4,086 square miles. News Thunderstorm hits Santa Barbara. (Very rare.) Delays at Newark after smoke in the cockpit forces a JetBlue plane to return. Here’s the Continue reading
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Remembranes
And I thought the voice was a knockoff of Leo Laporte Washington Post: He spent decades perfecting his voice. Now he says Google stole it: NPR’s David Greene says he was “completely freaked out” when he heard an AI voice that sounded just like his own, and he’s suing over it. It's still vendor sports. Continue reading
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Dues Day
Currently I have three of them. Do you have a principle? I hadn’t thought about that before reading Justin Mikolay‘s Inventing on Principle: A Distillation of Bret Victor’s Extraordinary Talk About How To Live Your Life. And that’s just one of many things that have been written about Bret Victor, a guy about whom I knew Continue reading
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Webnesday
The Oligarch Giveth, and The Oligarch Taketh Away The Guardian: ‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of workers—Former Post executive editor blasts owner Jeff Bezos’s ‘sickening efforts to curry favor’ with Trump This Pew study says 25% of US adults get news regularly from the Washington Post. (Disclosure: I subscribe, and I’m Continue reading
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Toes Day
Conched Out Conch is big food here on Harbour Island. Because there are a lot of them, I suppose. Ate some battered and fried conch yesterday at the Queen Conch (also the name of this species, aka Aliger gigas), on a dock above the water. Beside the dock on one side is a fenced conch Continue reading
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Discourse & Datcourse
The reverse centaur. That’s where Big AI is the human part, and you’re just the horse part. If you have a suspicion that the AI bubble will burst, or even if you don’t, it’s worthwhile to read Cory Doctorow’s AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage, in The Guardian. Some useful metaphors in Continue reading
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Who New?
Might be Winter Every day it snows a little here. Required reading. Seriously. Adrian Gropper: Taking Control of Your Healthcare is More Important Than Ever—Get help from a private AI that works for you – and only you. Announcing the North Atlantic Takeover Organization I avoid politics here, but it’s hard not to hear echoes Continue reading
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Mittwoch
Overheard Copilot is the new Clippy. Another one bites the sky In NiemanLab, Joshua Benton asks, Will Pittsburgh become America’s most important city without a newspaper? Sure, if you're just counting the size of the city. But the paper itself was kind of a mess anyway, at least as Joshua tells it. I'm guessing that ways will Continue reading
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Not the other thing
Location, Location, Location I'm 30 kilofeet above the Missouri River, westbound from IND to DEN, with (United tells me) eight minutes to get from Gate B24 to Gate…?. It's blank. Doesn't say. I guess we'll find out. Update over Nebraska: We need to get from B45 to B25 in 8 minutes or less. It'll be Continue reading
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Hey look
Cluetrain is in an Epstein file, as are the names of its authors, mine misspelled. A cool space launch from Vandenberg is scheduled for Sunday at 9:02pm. That's an hour when it's likely to leave a "jellyfish" exhaust where sunlight hits it while it's night below. I just appended an update what I wrote about Continue reading
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Findings
Toward personal AI. Balnce wants to give everyone "their own personal supercomputer. "You can start with a "personal intent navigator" app. I just downloaded mine for the iPhone. (It's mobile only so far.) We'll see how it goes. Closer lookings Johnny Ryan says "the Commission’s (and Germany’s) plan to gut EU digital rules will hurt Europe’s Continue reading
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Who and what are you?
Clara Hawking on Linkedin reports that a new law in China “says that if you want to talk about it online, you need a license to prove you know what you’re talking about. As of October 25, China now requires influencers to hold official qualifications before posting about ‘sensitive’ topics such as education, medicine, law, Continue reading
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Flying Wide
The crash of UPS Airlines Flight 2976 at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport (SDF) yesterday afternoon was 76 miles from here. Feels closer. A house in the middle of nowhere, Texas, contains a Boeing 727 fuselage. French words in English for airplane parts: fuselage, nacelle, aileron, empennage. This is largely because the Wright Brothers held tight Continue reading
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My Three Hooks
For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish. Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency, Continue reading
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On the Continuing End of OTA TV, Part 2
This is Part 2 of a post that began with a Jimmy Kimmel monologue, but really wasn’t about that. It was about the grave situation in which over-the-air (OTA) TV finds itself. Here is Part 1. Even people who don’t like leftish comedy should admit that Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue after he returned to the air Continue reading
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Education 3.0
Education 1.0 was about learning one one-on-one, or one one-on-few. Also by ourselves. This kind of on-site discovery and mentorship gave us stone tools, cave art, clothing, shelter, writing, engineering, construction on every scale, and great artists in every age. Writing was involved, mostly of the scribal kind before the Gutenberg Parenthesis began. After that, Continue reading
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Friday, June 27, 2025
Modest ambitions. I’ll be on the Immergence podcast (above) this coming Tuesday, July 1, at Noon Eastern time, talking with Nico Fara about The Intention Economy, ProjectVRM, Customer Commons, Personal AI, and using MyTerms to completely flip the script on agreements with websites and services, obsolescing all those annoying cookie notices—and blowing up surveillance-based adtech Continue reading
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Friday
Kwaaiday the 13th. If you're curious about personal AI (and you should be, especially of the open source kind), you might like to sit in on a meeting of folks volunteering toward making it happen, Kwaai has its weekly meeting going on right now at the Zoom link atop its home page. See some of Continue reading
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Tuesday
Whatever, it's complicated. The Narrow Path Needs a Floorplan: What Happens When You Feed Tristan Harris’s Vision Into the Meta-layer. The path is between the DYSTOPIA of centralized control and the CHAOS of "unchecked decentralized" whatever. The path is called COORDINATION, and involves "global clarity & coordinated action," which is about "co-governance—a path where humanity chooses structure, Continue reading