News
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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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The Science Kid
That’s me, with George F. R. Buletza, the principal of Maywood (NJ) Junior High. I was in the 8th grade, five-foot-three and eighty-three pounds, still with hair, no body fat, and obsessed by sciences in general and radio in particular. From my bedroom window I could see the lights atop the towers of New York’s Continue reading
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Saturdaze
Exceedingly common, turns out I was excited to see and shoot a butterfly (above) that a search (remember that?) tells me is a Common Buckeye. The News in Hues Poynter says Nexstar hopes to get its bid to buy Tegna (politically speaking) red-lit. It’s one more way the Redstream eats the Mainstream. Heavy Earth is two Continue reading
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Else wares
Not enough water Hotels on the south rim of the Grand Canyon are closed indefinitely. Naturally The most downloaded country song is by an AI. Or Not Says here the AI bubble will burst. Geoffrey Hinton, Big AI’s Cassandra, says otherwise. 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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Workings
Photos from the 41st IIW. Also from the first Agentic Internet Workshop. Many pix among them are of our group working on MyTerms, which I believe will be the biggest advance for the Web since the Web* itself. Nitin Batjatia: The Coming Illumination: When AI Reveals How Work Really Happens. Related, from an Amazon earnings call, how Continue reading
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As foretold by Avatar
As a half-Swede (my Mom was one), it is sad to learn that Trump has demolished Yggdrasil, the Ancient Tree of Life. Continue reading
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Questions of Law, not Just Politics
Go to HUD.gov, and you’ll get this: Go to USDA.gov, and you’ll get this: Seems to me these violate the Hatch Act, aka “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.” It was passed in 1939 and amended a couple of times since then. I am not a lawyer, but I know some, and I can Continue reading
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New Life for LIVE
Colbert’s cancellation looks political, but it’s not. The show was a ratings winner, but a money loser. And the ratings for all of late night, like all of live TV, have been in decline for decades, along with the question, “What’s on?” We live in the Age of Optionality now. Watch or listen to whatever Continue reading
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Wednesday
Cause for pessimism. There is a stat in basketball called VORP, for Value Over Replacement Player. I’d like one for coaches: VORC, for Value Over Replacement Coach. If such a stat existed, Tom Thibodeau’s VORC would be pretty high. Minnesota and Chicago both fell after he left. Bonus link: Nate Silver, Knicks fan, Thibs non-fan. Not 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
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Departments of Correction
Fortunately, we've already got it here: unlimited 2GB/s symmetrical service for $59/month. Bloomington's city fiber rollout has been paused by the mayor. Here's square's story about it, which is also in Bloomdocs—an example of a news commons at work. One more reason to move off Chrome? A URL that begins with chrome-extension://efwhaddfugisallthisjiveepwnj/ before it gets to http:// is not Continue reading
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TGI-Fi
Whole Lotta Badshit Going On. The latest 404 has a weekend worth of it. Surprised this one didn't come sooner. Want the feds to stop funding public broadcasting? Fine. There's an argument for that. (I made one, way back in 2008.) But bias, which is everywhere (because the voice from nowhere is insincere and boring), Continue reading
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Today’s Tabs
Overheard: "AI is bullshit's superpower." Big topic at IIW last week: What MCP’s Rise Really Shows: A Tale of Two Ecosystems. This may also relate: AI Agents x Law Initiative—A New Stanford and Industry Initiative Launched Yesterday. The best take on Adolescence I've seen so far. HT Dave Winer. My photos from Day One and Day Two Continue reading
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Gleanings
But that’s the idea, right? Lucas Ropek in Gizmodo: Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users: The advertising industry is immensely powerful and disturbingly opaque. Read it. Then look at a PageXray of that same story to see how much tracking Gizmodo does, and how deeply embedded it is in that same Continue reading
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Lightning Up
What you see above is a line of storms that is moving northeastward from southern Louisiana across all of Mississippi, western Tennessee, all of Kentucky, southern Indiana (where I am), and western Ohio. It is provided by Weatherbug. If you go there and slide the Weather Overlay up to the Storm Tracker view, the map Continue reading
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What Works After a Disaster Happens?
When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, the Swannanoa River rose three storys above its shores, all but erasing the town named after the river, and leaving hundreds homeless. But the challenge for Swannanoa was not just recovery. It was regeneration. For that, Swannanoa’s residents formed new kinds of partnerships and problem solutions that could Continue reading
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What Are Stories?
Twenty-first in the New Commons series Fifth on the #LAfires Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling joists of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed since the house, Continue reading
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Los Angeles Fires and Aftermath
Nineteenth in the News Commons series Third on the #LAfires 6:50am Friday, January 10, 2025—I will now shift my blogging about the #LAFires from the kind of continuous coverage I’ve done for the last three days to what we might call coverage of coverage. Or something beyond that: shifting to a new kind of news Continue reading