Doc Searls Weblog

Just trying to make stuff happen

  • Whether Weather

    Screen grabs from Windy, Lightning Maps, and Storm Radar

    NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is the alpha US source for weather forecasting, ocean science, climate research, and much more. So, as a weather geek, it concerns me when Wired says Dismantling NOAA Threatens the World’s Ability to Monitor Carbon Dioxide Levels: The agency maintains the global backbone of measurements of CO2 and other gases, but these are at risk of being curtailed if the foreshadowed cuts to NOAA are realized.

    So I dug a bit. Here are five threats:

    1. Massive Budget Cuts
      • Proposed 27% cut to NOAA’s overall budget, reducing it from $6.1 billion to approximately $4.5 billion.
      • Complete elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), NOAA’s central hub for climate science.
      • Threats to halt programs that underpin climate forecasting, weather modeling, and long-term environmental monitoring.
      • Threats to federal support for NOAA’s 16 cooperative research institutes, typically housed at major universities.
      • Sources: Washington Post, NPR, Axios
    2. Staff Reductions and Operational Disruptions
      • 880 NOAA employees laid off, so far, with 1,029 more departing through early retirement or buyouts.
      • Shuttering of regional climate centers.
      • Halted weather balloon launches, degrading forecast accuracy.
      • Reduced dependent local emergency planning and storm readiness.
      • Sources: Wikipedia, Vox, Newsweek
    3. Data Shutdowns and Transparency Rollbacks
      • Shutdowns of multiple publicly accessible datasets, including the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database (here’s Texas), on which insurance companies, city planners, climate researchers, emergency folk, and geeks like me all depend.
      • Source: Yahoo, Houston Chronicle
    4. Structural Realignment and Privatization Push
    5. Long-Term Risks to Public Safety and Science
      • Degrading NOAA’s capabilities will also degrade forecasting of extreme weather events.
      • Agriculture, shipping, aviation, and emergency services will all suffer major setbacks.
      • Source: The Guardian

    When I look at my weather sites and apps—

    —I wonder what will happen to them.

    Will NASA’s FIRMS and its fire detection and mapping satellite services (MODIS, VIIRS) go away, when stuff like that gets jobbed out to SpaceX, BlueOcean, or whatever? Every time I report on a wildfire, I depend on those. Examples.

    News about all this seems to be quieter lately. Did the cuts happen? If so, did they do what DOGE promised, and just cut fat and costs? Are they done with it?

    If you have answers, love to hear them.

    ,

  • Mittwoch

    More lost privacy. 404 reports that Flock Safety, an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, “is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches to ‘jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person,’ allowing police to much more easily identify and track the movements of specific people around the country without a warrant or court order, according to internal Flock presentation slides, Slack chats, and meeting audio obtained by 404 Media.” I wonder if Flock is downstream from the kind of surveillance that 404 allows through its participation in surveillance-based adtech. Look here. (Not as bad as some, but still a spreading delta of personal data leakage.)

    A small catch. Software Update for my Apple Watch requires entering a passcode on the watch which the watch does not provide a way to enter while it’s on its charger. The app says it’s “verifying…,” suggesting that something is updating, but it will fail. Clues?

    I love Edit All Categories in Wordland, which I’m writing in now. My blog on WordPress has been around since ’07, so I’ve accumulated a lot of categories, but I just added one more: Questions, for the post below.

    A question for those who know: How can one tell which of their posts on Medium are, or are not, behind paywalls?

    Final Four. Except for watching Jayson Tatum go down with one of the worst wounds in sports, I’ve enjoyed the NBA playoffs so far. Last night’s game between the Denver Nuggets and the Oklahoma City Thunder was brilliant. So was watching the Indiana Pacers eliminate the highly favored Cleveland Cavaliers in just five games. And so will be watching the New York Knicks finish off the equally favored Boston Celtics tonight (though I kinda hope this Celtics team wins a final one for the home crowd tonight, so the Knicks can win the final game of the series in front of their home crowd this weekend). Meanwhile, I expect the Minnesota Timberwolves to finish off the Curry-less Golden State Warriors. Wolves vs. Thunder and Pacers vs. Knicks should be games for the ages. By the way, while I’m a lifelong Knicks fan, I was a season ticket holder for the Warriors in the Run TMC era, and began digging the Celtics as well, starting when I came to Boston in ’07. And now I’m living in Indiana, where basketball, Pacers, and Fever fever all run high.

    I took three years of German in high school and gave them all back when I was done. But I do remember that Mitwoch is Wednesday, auf Deutsch.

    , , ,

  • Unrealities

    Developing the uncanny valley. HT to John Naughton (whom God preserve*) for pointage to Mistral's Le Chat, an AI image-generatng chatbot. It's a good answer to the challenge of making AI art that doesn't look like AI art. *This is an HT as well, toward one of John's warm conventions. And subscribe to his 'stack. It's terrific.

    I didn't. Got a phishing email from (not) Mark Pincus. It said "I’m backing a new AI fund that I think is really compelling. The team’s strong, and they're focused on applied AI with near-term upside — not just moonshot." If you get one, don't open it.

    Looking forward to Knicks-Pacers. The Knicks were unbeatable yesterday. They weren't (and aren't) just a collection of great players. They're a great team. It did suck, however, for Jayson Tatum to go down with a ruptured Achilles tendon, after keeping his team in the game almost single-handedly. He's now gone for up to a year and a half. When he returns, the Celtics will be a different team. The current roster costs too much.

  • Inflation

    This is at Costco. In Indiana:

    Just a fact.
    ,

  • Motherings

    Trump will be flying Qatar One instead of (or as) Air Force One:

    Aaaand,,,,

    Call your mother, if she’s still around. If she’s not, remember her anyway. I did that here.

    I’m pointing to A look at broadcast history happening because it came up in a conversation about archives. Also because that history (especially concerning the decline and not-yet-fall of AM radio) is happening faster than ever.

    Make that 89 light years. My answer four years ago to “How far has our first radio broadcast spread into space?“—

    The earliest broadcasts were on what we now call longwave (LW) and mediumwave (MW) frequencies. Later, shortwave (SW) was also used. Frequencies on these bands are either absorbed or reflected by layers of the ionosphere. Those are handy for broadcasts over long distances on the planet; but they suck for communications out into space. For that you need frequencies that weren’t used until VHF, UHF, and higher frequency bands became practicable, starting in the 1940s. FM was first demonstrated by its inventor, Edwin W. Armstrong, in June 1936, on a low VHF frequency. So, whatever is left of that transmission, if it escaped into space (not a certainty), would now be two months short of 85 light years away.

    Yes, there is one, and we’ll be digging it. The 13th USA International Harp Competition – 2025 will be happening here in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. There are twelve prizes totaling about $90k in value.

    , , ,

  • How to Make Customers Hate You

    Exhibit A:

    siriusxm negative option billing

    Welcome to negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” Works like this: offer a service at a discount that jumps up to a high “regular” price after the discount runs out, and count on the customer forgetting when the jump happens. It’s a hugely common practice. In One example of how subscriptions suck, I described how The New Yorker does it. Every year, I call them to renew by not renewing. Instead I get the promotional price for new customers, rather than the higher price reserved for suckers who don’t bother to get the discount (which you can only get by calling them).

    SiriusXM is a special case, however, because the “regular” price is more than 5x the promotional price, as we see above.

    Let me explain that billing list, briefly.

    • $10.91 is the promotional monthly price I got in December 2023. It was due to run out a year later, but I didn’t get an email notice, because I had opted out of marketing emails, which had been a deluge. But I should have set my own reminder and didn’t, because I’m not very organized.
    • $28.19 is a renewal fee.
    • The customer service person at SiriusXM couldn’t explain exactly what the $40.03 or the $54.95 were for, but I suspect the first was the charge for having one car’s SiriusXM service activated, and the second was for having two cars activated, because I get the second car in March of 2024. Note that the $10.91 price was for two cars. When I added the second car, they told me there would be no additional charge with the promotional plan I was on.

    Here is the page on the SiriusXM website explaining various plans. It doesn’t include the “deal” (if that’s what it was) that I got by calling customer support on the phone.

    I have been a SiriusXM subscriber since 2005, when the company was just Sirius. And I have been calling them every year to get the lowest possible rate, which they always say is for new customers. There are no rewards for being a long-time customer. Instead, there are punishments.

    I was so infuriated by all this today (when I learned about it) that I came very close to just saying “screw it,” and canceling. But I didn’t because I wanted to listen to the Knicks-Celtics game, which is going on right now. I also like the huge selection of SiriusXM  “stations” on the car radios and on the app. In number, variety, and quality, they far exceed what we ever had on the old-fashioned radio dial.

    Sound from the app is better than sound from the satellite. On the app you can also easily pause, go back and forward through a show’s timeline, and enjoy other conveniences. But the user interface is annoying. It opens to “Discover,” which has stuff “based on your afternoon listening,” or whatever. Where in the past your selection of “Favorite” channels was displayed on a nice stable vertical grid that looked the same every time you opened the app, they are now sidelined to a list called “Library.” The list is different every time you open the app, also based on some algorithm. The whole thing is full of guesswork like that. It’s not textbook enshittification, but close enough.

    Anyway, here is my new deal:

    Now the discount promotional new customer monthly fee is $10.99. It doesn’t say what it will be after the Renewal Charges hit, which (it also doesn’t say) will come a year from now. But you can bet it will be more than $54.95. And not worth it. SiriusXM knows that, but they also know a lot of us are suckers. They rely on us being suckers, rather than just coming up with a good flat-price deal (like, as I recall, they had in the first place)—one that signals what the service is worth, and anyone can respect.

    Naturally, there are moves afoot to fight sucker-baiting. For one, check out the FTC’s Negative Option Rule page. It’s proposed, of course. Will it ever happen? Not holding my breath.

    In the meantime, SiriusXM is earning my hate. Nice work.

    I still like many of the music channels and some of the shows (especially Howard Stern’s and the NBA ones). But it’s hard not to hate the service. The subscription system sucks, and so does the app.

    Subscription Hell is a disease suffered by companies, and the patients can’t fix it. Nor can any of the many services selling subscription systems to companies. (Even advice on playing nice recognizes that negative option pricing is still a form of baiting and switching.)

    We have to fix it from the outside. From our side: the customers’ side.

    That’s what we’ve been working on for nearly nineteen years with ProjectVRM (see here) and Customer Commons (see here). I also have more faith than ever that we’ll succeed, thanks to personal AI and related work. But there is much to be done.

    If you want to help, let me know.

     

     

    , , ,

  • Future Tabs

    Stay Calm and Check it out. Pure libertarians are neither right nor left, nor where the extremes of both meet. Mostly they come from a sensibility outside both redstream and mainstream: one that PJ O'Roarke put perfectly in Parliament of Whores: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work — and then they get elected and prove it." PJ is gone, and Reason isn't funny, but it comes from a sane place that neither side of the dem/rep duopoly dwells these days. So its take on many things is worth reading. Examples: Billy Binion's Is This Constitutional? Here's How Due Process Works and Virginia Postrel's Abundance Makes the Case for 'Supply-Side Progressivism'. Mainly, it makes thought-out arguments, rather than polemics—the kind of stuff that makes you nod along or shake your head without feeling the need to tweet it from the rooftops.

    I still don't like the plane. Crew vs. View on United's Boeing 787 now has had 3000 visits since it went up in 2017, Medium tells me. Most of those visits were from back when Medium was more of a happening thing. I put a fresher version of the post here on the blog, with the title A dark review for United’s Boeing 787.

    Too many? Probably. I'm losing count of how many links I'd like to share lead to paywalls or teasewalls (walls teasing a subscription that show up part way through a full read).

    , ,

  • Overhearings

    Strange but true enough. Why I've been farting less in 1996.

    From the Undersecretaries of Overstate. My phone bings with notifications from my weather apps saying there is a Dense Fog Advisory in effect—just as the clouds part and vanish, opening a clear blue sky and a bright new day. Where weather forecasts used to say (on radio and TV, back when those still mattered) there would be "afternoon and evening thundershowers," we now get "SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING" sent to our phones. But maybe that will end after NOAA (and hell, the rest of Commerce) gets thrown into the wood chipper.

    Not too oldie but still goodie.I was just reminded that I guested on Joseph Jaffe's podcast three years ago yesterday.  Starts about eleven minutes in at that link.

    , , ,

  • The Offing of What’s On

    Parody of a page from TV Guide, circa 1978†

    For the final seven decades of the last millennium, most people in the developed world scheduled their evenings by answering a simple question: What’s on? For the first two of those decades, the question was “What’s on the radio?” For the next five, it was “What’s on TV?”

    Guidance toward answers were provided on newspaper pages covering entertainment, and in weekly magazines. The biggest of those was TV Giude, at its peak the most popular magazine in the U.S.*, with 20 million customers, plus some multiple of that in pass-along readers.

    In the guide were stations (such as those above), which belonged to networks. The biggest networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—migrated from radio. PBS and Fox came later.

    To get TV stations, you needed an antenna. “Rabbit ears” (a pair of telescoping rods built into the TV or attached by a flat wire to a pair of screws on the back) worked if you had strong signals, but the picture looked best only if you had a roof antenna. The best of those looked like the skeleton of a 10-foot tuna on a spike:

    A dead TV antenna I spotted recently in Oden, Indiana. The flat feed line says it dates from the 1970s or earlier. The tower was next to a house, and the antenna was about 40 feet above the ground. Back in the Analog Age, it probably got stations from Indianapolis, Louisville, Evansville, Terra Haute, and maybe even St. Louis. Here in the Digital Age, it would get a handful of signals from stations within about 50 miles, but nothing from the bigger markets.

    In rural areas, you needed a big antenna, ideally high above the ground, on a tower of its own or strapped to a chimney, with a rotator so you could spin it around. This is what my rotator looked like when I lived in Chapel Hill, NC:

    I had a Radio Shack rotator like this one. The channel labels were cut out of a TV Guide and pasted on the box where you see the numbers. And yes, we got two channel 12s and two channel 13s. My antenna was highly directional.

    Cable began as CATV—Community Antenna Television. When I lived in far northern New Jersey in the early ’70s, we were shadowed by terrain from New York City and Philadelphia signals, but our CATV provider gave us the 12 VHF channels of both cities. Gradually, cable companies added lots of channels that were cable-only. That gave folks a lot more answers to “What’s On?” and kept that era going.

    But that era is mostly over, because optionality verges on absolute. This happened because, as Clay Shirky put it,

    Here Comes Everybody*
    Now you can produce a show on your phone almost as easily as you consume one on a TV. You can share it with the world on YouTube, Vimeo, your blog, or wherever. This is why there are more than fourteen billion videos on YouTube alone. There are also four and a half million podcasts, and countless millions of musical selections available over streaming services. Against all of this, broadcast radio and TV are near-dead technologies walking.

    Interesting fact: What makes a TV a TV is its antenna connection:

    Without that and the tuner inside, it’s just a monitor.

    So let’s compare:

    And that bottom line is where we’re at. “What’s on?” has become an archaic expression, like “prithee” and “forsooth.”

    And we’re changed by that. As Marshall McLuhan is said to have said (yes, he meant it, but didn’t say it—see that last link), we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.

    So, what’s our shape now? Are we becoming phono sapiens?

    I think it’s more like… where are we now?

    Clearly, we are in a state of massive optionality, but our agency is still largely bottled up in each app we use, each platform we occupy, and the separate technical worlds of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

    What will free us from those?

    I say two things. First is MyTerms. That’s how the sites and services of the world agree to our requirements, rather than us to theirs. Second is personal AI. We don’t have either one yet, but we will.

    What’s On will always be an option. But as a defaulted first choice, it is mostly going away.

    *James Joyce too, in Book 1, Chapter 5, of Finnegan’s Wake.

    †For more about where that parody came from, see here.

    ,

  • 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 a URL.

    My record is about 20 feet—in opposite directions. And under furniture that's hard to move. You drop your AirPods case on a hard floor. How far do the pods fly away from their popped case?

    Also wanted: knobs and switches. Buttons are coming back to dashboards.

    Their advice: If you want mail to be postmarked today, hand it to a human at the window. Letters we dropped off through a slot at a Los Angeles post office on April 9 were not postmarked and sent until the 15th. The reason: they were slammed and shorthanded.

    , , , , ,

  • Re-reading Material

    On our new digital age:
    Some New Ways to Look at Infrastructure was the first draft of
    What does the Internet make of us?, but is worth reading because the stuff about infrastructure mattered and was dropped in the second piece. (2017)
    Will Our Digital Lives Leave a Fossil Record? (2020)
    How early is Digital Life? (2020)

    On the decline of over-the-air broadcasting:
    The new business of free radio (2008, with additional remarks by Jonathan Marks)
    What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? (2008)
    What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? (2008)
    Doc Searls on VRM and the future of radio (2009)
    The past and future of radio (2010)
    March Madness and radio's future (2010)
    Why music radio is dying (2011)
    How to rescue radio (2013)
    The holy grail of radio (2013)
    AM radio declared dead by BMW and Disney (2014)
    A conversation with Doc Searls on the future of radio (2014)
    How will WMAL survive losing its transmitter? (2015)
    DIY radio with podcasting (2016)
    The slow sidelining of over-the-air radio (2016)
    FCC is just making a bad thing worse (2016)
    Where Public Radio Still Rocks (2019)
    How long will radio last (2020)
    How the once mighty fall (about WMAL, above, in 2020)
    A look at broadcast history happening (2023)
    The Tall Tower Market Collapses (2024)
    Radio's Death Knells (2025)
    When TV Went Digital (2025)—a reposting of the second item from the top of this list, with some updates

    , , ,

  • 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), claimed by POTUS, is the wrong reason. Woulda been better to just say public broadcasting should stand on its own. (Which, for the most part, it has been, for decades.)

    , , , ,

  • Visitations

    It's still creepy. World showed off its Orb a few years ago at IIW to approximately no applause at all. A lot seems to have happened since then. Here's what Wired says about it.

    Such as the "@ username" in the Profile setting. I'm in a group zoom-like conference call (is it a "call"?  a "session"? not sure) on Signal, where I'm learning (partly on my own) how Signal is changing. For example, one has up to three IDs: the handle you use in conversations, your phone number, and an @username, which is new to me. There's an appearance feature that lets you hide it in case somebody gets unwelcome access to your unlocked phone. Other stuff too. My main issue with Signal is how different it is on the phone and on the computer. Also, the conference (zoom-like) thing needs chat. I don't see it there. Some things are still not clear to me, which is okay, I guess.

    Old writing style, new habit. Wordland is easier than tweeting. Postings also go straight onto my blog, not onto some platform that (trust me, or Dave) that has to work hard not to enshittyfy itself.

    That aren't by an AI. Writings about AI: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, & Co.: They Are Not Brains, They Are Kernel-Smoother Functions, "Attention", "Transformers", in Neural Network "Large Language Models", and everything here.

    Same nightmare. David Strom expands on the privacy perils of the connected car. 

    As I recall, anyway. Just learned from Bill Wendel that firstpodcasts.org exists, and is mostly right. 

    The other Durant. Got some nice comments to The best 3-point shooter you never saw, which I posted four years ago.

    Shall I try Kagi? Google search is woefully enshittified.

    , ,

  • Grifting away

    According to Joseph Cox at 404, the U.S. government registered the domains

    All of these (correct me if I’m wrong) are about enriching the U.S. president, his family, and favored friends through a memecoin scheme by which anyone (say, Putin) can buy influence.

    There is nothing conservative about this. Nothing republican. Nothing that will make America, or anyone, great, much less again.

    It’s a something with an intrinsic worth of nothing, and a scam straight out of the old playbook.

    There is no pale beyond which shit like this cannot go.

    , ,

  • Flyings

    Neither here nor there, yet. At BWI, about to board an SWA flight to IND. There are thunderstorms between the airports and more on the way, but no delay so far. Meanwhile, this gives me  chance to talk weather apps. My current fave is Windy, which visualizes winds at all altitudes, real time lightning (with visuals and sounds), temperatures, satellite and radar imagery, changes past and future, and more. Second choice is Weatherbug.  I'd say more but need to board.

    , ,

  • Of possible interest

    In reply to the question "Which blog post took the most work?" the answer is From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium, which spanned 2005 to 2024 and involved taking many dozens of aerial photographs on approach to LAX, doing research, and writing about it, hoping it helps historians along the way.

    Two angles on one story. Noozhawk says Tri-County Produce, an independent local landmark store, has been saved by a longtime employee and his son. MSN says the purchase was made possible by local customers Eric and Wendy Schmidt.

    Arendt called it terror. Steven Weber on radical uncertainty, in Barron's.

    Signs of enshittification. SiriusXM's app sucks. It used to have Favorites, which were like buttons on an old car radio: a collection of channels you chose to put on a simple collection that you could arrange your own way. That's gone. Now the front of the app has Based on your morning listening and Channels for you below a bunch of tabs: For you, Music, Talk & Podcasts, Sports, and Howard. What used to be Favorites is now "Library" on the bottom right of the screen. These are topped by "New episodes," and then go down a list that changes based on… I don't know. Probably guesswork by an algorithm. Also on the bottom are Discover, Channels (remember those?), and Search. Imagine a grocery store where at the entrance you have to get past a pile of stuff that's some algorithm's guess at what you like, and everything you come for isn't where it was before, and won't be in the same place tomorrow. That's SiriusXM now.

    The pain is coming. Am I seeing less marine traffic to the U.S. than ever? Looking for historical data. I'm sure many are digging deep into intermodal and logistics stats to gauge the effects of tariffs and economic uncertainties caused by White House wackiness. Got links? [Readers answered! Logistics Managers Index (and the latest stats), CNBC on falling traffic in Los Angeles and Long Beach. HT to old pal Chip Hoagland.]

    Where safety is a slogan. Wired says your car is snitching on you. As Mozilla made clear almost two years ago, privacy is an inconvenience: for the car makers, for their commercial "partners," and for the cops. Consumer Reports says the same is true for TV makers.

    Nice! I just noticed that Wordland now lists all my (too many) categories. Taking advantage of that now.

    Today's title is how I view everything I write.

    , , ,

  • Terminations

    Looks like The Terminator took out a bunch of Starlink satellites. (SpaceWeather.com)

  • Pasts and Futures

    The Airbus 390 is gigantic. Like a cruise ship for the sky. Except, I gather, it’s not real.

    Pope Francis dies on Easter Monday. For a sense of what Francis embodied and meant, I recommend Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.  I’m in the midst of listening to Rauch on Russ Roberts’ Econtalk podcast, and I think his case is sound, caring, brilliant, and timely. (Arg: The episode isn’t listed yet.)

    Ad growth is decelerating.

    ,

  • An Inadequate AI Solution

    Let’s take the example of printers, which tend to suck. Here is one example of suckage at work, and the instructive hell it put me through:


    The Canon MG3600 is my wife’s. It sits by her desk and does a good-enough job.

    The Epson WF-3520 is mine. It sits by my desk and leaks black ink. It has been doing that since I bought it in a hurry for $35 at a Goodwill store when we first got to town in the summer of ’21. The drip runs at about a drop per month, but otherwise it’s been okay. I use it mostly for scanning. It’s good at that.

    Or was, until I encountered the problem above.

    Answers to questions about the error code proved fruitless in a series of searches (such as this one) and at the Epspon link above.

    So, naturally, I went shopping for a new printer. My only requirement was that it would scan at least as well as this old Epson.

    Alas, scanning is a checkbox for “all-in-one” printers. Here’s an example from PC Magaziine. Nothing much about scanning. This makes sense, because demand for high-quality scanning is relatively low, and most printers are at least okay at it. But Consumer Reports (bless them) does rank scanning quality, and it gave me this in reply to an Ask CR question:

    The Canon PIXMA G3262 is not one of CR’s recommended printers, rating a middling 47 out of a possible 100 score. Its problem areas are low predicted reliability, low versatility, and slow text speed. The only thing it’s good at is scanning. The printer page on Amazon is also not encouraging. It has only two user ratings, and both call it junk.

    The Brother MFC‐L8905CDW is $699.99 at Amazon, which is way out of my range.

    The Canon Pixma MG7720 is now in the used market, and (far as I can tell) available only on eBay, and none of the offerings there look interesting.

    So I went looking just for scanners, and narrowed my choice down to the Canon CanoScan Lide 400, which is just $78.86 on Amazon. I put it in my cart, then I thought, Wait a minute. What if I asked an AI what that error code means?

    So I did, with ChatGPT. The dialog:

    Me:

    What does “Failed to open connection to device (-21345)” mean on a Macbook Pro running Sequoia 15.3.1 that is trying to connect to an Epson WF-3520 printer?

    ChatGPT:

    “Failed to open a connection to the device (-21345)” on your MacBook Pro running macOS Sequoia 15.3.1, when attempting to connect to an Epson WF-3520 printer, typically indicates a communication issue between your Mac and the printer, particularly affecting scanning functionality. Here’s how you can troubleshoot and resolve this issue:

    ✅ Step-by-Step Solutions
    1. Enable Local Network Access for the Printer/Scanner
    macOS Sequoia introduces enhanced privacy settings that may block devices from accessing the local network. To ensure your Epson WF-3520 has the necessary permissions:​

    1. Navigate to System Settings.
    2. Select Privacy & Security.
    3. Click on Local Network.
    4. Locate your printer or scanner in the list and ensure it’s toggled on.​
      Apple Support Community
      Reddit

    This step has resolved similar issues for many users experiencing the (-21345) error.

    It listed other solutions, but that one worked. Three levels down in System Settings, the printer had been toggled off, presumably by Sequoia’s enhanced privacy settings. I am now back to scanning normally with my lousy old Epson.

    I could take my learnings here in at least two directions:

    1. I could carp about Apple failing to tell customers about potential hassles created by enhanced privacy settings. Ask ChatGPT “What kinds of things do Apple’s enhanced privacy settings (introduced with Sequoia) break or at least inconvenience?” and you’ll get a long list of answers, starting with the one I encountered with the printer. To my knowledge (always subject to correction), Apple hasn’t bothered with the same. (Wouldn’t providing customers with that kind of list be nice work for Apple Intelligence, which so far is an embarrassing fail?)
    2. I could compare how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta, CoPilot, Perplexity, and other early AI leaders perform on challenges like this one, but that would be a waste of time. That’s because, for all the good they do, they are not ours.

    See, AIs of the usual sort don’t know anything more about our personal stuff than we tell them, and we may not want to do that, just for privacy reasons. Also, they tend to forget. And they are not ours. At best they are personalized, rather than personal.

    A truly personal AI (or pAI) would be all mine and trained on what is under my control. For example, all my property, including these two printers. It would have data about my purchase and use of these printers. But it would also have access to data about identical or similar printers out in the world, and ways to engage the corporate AIs so we could solve problems together in far better ways than what we have now. In the process, the likes of Epson would have better intelligence about product usage than they’re getting now.

    So we are talking here about agent-to-agent stuff, with the right capabilities and resources located in the right places.

    Toward making that happen, there was lots of talk earlier this month at IIW XL (our 40th in 20 years) about MCP (the Model Context Protocol), A2A (agent-to-agent protocol), and GNAP (Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol), all of which hold promise. I’m not here to debate or advocate any of them, just to note that there are protocols out there, as options with which we can work.

    But what about the entities using those agents—companies making and selling products on one side, and customers using those products on the other? How can they learn from each other, and not just make transactions and then get frustrated with each other when problems show up?

    One answer is Market Intelligence That Flows Both Ways. I wrote that in 2016: nine years ahead of its time, so far.

    Looking back, I don’t think that kind of flow will happen without AI agents, and full agency by those agents operators, on both sides.

    We need to be able to lead in our dances with companies in the open marketplace. But first, we need personal AI to help us gather and manage intel about our lives, our things, our relationships (including the medical and financial kind), our travels, and the services we use. We are not close to having any of that, and not helped by the Apples, Microsofts, Amazons, and Googles of the world, all of which want to confine our capacities to their walled gardens.

    We don’t need to knock the walls of those gardens down. The revolution we need will simply obsolesce them.

    That’s why it will not be supplied by APIs, or by anything that requires that we have an account. We need to be independent and self-sovereign: first parties who speak for themselves in first-person voices.

    I’ll say more about all that in my next post and others to follow.

    , ,

  • 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 of last week's IIW are up. Should have Day Three up soon. VRM Day too.

    BBC: "The Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data watchdog, said online targeted advertising should be considered direct marketing." This is what Don Marti told me back in 2011, when he helped me with research toward The Intention Economy. it's also why, in Separating Advertising's Wheat and Chaff, I wrote this: "So how did direct response marketing get to be called advertising ? By looking the same. Online it’s hard to tell the difference between a wheat ad and a chaff one. Remember the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” (Or the remake by the same name?) Same thing here. Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself."

    Guess I'll be archiving and deleting all my data with 23andMe.

    Bloomberg busts Apple for privacy liberties Bloomberg also takes.

    Essential reading from Adrian Gropper: The value of AI is limited by privacy.

    , , , , ,