That's about half off. The Intention Economy hardcover edition is now $12.97 on Amazon. | Continue reading
A good sign. Ever hear of TCF, or the Transparency & Consent Framework? The TCF is how sites and services can obey the letter of the GDPR's law, while screwing its spirt. It does that with those annoying consent notices that interrupt your experience of seemingly every site you v … | Continue reading
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 Dioxid … | Continue reading
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 post … | Continue reading
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-P … | Continue reading
Here's mine. I still miss her. Call your mother, if she's still around. If she's not, remember her anyway. | Continue reading
Exhibit A: What you see there is negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” A service is offered at a discount, and then jumps up to a “regular” higher price after the discoun … | Continue reading
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). | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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?” Guidanc … | Continue reading
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 AirPod case on a hard floo … | Continue reading
On our new digital age:Will Our Digital Lives Leave a Fossil Record? 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. On the … | Continue reading
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 f … | Continue reading
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 Ar … | Continue reading
According to Joseph Cox at 404, the U.S. government registered — thetrilliondollardinner.gov,
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 … | Continue reading
Am I'm 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? Wired says your car is s … | Continue reading
Looks like The Terminator took out a bunch of Starlink satellites. (SpaceWeather.com) | Continue reading
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 m … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
All errands today here in Pasadena, which is one of my favorite places in SoCal. Or hell, the world. Check out City Hall. Looks like the capital city of some country on the Mediterranian. Sure, it's chock full of cars and traffic, but that's an American thnig. Right now I'm at th … | Continue reading
And then they did. There comes a time in high-stakes basketball games when a team melts. That's what happened to Duke. You could see it in the players' body language, all through the closing half. They were playing not to lose. Houston was playing to win, with wicked, committed d … | Continue reading
I’m here (a short drive south of San Jose) for the afternoon, if any local friends feel like stopping by. Tomorrow it’s VRM Day. Tuesday to Thursday, it’s IIW. See you theres. | Continue reading
Just loving the hang time we got yesterday with Tony after two long flights and one short drive from LAX. | Continue reading
Subscription economy suckage. Just made my annual call to The New Yorker, to get a better subscription deal than what they offer with automatic renewal. So, instead of paying $169.99, I'm getting a new subscriber promotional rate of $99.99. I've been a new subscriber every year s … | Continue reading
Though it may take longer. Usually does. I say some stuff I trust will eventually prove true in Pew's Imagining the Digital Future report on being human ten years from now. Be theres. In The False Intention Economy: How AI Systems Are Replacing Human Will with Modeled Behavior, K … | Continue reading
I suggest rocketing his ashes into space. I'm still shocked and sad to know Dave Täht has died, but I only have one source of information so far, and it says nothing about where and how he died. Or if there will be somewhere the customary celebration of his life. It will never di … | Continue reading
I just learned here that Dave Täht died today, at just 59. I don’t know how or where. I do know he was one of the world’s great human beings, as well as a brilliant and generous producer of tech and wisdom about it. Example: if you know about (and no longer have a network […] | Continue reading
Still miss him. Just found a photo of Aaron Swartz from the time I recruited him for a panel at Comdex in 2002. He was a kid, but rocked it. I suppose it's one of these. The photo at the top of this story is of the Linden Cogeneration Plant in New Jersey, which I […] | Continue reading
iLoveFood says the best pizza in Indiana is Mother Bear's here in Bloomington. Problem: it isn't. Osteria Rago's is better. Not that MB's is bad. It's good. Just not better than Osteria's. I'm also betting there must be a better pizza than both somewhere in Indianapolis. iLoveFoo … | Continue reading
And what will we call it? What becomes of democracy when it seems everybody has been herded into separate and opposed algorithmically assembled and maintained tribes, and when most of tech is run by oligarchs (for a few years while tech oligarchy stays a thing), and every status … | Continue reading
What is your DNA worth? 23andMe is filing for bankruptcy. I'm a customer, so it concerns me that they have a heap of data about my DNA. While I'd like the world to benefit from that DNA, should it be useful (and, given some of my odd genetics, e.g. this, it might be), I also […] | Continue reading
I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not th … | Continue reading
We'll know soon. Whether or not you're watching St. John's playing Arkansas, right now, in the NCAA's March Madness tournament, take out a minute and a half to take in Jimmy Fallon and the boys singing the Red Storm Shanty. Lou Carnaseca must be glowing in his grave. | Continue reading
What if it helps everyone do a better job? "I take my dog for walks outside my apartment… on the ledge. Some people are afraid of heights. I'm afraid of widths."—Steven Wright. Somehow that joke (as best I recall it) comes to mind when I consider OpenAI's Deep Research. Everybody … | Continue reading
The Voice of America is silent. To Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kari Lake (who now runs its corpse), the VOA was corrupt, biased, unnecessary, and needed to go. To nearly everyone else who cares, it was America’s voice on radio, and mattered enormously to an audience in the hundr … | Continue reading
IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop, is the UN of identity. While located in the U.S., it has always represented and welcomed the whole world to work on global problems best addressed in person. As it happens, IIW was born exactly twenty years ago tomorrow—20 March 2005—at Esther … | Continue reading
Sounding Good Everywhere. If you like old album rock and Americana rooted in North Carolina, the best thing on radio in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill is That Station, on 95.7 FM. Technically, the station translates (rebroadcasts) WRAL-FM/101.5's HD2 stream, and rarely mentions its t … | Continue reading
Here is what a Google News search for Voice of America looks like right now: ‘Bloody Saturday’ at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks, by David Folkenflik at NPR, begins with this: Journalists showed up at the Voice of America today to broadcast their programs only to … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
So there must be something to it. Watch how often people interrupt each other by saying the word "So," and then launching into whatever they think is more essential than what somebody else is saying. And watch for people giving a speech start with "So—" The first speaker I heard … | Continue reading
Right now, for those on Earth who see it when they look up, the Moon is as full as it can get without moving into the shadow of the Earth . Which it will. Shortly. Here is where Earth’s shadow is right now, as I write this, at around 10 PM Eastern Time: The outer […] | Continue reading
Hockey vs. Football. Suddenly this looks more likely. | Continue reading
I need to learn French. This is lovely. Who is this girl? Here's one clue. Another. Look for more. Never heard of her before today. Hello, I still love you. The Doors are 60 this year. Or would have been. Good and legendary as they were, I think they are woefully underrated. Manz … | Continue reading
What follows is a conversation I’m having with ChatGPT about personal AI. I guarantee it’s unlike any conversation about AI you’ll find anywhere else. It’s copied and pasted. I may be adding to it, though its probably long enough. Enjoy! You said: I am thinking about what persona … | Continue reading
Just learned about this, here. Thank you, Andy Sylvester! | Continue reading