Or both Monday and Tuesday? If Saturday and Sunday are the weekend, why not call Monday the Weekstart? | Continue reading
Super. Bowles a strike. Against ChatGPT. This is brilliant. Here's a bonus post from the reliably contrary Gary Marcus. | Continue reading
Kill the lottery I have a simple suggestion for getting rid of tanking in pro sports. Hope he gets the hat tip Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. Aviation, for example. At any moment a million people across the world are airborne and traveling safel … | Continue reading
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 That it's bad Reason says Trump's wantin … | Continue reading
Sounds right enough Axios: 1 big thing: 3 historic shifts. It begins, "You can only fully understand politics, business and your own anxiety in 2026 by reckoning with the three, once-in-a-generation shifts unfolding at once, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curt … | Continue reading
Story Bowl I'm a Patriots fan who was pained for the Seahawks when a bad play call (blame coaches) snatched defeat from the jaws of victory the last time the two teams met in the Super Bowl. So I won't be too bummed if the Seahawks win this one. The Revenge Bowl will be a […] | Continue reading
Without losing its charm I am in Harbour Island, where all the old houses have shutters. The house where we're staying is a small cottage built in 1832. It has survived countless hurricanes. Remember Her? Moltbook is a Reddit for AI chatbots. NBC: Humans welcome to observe: This … | Continue reading
Yesterday, Customer Commons and MyData Global launched MyTerms at a London event correctly titled The Only Way to Get Real Privacy Online. (I explain only and real at that link.) MyTerms is the nickname for 7012-2025 – IEEE Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Li … | Continue reading
You're welcome NASA: Asteroid 2024 YR4 will certainly miss Earth and has a 96.2% chance of missing the Moon. I share this in faint hope that when one sees BS on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or social media wherever saying the asteroid is going to have a spectacular impact on the … | Continue reading
Just what you didn't ask for Show of hands: Does anyone here want ads on ChatGPT? (Don't raise them if you work in the ad biz.) Did you want them in Amazon searches? How about Google's before that? Expect ChatGPT to become just as enshittified. And now, naturally, we have ICE Ex … | Continue reading
What is the opposite of criticism? On a lead from a friend, I followed a thread from this patent to its author, Brian Dear (another friend), then to his about page, his old blog, his BlueSky tweetings, his bandcamp page, his lettrboxd page, then to his criticism of Megan McArdle … | Continue reading
Preach! Because you haven't yet heard everything about Fernando Mendoza and the Indiana Hoosiers, I give you Mason Whitlock's take. Snow 'nuf My watch told me it was minus-1° when I woke up this morning, just like it was a year ago today. There's 14.5" of snow on the ground, and … | Continue reading
Go now to FlightAware’s MiseryMap. Cick on the blue Play button and watch The Great Storm of January 25-26 move across the land and cause massive delays at airports in its path. I have a 1.59 GB movie (.mov) of what you just saw. What should I do with it? Bonus image: | Continue reading
What emerges? You know how Google's original (and continuing) mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"? It didn't happen with Google. Gemini gets closer. So I'm thinking, if search was the larval stage, and now Gemini is the … | Continue reading
MyTerms is done and ready to begin. The launch is next Wednesday, in the room above at Imperial College London. Back in ’22, I called MyTerms (IEEE 7012) The Most Important Standard in Development Today. Now it’s finished and more important than ever. Join the launch. Times: 4 PM … | Continue reading
And how can this go well? YouTube plans to let creators make AI Shorts using their own likeness. | Continue reading
Only if all of them put up a paywall Dana Blankenhorn says Big AI is now a commodity, and that doesn't look good for OpenAI. ChatGPT's market share is slowly yielding to Gemini and Claude, but still dominates. But I wonder about revenue. Google's cash cow is advertising, especial … | Continue reading
Your irregularly nonscheduled blogging program will continue returning shortly. Or at length. We'll see. Woke up with a case of nausea and uselessness this morning. Took all day to get back to something like normal. And here we are, sort of. Cue Frank. | Continue reading
That’s a screen grab of an email we’re sending out for the MyTerms launch in London. Links: Be there in a Zoom square. Or in old-fashioned reality. | Continue reading
Because depending on Big AI for privacy won't work In Consumer AI Is Outpacing Enterprise, the VC firm Mayfield quotes Vanessa Parli, Managing Director of Programs and External Engagement at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI): "'If we can buil … | Continue reading
Our Indiana Hoosiers Football team has won the National Championship. You can read about it everywhere. Probably hard to escape, because it’s the best story in sports right now: how the team that had lost a record number of games went undefeated this season, going 16-0, a feat no … | Continue reading
There is a huge geomagnetic storm going on right now, producing auroras visible far south into the lower, um, maybe, twenty states, of the US. Note that auroras are a thousand miles high or so, so they can be seen far south of where they’re happening overhead. It’s overcast in In … | Continue reading
Only 20,000,000 likes out of 100,000 views A porkwarming pig slaughter and community feast story from the BBC. | Continue reading
The Net as one big gaslight Joan Westenberg: The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack. Just one worthy pullquote: "The problem is structural. The total volume of things-you-should-have-an-opinion-about has exceeded our cognitive bandwidth so thoroughly that having … | Continue reading
Air in LA Two pieces of interesting info from this clip on Reddit: 1) Don't have any plane, much less another gigantic A380, take off after another one like it. 2) LA Flights is an online YouTube channel doing live reporting of flights in and out of LAX. | Continue reading
I’ve been young a long time. My chronometer says 78.4685 years, which is long for a human but short for a rock. I know a lot of rocks. It helps to have perspective. I still work. A lot. I’ve outgrown getting paid, though my work is still valuable. (Or so I believe.) But it’s hard … | Continue reading
Don't use the A word Washington State University: Using the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in product descriptions reduces purchase intentions. | Continue reading
Being fully enshittified, it's one giant fecosystem. Dentsu says global ad spend will exceed $1 trillion this year. Ethical Marketing News says the adtech slice of some larger number is $1.19 trillion. In that, "Alphabet, Amazon and Meta take a combined market share of 56.1% excl … | Continue reading
Logisms I like "everwhat" and "everwhen." Just wanted to say that. Still trying "Life is a casino with no house, so go ahead and influence your own bets. The future is a black swan hatchery that will produce colors other than black and white. Every species is a mistake that works … | Continue reading
Divide and —? Axios: "The nation is splitting into three distinct economic realities: the Have-Nots (stalling) … the Haves (coasting) … and the Have-Lots (rocketing to greater wealth)…This shift, if it holds, will rattle economics, politics and AI throughout 2026 and beyond. We'r … | Continue reading
In What destroyed ‘the right to be let alone’, Tiffany Jenkins in the Washington Post argues that demolition of personal privacy began in the postwar years and became normative in 1973. That was when PBS ran An American Family: a cinéma verité exposure of the Loud family in Santa … | Continue reading
2 B Bob Weir is gone. He and Jerry Garcia were (at least to me) the sonic and vocal backbone of the Grateful Dead. He was less than two months younger than me. Jerry was older, but dead at 53. Phil Lesh made it to 84, dying in October 2024. Bill Kreutzmann is still with us […] | Continue reading
The last thing David Hodskins emailed to me was “Don’t become a Hoosiers fan.” It was David who made me a Duke Blue Devils Basketball fan. David was an Iron Duke—an alumnus who contributed to the program. And he made me a fan by bringing me often to fill the other of his two seas … | Continue reading
Whoosiers! The last thing David Hodskins emailed to me was "Don't become a Hoosiers fan." It was David who made me a Duke Blue Devils fan, by bringing me often to fill the other of his two season ticket seats in Cameron Indoor Stadium. This was between 1977 and 1984. At the begin … | Continue reading
Also, Gemini failed. I still don't know who she was. I think we could have powered two cities with the work Gemini just did, thinking slowly to help me identify the actress that my old pal Drew Youngs sings about in his video (and musical composition) Betty the Bloop. In an unrel … | Continue reading
That’s a PageXray of Craigslist.org. I ran it after reading Is Craigslist the Last Real Place on the Internet? by Jennifer Swann in Wired. It shows Craigslist doing no tracking at all. Nice! Craigslist also doesn’t interrupt your experience with a cookie notice, because it doesn’ … | Continue reading
A model for the future Nice piece on Craigslist in Wired. One paragraph: “It’s not a perfect platform by any means, but it does show that you can make a lot of money through an online endeavor that just treats users like they have some autonomy and grants everybody a degree of pr … | Continue reading
I’m thinking out loud here about how to get development rolling for MyTerms. I see three pieces required for a proof of concept: When we first thought about this at ProjectVRM in the late ’00s, we saw a browser header that looked like this: The ⊂ and the ⊃ are for the personal an … | Continue reading
Why German keyboards wear out faster I need to keep coming up with new titles for blog posts that might end up being on any number of subjects. Mittwoch jumped into my head because it's German for Wednesday. I took two years of German in high school, one of them twice, and gave t … | Continue reading
Always buy in the past In 1991, my bride bought us both lifetime memberships in United Airlines' airport lounge, then called the Red Carpet Club. I forget the price; but it was cheap, considering. I'm guessing it was less than what one would pay now for just a year's worth of ser … | Continue reading
Think about all the things that give you global scale online: Now think about what traps you: And now think about how much business the latter system prevents rather than enables. Such as VRM and market intelligence that flows both ways. At scale. I think that entrapment system n … | Continue reading
Anchors Away Nothing is more North Atlantic than Greenland. If the US siezes it, NATO will transform from an alliance to a war zone, where allies become combatants. Does anyone outside Trump's amen corner want that? But let's say the US buys Greenland from Denmark, like it bought … | Continue reading
I just discovered that the original Cyclone roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park has its own Wikipedia article, and that the two photos in it are ones I posted on Flickr in 2008 with a permissive license that encouraged re-use. Above is the first. Here is the second: George … | Continue reading
Also, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are great singers Went to a movie theater last night and watched Song Sung Blue with about ten other people. All of us clapped when it ended. It was that good. Playing Neil Diamond was mostly a no-no on the rock radio stations I worked with in t … | Continue reading
How about Linklessin? I've never liked LinkedIn, but I grudgingly participate because, well, ya gotta. So I'll hold my kvetching to a single gripe: LinkedIn's aversion to linking. Since they won't change that practice, how about changing their name? To what? I still won't play De … | Continue reading
Humans 1, Robot 0 The Wall Street Journal fuzzed the non-brain of a trial vending machine operator. Dreck Marketing In The Death of Merchandising in an Online World, Dana Blankenhorn correctly observes that brand value is declining as merchandising shifts from stores to online se … | Continue reading
And exactly which one were you looking for? Anna's Blog says Anna's Archive has backed up the whole of Spotify's music library.\: "This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s f … | Continue reading
You can now get a huge 4K TV for not much more than an ATM withdrawal. (Remember those? They gave you paper rectangles called “cash.”) You’ve already got Netflix, and probably four or five other subscription TV services, plus (or, increasingly, minus) cable. You can also get good … | Continue reading