Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published … | Continue reading
On big changes in nowheres becoming somewheres Audacy, by far the most stressed-out owner of too many radio stations, is killing off another big old signal: KXNT/840 in Las Vegas. I dug into that, and wrote about it on Trunkline, my neglected blog about infrastructure that will s … | Continue reading
Book now The next three IIWs. November 3 – 5, 2026IIWXLIII #43 Fall 2026 April 27 – 29, 2027IIWXLIV #44 Spring 2027 October 19 – 21, 2027IIWXLV #45 Fall 2027 Early bird ends in 15 days | Continue reading
We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of … | Continue reading
On AI wronging and writing I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It's not just the piles one-line paragraphs, the contrasty "not that, but this" argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It's a tone that sounds like a million well-put hunks of text publishe … | Continue reading
Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever see … | Continue reading
Toward eliminating an irony The IEEE's cookie notice says, "This website utilizes technologies such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as for analytics, personalization, and targeted advertising. Privacy Policy." Its privacy policy, at that last link, says … | Continue reading
I am a heavy Photoshop user, and recently upgraded to Photoshop 2026 at Adobe’s robotic insistence. But, when I went to do a “generative fill” on an old photo (in the outlined area above), I was met with this: Fuzzed by that, I hit the View my balance button and got this: This sh … | Continue reading
Thinkings out loud Overheard: "In tech, every bit of progress makes something easy obsolete." Did AI make me believe this? Charley Johnson: AI Can Change Your Mind Without You Noticing Why just brands? WordPress VIP: Future of the Web 2026: Chapter 1: The brand that feels human i … | Continue reading
Well, two of us know With Apple Is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It, Limited Edition Jonathan does a better job of saying what I've been saying about where Personal AI is going, most recently here. | Continue reading
WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my entire life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the sta … | Continue reading
Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight: And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking: I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one do … | Continue reading
Goldie Boone is a “digital country artist” who looks too good to be real. So I’m betting she’s not. (I wouldn’t have brought this up if she hadn’t appeared in one of my Facebook doomscroll reels.) | Continue reading
Welcome to New York AeroXplorer: LaGuardia Tower Alerts Pilots to Possible Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat Near Airport. Excerpt: "Controllers told inbound flights to stay alert for individuals on the ground who may have been carrying a rocket launcher." In case you're optimistic a … | Continue reading
He the People My Modern Met: Colorado Mayor Mike Coffman Spends Every Friday Night Sleeping in a Homeless Shelter. Excerpt: Coffman has described his overnight stays as a form of quality control, allowing him to evaluate whether Aurora’s incentive-based model is helping resident … | Continue reading
The continuing end of broadcasting Jason Lewis: It's Over—Talk Radio (as well as traditional media) has run its course. A newer beginning Nitin Badjatia has been laying out more and more reasons—and ways—that enterprises will adapt to customers, rather than the reverse. More a … | Continue reading
Uh oh Tornado watch for all five New York City boroughs. How the radar & lightning map looks now. And here are planes not landing at Newark (EWR): And the last center that holds Mediapost: Sports Is The Last True Mass Medium. | Continue reading
How about mintelligence? We need different words for human and machine intelligence. The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can't measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you'd get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends … | Continue reading
This is the first morning since I arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday that stepping outside in the morning didn’t feel like walking into an oven. It was 76° F (24.4° C), which isn’t bad. I also couldn’t see far up the road, because the air was full of smoke, and it was hard to brea … | Continue reading
It's 96° here in Baltimore, where the air quality sucks thanks to fires in Canada and Minnesota. But write on I shall. And your mone Ed Zitron's long read on the coming AI crash is worth your time. Seriously In paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms, Don Marti g … | Continue reading
That's all I have to prep for a month on the road. Tomorrow is Baltimore. After that, North Carolina. After that, California. Back in Bloomington in mid-August. Ground down [Says here](CKWX Vancouver,) that Rogers Sports & Media has closed six of its radio stations. One of those, … | Continue reading
Just a theory LeBron is going to Miami. Old connections. Fun team with Giannis and Bam there. Lots of great golf, year-round. | Continue reading
To whom else has God sold naming rights for days of the week? And you thought Tuesday was a grace of our turning Earth. | Continue reading
I leave shortly for fun family matters in Minneapolis. Meanwhiles, here are some worthy tabs to close: While finding this kindness by Kaliya Young (quoting a now-vanished utterance by the late and very great Craig Burton) published in 2005 on her IdentityWoman blog, I also dug he … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, in The George Carlin Model of AI, I said personal AI needed to work first on what George called a place for my stuff. Should Apple occupy that whole personal space, kinda like René Magritte visualized in a surrealist painting seventy-five years ago? I think … | Continue reading
Super Typhoon Bavi, not to be confused with Typhoon Bavi of 2020, is spinning into the Northern Marianas Islands, including Guam. NPR: “The super typhoon was moving north with maximum sustained winds of 165 miles per hour on Sunday, according to Guam’s Joint Information Center. T … | Continue reading
I see resemblances Back in 2005, Earl Monroe said, "You know, I watch the games, and even now I never see anyone who reminds me of me, the way I played." Earl is 81 now. I wonder what he thinks about Jalen Brunson. Too much else to do Recommendo got me into Down the Rabbit Hole, … | Continue reading
Hitting the road today, and may be away from rectangles all weekend. So I’ll let this image speak to our condition on departure: | Continue reading
Will I ever run out of new names for days of the week? We'll see. Markets are Money It doesn't say that in The Gluetrain Manifesto, but the long-gone (but archived) parody of The Cluetrain Manifesto is still funny. | Continue reading
Another shunny day NOYB: US Supreme Court just blew up EU-US Data Transfers. Here's the decision. | Continue reading
We'll see what happens Call for Tenders: Development, consultancy and support for a data altruism consent management system went out from the European Commission on 27 May of this year. It begins, "This call will fund a robust, legally compliant and user-friendly digital solution … | Continue reading
And in your browser, it's hard to tell who's winning Remember "fair use"? It's a concept kind of like "public airwaves." There's an ideal in there somewhere, but the context is a world where social contracts really aren't, and it's all kind of worked out, but not really. Alex Rak … | Continue reading
Please do Don Marti: Insulating people from fake consent. Hard to pick which great section to excerpt, so I'll just give you the bottom lines: Some folk privacy practices are ineffective or out of date, but coming up with some way to “get this annoying banner out of my face” is a … | Continue reading
The largest coming conflict in the new AI world is not the one between AI giants or the one between those giants and governments. It will be the conflict between containment and expansion of personal agency. On the side of containment are expanded surveillance, guesswork, and ent … | Continue reading
I differ to beg I'm digging The information ecosystem is being redrawn by AI. That might be good news by Shuwei Fang (Harvard Kennedy bio) Excerpts: 3. From artefacts to liquid informationOnce machines are the primary audience, the artefacts we have built around information (the … | Continue reading
Random: Lidar all kinds of stuff. Two books: The Sovereign Human: Who Are You When AI Can Do Everything? American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda Unpacked Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models: We present foundation language models developed to power Appl … | Continue reading
Security at one cost: your time. A thousand years ago, there was a cooking show on TV called Chef Tell (real name: Paul Friedman Erhardt). My teenage kids and I enjoyed watching him for just four words he would say, after making something too complex for any of us to bother with. … | Continue reading
The NBA draft is tonight, and will be hugely interesting for fans, because this year's class coming out of college is unusually thick with talent. But what's happening with trades is more interesting to me right now. The Miami Heat just traded most of its team and some valuable f … | Continue reading
My wife’s Mac laptop has ‘All Sent’ listed under ‘Favorites’ in the left panel of her Apple Mail app. Everywhere my Big AIs and I looked online, however, we didn’t see a way to add it, until ChatGPT suggested I mouse over the Favorites heading to see what appears. The two items t … | Continue reading
Something not to chew on. Or with. To dentists, teeth have numbers. They start on the top right, so your wisdom tooth there is #1. The numbers continue around to #16: your left wisdom tooth, then down to #17 below, and around to #32, your right bottom wisdom tooth. I'm losing #2 … | Continue reading
Any will do I can't call mine. Pop died in 1979, eight years younger than I am now. Were he alive today, he'd be 117 years old. I only knew him for 32 years, but I can still hear his voice clearly, and would know it anywhere. Mom's too. And Grandma's. Maybe I'll hear them […] | Continue reading
Forty-five years ago, George Carlin forecast the future of AI: Listen to what George says, if you haven’t already. You can stop about two and a half minutes in, after he talks about how all your shit is stuff and everyone else’s stuff is shit. Because that’s the reason Big AI wil … | Continue reading
Ed Zitron's latest two are good reads: Exclusive: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion Premium: The Silicon Valley Bubble (Part 2) I've worked in the Valley, both on-site and in the world, since 1977. (On site was '85 to '01.) It ain't the … | Continue reading
And then repeats as champs Rumors have it that Giannis Antetokounmpo is headed for the Boston Celtics in a complicated trade that will send Celtics stalwart Jaylen Brown to Milwaukee or elsewhere. I doubt this will happen, simply because at this stage in their careers, Jaylen is … | Continue reading
The only college sport I ever played was soccer, on the new club team my small college put together during my sophomore year. I only qualified because I showed up and didn’t suck at it. I only lasted two weeks on the team because the coach discovered I was on academic probation. … | Continue reading
News In the continuing story of news as a business, newspapers have been written out. The surviving characters are— Social networks, video networks, and AI News websites and apps TV Or so it says in News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media, b … | Continue reading
On a medical frontier Adrian Gropper in the AI corner of the New England Journal of Medicine: The Medical AI Assistant as Publication, Not Device — Why Peer-Reviewed, Open-Source AI Belongs in the Standard of Care. From the abstract: "I argue that when a physician publishes a MAI … | Continue reading
This Knicks NBA championship run is the greatest of all time. Reasons: | Continue reading