Essays
Extinction
We have known since August, 1945 that humanity has the power and the willingness to destroy all life on earth. Humanity’s ability for this destruction comes from our development of tools, all of which have the purpose for doing more than is normally possible. Our willingness comes from our ego-driven desire to be God. As I wrote yesterday, Artificial Intelligence may be the ultimate amplification. of humanity.
Consequently, I take serious the warnings raised by people working on the technology not because I understand the technology but because of my understanding of humanity. Our ego-driven lust of power prevents us from acting on the fact that there are things in the world that even though we can do them we ought not do them.
Six years ago the world suffered and many died because of a virus. Many people believe, some of whom are in positions of power, that COVID leaked from a lab. In other words, millions died due to a human mistake caused by an unwillingness to stop ourselves from doing something we know we shouldn’t do. I am sure the people who made the decisions to do that research believed they were doing so for the right reasons. I wish that Rand Paul could separate himself from his vendetta and the real lessons that would connect the dots between this type of “research” and this drive for AI.
Our inability to live with enough makes us our own worst enemy. The news every day drives home the point that there are no adults in the halls of power, and those in such positions who claim themselves Christian cannot divorce themselves from the idolatry of more.
iPhone Duo Quotables
I spent time this morning reading several articles about about the iPhone Duo and I look forward to the more detailed reviews to come. I think the biggest impact of the iPhone Duo will be with how it spurs software development for the form factor. My observation from afar of the Android based foldables has been that neither Google nor other developers have done enough to take full advantage of the form factor.
Apple’s Surprise and Shine Event: All the Small Things
John Voorhees https://www.macstories.net/news/apples-surprise-and-shine-event-all-the-small-things/
“Apple has released a six-video playlist on YouTube and in the Apple Developer app called “Get ready for iPhone Duo” to help get designers up to speed with the phone’s new format. The Human Interface Guidelines have been updated too.”
“Continuous Angle API lets developers receive ongoing updates about the Duo’s hinge angle to power interactive effects.”
Know When To Hold Them
Apple held their annual iPhone event/broadcast today during which they finally announced their long anticipated foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. When I saw the name leaked yesterday I thought to myself, surely Apple will not mimic Microsoft’s name for their first foldable, but that is the name so hopefully it will sell better than the Surface Duo.
Honestly, while I watch the Apple announcement broadcasts it’s hard for me to get excited by them as nearly all of Apple’s products now cost more than I will ever want to spend. Apple will get kudos for keeping the “base” model Duo to $1,999, which is still more than you pay now for either a Samsung ZFold8 at $1,899 or the Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold at $1,269. I will never spend more than $1,000 for a phone, let alone $2,000 even though it’s true that $1 to $2k purchase can replace the iPad Mini and phone.
Beside the price, I am put off by how the iPhone Duo looks. While it appears the “passport” sized foldable that Samsung and now Apple are using might be “the” winner, the rounded edges of the Duo when folded just look odd. The other problem I have with these foldables is how wide they are, which I think will feel bulky in a front pant pocket, not to mention the 8.96 ounce weight of the Duo is much more than the 7.2 ounces of my Pixel 10.
Given that I use my iPad Mini a lot, I am the type of person that fits the foldable use case. I personally think these devices should be marketed as foldable tablets rather than phones. The problem is, I can’t imagine a way for a foldable to never be bulkier than a smartphone, and I do want to be able to carry my phone without a bag.
Human Amplification
As I read articles such as this one by David Brooks I keep saying to myself, “we have learned nothing from the Internet.” At the beginning of the Internet there was all this pugnostication about how it was going to be democratizing, making the world better. What was not understood then is that the Internet amplifies the best and the worst parts of humanity. I think AI will be no different and that the focus on AI becoming generaliy intelligent or having a conscious is on the wrong thing, the focus should always be on all the ways humans can use AI for good and bad.
Humans always need rules to constrain their demons. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of conservatism is how their view of humanity leads to their creation rules against others but insisting on no rules to constrain their weaponization of capital against others for the sake of becoming wealthy.
Confidence Lost
Al Yellon on Greg Counsell’s decision to leave Boyd in the game to face Ortize in the eighth inning last night…
“The Brewers’ leadoff hitter in the eighth was a left-handed bat, Garrett Mitchell. So I figured Counsell would leave Boyd in to face Mitchell, then call on a right-handed reliever to face the next two bats, right-handed hitters Joey Ortiz and Jackson Chourio.
Ryan Zeferjahn, who’d been so good in his last two outings, was the righty in the bullpen. Unfortunately, Boyd walked Mitchell.
Still — the right call here is to bring in Zeferjahn to face Ortiz, right? With Ortiz being a right-handed hitter and Boyd now tiring at 93 pitches?
Well, you know what happened. Ortiz doubled down the line. Now Zeferjahn has to come in and face Chourio with two runners in scoring position with nobody out. His two-run single gave the Brewers the lead, and after a walk and strikeout, Jacob Webb was called in to clean up the mess. Another walk loaded the bases and a sac fly by Christian Yelich gave the Brewers a fourth run which, as it turned out, they needed.
Counsell should have taken Boyd out after Mitchell. Period. Not sure what he was thinking.”
I know what Counsell was thinking and it reflects a manager who has no confidence in his bullpen. Many of us have lost confidence too, therefore understand why Boyd was left in. The fundamental problem is that the Cubs' manager is in a position of not knowing what to do in September!
I have resigned myself to believing that while the Cubs will make the playoffs as a wildcard, they will exit right away, probably in a sweep. What makes the Cubs interesting to watch is Pete Crow-Armstrong’s chase for 40/40 and NL MVP.
Live Life Without Regret
From around the web….
A 450-Year History of Blogging
Brennan Kenneth Brown https://brennan.day/a-450-year-history-of-blogging/
“In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes [sic]” in order to measure the ship’s speed.[2] (The length was eventually counted by literal knots tied in the line at regular intervals; thus, our equally iconic term “knots.”) Recordings of the log-derived information, eventually replaced by the “chip log,” a weighted wooden quadrant, were entered into what would come to be called the “log board.”
— Janet Sorenson, “Logging-In: The Ship’s Log as Medium””
Winning The Trade Deadline Doesn't Matter
Trades at the Major League Baseball deadline do not make champions, championship teams are built during the off season and through development of young players. Good teams that need one or two players at the deadline and get them can make themselves a great team.
By most measures, the Chicago Cubs became a better team at this year’s deadline by getting the players they needed. The problem is, the Cubs needed too many players at the deadline, and didn’t make their lineup more reliable.
A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Nikhil Suresh https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
“Unfortunately, we live in a dark timeline. All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in22 We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway., but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method’s novelty. Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile.”
Only You Can Change You
Roadtripping In A Hyundai Tuscon
Looking In The Mirror
A Method For Quoteblogs
Among the many RSS feeds that I subscribe to there are a few that contain posts that share other people’s writing. I find the posts valuable because they provide me links to articles to read that I may not otherwise find and tend to be thoughtfully curated.
I want to provide my own “quoteblog” posts and landed on a method for creating them using the knowledge management app I’ve been developing for myself with Claude.
My reading flow starts by reviewing articles collected and presented by Feedland and River5 using RSS. I click articles with interesting titles and then send them to Readwise Reader using an extension, later I read them and highlight portions of the article that I like. Copies of the article highlights are downloaded to Obsidian and accessible to Readwise, which sends me random highlights of articles I read in daily emails.
The dashboard of my PKM app has a widget that is a list of the recent articles with highlights. Claude wrote the code to use the Readwise API to access the recent articles and display them in the widget. The article titles in the widget are links to the article highlights in Readwise. The articles roll off the widget over time but I can pin them to access them later via a Pinned Highlights page.
My quoteblog posts originate from the highlights I store in Readwise. Readwise provides the ability to tag articles, or what it calls documents, and tag individual highlights. I give the source article of the quotes a “blog-post” tag and the highlights to share a “quote” tag in Readwise. Claude then wrote the code that reviews the articles that I pinned looking for ones with a “blog-post” document tag and when it finds one, it puts thee article title, author, and source URL in a markdown file. Highlights that have a “quote” tag are then added to the markdown file.
For now I am not automating the publishing of the quoteblog post to this site. For now I am going to manually create my blog post in Obsidian, copy and paste the source of the quoteblog created from my highlights, and then do some light editing before publishing. The first of my quoteblog posts is Independent Food For Thought.
Independent Food For Thought
Two articles I think are worth reading on this, the 250th birthday of the United States because they describe how far we have come, yet still the same, while fighting against what we tell ourselves is the norm of civilization.
America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are
Derek Thompson https://www.derekthompson.org/p/america-1926-an-absurdly-deep-dive
“In other ways, the America of 1926 was another world—practically another planet. Roughly half of the U.S. still counted as rural, and tens of millions of Americans had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Thick smoke from oil lamps filled their homes, and they emptied their bladders and bowels in old-fashioned chamber pots. Women had only voted in two presidential elections. Millions of children still worked for pay. Of the nation’s 27 million households, only 11 million had a phonograph, to listen to music, or a car. The first movie with sound would not come out for another year.”
Democracy Is Bullshit
David Pinsof https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/democracy-is-bullshit
“So what is democracy? It is a key that perfectly fits the lock of group mode. It is a system that brandishes a fearsome weapon before our eyes—the coercive power of jails and cops and militaries—and tells us we cannot control it, and cannot defend ourselves from it, unless we band together into huge, lumbering groups. It is a system that pries power away from the hands of individuals and tosses it to mobs, cliques, unions, religions, interest groups, ethnic groups, and grotesque agglomerations of all the above called ‘political parties.’ It is a system defined by the crushing hopelessness of individual toil and the awesome power of collective synchrony.”
People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. -George Carlin
“The purpose of a group is to increase the power, status, and resources of the humans inside it relative to the humans outside it. How do we know this is true? Because over evolutionary time, the groups that reliably fulfilled this purpose became our ancestors.”
“Monarchy is rule by monarchs. Oligarchy is rule by oligarchs. Democracy might seem like it’s rule by the ‘demos’—by the people—but it’s not. Or at least, not by individual people. Democracy is, instead, rule by tribes. Yes, it’s time to switch from ‘groups’ to the more pejorative ‘tribes.’ The most cohesive, well-organized, well-funded tribes, bound into supertribes called ‘parties,’ are the ones who rule. It’s a tribeocracy. And given the well-documented ethical and intellectual downsides of tribalism, that is a very bad thing. It’s hard to think of a worse way to run a society than to systematically take power away from wonderful individuals and wise crowds so we can give it to mean, dumb, incoherent, sanctimonious tribes.”
“But there is a worse way to run a society, called autocracy, which leaves us with an important question: Why are democracies nicer places to live than autocracies? The main reason is that democracies are multitribal while autocracies are unitribal.”
A Look To The Future With AI In It
Read a really good essay titled After AI Takes Everything written by a software engineer based in Singapore who goes by Airing. The link I am providing is to a copy of the essay I have in Readwise that includes my highlights. If you work in IT or know someone who does that is worried about what AI is doing to their future I recommend that you read the essay.
A part of the essay I find most relatable is the following:
The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.
What will enable one to survive the AI revolution is their own sense of value as a human being. Consequently, I think what employees need to be sensitive to is the degree to which employers actually value them. If an employer treats their employees as a cog or as nothing more than a cost that employer will be eager to replace you no matter what. I would find another job. In fact, this is the primary reason why I decided to retire as what remains left of my life is too precious to be un-valued.
Oh, and by the way, I think this sense of value as a human beings is the core of Pope Leo’s encyclical.
Android 17
Google has released Android 17, and I just initiated the process to download and install it on my Pixel 10. 9to5Google has a video overview of all the changes, which are mostly cosmetic. For the last several years the Android version upgrades have not included significant functionality additions, rather they include UI and general performance improvements. Functional additions to Android come in the Quarterly Point Releases (QPR) and we expect QPR1 to Android 17 in the fall, timed with the release of the Pixel 11.
Also included in the Android 17 download is the June 2026 Pixel Drop that adds features to Pixel phones. Most useful to me is App Bubbles, which provide users the ability to add applications to the floating “bubble” that appears on top of all screens and apps running on the phone. We previously had this ability for text messaging conversations and I think of it as a multitasking feature that enables me to quickly switch to a task that I have pinned to the display.
One use that I have for app bubbles is for quick access to RadarScope while there are storms in my area to quickly see the current weather radar. To “pin” an app to the bubble tap and hold the app’s icon and tap Bubble at the bottom of the context menu. Note that this feature does not appear to work for all apps, particularly ones that have custom context menus. For example, tap and hold the Gmail icon and you do not see a Bubble option instead you see options to compose new email or open an Gmail account.
Wear OS 7 is also coming for the Pixel Watch and as I am less enthused about that release I am not go to force it to be installed on my watch.
Enough
I am of the opinion that one cannot begin to comprehend the risks of artificial intelligence without knowing oneself. We are embedded in a culture of “more” that teaches we should never be satisfied and we never see that “more” for what it is, an idol. The drive for the more, more wealth, more power and with that somehow a better life for oneself is the context in which decisions about artificial intelligence are being made.
More is the zeitgeist of the norm of civilization, so much so that most of us are willing to accept it as desirable and our true calling.
Using Google AI Plus
I replaced the standard, original, Google One subscription with Google AI Plus, which provides more AI features for $4.99 per month. I now have access to the Daily Brief produced by Gemini using Gmail, Calendar, and Text Messaging that I find useful but surprised I am not receiving notifications about them each day, instead I have to go in to the Gemini app to read them, which makes no sense. I found where I control whether I see notifications for Daily Brief and toggled that on/off.
Another problem I have with Gemini on the phone is that it is too verbose. When I ask it for information it produces several paragraphs and seems to insist on reading all of it when I prefer to read what was produced in silence. Perhaps Google could enable user to set a preference such as enabling users to tell Gemini to summarize long responses verbally and provide the remainder on screen to be read.
One more complaint… I like NotebookLM but I wish Google would do one of two things, either enable NotebookLM to access Google Keep or provide users the ability to create and edit notebook sources from a phone. Here is my use case. I religiously track the oil level in our 2013 GMC Terrain in a note in Google Keep. I found it useful to provide that odometer and oil level log to NotebookLM so that I can query it, but to get the log into a notebook I have to send a copy to Google Docs because NotebookLM only knows about Google Docs stored in Drive. Keep does not use Drive for storage, and I suspect Google stores notes in a backend database.
If Google will allow users to create notebooks in NotebookLM and create sources for them on a phone then that notebook could be an alternate to Keep. So far Google has not added any Gemini features to Keep, which is a bit surprising, but in another way suggests that maybe someday NotebookLM could replace Keep. I personally think it would be smart of Keep stayed as it and provided NotebookLM as the “AI equivalent” of Keep.
Ideally, NotebookLM would automatically sync/update Google Drive sources, but right now I have to manually sync to get updates which is fine except that if I simply send a Keep note to a Google Doc it doesn’t overwrite previously shared documents instead it creates another doc with the exact same name and the new “version” of the doc needs to be added as a source. In short, I don’t have an easy way to get updates to my oil log in to NotebookLM.
Idol Of Intelligence
I am fascinated by the number of reactions to Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in my technology feeds. It’s the first time that I can recall of seeing so many technologists spend any time with what a figure of religion has to say.
I am in the process of reading the encyclical, but I also have been reading many of the reactions and I particularly like this one by Yuval Levin. The following jumps out to me:
The appeal of idols has always been that they offer shortcuts. The God of the Bible demands that you live in a way that forms your mind and heart and soul toward your fullest human potential. This requires hard work but it yields a kind of person both capable and worthy of a flourishing life. The idol offers the material benefits of such a life without that formative work. And if all you care about are the benefits, not the form of your mind, heart, and soul, then the offer is awfully hard to resist.
Technologists tend to chase the shortcuts in life, apparently lacking the wisdom to see that we do so at the risk of not fully forming humanly. Another story from the Bible that comes to mind is the story of the fall in Genesis 3, which I think our ego causes us to conclude the “problem” or the “sin” of Adam and Eve is not obeying God. I think ego draws that conclusion because it controls over whether or not to obey. In other words, our ego is the solution to the problem.
I keep coming back to the following that Eve says in Genesis 3:2-3:
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ "
The tree in the middle of the garden is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and I ask myself, why does God say having knowledge of good and evil leads to death? Isn’t this nothing more than knowing right from wrong and isn’t that what every good parent is expected to teach their children?
I dare say how much different the world might be if the teaching of this scripture contemplated more on this paradox and avoided the egotistic shortcut of control and obedience. It is possible that the grand lesson of life is hidden in this seeming paradox of how something so fundamental to our very survival, good versus evil, friend or foe, leads to death. I think the problem it points to is the seeing of the world dualistically, as black and white, that makes it easy for us to see others apart from ourselves. From this we lose our humanity.
The Current Cubs Failure Starts At The Very Top
What Craig Counsell and David Ross have in common is that both are former players and I think that is the context in which one has to conclude that so far Counsell has not been better than the person he replaced. Former player managers appear to be more likely to continue to expect older players who once did very well to find their former selves any day now, when the probability of that happening is not likely.
The problem with the current Cubs is not Counsell just as Ross was not the problem when we was fired. The continued success of the Milwaukee Brewers after Counsell left them for the Cubs is for me strong evidence that it’s a system that leads to success not one person. What is important is the people at the top of a baseball team, the owner and next in command, to make good hires for people to put in place a good system.
The Chicago Cubs will continue fail to meet expectations and long as Jed Hoyer is running the Cubs. Hoyer wrongly over valued Counsell’s contributions at the Brewers and under valued the Brewer organization that clearly is superior to the Cubs. Counsell leaves and his bench coach is promoted to manager and the Brewers keep winning, what does that tell you?
I expect Counsell will be fired because that is the simplest action for Hoyer to take, and Jed isn’t going to fire himself. Rickett’s extended Hoyer last season before the trade deadline even after demonstrating poor decision making by trading the organization’s top prospect for a poor performing rental in Kyle Tucker.
Doing the same thing over and over is insanity. The Hoyer lead organization is convinced low cost, low budget aquisitions will get the Cubs back to the World Series but the current roster is just the latest evidence that will not work. We have the same team now as we had in every year since 2019.
Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should
I’ve written here a few times of my concerns with AI. Eric Markowitz expresses similar concerns.
We began to believe that because a capability exists, it must be deployed. That because a machine can replace a person, the person must go. This is an abdication of our moral duty as humans. It is surrendering our judgment to our instruments and calling it progress.
The reason this moment feels so acute, so existential, is not because AI is uniquely powerful — although it is. It’s because AI has arrived at precisely the moment when we have already hollowed out so much of what makes work meaningful.
We have already financialized everything. We have already reduced human beings to line items and disposed of them like inventory. We have already built an economy that treats people as costs to be minimized rather than as the very source of the value being created.
I also think the idea seeking meaning in their work is fools gold, intended to allow themselves to be used. Finding meaning in work confused vocation with occupation. Some times they do align, but I think only when starting with vocation.