Essays
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.
Streaking Baseball Players
The Chicago Cubs have won ten games in a row, which is their second ten game winning streak of this season. Right now it is fun to be a fan of the Chicago Cubs given that their entire lineup is hitting and that puts a lot pressure on opposing pitchers. If the line up keeps this up, the Cubs could be a champion, but that is not likely. The key to winning divisions in baseball is stacking wins to put distance between you and other teams in the division so that you can get a large enough for when the team loses several games in a row you don’t lose your place.
I think it’s hard for me to get really excited about this year’s team because of the pitching staff. Teams that have success in the playoffs have Cy Young caliber pitchers and right now I can’t put any of Cubs starters in that category.
Going in to the season, Cade Horton had that potential, but he is injured and done for the year. Shota Imanga is pitching very well as is Edward Cabrera but the big question about both is whether they can sustain their current performance through the entire season, both have history of injuries.
Pitching wins championships and right now it’s hard to feel confident that the Cubs current pitching is good enough. The Cubs lineup and current pitching may be good enough to win their division, and perhaps even get to the National League championship series, but as teams advance in the playoffs chances of that opposing pitching will neutralize a lineup increases and that is when your pitching matters.
Pitching Is Hurting The Cubs
While acknowledging this as probably too much of a generalization, I think baseball games are won (or lost) by either pitching or hitting. Based on earned run average, I think that when a MLB pitching staff gives up more than four runs it did not do its job. During the Cub’s recent ten game winning streak their pitchers gave up more than four runs only once. Now the Cubs have lost three in a row, and in every one the pitchers gave up more than four runs. Worse, they have given up six or more runs in each game, therefore not giving their hitting much of a chance to win.
The Cubs do currently have a winning 17-12 record due to the fact that of the 24 games played in April, Cub pitchers held opponents to four are fewer runs in 16 games. It appears to be the case that the huge number of their pitchers on IL is catching up to the Cubs.
If the pitching trend continues and given how well the other teams in the NL Central are playing, the Cubs will end up with a losing record for the season and not make the playoffs.
Personal Programming
I am old enough to remember a time when there were no personal computers. While computers existed throughout my life time (I was born in 1966), personal computers didn’t exist until 1975 (the Altair 8800) and back then they weren’t very useful because one had to program these computers for them to do anything.
In the 1970s there were no stores for one to go to and buy software needed to make the PC do something useful, instead one wrote their own programs. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, which enabled one to write their own programs, and ironically that led to the formation of Microsoft and the personal computer software industry.
The need to write programs limited the market for PCs to hobbyists who were willing to spend the time to learn and tinker and share their code with others. To most hobbyists the idea of selling programs was abhorrent as they saw them as art to be freely shared, and with this point of view the animosity toward Microsoft was born.
Building My Personal Assistant App
XTEInk X4
Time As A Retiree
I’ve learned over the years the best way for me to change is through small habits or routines. In 2019 I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and I found the best way for me to manage my blood sugar was by taking a ten to twenty minute walk after eating a meal. My walks are so much a part of my day that it feels very abnormal when I am not doing them.
So, when considering all this time I now have for myself, I began considering what it is I want to be doing each day. There were the obvious things like reading more and learning more, but I also realized that I could be doing a better job of helping to keep the house clean. Rather than doing all the cleaning all at once I broke down these tasks down into 15 minute items, one per day during week days.
Michigan Central
The Michigan Central train station closed in 1988, one year before Ruth and I moved to the Detroit area. I can think of no better symbol for the fall and rise of Detroit than this historic building. Built by the Vanderbilts and opened in 1914, it is a sibling to Grand Central station in New York.
After its abandonment by Amtrak it became a well known eye sore, and as a ruin it became used as a set for movies like Batman vs. Superman. Unlike the locals, our memories of this once glorious building is of a haunting structure with blown out windows.
Reports of its restoration and re-use surfaced throughout the years, but never became real until Ford purchased the building in 2018. It finally re-opened in 2024 and ever since I have wanted to go see it, which we finally did yesterday. The building, like Detroit, has survived the decline of the 90s and early 2000s to be the most prominent physical manifestation of Detroit’s motto: “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”
See the results of the labor of so many to restore this building to its original beauty in the pictures that I took. I envy those who get to work in this building, one with the personality afforded by wood, limestone, and granite. Designed when architecture emphasized materials of the earth over materials made from the earth.
Retirement First Quarter Report
At the beginning of April I passed the first three month milestone of retirement and I want to write down some thoughts about this new phase of life. Am I glad that I retired? Absolutely, but I would be lying if I did not admit feeling some fear caused by the fact that our retirement income is tied to the market that reacts to the whims of the President of the United States.
The market, and my reaction to it, is emotional and so the challenge is in managing those emotions. Uncertainty is a reality that always exists and my technique for living with uncertainty is to focus on, to the extent possible, what I know. For example, if all of our savings were to disappear, which is a very unlikely scenario, I have had these three months of life lived to my schedule whereas I could be still working, still have the savings disappear, and not have had that time.
Retirement for me is about savoring the most precious gift of time, which always passing and often only appreciated via hindsight. The best way to face uncertainty is in gratitude for the current moment. I have reasons to be grateful simply to be alive to experience this moment, but I confess that in the later years of my career I grew frustrated with having the precious time of my life controlled by a corporation that simply did not know nor care about me.
I’ve been working since I was 12 years old. When I define work in the context of my life, I broadly include in it all the requirements placed on my time by others, school and employers. Forty seven years, almost non-stop, of waking up to an alarm clock dictated by somebody else, and when I became more aware that my remaining time in life is shorter than the past life I have lived I grew more irritated with having to share that remaining time with a lifeless corporate entity.
Had you asked me what I planned to do in my retirement I would have simply answered, not work! Loveboy’s Working For The Weekend has been on loop in the soundtrack of my life these past 47 years. I retired so that there were no more stressful Sunday nights as my mind and body gave up the brief bit of relaxation it started experiencing the prior Friday evening.
Mission accomplished! I have even found on a few occasions that I forgot the day of the week, feeling as though it were a weekend.
Same Ole Cubs
Every year it seems the problems with the Chicago Cubs is the same, they struggle to hit with runners in scoring position because they have poor hitters. When the same issues keep appearing that indicates to me there is a systemic problem, which is not something fixable through signing one or two players. The evaluation of talent and construction of the roster is producing the same results we see year after year.
Getting the Cubs to the World Series after a century of losing is turning out to be easier than getting them back a decade after. It’s easy to get a talented team when you tank seasons and trade away what experienced players you have for prospects. The core of the 2016 team were those prospects lead by experienced veterans, but veterans who were in the later half of their careers.
Obviously, fans are not going to allow such a heavy rebuild. Seems to me that if you aren’t able to load up on prospects you have change your approach to obtaining MLB players. Every free agent signing the Cubs have made since 2016 are of players who are in the back end of their careers. Signing Alex Bregman this year is no different than signing Dansby Swanson, players who have won championships but who are not in their prime and therefore seem less capable of hitting consistently over a season.
Stay Awake
The intended effects of social networks for the sake of wealth ought to be the lens through which we look at AI. At their beginning we were told of all the good things social networks provide, and they did do that for a while, but then the wealth generation went in to hyper drive. We have no reason to believe the motivations towards more and more AI is not the same wealth generation. And since there can only be one most wealthiest person on earth, that leads to not caring about the negative impacts on the rest of the world.
A potentially helpful question to ponder when thinking about where all this AI “stuff” is going. Think of the songs that you have heard in your life, do those songs stand out because they sound good and are entertaining or do they stand out because you connect to the lyrics and relate what they convey? Perhaps that connection has also leads to feeling like you know the song writer, or better yet that the song writer knows you.
Bob Nystrom’s blog post, The Value of Things, inspired the question. Perhaps a way to combat the nihilism of AI is consciousness. Most times we are unconscious, which is like hearing music and simply enjoying the sound, while times we are conscious enough to hear and relate to the words. The risk of AI is the decrease in the amount of time that we are conscious, so perhaps working on our own consciousness is a method to combating the affects of AI.
Seeking Purity Denies The Cross
Today, on Holy Saturday, Christians are in the between times of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, and for those so inclined a time such as this can be a good time to wonder, just what is this all about and where is it that we are going.
As a life long Christian I can’t help but feel a sense of deja vu, here we are once again at Easter and then days and months will pass and the liturgical calendar will start all over again. And I wonder some times, what is the point? Is humanity evolving in any way through this repetition?
Contrasting Between What Is And What Intended
Tomorrow is the start of the Christian Holy Week. For those wondering whether Christianity is relevant to our current time, the stories about this week ought to provide the answer, but one may only see that with the help of leaders who connect the dots.
For me one of the best descriptions that sets the scene was written by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in their 2006 book The Last Week. It begins:
“Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30. . . One a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession. From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers. On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers. Jesus’ procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire.”
While this is not a report on what literally happened, it’s plausible contrasts the differences between what we all consider the norm of civilization, peace through violence, and the alternative rule of God of peace through love.
Palm Sunday is about hope, yes, but that is only appreciated in contrast to what is going all around us. If you get caught up in the hoopla then you are missing the point.
Fitbit On Pixel Watch Update 1
My Reddit post about the Fitbit app on my Pixel Watch is the source of an article on 9to5Google this morning as many people have replied to the post stating they are experiencing the same issue.
As an update, since I disconnected my watch from the Fitbit app on my phone, restarted both watch and phone, deleted yesterday’s step and distance data and then re-connected the watch to the Fitbit app the step count appears to be within expectations.
The problem now is I am not confident that the step count will remain accurate, so the whole situation is requiring more attention that I would like. One needs to be able to rely on data like this or there is no point in even collecting the data.
I have noticed through observations while sitting here at my desk that steps are added slowly over time while they shouldn’t be added at all. I have the felling the sensors on the watch are not being used properly right now, for steps and distance the watch should only increase when one is moving forward and not while sitting at a desk typing.