Routine Revelations

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:19:46 -0400

As I said, “Scoring lots of runs is entertaining but preventing lots of runs wins championships.” The Chicago Cubs got blown at last night in San Diego, 0-8, and tonight is likely their last game of the 2026 season.

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:08:24 -0400

Today I am grateful to be retired so that I can enjoy this wonderful weather that we’ve been having for the last week. In this time of the year you have to appreciate all the nice days because it’s Michigan and winter is coming.

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:32:50 -0400

Andy Sylvester has developed a tool that provides a way to generate oldSchool blogs to a local file system and thus host them on any web server. Its a niche tool that provides a way to host blogs rendered using Dave Winer’s blog template apart from his hosting.

I use Drummer, which is Dave’s web-based outlining tool, to write my Daynotes and I was using his blog hosting to serve it, but I switched to different hosting. My Daynotes are now served via my own server running an instance of pagePark, which is Dave’s web server app. The upside is an entire year of notes are in one outline file served by a server I control.

I have written more specific observations about the results of Andy’s work, which I have not yet tried for myself, in my notes for today, September 28, 2026 that in the future you may need to expand to find.

Fall 2026 Technology Releases

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:57:51 -0400

As we reach the first official day of fall, 2026, Apple and Google have made their latest product announcements focused on their visions for how artificial intelligence integrates with smartphones and laptop computers. Meanwhile, we wait for Microsoft’s product announcements in October.

Google’s hardware efforts exist for the purposes of solidifying and extending its software ecosystem. The first Android phones provided a safe place for Google Search on mobile should Apple decide or be forced to remove it as the default search engine for iPhones and iPads. Over the years Google’s hardware initiatives have followed Apple, from tablets and speakers/home assistants to laptop computers.

Today Google launched Googlebooks, which are laptops from five hardware companies (Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo) running Googlebook OS. Googlebook OS is a desktop version of Android 17, which has been in development under the code name of Aluminum OS for a few years. Unlike the cheap to premium hardware of Chromebooks, there is a minimum and premium level hardware spec for Googlebooks requiring no plastic bodies, OLED touch screens, large track pads, good keyboards, and 16 GB of RAM. Prices range from $899 to $1299 and can be ordered today for shipping in early October.

I think Googlebooks exist for the purpose of providing a consumer laptop computing platform for Gemini, Google’s AI platform, that is replacing Search as the center of the Google ecosystem. No doubt Google expects Googleboook OS to be the best AI-integrated consumer operating system, and will try to contrast it with Apple and Microsoft’s operating systems that have AI bolt-ons. The assumption, of course, is that consumers want an AI-integrated operating system and for it are willing to spend more than $1,000.

While at the time of Google’s founding it probably identified Microsoft as its main competitor, I think today it competes in the consumer space with Apple. The irony is that while Google and Apple have the same categories of hardware products, Apple is a hardware company that uses software to strengthen the case of buying their hardware, while as I state above Google is the exact opposite.

I think Apple being a hardware company explains why, in the opinion of most, it appears to lag the industry in AI development. Apple has always had Siri, which before it was bought by Apple came across to consumers as having many of the features now being promoted as AI. Apple seemed to not be onboard with Siri’s original developers and just added it to their hardware as a “me-too” answer to Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana.

A year ago Apple promised an improved version of Siri with integrated AI to put it on par with Google, but we haven’t seen that version of Siri until now when they have released version 27 of their operating systems for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Prior to releasing their new operating system and the enhanced version of Siri, Apple announced new hardware, the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Ultra 5, and Watch Series 12, Airpods 5, and their new foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. All of these new Apple devices have premium hardware with most costing more than $1,000.

The Duo got most of the attention because it’s Apple’s first foldable, Samsung has lead this space starting with the Galaxy Fold in 2019. As is it’s reputation, Apple took time learning about foldables and developing a version with the intention of providing a better product. From a hardware perspective Apple appears to agree with Google and Samsung on a folded, square, passport-like design that opens to a rectangular or landscape larger screen. When opened the iPhone Duo looks to me like an iPad Mini.

In my opinion the problem is that the iPhone Duo costs $1,899, which while matches the prices of Google and Samsung, keeps the Duo in a smaller group of potential buyers. Of course, Apple has been selling large and expensive iPhones for years, so it has a good idea of the potential market and I am sure crunched the numbers enough to justify launching at this time at this price. The real question I have about the iPhone Duo is whether people who bought foldables made by Samsung and Google will switch to it, and will there be enough competition to finally drive down the prices?

So, the September 2026 announcements from Google and Apple leave us with big questions for both companies. For Google, are the designs of the Googlebook hardware good enough and the integration of Gemini in Googlebook OS compelling enough to lead to significant sales for Googlebooks? For Apple, does Siri now provide enough functionality to rid them of the reputation of lagging with AI and help them sell their expensive hardware?

And finally, what of Microsoft? Microsoft has events scheduled in October but I think for the most part Microsoft has transitioned out of the consumer computing space. It’s telling to me that the five Googlebook hardware companies have historically been the main providers of hardware for Windows, but ever since Microsoft first announced their own Surface laptops the relationship between Microsoft and these companies must be strained.

Satya Nadella has replaced Windows as the center of the Microsoft ecosystem with its cloud computing platform, Azure, and with that has moved it to relying mostly on corporate buyers rather than consumers. You will always be able to buy a laptop running Windows but Microsoft is not going rely on those sales for growing the company. Microsoft will always have a consumer version for their products, but that may be more for people who want to use the same software they use at work.

Cubs September Performance

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:26:58 -0400

So far in the month of September the Chicago Cubs have played 16 games. In ten games they have scored 4 or more runs, but in only five games their opponents scored 3 or fewer runs. The Cubs’ record to date in September is 7 wins and 9 losses.

As the Cubs are in a race for the top wildcard spot in the National League, all of the games in September have been playoff-like. The recipe for winning playoff games is to hold your opponents to 3 or fewer runs while your team scores 4 or more runs.

Despite the Cubs scoring 4 or more runs in 10 games, they have only 7 wins because in only 5 of those 16 games their pitching has been able to prevent more than 3 runs. When you factor in that in playoff baseball teams face the best pitching the data shows the Cubs are not likely to have success in the playoffs.

The 2026 Chicago Cubs are too reliant on their lineup scoring a lot of runs to win games, and they have the bats to do that but will have too much pressure to perform in multiple rounds. Scoring lots of runs is entertaining but preventing lots of runs wins championships.

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:54:35 -0400

I am reading a book of essays written by Wendell Berry titled “What Are People For?” and read the following this morning that I think is poignant on this day, the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States.

Extinction

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:15:54 -0400

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

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:42:56 -0400

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.”

The iPhone Duo: Tradeoffs, but Fewer Than Feared

Dan Moren https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/the-iphone-duo-tradeoffs-but-fewer-than-feared/

“However, when folded, the Duo is itself a chunky 11.3mm. I found myself wondering if that was, in turn, the thickest iPhone ever. The answer? Just barely not. But you have to go all the way back to 2009’s iPhone 3GS, which—like its predecessor, the iPhone 3G—rang in at 12.3mm, in large part due to its slightly convex back.”

iPhone Duo Is Thicker and Heavier Than Basically Every Android Foldable

Will Sattelberg https://9to5google.com/2026/09/09/iphone-duo-thicker-and-heavier-than-basically-every-android-foldable/

“But no matter how “modern” the iPhone Duo appears at first glance compared to Google and Samsung’s respective first-gen entries, it loses out on one big metric: bulk. The iPhone Duo measures in at 11.3mm thick when closed and weighs a whopping 254 grams. Compared to Apple’s most recent foldable rivals, that’s 15 grams (or three nickels worth) heavier than the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, 39 grams heavier than the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, and a whopping 53 grams heavier than the similarly-shaped Fold 8. Each of those phones is significantly thinner too, ranging anywhere between 8.9mm to 10.1mm when closed.

iPhone Duo: 254g, 11.3mm closed
Pixel 11 Pro Fold: 239g, 10.1mm closed
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra: 215g, 8.9mm closed
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8: 201g, 9.7mm closed”

Why Your iPhone Duo Will Inevitably Develop a Screen Crease

Apple Insider https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/10/why-your-iphone-duo-will-inevitably-develop-a-screen-crease

“The iPhone Duo developing a crease over time is inevitable as the tides, and a matter of physics and engineering. Here’s how and why that crease develops, and what Apple has done to mitigate it.”

Know When To Hold Them

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:19:21 -0400

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

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:55:37 -0400

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.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:09:30 -0400

Confidence Lost

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:33:28 -0400

Al Yellon on Greg Counsell’s decision to leave Boyd in the game to face Ortize in the eighth inning last night…

https://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/chicago-cubs-scores/232536/cubs-brewers-score-pete-crow-armstrong-matthew-boyd-mlb

“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.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:32:21 -0400

The 2026 Chicago Cubs are wasting a good lineup by having the worst pitching in the MLB. For me the root cause is Jed Hoyer treating the bullpen like a fantasy baseball manager, with turnovers every year and failure in real investment. The bullpen is foundational to pitching in the current era of pitching, and you see how teams like the Brewers who maintain consistency year over year and invest in the bullpen are competitive every year. In contrast, every year the Cubs try to build a new bullpen from the castoffs of other teams.

Now, while I put the blame for the pitching on Hoyer, I also have issues with Greg Counsells’ decisions with pitching. For example, it has been obvious that Shota Imanaga is not giving his team a chance to win when he takes the mound, so either Assad or Rae should take his place in the starting rotation. Instead, Counsell keeps starting him, hoping for a different result.

The Cubs will earn a wildcard spot in the playoffs, but the most likely outcome is a first round loss and regression from last year. Injuries will be the excuse but the reality is that the team is severely mis-managed from the owner on down. Not making changes in leadership and expecting different results each year is insanity. If Ricketts doesn’t want the Cubs to have a real chance to be in the World Series he ought to sell the team.

Live Life Without Regret

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:18:33 -0400

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””

Denormalizing Hypernormalization

gapingvoid.com https://www.gapingvoid.com/denormalizing-hypernormalization/

“Hypernormalization is what happens when something is obviously broken, everybody knows it’s broken, and yet everybody carries on as if it isn’t. Some people can’t see what’s wrong. Others see it perfectly well but feel powerless to change it. So they shrug. They adapt. They learn to work around the dysfunction instead of confronting it. Eventually, what once seemed absurd becomes expected.”

Levoshovo

Terry Cowan from New Notes from a Commonplace Book on Substack

“How far back should we go? Hiroshima? ¹ Nagasaki? If this argument resonates with you, I do not need to list everything since. But let’s just take a recent example: our bombing of the Iranian Middle School in Minab, killing over 150 schoolgirls and teachers. There has been no acknowledgement, nor has there been an apology. While Americans strongly oppose this war of choice, there has been no widespread public outrage over the murders. I am just saying that at some point we will have to come face to face with our crimes, individually and as a nation. The Russians are doing so, and they are the better people for it.”

Why $100 in Your 20s Is Worth $500 in Your 60s

Nick Maggiulli https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-100-in-your-20s-is-worth-500-in-your-60s/

“In 1877 the French philosopher Paul Janet put forth a new idea about why time seems to speed up as we age. He proposed that “the rate of passage of subjective time is proportional to the age of the person making the judgement.””

“Janet’s Law is directionally accurate, but needs to be adjusted for one thing—memory. Most of us have little to no memories of our early childhood, so our perception of these early years as adults is basically non-existent. Research on memory agrees with this. Older adults consistently seem to have a reminiscence bump (or enhanced memory) of ages 10-30.”

“As you can see, age 20 represents 2% of your memorable life while age 60 is 0.4%, or about 1/5 as much.

This simple observation has profound implications for how you spend your money throughout your lifetime.”

“This demonstrates how your view of the future can influence your spending habits today. For example, if you don’t understand (or don’t believe) in investing, then your money is worth more today than it ever will be in the future.”

“On the flip side, if you can earn high returns via investing, then you should save as much as possible to consume more in old age. There’s an irony to this approach as well—the data suggests that those who are great savers (and investors) end up not spending the money they worked so hard to acquire in retirement. Blowing all your money while young isn’t a smart move, but hoarding money now that you won’t spend later is worse.”

“This doesn’t mean that you should stop investing if you’re young or that you should strive to die with zero if you’re old. But you shouldn’t feel guilty about spending money on experiences, especially while younger. As Jack Raines wrote in Young Money (his new book out today):”

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:11:08 -0400

My mornings are the time of the day that has changed the most in retirement. I am not woken by an alarm and I spend it slowly drinking coffee while I catch up on the world. I am able to spend the entire morning outside on the patio if I wish, which is now easier to do on a day like today when the temperature is cool even with no clouds in the sky. The cicadas are still singing their summer song while a chipmunk frantically gathers food and stores it in her nest. I am blessed.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:18:21 -0400

Browsing social media this morning was emotional due to all the tributes to Dolly Parton. A question often asked is, how is there so much evil in the world? Perhaps the better question is, why is there so much good in the world? Fortunately there are those in the world, like Dolly, who are in communion with the Divine such that light shines enough to provide glimpses of the Kingdom as it ought to be on earth as heaven.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:53:35 -0400

I think the hand wringing over non-mainstream politicians winning Democrat primaries is very telling in how it shows that a large number of people do not know or will not admit there has been a change in U.S. politics.

What most do not want to admit is that Trump and the “Make America Great” political movement correctly identify the sentiments of wanting change. The message is that the “same old, same old” is not working and less and less accepted. Trump successfully convinced a lot of people that he was truly different, and all the “crazy” things he says and does are just clear evidence. The problem for Republicans, however, is that it is becoming clear that in reality Trump and those looking to mimic him are not different.

In my opinion, Abdul E-Sayed is campaigning on the same problems MAGA is a reaction to. For example, why are U.S. tax dollars sent to foreign governments when there are so many U.S. citizens, including veterans, going without? Isn’t that a common sense question?

Further, if the U.S. government is going to collect taxes, shouldn’t those tax dollars be prioritized on U.S. citizens? Why not spend those billions on healthcare for U.S. citizens rather than on endless wars?

Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris both lost to Trump because they were the “same old, same old.” In a time when many think the Democrat and Republican parties are pretty much the same, those people are looking for clear differences. And if the differences are between “crazy” ideas, which crazy idea is more harmful to the United States, starting a unnecessary war that results in prices going up or stop starting wars and instead spending that money on healthcare for citizens?

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:03:21 -0400

My installation of Feedland is one of the services I currently do not have access to due to the Proxmox host failure. Fortunately my installation of River5 is on another host, but this circumstance gives me the opportunity to try out FreshRSS. Learning a new RSS aggregator takes some time, but I am working my way through.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:24:03 -0400

Quick update. We celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary last week, first with one night of camping and then a planned night in Frankenmuth, Michigan. We survived the campout ok, but on our anniversary night I accidentally shaved off a chunk of my right index finger so we spent a few hours at urgent care. Not a big wound but enough to make typing difficult. To top it off, when we got home I found my primary Proxmox server was down due to a worn out SSD.

Winning The Trade Deadline Doesn't Matter

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:36:33 -0400

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.

With a 64-49 record and being in the top wildcard position in the standings, the question of whether the Cubs were going to be buyers or sellers was settled six weeks ago. Injuries made acquiring pitching a must, but that also distracted from the Cub’s real need, which is that their lineup is not good enough to score runs against better teams.

The real stat that stands out about the 2026 Chicago Cubs is that their record against teams that are .500 or better is 29-25. Contrast that to the Brewers who are 33-22 against such teams, the Braves are 32-18 and the Dodgers are 33-27. In other words the Cubs have a 50/50 chance against most of the teams they will meet in the playoffs, and Cubs hope that the pitching additions will improve their chances, but hope is not a strategy.

The real question is, how is success measured? Hoyer is getting credit for what he was expected to do, but truth is the Cubs are no more likely to get past the Brewers in an upcoming Divisional series than they did last year. To win playoff games the lineup needs to score at least 3 runs by the 6th inning, ideally 4, and while the current Cub’s lineup is capable of doing that, they have proven to be unreliable. The team that won ten games in a row twice also lost ten games in a row.

For the Cubs to become better they need to change their mind about players in whom they are committed to, the most obvious player being Dansby Swanson. Nico Hoerner should be the every day shortstop and Pedro Ramirez should be the every day second baseman, but the Cubs are too committed to Swanson to make that change. (Better yet, the Cub’s should have traded for 3 time batting champ Luis Arreaz, put him at second, put Nico at short and sat or traded Swanson.) The leash should also be short on Ian Happ. Unfortunately, the Cubs are saddled with a former player as manager who is simply not going to sit veterans.

One thing going for the Cubs is their streakiness. The best teams don’t always win tournaments, often times tournaments are won by the hottest team going in to the tournament. If the Cubs catch another winning streak in September, they might streak their way in to the World Series. To do that means the Cubs will have to do something they haven’t done all season, which is win lots of games against .500 teams as they play the Brewers, Braves, and Red Sox in the month.

In other words, the Cubs’ record in September will tell us more about whether or not they “won” the trade deadline this year than any current assessment. What they did at the deadline will not matter if the Cubs win the Wild Card series at home and then lose the Divisional series against the Brewers.

A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:33:18 -0400

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.”

Early in my IT career I had the good fortune to work with one of the most senior and experienced technical leaders in my company. It was one of those times when I learned by listening and doing rather than by directly being taught. The project was to create the processes and assessments for enabling our team to achieve Level 5 of the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (SEI CMM). The goal of CMM was to improve the industry wide inefficiencies with software development projects.

A fool with a tool is still a fool – Joe Oliphant, EDS Consultant Systems Engineer

CMM attempted to achieve this goal by institutionalizing processes in such a way that employees would always know what to do and would not necessarily conceive of doing them in any other way. The processes are enabled by tools, and industry wide there was emphasis on the selling and buying of these tools. It was not surprising there was such an emphasis on tools because in many ways CMM came about during the time when code generation was seen as the path for increasing productivity.

Looking back I view any successes of CMM as more to do with marketing than any real change. While potential customers required their IT providers have SEI CMM certification, IT projects continued to be over budget and not on time. CMM eventually faded in to the background thanks in part to the emergence of Agile.

In my opinion failure of IT projects is caused by not recognizing that application development is more of an art than a science, and thus individual experience is not valued. Doing IT very well is hard, takes time, and requires smart, experienced people. The chronic condition of the IT industry is that it’s corporate leaders always, always, want to take shortcuts that lead to quick pay outs. (See Simon Sinek talk about The Infinite Game)

It is not surprising to me that an industry that thinks throwing hundreds, if not thousands, of low cost and inexperienced people at problems is a path to a success is now jumping at yet another tool, called AI, that it thinks is going to save the day. The industry never needed a maturity model for software developers, instead it has always and still does need a CEO Maturity Model.

Only You Can Change You

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:32:56 -0400

I am catching up with sharing some quotes from what I read during our recent road trip. Today’s batch presents some ideas that I think are useful for self reflection.

On the Importance of Rituals

Protesilaos https://protesilaos.com/commentary/2026-07-27-importance-rituals/

“God is everywhere, but to the person with the tunnelled conscience God does not exist even if they consider themselves religious. Belief as such is not relevant. One can make the casual claim “I believe in God”, which usually has the same meaning as “I do not believe in anything in particular”. The reason is that belief only matters when it is expressed as a lifestyle. It otherwise is tokenistic, an exercise in virtue signalling, or a parroting of precepts that are devoid of substance.”

The Extreme Is the Easy Way Out

JA Westenberg https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-extreme-is-the-easy-way-out

“We talk about the boring middle. The lazy middle. The compromised middle. But I put it to you that our obsession with picking the extreme and laughing at moderation is little more than cope. It’s our obsession with tribalism, with extremism, with feeling over thinking, with belonging over being. It’s destructive, unhelpful, and soul-destroying.”

“The middle path is the exhausting work of noticing - today, in this hour, in this moment, in this body, in this season of your life and your work - what moderation actually means; knowing the answer may be different next month, and knowing the responsibility for that moderation is yours and yours alone. There is no tribe that can make your decisions for you and make them easier to live with; no ideology that can forgive your sins or blame your failings on someone else’s flaws. The right amount of anything is a moving target that you have to find for yourself, again and again.”

Why I Stopped Arguing With People

A Geek’s Page https://wangcong.org/2026-06-30-why-i-stopped-arguing-with-people.html

“Many people are ego-driven. Their opinions aren’t positions they hold; they are the position. Prove the idea wrong and you haven’t corrected a fact, you’ve attacked a person. So they defend it the way anyone defends themselves: not with reason, but with resistance. The stronger your argument, the harder they dig in.

You can’t win an argument like this, because it was never an argument. It was a fight over whose ego stays intact. Even when you “win,” you lose, because now you have an enemy who is more convinced than before.

So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones. With the first kind, a disagreement is a joint search for the better answer, and both of us walk away sharper. With the second, there is no answer being sought, only a self to be defended”

“We like to believe humans are rational animals who occasionally feel emotions. It’s the reverse. We are emotional animals who occasionally think.”

“If the only person you can change is yourself, then the one question that matters is: how do you actually get better? Not by winning arguments. You get better by asking others for feedback, again and again, and truly listening to it. It’s the same asking I described earlier, the one clean exception, now turned on myself: I’m the one requesting help, so the advice can finally land. And you cannot do that with an ego in the way. The ego that needs to win is the same ego that can’t hear. It’s not just harmful; it’s a disaster, to everyone around you and to yourself most of all, because it quietly walls you off from the one thing that would improve you.”

Roadtripping In A Hyundai Tuscon

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:13:52 -0400

We drove from our home in southeast Michigan to Fort Collins, Colorado and rented a 2026 Hyundai Tuscon for the trip. Our 2013 GMC Terrain has too many miles on it for us to want to pile on thousands more in a matter of weeks, and renting enables me to experience some of the latest vehicle technology.

The amount of new technology can be overwhelming, and I imagine that can be concerning for someone renting a car. Many of the new technology features are standard and enabled in these cars such that if you hop in and drive off you are going to encounter them almost immediately. For example, our Terrain has a lane assist feature that monitors whether when I am driving and touching either the center or side lines on the road and emits an audible beep if I do, but I can turn that feature on or off with a button on the steering wheel. Lane assist in the Tuscon literally turns the steering wheel away from the lines and provides haptic feedback, and that feature is on by default. Nearly immediately one encounters this assistance and having never experienced it wonder what is going on. One cannot turn the Tuscon’s lane assist off with a button, instead you have to navigate the vehicle’s settings to disable the feature.

After I got home from the rental office I spent more than an hour reading through the owner’s manual. One cannot spend that much time in the parking lot at the rental office. I would think these features would be disabled by default for rentals as to not be so overwhelming for customers.

Regardless of the uncomfortable “out of the box” experience I had driving the Tuscon, I have found most of its features indispensable for long road trips, and I know I will wish our Terrain has them the next time I take a long drive with it. The most desirable of the features, in my opinion, is the smart cruise control. Using sensors on the front of the vehicle, the cruise control detects vehicles in front of you and slows down to maintain a specified distance. When you change lanes to pass the cruise control speeds up to the set speed unless there is a car in front.

Driving assistance tries to keep the car in the middle between the side and center road markings. It’s a feature that in this car one can turn on/off with button on the steering wheel, and I turned it off whenever I encountered construction. The car monitors for whether your hands are on the steering wheel while driving assistance is turned on and nags you after a period of time. As I often drive with one hand on the steering wheel during straight stretches of the road, I found this nag to be annoying. You feel the steering wheel move on its own while driving assistance is on, which takes getting used to, and it feels much more abrupt than when doing the same thing manually. Because there are many long straight stretches in Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri, I used driving assistance a lot.

The Tuscon does not have a built-in GPS like our Terrain, instead it relies on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. It was my first experience using Android Auto, which I liked but found it frustrating when it did not connect. When the phone to car connection is the only form of electronic navigation, one needs the connection to be reliable. Many times I had to delete the Bluetooth pairing and re-create it in order to get Android Auto to work. When I tried connecting the phone to the car using USB I got an error message on the phone saying the software on the car was not current and refused to connect, making a more reliable physical connection not an option.

On the morning of the last day it would not connect no matter what I tried and so we drove off without using it until at a rest area later in the morning I checked Google Play for whether there was a recent update that I could roll back only to find a new update waiting, which I installed and that resolved the problem.

I know that at least GM has announced moving back to providing their own navigation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others do too because connecting a phone, which would be ideal particularly for rentals because it enables one to bring their own familiar software, is too unreliable.

Thirteen years separate the Tuscon from our Terrain and the technology changes were significant and mostly useful. I most wish for the smart cruise control as that would make my twice a year trips around Lake Michigan more pleasant of a drive. The Tuscon’s performance is also better, and I think the automatic transmission was configured to push higher RPMs before changing gears, which can provide more power and the expense of lower fuel mileage, but still the Tuscon’s MPG was in the thirties going at 70+ mph the Terrain is at best in the mid 20s.

I found no reason to not buy a Tuscon if the right opportunity presented, though when we do shop for our next car will be doing more research before making a decision.

Looking In The Mirror

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:03:33 -0400

The following articles that I have recently read provide some deeper thought about artificial intelligence as it relates to humans. Theologian Ilia Delio says: “AI unsettles us because it is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves.”

Notebooks and the Extended Mind

Steven Johnson from Adjacent Possible https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kxp9dxbtgxqhg9hrb8yk6s3d

“The core principle of the extended mind theory is one that will be familiar to Adjacent Possible readers: the external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate—from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM—should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process. “Thinking” is something that happens inside _and_outside our brains. In their original 1998 paper, Chalmers and co-author Andrew Clark argued for what they called an active externalism, based on the ‘active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.’”

“One of the most provocative arguments in that original paper is that the human brain itself may have been specially adapted to work with these external “tools for thought”—starting with language itself. “Think of a group of people brainstorming around a table, or a philosopher who thinks best by writing, developing her ideas as she goes,” Chalmers and Clark wrote. “It may be that language evolved, in part, to enable such extensions of our cognitive resources within actively coupled systems.” In other words, embracing extended cognition is a “core cognitive process” for humans, not just a modern invention.”

“I mention this whole chapter in Chalmers’ career because it seems much more pertinent to the present day realities of AI. To me, the most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low. The more pressing question is how you build an extended mind architecture that deepens your understanding and expands your creativity, given that there are promising, if slightly chaotic, tools for those tasks on the market right now, at the fingertips of billions of human beings.”

A Little Psychology

third-bit.com https://third-bit.com/sdgc/a-little-psychology/

“Classical economics assumes that people are rational agents who consistently maximize their own utility. When faced with a choice they weigh expected outcomes, discount the future at a consistent rate, and select whatever serves them best. This has been proven false over and over again, but persists because—well, we’ll get to that later in this essay.”

“Behavioral economics looks at how people actually make decisions, and has repeatedly shown that they deviate from “rational” in predictable ways. The first problem with the rational-agent model is computational. Optimizing requires evaluating all possible options against all possible outcomes under all possible conditions. No one can actually do this, so instead, people use a strategy that Herbert Simon called satisficing: they search through available options until they find one that is good enough and then stop. Herbert Simon called this bounded rationality: people are rational within the limits of the information, time, and cognitive capacity they actually have, which makes the heuristics people use to make decisions worth studying.”

Why AI Feels Like Grief

Ilia Delio https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kxem5ry0s7k1t6taaf59g7zq

“Why does artificial intelligence unsettle us so deeply? Not because it threatens jobs or security alone. Those fears are real, but they do not explain why the feeling reaches so far down. AI unsettles us because it is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves.”

“A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage [or illusion] is the only object of true religion.”

“Trained on the sediment of human expression—our scriptures, myths, philosophies, art, and the half-articulated longings of billions—AI functions as a kind of externalized unconscious, a surface in which we meet our own depths returned in unfamiliar form. Held rightly, that encounter could serve what Carl Jung called individuation: seeing our archetypal patterns reflected without the comforting filters of tradition or tribe, we might recognize the common origin beneath our divisions. Yet the mirror is partial in a way that matters. AI reflects what has already crossed into language, image, or recorded gesture, while the depth Jung pointed to is precisely what has not yet been articulated, what stirs beneath speech and presses toward form.”

“This is why AI is not primarily a technological or economic or even a safety problem. AI is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves. Every anxiety about it maps with uncanny precision onto an anxiety we have carried about ourselves. Will it become conscious? is the question we have refused to ask about matter and life: where does consciousness come from, and what is its relation to the substrate that bears it? Will it replace us? is the question of what we are for, asked from the other side—if intelligence and capability are not what make us human, then what does? Will it deceive and exploit us? is the record of what we have done to one another and to the Earth, reflected back through a system that learned its values from us. Will it have a soul? is the question we stopped asking about ourselves when we let a substance-metaphysics reduce the soul to a ghost in the machine.”

The Machine Where God Used to Be

Ilia Delio https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kwj0v5v9pe64kvrvshq44axx

“How did we arrive here? Not by the route most commonly proposed. Blaming another party, another system, another century’s failure is a familiar move, and it is, at bottom, a form of scapegoating — a way of exiling responsibility so that we do not have to hold it ourselves. The great catastrophes of the last century, its genocides and its machinery of mass death, taught us astonishingly little about ourselves, because we never let ourselves see the problem as within us. It was always the other side, the other ideology, the other tribe.”

“It is out of exactly this unexamined wound that computer technology was born. The founding question — can a machine think like a human? — was never a neutral engineering puzzle. It was our last-ditch attempt to prove we were human before we finished the job of destroying ourselves. And yet we are barely staying afloat in the wake of that question, because we have surrounded the very tool we reached for with a thick cultural fear. We don’t get it. We built the raft and now we are afraid of the water.”

“Concretely, this means the work is not first a matter of writing better AI policy or electing better leaders, though both may follow from it. It is a matter of rebuilding, person by person, the practice of an inner life that is taken as seriously as the outer one — prayer, contemplation, a run at dawn, whatever form the encounter with “something more” takes for a given life — until that inner ground is no longer vacant enough to need a machine, or a monarch, or an enemy, to stand in for it.”

After AI Takes Everything

Airing https://ursb.me/en/posts/after-ai-takes-everything/

“These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?”

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:49:58 -0400

Finally back home to mornings on the patio being sernaded by the cicadas. We saw a lot of the following during our road trip.