Read a blog post by Doc Searls about the crazy number of accounts one needs to “use” the Internet that directs me to what Searls calls Personal AI, Kwaai. Kwaai sounds interesting, so I want to follow “it” to get updates on progress, but looking around the web site I find no way to subscribe or follow it. For me this is a component of the subscription problem Dave Winer has recently written about, Dave notes the technological issues but there is also an intention issue. Web site owners need to think about how readers such as myself want to “subscribe” to updates to the site. The original model of relying on users to bookmark a site and return to it regularly not only doesn’t work, but is no longer expected. In this case Kwaai is working against itself.
It’s embarrassing. Unfortunately, for too many it is funny, but the consequences are dire. We ought to be asking how it got this way, and I suspect it is as how the oligarchs want it to be.
Should government officials be allowed to receive gratuities from individuals or businesses to which they awarded government business? SCOTUS says yes. Money is at the root of all the cynicism of our institutions in the United States, and the failure of which is slowly destroying the country. We don’t trust government officials because we know they are influenced by lobbyist contributions. We don’t trust doctors because we think they are taking money from big pharma. We don’t trust newspapers, news stations, and cable news because we think they are only publishing stories that make them money. We don’t trust CEOs because we think every decision that they make is to drive up stock price and their own wealth. We don’t trust SCOTUS because we think they are given lavish gifts (gratuities?) from people who may have business before the court, and so there no reason to think they would rule on this case otherwise.
When one violently confronts evil, evil persists because that confrontation in turn makes one evil; this is nearly the whole of the teaching of Jesus, the Christ. By the nature of how the United States follows Christendom, it is a Christian nation. In how little it follows Jesus, it cannot legitimately make such claim. Christianity would know this best if it truly had the mind of Christ and followed Jesus as a movement rather than be a reflection of the human empire that assimilated it into an institution.
Cool cloud formation during my evening walk.
As far as I can tell, one of the main measures that a typical person has for inflation is the price of gas. Many complaints I read about Biden are related to gas prices. I don’t think there is an honest understanding of how gas prices work, in my opinion gas companies take advantage of every opportunity (wars, disasters, oil refinery issues) to bump up prices that rarely return to prior levels for any length of time. Do you think we will ever see gas below $3 per gallon (on average) again? Is this the fault of the President of the United States, or is it the fault of greedy corporations? How gas is priced may explain the disconnect between the graph shown here and general opinion.
Forty years go today the Chicago Cubs signed Rick Sutcliffe and the team would go on to the NLCS for first time in my life. Unfortunately, in 1984 the Cubs blew a 2-0 lead of a five game series against the San Diego Padres, losing three straight in San Diego, so they did not go on to the World Series when they would likely have lost to the Detroit Tigers.
Matt Webb has a different take on AI that appears to be a polar opposite to mine that aligns with personal computing. Webb sees the potential for better collaboration.
The main reason why I have invested in and use Google’s hardware, mostly phones running Android, all these years is that I believe the idea of “organizing the world’s information” best aligns to how I think about personal computing. Years ago I wrote about these ideas and how I saw the emergence of smartphones and tablets as the true, real, personal computing moment. I defined personal computing as hardware + software (apps) + Internet + intelligence and believed then that Google was closest to meeting this definition with what was emerging as Google Assistant. I think now that Apple’s description and implementation of Apple Intelligence is closer to actualizing what I imagined back then.
A People's AI
On this date the Chicago Cubs' record is 32-35 and they are 7 games behind Milwaukee for the NL Central division and a half game behind the last wildcard spot. In short, about the same record and standings as they had last year. The Cubs didn’t need to make Craig Counsell the highest paid manager in Major League Baseball to achieve this level of mediocrity, they did that fine under David Ross. It should be obvious by now the real problem is the front office.
I created a notes outline of the Apple 2024 WWDC Keynote while watching the stream of the keynote. I will make updates to the outline as I read articles about the keynote.
Forty seven years ago today Apple launched the Apple II and basically at that point really started becoming the Apple we now know today. I doubt that the WWDC today will be as seminal, but I am looking forward to seeing what they announce.
I wish that my RSS feed reader could filter out items behind a pay wall, or at least flag them in some way. It would also be nice if bloggers either didn’t link to stuff behind pay walls or at least indicate that a subscription is required. I think it is ironic how Dave frequently argues against the burden of pay walls and also frequently shares links to stories that are behind pay walls.
The reviews of last nights Michigan Central live concert that I have read do a good job of describing the moment. The concert was free for the little over 20,000 who were able to attend and streamed on Peacock. I believe there is a replay of it Sunday night at 7 PM on NBC, although I do not whether that is nationwide.
Over the years I’ve seen so many deer and wild turkey within our condominium that they no longer surprise me, but the appearance of new wildlife within my urban environment is always surprising. Last night as we were watching the Michigan Central Station live concert on TV we saw two coyotes amble past our patio window. Apparently coyotes are not uncommon to our township, per this picture posted by the police department. About twenty minutes later we saw a deer run by in the opposite direction and we expected to see the coyotes in pursuit, but did not. Maybe I need to create a wildlife bingo card.
I realize that category archives of this blog has pages in a manner similar to how Old School creates monthly pages, so I decided to create a notebook in NotebookLM and provide it the URLs for all of the essays I’ve written here. Essays in the context of this blog are blog posts with titles. Next, I had the Notebook Guide create what it calls a Timeline of Events that I then copied in to Drummer and formatted to create this page, which is a timeline with short summary of the essays.
On a whim I decided to give NotebookLM the RSS feed to the essays (titled posts) to this site, and it ingested the feed and does answer questions I pose correctly. One problem though is that the source(s) it cites for responses is to the single, large, file, and not the specific location in the file, which tells me (obviously) that it doesn’t know the RSS XML format but it still handles the text within the feed.