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.
Is there anything more disconcerting than a computer keyboard and mouse amok? For some reason just now my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected to the MacBook wouldn’t do what I want. Click an icon on the dock and instead of launching the app a Finder window opens with the Application I clicked highlighted. Click icons on the menu bar and nothing happens. Restarted several times, including without the externals and shutoff some items that start at login. It’s gone for now, but I don’t know which item I shut off was the culprit and I don’t know that I care.
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.
I wonder, now that we have decided on a company to replace our windows, when will I stop seeing ads for window replacement companies in my Instagram feed?
I am reading through articles about announcements from Google I/O 2026, and I think this change Google is planning to make to Tiles in Wear OS 7 has to be one of the most idiotic design decisions I have seen. When you have a UI on a small screen like a watch, why would you not use the entire screen? What are they thinking?
Tiles are also getting a redesign. Google will roll out widgets with Wear OS 7 to replace full-screen tiles. A 2×1 or 2×2 block will display app information in a style that more closely resembles Android 16’s widgets. It doesn’t appear that the new design will allow users to stack widgets on top of each other in the same screen, like Samsung’s version of Wear OS allows Galaxy Watch users to do.
I put my Pixel 10 on a Belkin MagSafe wireless charger. Today it dawned on me that it would be cool if when the phone is on the charger that if a phone call comes in the phone would automatically operate in speaker phone mode so I could just tap a button to receive the call and talk.
Gadgeteer has an embed of a leaked walk thru of the forthcoming Android Desktop that Google officially announced as Googlebook this week. The demo is running in a VM on a Mac not on any native hardware. I don’t see anything in the demo that is really new or exciting. We have been using the “desktop” personal computer metaphor for so long and I wish that a company would have the guts to try something really new.
I think the only reason to consider Googlebook if it were built from the ground up as a AI-based user interface, but instead I think it will simply have AI stuff bolted on and that is not appealing. It’s early days, but hard to say what will be the reason to buy a Googlebook rather than a MacBook.
A significant amount of my childhood fears was driven by K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base located about 50 miles north of my childhood home. The base was part of the United States Strategic Air Command, housing B-52 bombers and nuclear weapons. When there was ever talk in the 1970s and 80s about nuclear war, that meant bombs dropping on K.I. Sawyer and close enough for either instant or near term death. The based paired with the Soo Locks that are vital to the transportation of iron ore to manufacture weapons, meant the U.P. in general was a strategic target for our enemies, meaning then the U.S.S.R.
Of course things changed in the early 90s with the fall of the Soviet Union and with it a decrease for the need of Air Force Bases, leading to the closure of K.I. Sawyer. The economic impact on the area was huge, and while today the site is partially in use including for the Marquette County airport, some of the buildings standing unused not too unlike the abandoned mining locations that dot the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Om Malik has written a very compelling post about what he calls the Internet of AI. Part of the post is an explanation about what AI actual means from an overall technology perspective. Here is a valuable summary:
The right historical analogy for what is happening with AI is not Web 2.0 or the cloud. It is the railroads of the nineteenth century. Railroad operators understood the freight cars were not where value lived. The value was in owning the rails and everything around them, including the land. Owning the rails meant controlling routes, latency, geography, redundancy, and the cost structure of every customer who depended on the network.
Home improvement is exhausting. We have spent the last two weeks seeking quotes to replace the windows in our condo. The condo was built in the 1970s and the windows are original and should have been replaced long ago. Ever since we bought this unit, windows has been the responsibility of the association, but the cost of replacing all the windows of all the units of the condominium would result in a huge assessment, so the topic has been avoided. Now the association is planning to update the bylaws to make window replacement the responsibility of co-owners.
The cost of replacing windows is made worse by the fact that our unit, like many in our condominium, has several large, non-standard windows. For example, multiple patio doors with four foot wide panels rather than a more standard three foot wide panels. By the end of the week we will have four quotes with a wide range in price between low and high. Part of me wants to pay the lowest amount, but the other part of me does not want to risk having to replace the windows again, given that we may be living here for ten more years. We are on the fence about which direction to take.