Book now The next three IIWs. November 3 – 5, 2026IIWXLIII #43 Fall 2026 April 27 – 29, 2027IIWXLIV #44 Spring 2027 October 19 – 21, 2027IIWXLV #45 Fall 2027 Early bird ends in 15 days

We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis.) In The Rise of the Stupid Network, David Isenberg (in 1997!) explained […]

On AI wronging and writing I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It's not just the piles one-line paragraphs, the contrasty "not that, but this" argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It's a tone that sounds like a million well-put hunks of text published by competent writers of opinion […]

Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other […]

Toward eliminating an irony The IEEE's cookie notice says, "This website utilizes technologies such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as for analytics, personalization, and targeted advertising. Privacy Policy." Its privacy policy, at that last link, says it collects eighteen kinds of personal information, and says one of the purposes for collecting […]

I am a heavy Photoshop user, and recently upgraded to Photoshop 2026 at Adobe’s robotic insistence. But, when I went to do a “generative fill” on an old photo (in the outlined area above), I was met with this: Fuzzed by that, I hit the View my balance button and got this: This shows I’m […]

Thinkings out loud Overheard: "In tech, every bit of progress makes something easy obsolete." Did AI make me believe this? Charley Johnson: AI Can Change Your Mind Without You Noticing Why just brands? WordPress VIP: Future of the Web 2026: Chapter 1: The brand that feels human in the AI era earns the decade ahead. A […]

Well, two of us know With Apple Is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It, Limited Edition Jonathan does a better job of saying what I've been saying about where Personal AI is going, most recently here.

WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my entire life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands […]

Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight: And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking: I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one doesn’t have a way […]

Goldie Boone is a “digital country artist” who looks too good to be real. So I’m betting she’s not. (I wouldn’t have brought this up if she hadn’t appeared in one of my Facebook doomscroll reels.)

Welcome to New York AeroXplorer: LaGuardia Tower Alerts Pilots to Possible Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat Near Airport. Excerpt: "Controllers told inbound flights to stay alert for individuals on the ground who may have been carrying a rocket launcher." In case you're optimistic about AI today  AI Secret : OpenAI Bags a Fields Medalist. Plus: GPUs Stop Waiting, Kimi Exposed […]

He the People My Modern Met: Colorado Mayor Mike Coffman Spends Every Friday Night Sleeping in a Homeless Shelter. Excerpt:  Coffman has described his overnight stays as a form of quality control, allowing him to evaluate whether Aurora’s incentive-based model is helping residents move toward stable housing. He plans to continue sleeping at the shelter every […]

The continuing end of broadcasting  Jason Lewis: It's Over—Talk Radio (as well as traditional media) has run its course.   A newer beginning Nitin Badjatia has been laying out more and more reasons—and ways—that enterprises will adapt to customers, rather than the reverse. More at ProjectVRM.

Uh oh Tornado watch for all five New York City boroughs. How the radar & lightning map looks now. And the last center that holds Mediapost: Sports Is The Last True Mass Medium.

How about mintelligence? We need different words for human and machine intelligence.  The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can't measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you'd get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends to measure intelligence, but it doesn't. (I […]

This is the first morning since I arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday that stepping outside in the morning didn’t feel like walking into an oven. It was 76° F (24.4° C), which isn’t bad. I also couldn’t see far up the road, because the air was full of smoke, and it was hard to breathe. […]

It's 96° here in Baltimore, where the air quality sucks thanks to fires in Canada and Minnesota. But write on I shall. And your mone Ed Zitron's long read on the coming AI crash is worth your time. Seriously In paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms, Don Marti gives us a useful frame and […]

That's all I have to prep for a month on the road. Tomorrow is Baltimore. After that, North Carolina. After that, California. Back in Bloomington in mid-August. Ground down [Says here](CKWX Vancouver,) that Rogers Sports & Media has closed six of its radio stations. One of those, CKWX /1130 in Vancouver, I enjoyed listening to in […]

Just a theory LeBron is going to Miami. Old connections. Fun team with Giannis and Bam there. Lots of great golf, year-round.

To whom else has God sold naming rights for days of the week? And you thought Tuesday was a grace of our turning Earth. <bonus content to avoid if oral surgery grosses you out> Since I had a molar extracted last week, there remains an open wound in my mouth where the tooth used to […]

I leave shortly for fun family matters in Minneapolis. Meanwhiles, here are some worthy tabs to close: While finding this kindness by Kaliya Young (quoting a now-vanished utterance by the late and very great Craig Burton) published in 2005 on her IdentityWoman blog, I also dug her latest post there, which is about commons and […]

A couple of weeks ago, in The George Carlin Model of AI, I said personal AI needed to work first on what George called a place for my stuff. Should Apple occupy that whole personal space, kinda like René Magritte visualized in a surrealist painting seventy-five years ago? I think that’s where they’re going. You […]

Super Typhoon Bavi, not to be confused with Typhoon Bavi of 2020, is spinning into the Northern Marianas Islands, including Guam. NPR: “The super typhoon was moving north with maximum sustained winds of 165 miles per hour on Sunday, according to Guam’s Joint Information Center. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) estimates that Bavi’s winds could strengthen to 180 […]

I see resemblances Back in 2005, Earl Monroe said, "You know, I watch the games, and even now I never see anyone who reminds me of me, the way I played." Earl is 81 now. I wonder what he thinks about Jalen Brunson. Too much else to do Recommendo got me into Down the Rabbit Hole, […]

Hitting the road today, and may be away from rectangles all weekend. So I’ll let this image speak to our condition on departure:

Markets are Money It doesn’t say that in The Gluetrain Manifesto, but the long-gone (but archived) parody of The Cluetrain Manifesto is still funny. Or was it? I didn’t hear that China was building robot armies before it was debunked. May the most talented robots still lose 404 Media: Tidal Says It Won’t Pay Royalties for […]

The worst trade since Luka for whatever that was Something very very bad must have happened to kill the relationship between Jaylen Brown and the Boston Celtics, a team JB loved and led to performance levels far above expectations this past season. At the end of that failed relationship came one of the worst trades […]

We'll see what happens Call for Tenders: Development, consultancy and support for a data altruism consent management system went out from the European Commission on 27 May of this year. It begins, "This call will fund a robust, legally compliant and user-friendly digital solution that enables individuals to give, withdraw and manage consent for data […]

And in your browser, it's hard to tell who's winning Remember "fair use"? It's a concept kind of like "public airwaves." There's an ideal in there somewhere, but the context is a world where social contracts really aren't, and it's all kind of worked out, but not really. Alex Raksin tackles "fair use" in How […]