The Web isn’t dying, but it is being removed from our experience. As a place to seek knowledge and connections, it is being replaced for many (including me) by AI chatbots that harvest findings from it, rewrite and summarize what they find, and—as gravy on that steak—point to sources it finds there. To some degree, […]

Stormy Whether GDPR services is a market we shouldn't need at all, but it's growing like a thundercloud. (Source: Mordor Intelligence) Toward Agentic VRM vCon is "A new IETF open standard defining how conversation data — audio, video, text, and metadata — is structured, signed, and exchanged across any system. The foundation of VCONify." More: A […]

First, and most importantly, don't miss Peter Kaminsky's talk today at 4 PM Eastern. Required Viewing I EXPOSED what big tech knows about you by becoming… a data broker, by Chris the Producer, on YouTube. It's brilliant. More about him here. And here. And here. Hat's off to Don Marti for the find. Bonus link. […]

Riding wide On the road for a while. Above is a storm coming over Elk Country in north-central Pennsylvania. After that, Elk Country, Ohio, and back to Indiana, by RAV4. Didn’t know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against fast-food drive-thru AI trend. Maybe Is doomscrolling doomed?

This is the flyer for the next talk in our speaker series at IU. It’s on Tuesday, and a can’t-miss event. I explain more below. I know a lot of people who know a lot about AI. Or seem to. Or say they do. But Pete Kaminski is the real deal. More importantly, he knows […]

The idea was to get my photos from the latest Lotus Festival up right after the three-day event ended on Sunday the 4th. I had too many other things to do, so a week went by. But at least my shots of the last two performances are up. This one is for Nikki D & […]

I'm in Chicago for the Marathon and our son's birthday (he's running tomorrow). Also hanging with relatives and enjoying the city, which always feels to me like a giant Boston. (Color me wrong, it's okay.) Meaning it was fully yours Steven Levy: I’m Still Convinced the iPod Was the Perfect Gadget—Apple’s original music player got […]

AI isn’t just a “surf’s up” moment. It’s a tsunami. You have to surf that tsunami, just to keep from drowning.  Using your time. Your calendar is your surfboard. What’s your best beach for riding that calendar? Well, right now there are countless conferences with “AI” or “Agentic” in their titles. Yes, they’re beaches. You […]

Didn't know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against fast-food drive-thru AI trend. Maybe Is doomscrolling doomed?

That's what it says at MoonPhase.today Specifically, 26%.

If  you don't, you're a human AI Test: See if you don't laugh at something as you scroll down through here. Am I alone in finding it annoying? Does anybody want, or use, the "workspace" that shows up, whether you want it or not, every time you open a Zoom session?  Getting less faint Wall […]

OMGF This was bad.

In wasted dollars Our species began to get civilized when it invented clothing: the original privacy tech. But that was in the natural world. In the digital one, we are still naked, and privacy is just a promise you get from "consent" (cookie notice) agreements and settings. It's a fail. Example: the GDPR Privacy Monitor examined […]

AI shit gets so weird. For example, the fake golfer Grace (aka Gracie) Brooks appeared in the midst of my Facebook doomscrolling (above) to say something to me (scrolled across her boobage) about “an older guy” watching her. Never saw her before, or cared to see her. But I am curious about “her” business model. […]

Real hard forks Hmm… NiemanLab: NPR, the quintessential audio news brand, adapts to a video-first future. Specifically, “NPR … landed Machine Gods, the new video-first podcast from veteran tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose.” I subscribed to Casey and Kevin’s old podcast, Hard Fork, and I’ll subscribe to Machine Gods too. But I doubt I’ll […]

Ilmoonination Actually, we have a waning gibbous moon tonight. It was full two nights ago. But I need to a headline, so there ya go. How's fishing? Mainstream media continues to get sidestreamed. That's what I take from Ad Market Resumes Tepid Growth In August, 'Traditional' Media's Share Falls Below 20%, by Joe Mandese in today's MediaPost. […]

Google him This is a great Indiana Football rap song.

When a whole business category is fubar, and its members together exemplify enshittification better than each does alone, I suggest we speak of their collectivity as a fecosystem. I’ve been using that word since 2016, and bring it up now because these two posts about the subscription industry’s fecosystem have been getting action lately, and I […]

And this all started in the Pleistocene This post about Blackhawk Slide is getting some action lately, my stats page says. It features a photo I shot, but this one tells the story better and has more geology. In revisiting that piece, I learned that two of my own sources, geologists Robert M. Norris and […]

Turned out to be yummy Thirteen years ago, I wrote this defense of QR codes, which friends were calling "robot barf."

Anu Bradford‘s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially in respect to personal privacy. And for that we should be grateful, because the US and China mostly don’t give a shit. On the other hand, every cookie […]

They need more. Smithsonian Magazine: An Amateur Astronomer Using Google Maps Spotted a Strange Indentation. It Turned Out to Be a Meteorite Crater From 390 Million Years Ago. That one has been added to the excellent Impact Earth crater map.

For many years, I have despaired of ever saving the contents of my old blog (1999-2007), my writing for Linux Journal (1996-2019), and countless other articles, essays, and posts, published mostly on the Web—which looks and sounds like a permanent place (“sites,” “locations,” domains”), but in fact is a whiteboard. Then, last week, I asked […]

The Moon has a new crater, called McGetchin. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera people have the story here. (That’s their before and after view.) NASA calls it a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Specifically, Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after […]

In the foreground are three towers standing on nineteen acres in Charlotte’s south side. They transmit the signal of WBT/1110 AM, a 50,000-watt giant, with a signal that stretches from Canada to Cuba at night: WBT was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land under its towers is worth more […]

War prep redux Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since then, while […]

On AI building us, and maybe killing us I posted What does the Internet make of us? seven years and one day ago. I’d be inclined to write a new one about what AI is making of us if I could see AI’s full import better than I could see what the Internet was doing to us […]

That was quick Techcrunch says Matt Mullenweg is back in charge of Automattic. That's behind a trackwall, so I'll go with Mary Hubbard's tweet: I'm relieved and pleased to see Matt Mullenweg return as CEO of Automattic, the largest financial contributor to the WordPress project. Having WordPress's Co-founder and Project Lead at the helm gives […]

On the whole, AI writing is good. Yes, I’ve called it “AutoTune for the human kind” and “fancy blah.” Claudio Nastruzzi called it “semantic ablation.” But Big AI’s grammar, styling, and prose still tends to beat the shit out of the ways most people write. Does that have to be a bad thing? Nearly all of […]

Cory Doctorow makes sense of wtf is happening with AI. The Indiana Hoosiers football team, still-undefeated national champs (17-0 including last year and this one) take on the Howard Bison today at noon. I'll be watching. (It's on Fox One.) John Venn has the perfect historical marker. How Tony Pierce's busblog took off on 9/11. […]