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When I posted this I felt a great weight lifting. 

Everybody is talking about Elizabeth Dias’s long report in the NYT on Anthropic and religious scholars, and rightly so. It’s brilliant. Elizabeth (like her Times colleague Ruth Graham) was my student back in the day, so of course I would like to take credit for the excellence of her work … but I can’t. I think she just had one class from me. But still: liberal-arts education FTW! 

Adam Nayman’s review of Digger mentions more than thirty — more than thirty — other movies, along with a few TV shows. This hyper-referential style of reviewing was pioneered by Pitchfork in its record reviews, and has now spread everywhere: it’s a giant tumor on online writing. There are whole generations of critics today who can’t describe what they have seen or heard, but only analogize to other things they have seen and heard. It ain’t helpful. 

Apple, in a Developer News post I am reproducing in its entirety, segment-by-segment: We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function […]

The White House issued an executive order last week: The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people. Accordingly, the term “Super Intelligence” more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies. It is therefore […]⌥ Permalink

Tahoe, California, December 2024.

From the video Photography under a foot of snow in Tahoe.

Claude's biggest most amazing strength is its ability to inhale a lot of source code and understand what's going on, any language, any OS, anything, in an instant.

BTW now that I have Frontier back and am using it for most of my work, I'm having a lot more fun writing my blog. Can you tell??

Great scene from The West Wing. CJ and Josh, on the street outside the White House. The president was hiding serious disease, and it’s about to come out. Back in those days such a revelation meant the president has no chance of being re-elected. Anyway, the kid has an idea ...

Twitter with its relaxed character limit is getting pretty close to being a blogging platform. I wrote the first draft of this post on my iPad, that's how useful it is. Imagine if a real blog platform created a super simple way to write posts, no need for Gutenberg, just Mar...

Het is weer Doeidag! Elke eerste zondag van de maand aandacht voor hoe je jezelf weer een stapje van BigTech verwijdert. Nou heb ik de afgelopen jaren al heel wat BigTech uit mijn leven en uit mijn bedrijf gebannen, met name als het gaat om social media platformen, applicaties en media. In een eerdere Doei […]

Once again the app that bridges from scripting.com to daveverse.org went down for a couple of days. Just noticed it, kicked the server to get it running again, and all is good, except a couple of pieces show up today that were really posted on Thursday or Friday. The problem as often is the case goes back to PagePark, the server that runs my Heroku-like server crashed and it doesn't work well from then on, even after it's automatically restarted. Then the thing to do is to reboot the server. It doesn't happen often but when it does it makes the server behave badly. It's up and running again. One day I'll get a few days to fix the problems in PP.

People really liked the RSS tip I posted the other day, so here's another one, also related to the channel-level title element. Consider the screen shot below, and the Thinking about... blog. Part of a blogroll with limited info about a great blogger, Timothy Snyder. I c...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this last week, once again, at DF.

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Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said: We have identified an issue affecting a small number of iPhone 18 Pro Max users on the AT&T network that may cause a device to lose service and be unable to make calls. We released iOS 27.0.1 earlier ...

2001: "Like a boat, a human being has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch. Change the appearance if necessary."

If you're psyched about what the polls say about the midterms, remember that Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win in 2016, based on polling.

Some have asked, so: I still have no answers to my questions about the non-appearance of the hardcover of my Sayers biography and the flaws in the Kindle version. No answers, no idea when I’ll get answers, no idea when the book will be available. I assume that eventually people will be able to buy the book, but whether that will be next week, next month, or next year I can’t guess. The only person at OUP who has responded seems to believe that my chief concern is that I haven’t received my author’s copies. I corrected this assumption, but there’s been no response since. At the moment I’m still holding to my theory. 

That world-transforming, world-shattering, world-saving technology/person/event? The one that “changes everything”? It changes nothing. You're still you, and the same challenges confront you that have always confronted humanity and will always confront humanity. Every week you give yourself a new reason why you now don't have to think about loving your neighbor as yourself, turning the other cheek, doing justly and loving mercy and walking humbly with your God. It’s a crisis! It’s Flight 93! But come on: you're kidding yourself. Everything important is what it was, and wherever you go, there you are. Hey, I get it: All you want is to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride. But it ain't happening. The ride never ends ... until you do. 

Finished reading: John Muir: Nature Writings (LOA #92) by John Muir 📚 The poor bit of measured time was soon spent, and while the saddles were being adjusted I again urged Emerson to stay. “You are yourself a sequoia,” I said. “Stop and get acquainted with your big brethre...