Doc Searls's Blog, page 10

Monday

Just some facts. No interpretations. This blog post got nine reads by the end of the day. This photo got about the same. The photo above has had 22,122 views, 421 faves, and 21 comments. And lots more views every day. It may also be the best photo I’ve ever taken from the window of a passenger plane. And I’ve shot a zillion. (Here’s just one collection.)

The music lives. Ted Gioia has a great post on Sly Stone, who died today.

A winner for me anyway. Online Sports Betting is for Losers now has more than 3000 reads.

Not quite universal. After my wife noticed that the Apple USB-C wired earbuds she got for her new iPhone 16 wouldn’t play when plugged into either of the USB-C ports in her MacBook Air, I went looking for USB-C wisdom and ran across The USB-C dream is dead and it’s too late to revive it, by Robert Triggs in Android Authority. The headline overstates the case a bit, but the piece is an informative read.

Stay attuned. Dave Askins’ latest B Square Bulletin takes a hint from a wild Barbie (scroll down to “Photo Finish B-Line & 6th Street”) that the artist Joel Shields is back in town. Here is my own photo set of a Shields installation along the B Line bikeway in 2022.

Go Ephs! Williams College is turning down federal grants with anti-DEI requirements. From what I gather, the college sees anti-DEI “anti-discrimination” requirements as a form of discrimination.

Be not afraid. Good observations and advice from Dana Blankenhorn about AI. Along the same lines, also this from Don Duval.

The points would remain the same. And original. I wrote Making a New World in March 2005 and self-published it (in a file pile at searls.com) because nobody else would. If someone wanted to publish it today, I would mostly just change references to companies that have gone out of business or changed their minds.

A Happy Hundredth to Gail Jesswein

Gail Jesswein with his wife Marilyn, on his 90th birthday at our house in Santa Barbara, June 8, 2015.

Today is the 100th birthday of Gail Jesswein, my father-in-law.

Gail was the father of eight, the first of whom is my wife Joyce. Gail was a merchant mariner during World War II (when the casualty rate was one in twenty-six, higher than any U.S. military branch), at the end of which he met Bernadette Joyce, who was on vacation from Chicago, on the Santa Monica pier. Gail and Bernie married shortly thereafter, and raised their family in Los Angeles, where all their kids attended local Catholic schools and churches, while Gail ran a thriving electrical contracting business.

After Bernie passed of cancer (at just 46), Gail married Marilyn Green, a teacher and former nun from Iowa. After the kids were all grown, Gail and Marilyn moved first to San Francisco and later to Sacramento, while he worked as a California state official under the administrations of Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian. On the recreational side, Gail was, among other things, a commodore of the Delta Yacht Club, on an island in California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, where the family enjoyed many summers camping and water skiing.

The first Jesswein families in the U.S. (as I understand it, anyway) were those raised by two brothers who emigrated from Kiev, where both were court translators, in the late 1800s.* A generation or two later, Gail and his brother Donald grew up on a farm in the crossroads town of Lydick, Indiana, just west of South Bend. His favorite song was . You can understand why, not that it seemed to bother him. Far as I could tell, not much did. He was tough, but not in a mean way. He was of a type John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Robert Mitchum might play: a man of few words and strong character.

And he loved a good laugh. We all got plenty at Gail’s 90th birthday party at our house in Santa Barbara, where various members of his large extended family made a theater production, acting out episodes from his long life. Though he was fighting late-stage cancer at the time, he enjoyed every second of it.

Gail passed later that year. A few years after that, Joyce and I took gigs at Indiana University in Bloomington. We are sure Gail would be amused to learn that his firstborn is now a second-generation Hoosier, and enjoying life in the home state he was so eager to leave that he headed straight for an ocean.

I’m hoping other family members can give me corrections and expansions of what I’ve written here so far. (Being a blog, I can do that.)

What matters is that Gail Jesswein was a good man. It was a great privilege to know him, and I wish he were here to help us celebrate.

*I just found , where Gail, Don, and their mother Dorothy are all mentioned. I got the brothers-from-Kiev story from a file folder that Dorothy shared with me a few years before she passed. I believe Christoph was one of the brothers and Mathilde was in the next generation. in the Ottenheim Lutheran Cemetery in Lincoln County, Kentucky. While Descendants of Christoph Jesswein doesn’t list Gail, from what I recall of Dorothy’s genealogy file, he’s a descendant. He also shows up in . Like other places where you can look up surnames, digging further will cost ya.

Sunday

Chrome question. One of my windows, with dozens of open tabs, vanished. How does one re-materialze it? ChatGPT says, Press Cmd + Y (Mac) or Ctrl + H (Windows) to open History. Look for a group entry like: “[Number] tabs – [Time]” under “Recently closed” or “Tabs from other devices.” Click it — the entire lost window should reopen. But I see no group entry like that.

Saturday

Blogging will be light. Big Granfalloon day.

Everything, just not all at once. Ted Gioia gives ten warning signs that the "knowledge system" is collapsing. I'm in that system, as are all serious journalists and academics (I work in both worlds). So are all technologists. (I'm kinda that too.) What will replace it?

Don't be disappointed. The Milky Way and Andromeda may not marry after all. I last visited this topic in The Universe is a Startup. I still stand by that point.

Friday

Anyone else here follow him? Peter Ziehan, who is new to me, has some interesting things to say about China's demographics and extreme centralization. First heard about him here.

For KwaaiNet. Looks like what I posted yesterday about personal AI started a fire.

It should have been like this in the first place. See a future of digital commerce in Iain Henderson's Smart Receipts as an Enabler of Data Portability: Smarter shopping, and much improved empowerment of consumer rights. Bonus link.

New habits start easy. I now start my day with a new post here using Wordland. I name the post after the day and start tweeting—but on my own blog rather than social media.

Thursday

Knicks fans know how OKC feels right now. The state of Indiana would like to thank the NBA players who called Tyrese Haliburton the "most overrated" player in the league. Halliburton just won the opening game of the NBA finals for the Pacers with less than a second left against the highly favored Thunder, in Oklahoma City. Doing that shit is a habit he has. Give it to him: the dude is clutch.

About face. The only fix for my face showing up on social media when I promote a blog post that has no image is to get a new theme for the blog—specifically one that I edit in block rather than classic mode. (That's WordPress talk.)  So I am learning block editing on a practice blog. Stay tuned for the change.

I don't know why. What are the balls on Prague’s spires called?? was posted here in 2015 and still gets about five new reads every day.

More bad news. Wired: The Quantum Apocalypse Is Coming. Be Very Afraid.

It's personal. Like your hair or your shoes. Here is a comment I posted today in this Linkedin thread, slightly edited:

The Meeker report is here https://www.bondcap.com/reports/tai and is 339 slides.

Look at slide 30. What's not there is personal AI that gives you ways to get control over the data in your life: what you own, where you've been, what you subscribe to (on what, how, and on what terms), how you save/invest/spend, what you've agreed to, how you are being followed and by what, who you know and how, facts about your health and fitness, all your obligations. There are apps and tools for some of that stuff, but not much of it is integrated, or integratable by you for your own purposes.

Look at Apple Intelligence. The guesswork in your Apple Mail app about what matters to you is often wildly speculative and off-base. Most of what Apple Intelligence seems to be for (or at least what salespeople showed off to my wife in the Apple Store where she bought her new iPhone 16 the other day) is for helping you buy shit, not helping you manage the shit you have. Ask Siri to turn off notifications from one of the apps on your phone, and see what happens. You'll get something like "I don't understand the question," or worse, "Would you like me to ask ChatGPT?"

We can only get personal control with personal AI. Your AI. Simple as that.

Wednesday

Cause for pessimism. There is a stat in basketball called VORP, for Value Over Replacement Player. I'd like one for coaches: VORC, for Value Over Replacement Coach. If such a stat existed, Tom Thibodeau's VORC would be pretty high. Minnesota and Chicago both fell after he left. Bonus link: Nate Silver, Knicks fan, Thibs non-fan.

Not surprisingly,,, Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers. From Ars Technica.

But not by much. WaPo: 5 AI bots took our tough reading test. One was smartest — and it wasn’t ChatGPT. It was Claude.

Today's rollback link. Podcasts, Wallcasts, and Paycasts, from last October. A pull-quote from a comment: "Paywalls are going up everywhere, as producers in the shittily named content business try to get ahead of Peak Subscription, and in the process are killing the open Internet, which is biggest farm ever created for geese that lay golden eggs."

Frontiers of bullshit. In FT: Generative AI models are skilled in the art of bullshit. And MODERN-DAY ORACLES or BULLSHIT MACHINES? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world, By Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West. Also for fun, a search.

It's all about geometry and packaging. Several million tech years ago, in the late '80s and early '90s, I did a lot of work for Hitachi Semiconductor and the collection of chip makers putting out (or planning at the time to put out) Sun Microsystems' SPARC CPU. The one I learned the most from was Hitachi, which at the time was making the microprocessors embedded in automobile brake systems and first-generation flash memory. Scientists from deep inside the company would make presentations predicting what would happen across the decades to come, just based on inevitable progress in chip design, function integration, and manufacture. I've watched, across those decades, how their predictions came true. One prediction both they and I made at the time was that the fabs required were beyond Hitachi's scope, and that one or two companies not among the leaders back then would end up making the chips and products that ordinary people would pocket and use to vastly extend their agency in both the physical and digital worlds. The three most important companies doing that today are TSMC, Samsung, and Apple. I share all this to tee up Beyond 2nm: Apple’s A20 chip to introduce new packaging breakthrough, in 9to5mac. When when you read about TSMC at that link, recall this one-liner from Jerry Sanders when he ran AMD: "Real men have fabs."

In case you're not worried enough. All in Wired:

A GPS Blackout Would Shut Down the World.
The Texting Network for the End of the World.
The Rise of ‘Vibe Hacking’ Is the Next AI Nightmare.
The US Grid Attack Looming on the Horizon.
You’re Not Ready for Quantum Cracks.

Tuesday

About a face. The problem Dave talks about here (my face pointlessly appearing with social media posts) is due to using an old theme that needs to be replaced. Hoping to make that happen this week. (The issue involves the "featured image" feature, as Dave points out in that post. When writing in Wordland, as I am now. I don't specify a featured image, so the social medium picks up my face for some reason. Dave suggests a fix, which the WordPress folks will catch when they read this.)

Worse than you thought. If you were thinking. Wired's Every Cyber Attack Facing America does not have the word "fiber" in it. But that's interesting too.

Giveaways

And that's just one problem for the party. Nate Silver: Why young men don't like Democrats.

Follow the money. Reason: J.D. Vance Wants a Free Market for Crypto. What About Everything Else?

What happened to that IBM, no Microsoft, monopoly? Some U.S. stats: Apple mobile phone share: 58.87%; tablet share, 54.43%; laptop share: 17.1%. (via stat counter.com)

Essentially outlawing VPNs. techradar: "We would be less confidential than Google": Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law—If passed, new rules would require VPNs and messaging apps to identify and retain users' data.

Did you know they existed? Hollywood Reporter: In Touch, Life & Style, Closer and First for Women Magazines to Shutter, Lay Off Entire Staffs.

Watch this future space. Big things are being worked on right now (without a website yet, but wait) based on Why we need first person technologies on the Net.

Sounds like filler. How to tell the real author is ChatGPT.

Scott vs. Tyler. There's an argument going on here.

Maybe it was smart. This answer to a question about IQ now has 20 upvotes.

Weekendings

Finals thoughts. I'm a lifelong Knicks fan who felt that the Knicks and the Pacers are (or were) so evenly matched that the difference would be coaching. And that's why I thought the Knicks would win game six in Indianapolis last night, and close the series with game seven in New York. Tom Thibodeau did such a great job game-planing against the Pacers for game five that I thought the Knicks were good for the rest. Alas, the Pacers are a bit better. And maybe really the best in the East. They did take out the Cavaliers, which is non-trivial. But the Knicks are still among the top few teams in the league, and no worse than third in the East. So I want them to hold the team together for next year. NBA teams aren't just a collection of "assets." They are men who play for each other. Don't discount what you've got. Oh, and work on offense. Get KAT more involved. Let Robinson keep improving. You know the rest. Meanwhile, I am in Indiana, which is crazy about basketball and the Pacers. So, in respect for my neighbors, I'd like to see the Pacers win the finals. But I'm betting that the Thunder take the series in five.

Not mine. Any more, anyway. Does alcohol kill brain cells?

Your altitude may vary. This is why my flight from Baltimore to Indianapolis was so smooth this morning: https://aviationweather.gov/