Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

OpenAI Wants Your Financial Info

Fun and games with frontier financing

Oh, ye brave intrepid adventurers trodding through the frontier, trod on. Carve your way into uncharted territory, knowing not what lies beyond the bend. The rest of us will wait. I’m guessing the rest of us are going to be quite content doing so.

This image shows two side-by-side screenshots of a mobile application interface designed for personal finance management, featuring a clean, minimalist aesthetic with a green and white color palette.

News popped today that OpenAI wants users of ChatGPT to provide access to their bank accounts and other financial data.

Read that again.

The chatbot that’s famous for telling us it might make a mistake, and delivering on that promise, wants users to turn over access to their banking accounts to help them better understand their finances.

The article from The Verge I saw pop across my feeds begins its lede with “Your trust in AI is about to be put to the test.” It could have just as easily said, “OpenAI is looking for suckers.”

I’m not going to get into the whys and wherefores of the tech behind this. The article linked above gives you some of that info. TechCrunch has another if you care to look. There does seem to be a list of well known financial institutions that are willing to let there customers connect to the service including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, American Express, and Capital One. Apparently there are over 12,000.

Quoting from the TechCrunch article:

With the new financial tool integration, users can get detailed answers to questions such as “I feel like I’ve been spending more recently. Has anything changed?” or “Help me build a plan to be ready to buy a house in my area in the next 5 years.”

Tell me you didn’t read that and immediately think that the minute a user enters that prompt they will immediately start receiving offers from those 12,000 financial institutions. That’s where this is headed. And as far as the history of the Internet is concerned, AI or not, that’s what it’s all turned into.

The reality is that just like with the health data that OpenAI also wants, whether users turn this type of info over or not, the data is going to be delivered to some data center at some point. Don’t think the three credit bureaus aren’t just waiting for the right offer to turn over your data, much the same way insurance companies are with your health data. Users donating their data will just provide another point of triangulation, and a more direct access to their inboxes.

If you ask me, this is just another exercise taking advantage of human curiosity and gullibility and turning that into more vectors to sell, sell, sell.

If those willing to head out into this new frontier of finance are willing to take that gamble, I say go for it. Let us know what you find.

My hunch it won’t be anything new.

(Image from OpenAI)

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

Gearing Up For Another Journey With The International Voices Project

The plays may be from far away, but the stories feel closer to home

It’s that time again. A time to journey into parts unknown with writers new to me. That means it’s time for The International Voices Project festival.

This is a gig I participate in once or twice a year. IVP gives me a chance to explore writers, different cultures, and a larger world. The mission of IVP is to bring international works translated into English to Chicago audiences. They are presented in a staged reading format. That simply means actors are carrying scripts and the production isn’t fully realized. The emphasis is on the text and the story.

This year I’m headed to Indonesia and the play, OH, by Puta Wijaya. The story features a young attorney who arrives at his father’s hospital bedside to fulfill his father’s request, but he comes not as a son, but as an ambitious lawyer seeking his mentor’s opinion on a case: defending a drug dealer facing two death sentences. Wijaya himself adapted the piece into a play from an original short story of his, called The People’s Justice.

The one thing I always learn from these plays from other countries is not how different we are, but just how much we are the same. That’s more than true with this piece, as much of what the main character thinks could be ripped out of today’s US headlines or from social media.

Looking forward to spending the next week rehearsing and hearing the staged reading of OH, next week.

Indigo: A Well Designed Social Media App For Those Who Need It

Good design and execution matter.

Here’s something I’ve been recently thinking about software. There’s really nothing new under the sun. And the skies have been cloudy for a good while. It feels like we’ve reached a point where the only difference between apps within a category boil down to execution and design. Often not even then.

Perhaps we’ve exhausted all of the ideas for what software can do and we’re just looking for a better iteration of what we already have at hand.

I’m talking on a consumer level. Beyond whatever AI supposedly offers, and the explosion of social media apps that happened when Twitter x-ed itself out, I can’t name an app or piece of software in the last few years that wasn’t a different version of something that already existed. Even AI software feels like it’s more of the same, just at a quicker pace.

Certainly there are nuances. But over time they tend to blur. As an example, take weather apps. They’ve all recently followed the leader (I don’t know which app that was) to display variable forecasts from different weather sources. It’s a good feature given that weather services can offer different forecasts. But as most weather apps have quickly adopted similar features, once again there isn’t much of a differentiator between them. Unless Carrot Weather’s bell weather use of insults is your cup of tea.

Don’t get me wrong. Execution and design can (and should) go a long way. Even more so when all things seem much the same or serve the same purpose. Beyond price, that’s really the only big differentiator.

It’s why I’ll try out an app that looks like it doesn’t offer anything beyond what I already have. Within that personal scope, let me say that the new social media browsing and crossposting app Indigo is worth your attention if its functionality fits how you use social media.

Indigo is the creation of Soapbox, the developers who created crossposting app Croissant. (I wrote about it when it released.) While Croissant allows you to cross post to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, (functionality I find useful), Indigo is meant primarily to merge and scroll through a single timeline of your Mastodon and Bluesky feeds. You can also crosspost to both if that’s your desire. Threads isn’t included, as it doesn’t allow for viewing its timelines in the same way, which is curious as it is supposedly federated with Activity Pub.

If scrolling social media feeds is your thing, Indigo is certainly worth a look. It’s very well designed, and easy to discover its functionality.

It’s a first version of the app, and as one of the developers, Aaron Vegh says on his blog, “The Indigo we’re shipping today is going to be the worst version.” For the worst and first version, I believe Aaron and Ben McCarthy have done an excellent job. (You should read both Aaron’s and Ben’s blog posts. Ben’s describes the functionality quite well.) Having followed the development of Croissant since its release, I’ll say that the care they’ve used in the past with that app points to the same for the future of Indigo.

If you use both Mastodon and Bluesky, once you sign in to both through Indigo, you see your feeds merged together. You don’t need to use both social networks. The functionality is the same if you prefer only one of the two social networks. So, if you’re user of only one, it could replace whatever app you might currently be using.

One of the nicest design touches, and obviously an essential one, is that it’s easy to distinguish where things are coming from if you merge your timelines. Mastodon links are purple and those from Bluesky are, well they’re blue.

You can tell if a post is crossposted between the two networks, and another nice feature is that Indigo will merge the two in some cases (timing plays a part) so you don’t see them twice. You can switch between each version and take actions like quoting or replying to both at the same time.

If you’ve used Croissant to crosspost, doing so on Indigo will feel very familiar. Notifications, should you choose to receive them on your device, work as you would expect. The Notification tab in the app is quite well done and easy to understand.

The app is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and a single subscription covers you across devices. There is a free tier that’s read-only. If you’re interested in Indigo, the free tier is read only. That’s good way to determine if the excellent design of the app appeals to you.

If you use both social networks and would like to combine your feeds into one timeline I think Indigo is worth a look. Let me say this about Indigo and my social media usage. The single merged timeline feature has its attraction, but it’s not something that’s a high priority for me and that brings me back to the beginning of this post.

I like to keep my eye out for developers who focus on good design and good functionality. That’s the case with Indigo. As in this case, an app may not fit my needs, but I’ll remember the developers or company behind it. It’s much the same way I follow good theatre or film directors, and good writers.

I don’t see many new ideas or new needs to fill coming down the software or app pike in the near future. That may say more about me than it does the software market these days. Even so, that view of mine has me paying even closer attention to those who care about the look and feel of what they produce.

(image from the author)

Spring Nights In The City

Weird meteorological magic

Sometimes the city calls to you and begs you to pay attention.

A wide-angle, low-light shot captures a busy urban intersection at twilight in Chicago. In the foreground, a prominent black traffic light pole features a glowing green light and a "One Way" sign pointing left, heavily adorned with stickers. A black metal trash can sits on the brick sidewalk nearby.

Certainly on some early Spring evenings, when the air is clear, and there can still be a chill in the air.

You may want to escape a jacket during the day, but it brings comfort as the sky darkens. You may curse the morning chill, but not that of the early evening.

Because you know as the weather warms, the city works its weird meteorological magic and the air warms up with the setting sun as the heat of the day escapes the streets and the buildings.

In the Spring, in the early evening, the city calls to you, and says enjoy it while you can.

The Promise No Tech CEO or Politician Will Ever Make

A promise not made is easier to avoid than a promise made

There’s an issue out there that could change the way people think about a nuisance we all increasingly live with. That issue is spam. Emails, texts, phone calls, you name it. We’re swarmed with it like with mosquitos at dusk. And every effort you hear a tech company make to try and make unwanted calls and messages less of a problem is essentially a sop, soon to be defeated. The bad guys are better at this game, and quite frankly, the good guys don’t really care.

Cans of Spam displayed in a grid by Hannes johnson mRgffV3Hc6c unsplash.

I’ve often said that any politician running for national office promising to end spam in all forms as we know it would instantly find a constituency. I still believe that.

Politicians won’t do it, because, hey, they are part of the spamming problem. Note that they’ve exempted themselves from any soft shelled regulations they’ve legislated in the past.

These days, Tech CEOs also have an opening they’ll never take advantage of it. Not that they don’t care the way politicians don’t, but spam is good for their business. Take the AI push and the reactions to it. The folks pushing Artificial Intelligence are worried about a backlash spoiling their game from consumers, corporations, and maybe a government or two. And that backlash appears to be growing.

Who knew that if the sales pitch was AI would take your job, some would be unhappy?

Who knew that if your CEO discovered that they weren’t wracking up bottom line savings by dismissing the workforce that they’d be a bit peeved?

Who knew in what AI-induced downsizing law firms that feeding legal advice or sensitive information into an AI chatbot removed attorney client privilege?

Who knew that folks watching in plain sight as local politicians took cash to push through new data center construction that would increase their utility bills that folks would shockingly rise up in anger?

Who knew that employees of AI companies would be so concerned about how governments might use AI for surveillance and war fighting that they would petition their CEOs to stop government contracts?

Who knew that governments, that at one point were fat and happy to let AI run its race given all the cash lobbyists were stuffing in their pockets, would discover that perhaps these robots could possibly indeed bring chaos to things like financial systems and just about anything else?

Who knew that in order to keep AI chatbots from hallucinating, the user has to tell the AI chatbot not to hallucinate? It’s like telling your kid or a politician not to lie and expecting that to happen.

Here’s a small hint. Everybody knew. Everybody knows. It sounds like for the most part the chumps are catching on.

While there are spheres where AI might actually be of benefit to society AI might not get that chance unencumbered. So far on a consumer level its time saving and life altering benefits seem to have boiled down to sorting through emails and calendars, creating nonconsensual porn, making music and podcasts that nobody wants, dishing out bad therapy advice, and creating conversational partners for those who can’t converse with others in real life.

Essentially the same promises that computer technology has always promised. Only this time around the wheel it’s becoming exponentially easier to collect data from anyone using the computers. And that’s the end game.

Even with this growing backlash, tech CEOs aren’t going to make a promise to use this new super intelligence that can schedule a flower delivery, or spit out your calendar, to derail the possibility of them controlling that game. It is funny though that no one seems to have created a chatbot or LLM that can solve PR problems.

I don’t pretend to understand all of the technological ins and outs of chatbots, LLMs, MCPs, and other terms that seem to change each time a new version comes out or something goes wrong. I do suspect that the technology they are promising could fix the spam problem if that was the desire. In the same way, politicians could do so with regulation.

There’s a part of me that thinks these are actually political promises with technological problems that could actually be solved, or at least ameliorated. But promises not made are easier to deal with than keeping promises made.

There’s money to be made, and plenty of suckers willing to pony up. So why upset the game by pandering to sentiment?

(Image from Hannes Johnson on Unsplash)

Sunday Morning Reading

Sometimes a pear is just a pear.

Another Sunday dawns, so it must be time for Sunday Morning Reading. An interesting collection of pieces to share this week. On one hand it seems like any other week. On the other, this week’s edition offers a few nuggets worth chewing on. Don’t over think it. Enjoy.

Leading off, I’m highlighting an excellent series from The Baffler called The Profession That Does Not Exist. The Baffler bills itself as “America’s leading voice of incisive and unconventional left-wing criticism”, for what that’s worth. I find it an excellent source of good writing. Each of the pieces in the series that has the subhead “writing won’t make you a living”, is worth your time, but I’ll highlight two.

A Pear Is Just A Pear by Timmy Straw. Making your way in a crazy world you can find that sometimes a pear is just that. A pear.

Bertrand Cooper’s ISpyForGood recounts his experience as a social media investigator, a job that allowed the possibility of stepping out of poverty that entailed examining how others often scammed their ways to do the same.

Apparently the ruling class in Silicon Valley are worried that folks don’t take too kindly to their products or their ruling. David Wallace-Wells takes a look in A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. I guess when you threaten to turn the world upside down folks do get a bit antsy.

Open your arms and wave at just about anything happening around and to us and you can’t miss the obvious. Tom Wellborn takes it all on in The Frequency At Which Accountability Cannot Reach. Sometimes a pear is just a pear.

JA Westenberg says Outrage Is Letting Someone Else Set The Frame. Westenberg also offers up The War Between Fast And Legitimate Is Here. I suggest getting out of these messes we’re in calls for new frames or new acceptance of coloring outside the lines. Oh, wait. All the lines have been blurred.

James O’Sullivan thinks We’ll Soon Find Out What Is Truly Special About Human Writing. I suggest we’ll “rediscover” rather than finding out, but his point is spot on.

Meanwhile, Will Gottsegen says Sam Altman Wants To Know Whether You’re Human. It appears Altman and his ilk are looking at the problem through the wrong end of a telescope at a tiny mirror reflecting back.

On another front, Marianne Dhenin takes a look at The Small Wisconsin City That Defeated A Giant Data Center. I don’t think the robots will ever be able to muster this kind of civil action.

You, like I, may be overly tired of hearing anything having to do with the Epstein Files. Even so, I encourage you to take a look at this excellent piece from Gabrielle Glancy. I Grew Up With Epstein In Brooklyn. Our Neighborhood Held Dark Secrets not only tells a tale that should frighten, but one that I guess more might share than most ever want to acknowledge.

Happy Mother’s Day to all our mothers out there and all to come. Sometimes a pear is just a pear.

(Image from Tijana Drndarski on Unsplash)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. This site does not use affilate links.

Things You Run Across On A Walk

Put a fork in it

With the weather finally warming I’m getting back into the habit of taking a good long walk each day through the neighborhoods surrounding my digs. I have to admit I got out of that habit during this past winter with family travels and other things on the agenda.

Occasionally I stumble across something new, or at least something I don’t remember. This wooden sculpture of a sausage skewered on a fork in a local dog park is one of those things. A clever bit of whimsy on a nice afternoon.

We can all use a bit more whimsy these days.

Virginia Rejoins The Confederacy With Supreme Court Action On Voting Acts

Time to get off high horses on the high road

After the U.S Supreme Court decided to to do away with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Virginia Supreme Court said hold my beer and rejoined the Confederacy, rushing to throw out the results of a recent redistricting referendum, which allowed the Commonwealth to redraw legislative districts.

A high curving road in the mountains. Photo by ARRitz on Shutterstock

These turn back the clock on civil and voting rights efforts are moving at a rapid and dizzying pace. You can certainly say that those who’ve been harboring their south will rise again dreams are sensing their chance and seizing upon it, thanks to the U.S Supreme Court Callais vs Louisiana ruling.

You can also sense that there’s a bit of panic in the air on their part. If they miss this chance, it’ll be a while before there is another one, seeing that the leader they’ve chosen to lead their fight is losing popularity as quickly as he’s losing what’s left of his mind and dragging down what used to be the GOP with it. But I fear that’s not going to even matter.

As I said in this post a couple of days ago, this is the continuation of a struggle that has gone on since the birth of this country. And while many of the southern states that made up the Confederacy during the American Civil War can’t wait for their chance to rip out the pages of history, they can really only do so because of a racist hatred and nakedly corrupted criminal influence that has taken hold in all corners of the U.S.

As to that sense of panic, I wish I could sense some of that panic in this from the other side. Quite frankly, it’s time to get off the high horse on the high road and get a little dirty in this fight. I haven’t seen or heard it yet in any of the statements made in the wake of these decisions, or the recent special session in Tennessee that effectively turned that states representation possibilities into a joke. Tennessee didn’t have this easy of a time choosing to eventually secede the first time around.

I’m not sure what makes me angrier. The open nakedly racist aggression against voting rights, or the milk-toast almost resigned reactions by Democrats. That politicians yanking us back into an unwanted past and into a dismal future are doing so with glee in their cold dead hearts. It makes the weak kneed attempts of their opponents seem even weaker. Jellyfish have stiffer spines. You can’t have a country supposedly ruled by laws, if those charged with carrying out those laws bathe openly in criminal corruption.

Given all of the efforts at election interference and obstruction that have already taken place and that will continue, these redistricting battles are creating a scenario in which it doesn’t matter how big a turnout Democrats can muster or how evil these leeches on humanity are.

We haven’t seen a roll back of rights like this since the ancestors of those leading this one rolled back Reconstruction efforts.

(Photo by ARRITtz on Shutterstock)

Sometimes Nature Stares Back At You

Sometimes Mother Nature stares back at you with a face of her own.

A detailed close-up shot of a single pansy flower, centered within a bed of its own green leaves. The flower has two large deep-purple upper petals, while the lower central petal features a vibrant yellow patch with a dark violet or maroon mask pattern that has radiating lines. A white, slightly textured brick wall is in the background.

Best not to look away.

Civil War Revisited

Hard times have come again

Twice a week, every week, I post the following on social media.

A Mastodon post from Warner Crocker that says, Your twice, now continuing, weekly reminder that we're still in a Civil War.

Set aside for the moment the arguments that some toss back at me that we’re not in a Civil War because we’re not fighting with guns and bullets. I find that argument naive, even if there’s a degree of truth about it. That said, it’s my contention that much of what we’ve been living through for the last decade is not only a continuation of the American Civil War that we thought ended in 1865, but an out in the open fight over the same issues. Denying that, I do find naive.

Yes, it’s about race, and yes, it’s also about so much more. But so was that conflict that’s bubbled and boiled since the founding of this country that finally spilled over into a conflagration at a time that men thought was the only way to solve that large of a disagreement. The question may have been called on the battlefields, but the larger questions were never settled.

I do find it ironic that a New York hustler and pedophile is leading the South’s charge this time around. The South could never rise again on its own, it appears.

But then as playwright Lanford Wilson says in his play, Talley’s Folly,

…there is New York City, isolated neighborhoods in Boston, and believe me, the rest is all the South.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Callais v. Lousiana, essentially dismantling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by declaring that we’re so over racism that we don’t need voting rights protections any longer has ratcheted up the fight and placed it squarely in the halls of state capitals. Given how the U.S. Congress has abrogated any real responsibility on and off for generations, it seems fitting and also ironic that the power will now reside in the states.

The new battlefields in those state capitals are all about redistricting and gerrymandering with states rushing into special sessions to cut out voters of one party or the other in some meaningless attempt to control who has the majority in that same inept U.S. Congress. I say meaningless, because that’s body that has essentially fought back and forth on this since the fighting ended in 1865.

However any and all of these redistricting battles turn out, and given the current number of states controlled by the forces that somehow still call themselves Republicans, what happens in Washington DC will be pre-ordained long before the swearing in of each new Congress takes place.

As long as states can continue to fight using political cartographers and gerrymandering pens as their weapons of choice, things might ebb and flow a bit, but not enough to radically alter the picture or turn back the clock for at least a couple of generations.

Of all of the terrible things that have happened since 2016, I think this just might be the worst of it. I hope I’m wrong. I doubt I am. Stephen Foster’s 1854 song that pleaded for relief, Hard Times Come Again No More, might just become popular again.