Chicago – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

Is reading, like writing, in danger?

Time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. But reader beware. Some think reading might be in danger. Read on. If you choose to.

Ben white 1MHU3zpTvro unsplash. A man sitting by a lake or river, reading a book.

Like a lot of folks who write I’ve been recently writing about writing in this AI age. But writing is only one side of the page writers want readers to turn. Readers don’t turn pages if they don’t like what they read. Bryan Cantrill thinks readers might be slowing their roll in his piece The Revolt of the Reader. I’d give it a read whether you write, or simply read the words of others.

Becky Ferreira takes a look at how The Remnants Of A Lost ‘Supercontinent’ Just Rewrote The History Of Life On Earth. Accepting that would require a global scale of editing and require quite a bit of new reading.

Roko’s Basilisk. Ever heard of it? Yes or no, you should check out Albert Buneko’s piece What If We Could Have A Future?

Perhaps you’ve heard that there’s a 10% chance AI will destroy humanity in the next decade? Over the weekend Anthropic’s Dario Amodei penned a large piece (or maybe he just had Claude generate it-who knows?) titled We Must Pace The Frontier. In the race he’s running he’s calling for things to slow down and governments to step in because there’s danger out there. It’s caused quite a stir. Fellow race participants, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, have quickly jumped in to agree. Either these guys are seeing the writing on the wall from folks who just aren’t buying their overhyped promises, or one of their AIs cracked into something we don’t know about yet. Or it could just be more hype. Or it could just be an attempt to push their agenda in upcoming talks the US is to have with China. Given that no one trusts anything they say, who knows? I’d say who cares, but there is that whole future thing that Albert Buneko was writing about.

Speaking of writing on the wall, apparently the gold rush for vibe coding apps isn’t what it looked like it might be. Paul Ford asks A.I. Was Supposed To Give Us Killer Apps. What Happened? The world only needs so many task management apps.

In the political realm folks are turning their attention to January 3, 2027 as a possible next January 6th coup. Michael Luttig lays it all out in The Final Battle For America’s Democracy. It’s a scary read. I think what he lays out is indeed possible. That said, if there is such a thing as a final battle, I think it was lost with the last presidential election.

With a hat tip to David Todd McCarty, I discovered Patrick Metzger’s piece What Canadians Won’t Admit About America. You should discover it as well.

And if you’re not going to be doing any reading this Sunday, perhaps go out and take a walk. Before you do, read David Todd McCarty’s Life On Goshen Landing Road.

Read well.

(Image from Ben White on Unsplash)

Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. 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.

Sunday Morning Reading

Reading and thinking on a rainy late-summer morning.

I have a love/hate relationship with late August in Chicago. Hints of Autumn, my favorite season, become stronger. The sun rises later, which I’m not a fan of. That’s where we are on this rainy Sunday morning in Chicago, so it’s time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. And thinking.

Ronit shaked ENNtoNUxhU unsplash. Transparent umbrellas appear to float in the sky.

I like to think I keep an open mind. I also like to think that the life we’re living currently will one day be better. Bottom line, I like to think. Daryl Van Tongeren says that Everyone Wants To Think They’re Open-Minded. Here’s Why Most People Aren’t. My mind is increasingly closing to the possibility of things getting better in my lifetime.

Natasha MH explores egos and gatekeepers in The Structural Shift Beneath Our Feet. I’d argue the shift is in our minds.

David Todd McCarty says that Engagement Might Be The Problem, Not The Solution. To my way of thinking, it never was the solution. Unless you were running one of the engagement platforms.

Davi Ottenheimer sees a similarity between the tech bros and plantation owners. He’s not wrong. Check out “AI Own” And The Techbro Dream of Plantation Life.

Zoe Williams tells us How To Spot A Psychopath, saying ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat.” Given that most probably haven’t encountered the latter, perhaps it’s no surprise that the real deal is often so difficult to spot.

Neil Steinberg continues to delve into his archives, this time with a piece from 2015 called Face Fear. When you look and think beneath the surface, there’s no wonder what wonders you’ll discover.

I’ve attended a number of wakes, visitations, memorials, and celebrations of life recently. “Wake” is my favorite term of art for masking grief. It just feels more appropriate to my way of thinking. Timing is everything, so Natasha MH’s piece While The Dead Was Sleeping struck a chord this week.

Speaking of those departed, this week we lost one of the good ones, Dolly Parton. Lots of things written about her extraordinary life and legacy. I particularly enjoyed this piece from Heather Cox Richardson.

It’s a dreary day and some of the links above are also are a bit dreary. So, to close on a cheerier note, Mastodon friend Ian Robinson linked to this piece called How To Talk To Comedy Writer from Andy Reilly. If you’ve ever paid attention to comedy, I bet you’ll recognize some of what you’ve seen, if not why you laughed at it.

(Image from Ronit Shaked on Unsplash)

Sunday Morning Reading

“Cowardice is stronger than common sense.”

Another Sunday with yet another stab a sharing some Sunday Morning Reading. What caught my eye this week revolved around history, featuring fiddle players, photography, and a bit of Chekov among other topics. Rosin up the bow and enjoy.

Guillaume gryn_dvs kv5v3 Yh _M unsplash. Black-and-white close-up of an older man playing a violin, wearing a light fedora with a dark band and a patterned shirt, focused with an expressive, open-mouthed expression as he draws the bow across the strings.

Kicking things off are two great pieces from Robin Ince. He jump starts the first with a well worn quote from James Baldwin:

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

I think we’ve all been gaslit a time or two in our lives. Even if you think you haven’t you should give both The Gaslight Years — Part One and To The End — Gaslighting Part Two a read. I think the fact that Baldwin wrote “hates” in the plural tells a tale.

“Agreement is cheap. Challenge is expensive.” So, says JA Westenberg in The Intellectual Circle Jerk And Why We Can’t Stop. Regardless of the hit to the pocketbook, both come with a cost.

We’ve always fought over history, even while we’re making it. Fine to fight over it, because history teaches us you can’t erase it, no matter how hard you try. Kelsey Ables takes a look at The New History Wars.

Speaking of history, Alan Palazon looks into The Forgotten Photographer Who Put A US President In The White House — And Pioneered Photographic Branding.

Harrison Smith tells the story of Violet Hensley. She Set Aside The Fiddle To Raise Children. At 99, She Made Her Opry Debut. Ms. Hensley recently passed away. Rest in peace.

I’m glad to see that Natasha MH keeps pursuing her art and her writing about it. Check out In The Canvas Grotto.

And to close, here’s a piece from 2018 that Neil Steinberg pulled out of his archives to highlight again this week. Glad he did. The title is a famous quote from Anton Chekov. Cowardice Is Stronger Than Common Sense. Maybe history does just rhyme after all.

(Image from Guillaume Gryn DVS on Unsplash)

Sunday Morning Reading

A moment to breathe differently

The road to our time at the family lake house is a mile long and a bumpy washboard filled with twists and turns. Arriving after shaking out a filling or two, there’s a leveling out that leads to a sort of peace, even if only for a few days. I’m not sure I leveled out fully this weekend, but the moments to breathe differently sure helped. Even if the weather only cooperated for a few hours.

Thanks to science, apparently the human origin story is being rewritten according to Ross Anderson in The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised. Probably a good thing given that today’s story tellers keep rewriting recent history. So it begs the question as to who might listen to any new version science rewrites.

Speaking of science, and also how we might define the human story and its origins, Claire L. Evans takes a look at the creation of brains in labs in AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive.

Whatever the twists and turns, bumps and bruises of history, science, and the stories that make up different versions of our lives, I happen to agree with Lauren Leek that everything is being flattened to feel all the same. Check out Temperature Zero For Culture: Why Everything Is Starting To Look The Same.

Given the intermittent rain storms, it was a battle to keep most of us away from our phones this weekend. Neil Steinberg suggests maybe adults need to adopt the practice of some schools in Maybe Adults Should Follow Students In Setting Down Our Phones.

Natasha MH takes a look at crippling anxiety is Sunshine After The Rain. Be the sunshine.

Dealing with anxiety can be painful. Lots of that to go around these days. David Todd McCarty examines The Upside Of Pain.

Disunion by Kurt Anderson is a terrific short story. It may be speculative fiction, but it feels all too real. I don’t know why, but reading this does not make me feel anxious or cause me pain.

With things flattening out, I believe the extreme edges are where things always matter. Robin Ince writes How I Became An Extremist.

Using quotes from throughout history, literary and otherwise, Jordan Dworkin built a fascinating webpage that tours through the ordinary things of an apartment, reminding us that the things we take for granted were once new and invented somewhere along the line and that “we remain restless in the midst of progress,” and our lives today are “a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same.” Check out Ordinary Abundance. It’s a lovely piece and worth your time. I wish I felt the same about the things we’re trying to create today.

(Photo by the author)

Stillness.

Necessary calm.

There’s something about the early morning stillness at the lake.

I’m an early riser and always the first up when we visit. Early morning visits to the lake slow things down before the day begins for everyone else, with only the sound of the occasional fish jumping for their breakfast and breaking the calm.

I need more of this.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. 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.

Sunday Morning Reading

Where does it begin? Where does it end?

Origin stories. Crazy stuff sometimes. Living in a world when we can make up, massage, or hallucinate just about anything, it’s no wonder that origin stories captivate and often capture us in our quest for meaning. Perhaps so we can have disagreements over them. I wonder what the origin of that is all about? This week’s Sunday Morning Reading touches on origin stories as well as some of the usual topics that I find of interest and worth sharing.

A typewriter with a page inserted with the sentence "In The Beginning" Getty images c O6QssKbtI unsplash.

Ross Anderson tells us The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised. Even if we discovered that this is all a simulation, I’m sure it would be debated, monetized, summarized, and bastardized into meaninglessness somehow.

No origin story is complete without some sort of religious or spiritual interpretation. Even Artificial Intelligence isn’t immune to that human phenomenon. Hayden Field explores How AI Bots Started A Religion — Humans Immediately Followed.

Everybody makes mistakes. Neil Steinberg suggests we might be getting too comfortable with that fact and a writer’s duty is to aim higher for accuracy, while admitting our flaws in To Write Is Too Err.

On a political front, everyone seems mired in a mud fight about how the Democrats might be unable to reconcile their progressive and moderate wings. Jay Caspian King takes a look at Subaru Socialists And The Great Disappointed, trying to figure out what’s behind some of the millennial thinking these days, as well as that of the generation that followed them, which he labels “The Great Disappointed.” Life is disappointment. Living is how you deal with it.

Meanwhile, David Todd McCarty asks What Does It Mean To Be A Moderate? I don’t have the answer to that. Frankly, given that everyone is so pissed off I don’t think it matters. That said, while how we insist on defining ourselves might help talk about political life, it sure isn’t helping cure what ails us.

Apparently the one thing that all flavors of the political spectrum can agree on is that data centers are not a good thing. Except those who make the policy and accept the bribes to allow data center construction in my backyard or yours. Molly Taft looks at How Data Centers Broke American Politics. I might argue that they revealed rather than broke. Because the bagmen got too clumsy.

I’ve been following the goings on at Google for most of the summer because the goings on are going to change things. In my view, not for the better. Like Donald Trump, Google hasn’t been shy about saying it’s going to screw things up. (My words, not theirs.) This week there was a shakeup among Google’s AI hierarchy that suggests the screws on the screw up are tightening down in what seems like a rush to productize too soon. Hayden Field gets into The Messy Politics Behind Google’s Big AI Shakeup.

Every origin story is one that also reaches an end. I commented on the passing of Om Malik several Sunday’s ago. Thanks to John Gruber for linking to Om’s final blog post, something I somehow missed. It’s about so much more than the headline suggests. But that’s what Om Malik was about. So much more. Check out The Myth, The Mythos and the Man. I’ll close with this quote from his post:

The sophist is selecting, sequencing, and presenting in ways that produce belief without requiring the audience to do the work. Mythos, for Plato, was the domain of poets and myth-makers. Useful for educating the young, dangerous when deployed as a substitute for rigorous argument among adults.

(Image licensed from Getty Images for Unsplash+)

Sunday Morning Reading

Revelate

Still on the road for summer travels, but this week offered a few moments to do some reading when not toodling along listening to the music of Glen Hansard. So time to share a few good pieces of writing and good reads in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading.

Kick things off with a piece by Robert P. George called The Two Great Threats To Truth. He questions whether there really is a difference between moral relativism and fantacism, if in the end they yield the same result. The piece will make you think. If thinking is your thing.

Claire Stapelton rose through the ranks at Google. From reading The Voice Of Google, it sounds like she saw it all, and she’s telling quite a bit of it.

“Government Efficiency and Death by Indifference” is the subhead to Anton Shekhovtsov’s The Techno-Oligarchy’s First “Holocaust.” It’s quite a dire piece, but certainly worth your time.

Speaking of oligarchs, a trio of NY Times writers take a look at Larry Ellison and his bet on AI. Check out Jonathan Mahler, Jim Rutenberg and Kirsten Grind’s story, Larry Ellision Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be The Face of the A.I. Bubble? At some point this bubble has to pop, right?

David Todd McCarthy says There Is A Crack In Everything. Truth and beauty lie in the imperfections, not in the perfect.

The world is certainly an imperfect place. Rachel Yoder’s short story, The Promise perfectly reveals that.

Alex Skopic flushes out some thoughts on the failed state in Diarrhea In Every Pot and A Gun In Every Mailbox. When you break things down to “shooting and shitting” you might be on to something.

There’s nothing obligatory about Jeff Johnson’s piece The Obligatory AI Post. Make it obligatory reading.

To close out this week, a sad one when we lost one of the good ones in Glen Hansard, give a read to Sophia Stewart’s tribute, The People’s Troubador. If you don’t know the music, you should.

Revelate.

(Image from Samuel Couto on Unsplash)

A Bit Of Good News In Illinois About Digital Grocery Store Coupons

A nod to those less technically inclined

A bit of good news for Illinois residents in this follow up about Electronic Shelf Labels.

I wrote about Electronic Shelf Labels a bit ago, and the problems I had with not only reading them, but the problems I could foresee them being used for, including surge or dynamic pricing. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a law to take effect on January 1, 2027 that will at least require grocery store owners to honor promotions offered via digital means to those who may not have access to the technology to access the promotions.

Essentially the law means grocery stores have to make the discount available to all customers, regardless of whether or not they are using an app to access the promotions.

Based on the news coverage and the reading of the law I’m unclear how this will go into effect, but at least it will allow customers to take advantage of promotions without using an app.

In my experience this has caused numerous problems and delays at the checkout counter, especially for senior customers. Grocery store cashiers (when you shop at a store that still offers them) also complain.

I’m not sure what impact this may have on surge pricing, which is obviously a goal from the purveyors of digital coupons, but if stores have to make the same discount available to everyone it should at least slow down the momentum towards that type of marketing.

I doubt this solves the readability issue though.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. 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.

Sunday Morning Reading

Still milling milestones

It’s a Sunday. It’s a Sunday when I can say I’ve hung around for seven decades as the clock ticked past 70 yesterday. Spending the weekend celebrating with the grandkids, dodging in an out of pockets of time when the air is breathable, so there’s only a few links to share in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Hope you enjoy them as much as I have spending it with two innocents watching them approach the world from that perspective. When they look to you for answers, it’s awesomely terrifying.

David Todd McCarty thinks We’re Teaching Our Kinds The Wrong Lessons. As someone who wonders why we spend so much time teaching them not to lie in a world that rewards liars, I often think the same.

NatashaMH writes about An Artist’s Search For Meaning. The quote below she included from Viktor E. Frankel, hit in a different way on this birthday weekend.

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly.”

It wouldn’t be a Sunday Morning Reading column without at least one nod to politics, Her’s the nod from Carlyn Beccia, wondering Has America Crossed The Asshole Threshold? I would argue yes, but wouldn’t limit it to just America.

Claire Stapleton worked at Google. She saw most of it. She tells what she saw in The Voice Of Google in a piece that is so much more than just about Google and the tech culture.

Dry Throats and Smokey Sunset

Smoke gets in your everywhere

Out on an errand run, I grabbed this shot of an orange dot of a sun trying to burn through the smoke and haze blowing through the US from Canadian wildfires. A hazy street scene in Chicago looking down a road with cars. A tall street light pole with a green "N Laramie Av" sign stands in the foreground, with the prominent clock tower of the Copernicus Center visible on the right against a dim, glowing sun obscured by thick smoke from Canadian wildfires

Forgot to grab my mask as I headed out for the short trip, so traveling from two parking lots into two stores, my throat and sinuses dried up with that burning taste in a hurry.

Seeing very little in town traffic for this time of day, it sounds like most folks are heeding warnings and staying inside. Wish I had.

Stay careful out there.