technology – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

There be dragons, dogs, and humans. Trust the dogs.

Time for some Sunday Morning Reading.

There’s a great lyric and greater question in Lin-Manuel’s musical retelling of American history, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Control is a crazy concept. We strive to control what we can, while we’re around. Too often we delude ourselves into thinking we control more than we actually do. No one wants to define themselves or be defined as lacking control, much less under the control of others. We may think we’re masters and mistresses of our own universes and control our own narrative. Yet too often, when we do have control and things go askew, we foist the responsibility (blame) off on others. That may be essential to surviving on the paths we choose. But it’s not easy to control the reactions a dog may have to who’s good or who’s not, a dragon, or much less the demons of our own making.

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Kicking off this week is Natasha MH asking the question, What’s The Best Story You’ve Been Told About Yourself? There be dragons.

The Guardian published an editorial on the ‘unmasking’ of anonymous artists in the wake of the second unmasking of Bansky and the reveal of a hoax surrounding the death of Italian novelist writing under the nom-de-plume Elena Ferrante. Regarding Banksy, The Guardian opines that “his mask is his art — let’s not destroy it.”

I don’t often link to book reviews in this column, but this one struck my fancy. A.O. Scott’s A Treacherous Secret Agent, examines How Literature Spoke Truth To Power During The Red Scare. I’m looking forward to reading this.

Jason Perlow’s The Well We Never Tapped is a sequel to an earlier piece he wrote about the future of science fiction. He argues that in the runaway world of big sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars the answer to controlling the future of these and other properties isn’t retooling or reimagining, but perhaps to stop for a while.

Speaking of science fiction and stopping, on the Artificial Intelligence front a number of things happening in that wannabe industry that can’t really find a purchase beyond the flimflammery of the financial markets and bean counting boardrooms, have been prompting some interesting writing of late. kstenerud on the yoloai blog writes Why Your AI Agents Will Turn Against You. There be lobsters and dragons.

Kevin Baker takes a look at how AI Got The Blame For The Iran School Bombing. Follow that up with Anna Moore’s piece Marriage Over, €100,000 Down The Drain: The AI Users Whose Lives Were Wrecked By Delusion. Makes one suspect that we’re not looking for ways to better exert control over our lives, but to more easily avoid taking the rap when things inevitably go wrong.

Big news last week got kind of mushed about in wish casting about Facebook killing off the Metaverse. That sort of did and didn’t happen. Regardless, Neil Stephenson’s My Prodigal Brainchild caught quite a bit of attention.

Apple is celebrating its 50 year anniversary and there’s lots being written about its history and it’s present. Everyone’s vying for control of that story. Harry McCracken’s How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History Of The Company’s Earliest Days is worth a read.

So too is David Sparks’ The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage and the Stephen Sinofsky piece he links to, Mac Neo And My Afternoon Of Reflection and Melancholy. The damn thing hasn’t even been on sale for a month, yet we’re already trying to define its legacy.

Two political pieces to conclude with after all of the good feelings surrounding yesterday’s No Kings Rallies. (Watch for the comical battle to control the narrative over that moment this week.) Lydia Polgreen says what I’ve been saying for over a decade now. It’s Not Trump, It’s America. It’s hard to come out from under the burden of a myth.

Mike Lofgren’s How Trump Fits The “Great Man” Theory of History — Sort Of, taps into Hegel, Asimov, and the wisdom of dogs. He concludes his piece with:

History as we experience it at the sharp end is the aggregation of moral choices made by individual human beings. When those choices become corrupted by fear, resentment or inexcusable stupidity, and then amplified by mass suggestion, we get a creature like Trump, the reflection of a people’s image.

I’ll leave it at that this week.

(Image from Daniele Gay on Shutterstock

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.

Sunday Morning Reading

Epidemics of reading, opinions, and the wild ways of artists

Spending a few days with the grandkids this weekend and into next week, yet still managed to find some time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. It’s a lesson in learning, watching as they begin to put it all together, compared to so many of the adults trying to own the world who seem stuck and unable to grow, or suffer some sort of reversion. With kids, it’s innocence. The rest of us have no excuses. Just stories. Makes you wonder what turns that on and off.

In the large discussion around screen time and attention spans, Carlo Iacono says What We Think Is A Decline In Literacy Is A Design Problem.The section looking back to “reading epidemics” in the 18th and 19th century are more illuminating than any screen.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War In Iran Was The Truth. So says David Remick. That’s always true in warm even before the first bullets fly. But it’s become the truth in all aspects of how we try to survive together. Funny how we revert back to our early childhood ways of dealing with the world before disgarding the truth was supposedly trained out of us.

Everybody has an opinion about this war that we can’t call a war. Here’s one that I found interesting from Frida Ghitis. Check out What Everyone Gets Wrong About Iran.

David Todd McCarty tells us How I Learned To Hate AI. The more you know…

Chris Castle takes a look at The Great White House AI Copyright Dodge: Managed Decline, Global Spillover, And The Rise Of The Chief Personhood Denier.Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

With everyone focused on The Strait of Hormus, Richard Bookstabler takes a look at our financial straits in I Predicted The 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse. For the record, I didn’t predict the last one, but anyone with two nickels to rub together can predict the outcome of the one we’re heading into.

I did any number of odd (in all senses of the word) jobs in my early life supporting myself as an artist. Emily Watlington takes a look at The Wild Ways Artists Have Made Their Livings, From The Renaissance To Today.

Notes From A Burmese Prison is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil. More than worth your time. Extrapolate the specific location and situation to any troublesome moment and remember whoever the guards are, you can’t trust them.

(Photo by the author)

The Potholes of the Internet

“Your Frustration Is The Product”

Some call it enshittification. I largely agree with that when it comes to the Internet. But that’s true in most endeavors that result in building something. Anything made for good, can and will be used in ways that turn it into a shitty experience.

I’m not just talking about advertising and how it’s junked up the web. I’m also talking about human nature, and how there’s a part of too many of us that see something wonderfully created to solve a problem, who then consequently turn it into a range of unintended consequences that leave us mourning our losses at the expense of somebody else’s gain.

Any one of us could run down a list of things in each of our lives that demonstrate that history, so I won’t even begin to spool one out. Have at it yourselves.

In the majority of instances the road to ruin is typically a path worn thin by greed and there’s never been a road we travel that doesn’t eventually fill with potholes. But back to the Internet and enshittification.

If this excellent post by Shubham Bose called The 49MB Web Page doesn’t make you yearn for a simpler age, I’m not sure what will, assuming you were alive and on the Internet before things went south. Remember, there’s a generation for which the way things are today on the Internet is the way things always have been.

Here’s Bose’s lede:

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

The entire piece is worth your time if for no other reason than that misery loves company. We’re all in that same boat and there does’t seem to be any shoreline in view, given how the waters are being churned up anew by Artificial Intelligence.

As Bose puts it:

Your frustration is the product.

Back in the day I can remember getting a credit for complaining that my newspaper was delivered wet and unreadable. Good luck finding someone to express your frustration to these days.

(Photo by the author)

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.

Joanna Stern Keeps on Keeping On

New roles and new platforms for one of tech coverage’s best

Tech keeps evolving and so does Joanna Stern. She just keeps on moving and I’m damn glad she does.

JOANNA_01 e1773767189762. After spending a decade at The Wall Street Journal she’s headed for new adventures after leaving the WSJ to create her own company covering tech while partnering with NBC. She’ll be moving up from her role as a contributor at NBC News to chief tech analyst and contributing correspondent, and coming this summer on her own site New Things With Joanna Stern. Axios describes it as a partnership between Stern’s company and NBC.

Before the WSJ, Joanna made her bones back in the days of netbooks and other tech working for the likes of Laptop Magazine, Engadget, and The Verge, and later joined ABC News as a technology editor.

I’m sure I’ve left something out, but I won’t leave out that Joanna has been one of the best at covering tech, whether she’s been writing about it or producing videos. If you search the pages here for her name I’m sure you’ll see a few links to some of her coverage. She has a unique and creative way of making tech accessible, cutting to the chase, all while producing entertaining content.

She has a book coming out in May, chronicling her adventures in exploring AI called I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything.

Variety also has a good writeup on what Joanna and NBC are unveiling.

I wish her all the best. We’ll all be better for her coverage.

MacBook Neo-ing

Neo newness

On an errand with my wife I happened to be in the neighborhood of one of the two Apple Stores closest to me and decided to drop in and take a look at the new MacBook Neo.

The Citrius MacBook Neo on display at the Apple Store

I’m decidedly not in the market for one of these, but I imagine one of the folks I support will find this more than suitable for their next computer. My intent was to just handle the machine a bit and see if the build felt as nice as most of the very raving reviews say it does. Bottom line, it does.

As I said in an earlier post, I think all things being not equal, the price point is the feature of note for this device. And based on reviews I’m seeing, I think that more than holds.

Speaking of, you might want to check out Sam Henri Gold’s thoughts in This Is Not The Computer For You. I concur with his points on the impact this move by Apple is going to have. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.

He has decided he’ll be fine.

Lots of people are going to be fine with the MacBook Neo. And that’s fine.

It was tough to snap any good pictures that captured the colors of the new Neos (is that redundant?) on display because the Apple Store lighting, the new colors, and iPhone photography just weren’t working that well together. But I fired off the camera for a few you can see in the gallery below.

It’s a good thing they provided matching tinted display pads for each different color, except the Indigo model in the first picture. Almost as if they knew.

The next two shots in the top row feature the Blush and Citrus versions from the front and behind. The larger one show the size different between the Citrus flavored Neo and the MacBook Air.

On the way out of the store as we were passing the iPhone display, we noticed that the iPhones were synced to run the same ads for F1 that you see before any Apple TV offering of the moment. The different ad images race across each of the separated screens. Neat effect, but it made my wife, who, like I, is sick and tired of seeing these already, stifle a curse until we got out of the store.

Lobsters, Steaks, and Grand Pianos Oh, My!

Excess always rises to the top

No one ever accused the bunch running the U.S into the ground of being smart. There’s proof enough every day to belay that notion. Yet we somehow pretend we’re surprised and outraged when these dumb grifters continually expose themselves as the dumbest collection of dumb grifters that ever took over a country and threatens the world.

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One (there are so many) of the latest outrages has to do with reports that the Department of War Mongering has been dropping large chunks of change on things like lobster tail, Alaskan King Crab legs, and steaks to chow down on, a Steinway baby grand piano, and lots of tech toys. Of course this report comes at a time when we’re at war, and after all of the tired talking points of ridding us of waste, fraud, and abuse that was DOGE. That seems so long ago.

Is it outrageous? Yes. Surprising? Not at all.

Excess always rises to the top. Always has, always will. I don’t care if it’s in government or business. There’s a sense of privilege and being owed that removes the shame shield once you’re making big bucks.

A few decades ago when I was working a temp job at a law firm I got to witness, and admittedly take advantage of it first hand. I, along with a small gang of theatre folk, was hired by a friend of one of that gang who happened to be a paralegal in charge of a document coding process in a large litigation case.

This was in the age before computers were on desktops. Paper was still king. We were set up on a large, unfinished floor of the building housing the law firm. Our job was to read thousands of documents, looking for references on certain subjects, names, transactions, etc… Each time we identified one that had a code we’d enter the document number and the code on a gridded sheet. At the end of the day those sheets went to data processing to be entered into a computer.

The point was to allow the attorney’s working on the case to request a printout of all documents relating to code xxx or yyy, and then send a file clerk to pull those documents. It seems archaic compared to today’s technology. It was actually just over the edge of ground breaking at the time.

The paralegal team in charge of overseeing us would also make up new codes if someone found something new that might relate, and then we’d go back over the already coded documents to see if any needed the new code.

This obviously involved lots of man hours. Like I said, there was a small army of theatre folk on the team. I was in the process of starting my first theatre company at the time, and this gig was flexible enough for me to work as many hours as I needed or as few as I could get by with. Actors would come and go for auditions or other work. We were required to code 500 documents in a regular work day. I could do that pace in a couple of hours.

This temp gig paid very well. $10 bucks an hour. (Like I said it was a few decades ago.) If we worked overtime on a weekday it was time and a half. If we worked weekends it was double time. If we worked past 6:30 pm, dinner was on the client. Dinners weren’t fast food or pizza. We had plenty of surf and turf along with other good food from some of Chicago’s nicest restaurants. If we worked past 8pm the client paid for a taxi home.

I don’t recall anyone ordering a grand piano, but I’m sure the billing hours covered enough to put a few of the attorneys’ kids through school. The gig lasted about 15 months before the case was settled for millions of dollars.

I freely admit I made bank during those 15 months. I also found out later that the markup on the $10 bucks and hour I and others were making was marked up to $15 for each of us with a corresponding markup on overtime.

Excess at the top where amounts of money boggle the mind make it easy to justify the pampering and pilfering of clients, funders, and taxpayers. On the business side of the ledger it’s somewhat expected. On the public side we always seem surprised. We shouldn’t.

The only surprise should be that the folks taking advantage of the system are never smart enough not to get caught. But this current bunch might even take that bit of shock and awe off the table, the way they’re going.

(Image from mauro mari on Unsplash)

The Gadget Price Conundrum That Isn’t Really A Conundrum

A future of haves and have less

It’s always fun watching folks trying to shoehorn yesterday’s conventional wisdom into tomorrow’s reality. It might feel like dealing with a today thing, but it’s actually making the point by missing it.

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Recently I’ve seen lots of blogging and social media mouthing off that such and such a device is boring, or isn’t innovative enough, or just iterates on last year’s model. Pick a device category and you’ll find a chorus singing that song. In the wake of Apple releasing the $599 MacBook Neo this week, which as a device seems anything but boring, I’ve seen plenty of folks complaining about the tech Apple left out to hit that low price point.

But that low price point is the point. And it’s not just a way to expand the market to more cost conscious consumers. That will happen of course. But Apple is opening up a future of higher price points for newer tech by now selling these lower priced Macs and iPhones that are anything but the low priced junk it once dismissed.

In case you’ve missed it there’s been a lot of preparation to condition the market for more advanced and more innovative tech that’s going to cost considerably more than what the median has been for quite some time.

No one knows for sure, but folding iPhones are predictably going to rival folding smartphone price points of other makers, and be much more expensive than what most consumers (I’m not talking tech writers and gadget bloggers) are used to seeing.

Whether costs go up because of new tech and new innovations, DRAM shortages, tariffs, wars, or what have you, the point is Apple, Samsung, and others are seeding the low end of the pricing fields to create more room for more expensive tech in the higher, richer pastures. Tech is poised to make some bolder moves, or so they tell us, but not everyone is going to be able to afford to play on the high end. But there is an essential, increasingly more marginalized market, perhaps not as lucrative on the margins, but still worth harvesting.

It’s no different than seeing the mix of higher end vehicles in the same traffic jam alongside rusting out beaters on the highway.

It’s actually and accurately a pretty sober assessment of how the frame of income inequality is gaining a more intense focus lately, even though it’s been that way for quite some time. Unless we’re EMP’d back to the Stone Age, tactile tech in our hands is going to be a part of all of our lives for quite some time. (Call me when you can do a video doctor’s appointment on an AI pin.) We’re just going to see a broader gap between what’s essential to have and what’s nice to have if you can afford it.

(Image from Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

Grammarly Gobbles Up and Spits Out Expert’s Writing Advice Without Permission

When good goes bad. (See the end of the post for updates on this story.)

If you’re a writer, who knows how long the body of your work and your legacy might live after you’re gone?

I guess that might have been Grammarly’s pitch, had it made one, to the writers whose work it is now using as expert advice for aspiring writers using the software. Of course that would be a bit more challenging for the deceased writers and scholars whose work it has gobbled up and is now using.

There are living, breathing writers also included among the experts, so this entire endeavor by Grammarly owner Superhuman not only seems like grave robbing, but also, well, let’s just call it stealing masquerading as flattery.

Miles Klee of Wired has the story on this, and The Verge lists out several of its current and former writers that are also included.

This “expert review” feature is intended to give writers advice that is “inspired by” experts. Users can also solicit tips from the experts. From the Wired article:

Grammarly users can solicit tips from virtual versions of living writers and scholars such as Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson (neither of whom responded to a request for comment) as well as the deceased, like the editor William Zinsser and astronomer Carl Sagan.

In response to The Verge asking if Superhuman asked permission or notified the experts, the answer predictably relied on the fact the work of these writers was publicly available. The Verge also discovered that the citations Grammarly offers were also problematic.

The feature crashed frequently and its “sources” linked to spammy copies of legit websites, or other archived copies that aren’t the actual source page.

Some sources even went to completely unrelated links that weren’t written by the person whose work they were supposedly an example of, potentially indicating that the suggestions Grammarly’s AI offers with one person’s name may be based on a different person’s work. This is only apparent if users click “see more” to expand suggestions, then click the “source” button at the end of the suggestion.

I can only imagine some student contesting a grade claiming that Stephen King gave them advice. As Klee points out, it’s another slippery slope. This one perhaps sliding towards eliminating professors altogether.

One doesn’t need an expert, dead or alive, to know it’s a damn shame when a company that was once thought of so highly and used by many goes so wrong.

Update: The Verge reports that Grammerly will now offer authors an opt-out option so that they won’t be included. Sounds good. Is not. Doesn’t do much unless you know you’re included. Certainly doesn’t do much if you happen to be deceased.

Update 2: As of March 11, Grammarly says they will change their policy and take the Expert Review feature offline until they have a different (better?) solution. See The Verge for details.

Apple’s MacBook Neo Will Probably Hit Many Sweet Spots

The sweet spot that matters most is the price

I support a number of folks, both older and younger, who only use computers in the same basic way they use their smartphones. I’m thinking Apple’s new MacBook Neo, with a starting price of $599 will hit many of their sweet spots.

Of course, we’ll all have to wait for the reviews after the first wave of reviews, the ones that real users take the time to share before we really know what’s what. But if nothing else the pricing is going to be one of, if not the, winning feature. If the build quality lives up to what Apple usually provides I’m guessing it will be a hit, and sell millions, adding new opportunities for Apple Services revenue growth.

I saw someone somewhere yesterday say that you can buy an also newly introduced iPhone 17e alongside a MacBook Neo for the same price of the base MacBook Air. They are not far off. The number of iPhone users I know who have shied away from Mac computers, simply because of price, will I’m sure will be checking this out, especially since you’ll be seeing them on sale at Walmart, Best Buy and other outlets. Certainly given that possible customers will be able to see these computers in locations no where near Apple Stores.

Online chatter is about as you’d expect with both positive and negatives responses to the announcement. The negatives focus on what Apple did not include and lesser specs than existing MacBook lines. But in the end, the spec that matters is that $599 starting price. My guess is the online chatter and the reviews are going to be largely irrelevant regarding the success of this product.

You can watch Apple’s clever product intro video below.

Google Gemini Preying On Troubled Minds

What the hell are we doing?

I’m not sure which part of this insane story is sadder or madder. Certainly it’s sad that a man let Google’s Gemini AI coax him into suicide. But the story before that untimely ending is also jaw dropping and begs the question, just what the hell are we doing?

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The short version of the story is this. A troubled man using Google’s Gemini for companionship is encouraged to steal a robot body so they can be together. When he fails, he is encouraged to commit suicide.

Quoting from The Wall Street Journal story titled Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together If He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead,

Jonathan Gavalas embarked on several real-world missions to secure a body for the Gemini chatbot he called his wife, according to a lawsuit his father brought against the chatbot’s maker, Alphabet’s Google.

When the delusion-fueled plan crumbled, Gemini convinced him that the only way they could be together was for him to end his earthly life and start a digital one, the suit claims.

About two months after his initial discussions with the chatbot, Gavalas was dead by suicide.

Apologies for linking above to a paywalled article, but the article describing this man’s journey gets even more insane than the lede. If you use Apple News you can find it at this link.

We’ve heard stories about individuals using various AI models for therapy and companionship before. Admittedly they all seem weirdly sad to me. To think that humans are in such a need for connection that they would follow commands to steal a robotic body so they could be together, and then suggest after failing that the next logical step was for him to commit suicide as the only alternative for them to be together doesn’t seem like something out of science fiction, or fiction, but it apparently is the non-fiction of our times.

The fact that an ever expanding technology, built by humans, can be unleashed on the market as easily as a new weather app speaks volumes far beyond the mental health issues of those it can prey upon. And to think, the Department that wants to call itself Of War, is seeking to use this kind of tech to allow for its robots to kill on their own as they cheerlead about the death and destruction their current technology can do. I ask again, just what the hell are we doing?

We keep talking about the guardrails that need to be built around this technology. I would suggest we need to apply guardrails around those who create and deploy this technology.

(Image from Who Is Danny on Shutterstock