technology – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

“Scars speak more loudly than the sword that caused them.” – Paulo Coelho

It figures. You plan a weekend of yard work and Mother Nature reminds you she controls more than you do. In these parts that makes this a perfect chilly Sunday for a little Sunday Morning Reading. I’m not sure how, but a theme emerges in the collection of links I’m sharing this weekend, somehow suggesting that regardless of our feelings, the forces that seem to be conspiring against us just keep rolling. At some point, just like with the shifts in the weather, you just want some unshifting force to make it all stop.

Here in Chicago we’re seeing a number of theatre spaces closing. (We’re also seeing a few open.) On the national stage, we’re watching with dismay, anger, and sadness as The Kennedy Center is being shut down by cultural barbarians. Josef Palermo had an inside seat to that dismantling and tells the story in My Front-Row Seat To The Kennedy Center Implosion.

And while Madison Square Garden is more a venue for pure entertainment than the arts, the story about how its owner is using surveillance on its patrons and employees that upset the powers that be is a harbinger of things to come in all arenas of our lives. Check out The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine by Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman.

Having experimented a bit with Artificial Intelligence in seeking information about a statue this weekend, my ongoing suspicions that this “way of the future” isn’t ready for today, much less tomorrow. The technology might be not ready for prime time, but the hype has never been. Kyle Chayka says A.I. Has A Message Problem Of It’s Own Making. I like this quote in the subhead, “If you tell people that your product will upend their way of life, take their jobs, and possibly threaten humanity, they might believe you.” True enough. And if those things are as incompetent as humans, what’s the damn point?

It’s all math. That’s one way to sum up any computing activity. Unless it comes to emotion. And yet, some think feelings are somewhere in the numbers. Mike Elgan writes, No, Math Doesn’t Have Feelings in response to those who must not have any feelings of their own, but are trying to add that into the AI equation.

Gaby Del Valle, says The Only Way To Fight Deepfakes Is By Making Deepfakes. Sounds like an arms race to me. We should be up in arms about it.

Speaking of arms races, Gideon Lewis-Kraus looks at AI in the war that isn’t a war, that’s over every week, but begins again every weekend once the markets close in How Project Maven Put AI Into The Kill Chain.

Apologies for so much AI linkage this week, but it’s been on my mind lately, especially since the news of Mythos broke. It’s the latest demon to fly out of Pandora’s box, and I’m afraid it’s not the last. Margie Murphy, Jake Bleiberg, and Patrick Howell O’Neill examine How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous For The Wild.

CNN has a report by Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, Eleanor Stubbs, and Marco Chacon called Exposing A Global Rape Academy. It’s a hard, but I think necessary read considering the topic is just how horrible humans can be to one another. Maybe we should hope the robots develop feelings. Too many humans seem to have stopped developing theirs.

Gail Beckerman says If You Want A Better World, Act Like You Live In It. I concur.

And to close out this week, Scars is a short story by Sigrid Nunez. Some scars can’t be seen. The ones we’re watching form daily, can be.

(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.

Thoughts On The MacBook Neo

A palpable hit

The MacBook Neo is a nice piece of kit. If you’re in the market the price is right, the build is very good, and in my first impressions the laptop is a delight. Any of the complaints and concerns you’ve probably read or heard from those who own more kitted out Macs can be easily dismissed. At the moment. I’d venture to say that for the vast majority of everyday computer users the MacBook Neo will be a nice fit.

One of the folks I support reached out and said they wanted to obtain one, so I picked one up and did the drudge work of installing the OS update and some of the initial setup last week. We later spent some time together getting it set up the way they like. Moving from an M1 MacBook Air bought in 2022, they opted for a Citrus colored 512GB model with TouchID. The good news is there’s no real learning curve for this client when it comes to features and using the device. There is no bad news.

When I say “in the market,” my client is what I consider one of the perfect customers for the MacBook Neo. A retired senior that began using a computer later in life, later jumping on the iPhone train with the iPhone 5.

They do most of their computing on an iPhone and use a laptop for email, messaging, shopping, FaceTime, and some occasional writing. Occasionally they use Photos on a MacBook Air to manage photos, but still do most of that on an iPhone.

Of the fancy new features Apple has released over the last few years the only one they really rely on is seeing notifications from their iPhone on their laptop screen when they are using the laptop. There’s a currently a problem with that, which I’ll address later.

Given their computing needs and desires, they could probably get by without a laptop, but due to decreased finger flexibility, they feel more comfortable using a laptop for apps like Messages and Apple Mail when they are home. The only thing they connect to a port is power.

Hardware

As to the device itself, it feels great and a bit whimsical. As a MacBook Air user (13-inch, M4) I have to say that I’d love to see the guts of the Air in this form factor. They weigh the same, and the Neo is slightly smaller, but it feels tinier and more totable. You give up a bit of screen real estate with the slightly smaller display, but there is no notch. Apple may have cut features now considered defaults on the MacBook Air, but it didn’t skimp on the look and feel quality. In my opinion that and the price point are what sells the device.

We’ve long since reached a point where computing devices, whether in traditional form, or smartphones and tablets, all come with so many features that even power users don’t need or use some of what’s possible. Innovation has always curved towards adding more possibilities, as it should. In my opinion, it’s a good thing to flatten the curve a bit, offering products that don’t need all the bells and whistles.

Color

Apple is taking larger steps towards bolder color choices these days, and the Citrus color scheme for the Neo certainly is another big stride into that orchard. I personally wasn’t that attracted to it when it was unveiled, but after having the Neo around for a bit, I have to say that it not only adds to the novelty, but makes the tool feel a bit more fun. At night under a desk lamp the damn thing gives off an almost otherworldly glow.

One of Apple’s trends of the last few years is to match up UI color schemes and themes with the color chosen for the hardware. Highlights, buttons, and some text reflect and complement the color of the shell. The tinted keyboard of the Neo takes that a further step forward on the fun factor scale. That said, the citrus Neo’s color scheme, bold as it is, often leaves some text harder to read, certainly for older eyes.

We settled on choosing the dark version of the Citrus wallpaper for my client to solve this.

Another example of hard to read text with this theme.

The A18 Pro Chip

Apple raised eyebrows announcing and releasing this new laptop powered by an iPhone chip. An older and binned A18 Pro chip. In my limited time with the Neo I haven’t noticed anything but good performance.

I’ve heard and read others state that the setup process was slower than they have experienced on M-series Apple laptops. That wasn’t my experience. Things moved along readily enough If you count the number of times you have to accept and click on permission popups as something that’s desirable in an out-of-the-box experience. But that’s unfortunately true of any of Apple’s computers.

Again, I’m experiencing this only through setting up and doing a few tutorials for my client, but the performance I’m seeing feels more than adequate to met their needs.

One thing I did notice throughout my hands on time is that the Neo takes longer to connect to a WiFi network than either my MacBook Air or iMac (both M4 devices.) In fact, it feels very much like how long an iPhone sometimes does connecting to WiFi when rebooting. That makes sense on a smartphone when a device immediately connects to a cell signal, but in an age when everything is expecting an Internet connection one way or another, (on setting up a new device one of the first things required is to establish a WiFi connection) it seems like there should be a way to not start reaching out on a previously set up, non-cellular device until after a connection is made.

Battery Life

Setting up any new computer or smartphone puts a load on battery life. That continues during the first day or so after initial setup as things sync up. After performing the first OS update I didn’t use the Neo much until after my client was with me, but even after continuing setup and tweaking a few things there was 68% battery life left. Time will tell how that goes, but given my client’s usage I don’t anticipate them having battery life issues.

Memory Management

Much was also made about the one size fits all 8GB memory cap, regardless of the storage model one chooses. My client doesn’t run a heavy load of applications or keep many tabs open, so I’m not the best judge of how good the swapping out of memory to the SSD works. Apple’s Unified Memory Architecture seems to be working as designed in my limited view. I do wonder how well it does with devices that only have a 256GB SSD if they contain a lot of data.

Screen Size

I prefer the More Space option on displays I use. My client prefers the default view. Even with More Space selected, the Neo feels very much like a one app at a time computer to me, which generally lines up with my client’s needs. I always set up a Hot Corner Shortcut with Mission Control to make window navigation easier, and that feels more necessary on the Neo in the default display mode.

Apple has a feature that allows you to click the wallpaper and move all open apps off of the screen. You can choose to do this all of the time, or only in Stage Manager. I don’t recommend Stage Manager to my clients, and I typically recommend turning off the click wallpaper to show desktop feature. In this case my client likes this fly away feature, and sees it as a bit of whimsy. Even though they prefer to keep the Dock and Menu Bar always visible. So we’ll leave it on.

Trackpad

The Neo has a different trackpad than other current MacBooks. From what I’d read previously I expected to feel more of a difference between it and the trackpad on the MacBook Air. There’s a difference certainly, but it doesn’t feel like that big of one to me. I moved back and forth between the two devices without even really thinking about it.

Notifications from iPhone

I mentioned an issue earlier with iPhone notifications flowing through to the MacBook Neo. This is a feature I use myself. It’s set up through iPhone Mirroring, which you have to open at least once in order to set up.

One of the nifty things about this feature is that you’re allowed to pick and choose which notifications flow through and those you block either on your iPhone, or on your Mac. If you choose to use this feature and set it up, you’ll see an option in your Mac’s settings to allow these notifications.

CleanShot 2026-04-15 at 16.49.

If you click on Allow Notifications from iPhone, you’ll be taken to another screen. Below the three Allow options here, you’ll see a list of any notifications you’re allowing to flow through or not from your iPhone, and whether you’ve turned them off on your iPhone, or they are coming through from an app installed on your Mac. As a reference, the screenshot below is from my iMac.

CleanShot 2026-04-15 at 16.48.

On my client’s Neo, no apps appeared initially. The section above that begins with Acme Weather is blank on their Neo. There shouldn’t have been many. Regardless none were there. We called Apple Support and opened a ticket. Luckily on the first call we got a senior advisor who understood the issue. After doing some checking the situation turned into something Apple is really interested in tracking down. These are a new line of devices after all. So we were off into the land of running sysdiagnoses. We’re expecting a call back on Friday with any discoveries or solutions Apple may have come up with. Fortunately we have time still left in the return window.

At the Moment

In the opening paragraph of this post I also used the phrase “At the moment.” Two thoughts there.

First, as I’ve described my client, they are not a heavy laptop user. Those who might be looking into the MacBook Neo who are, might have a different experience in both the short or long term. I’ve never yet met a computer that doesn’t slow down over time. I doubt the MacBook Neo will be any different. The difference in any performance degradation between the Neo and other Mac laptops is yet to be seen. My hunch is this first MacBook Neo will still be a winner for at least a few years, certainly if you’re a not a heavy user.

Second, the rumors are that the Neo is such a success that Apple might be running out of the binned A18Pro chips it’s using to power the MacBook Neo. Speculation on what happens if that’s true is rampant, and who really knows. Current demand has already caused a delay in shipping times, and I know that secondary retailers Walmart, Target, and Best Buy have plenty of signs, but very limited or no stock. My hunch here is that Apple will be selling MacBook Neos for quite some time, even though it might take you a while to get your hands on one.

Summing Up

To conclude, let me say that I’ve thought since Apple’s announcement of the MacBook Neo that it would prove to be a hit and a palpable one to the laptop market in general. In my brief experience setting up this one for my client and seeing their delight at the form factor, coupled with the high demand, I’ll more than double down on that thinking.

Personally, as I anticipate my computing needs becoming less in the more quickly than I’d like years to come, I could easily see myself relying on a MacBook Neo in the future.

Apple and Google Still Generating Profits from Grok’s Sexualized Image Generation

It’s my rule. I’ll break it if I want.

Rules are made to be broken is the cliché. That’s a theme that’s running louder and wilder through much of life these days. Build complicated and successful things. Create rules to protect what you’ve built. Mass enough power and then bend or ignore the rules when they become inconvenient.

That theme surfaces frequently enough that it’s almost a meme. In politics it happens every day, enough to make a mocking myth of things like the rule of law and the constitution. We see it in religion. We see it in business, too frequently in the business of tech. When you’re big enough that you have to, and can create rules to protect what you’ve built against others, and yourself, you substitute the convenience of adhering to the rules for the inconvenience of principle.

Back in January, (damn that seems so long ago), Elon Musk’s Grok released an AI image editing feature that allowed users to create nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes. It was ugly and disgusting.

As with all new things tech, it caught on like wildfire, and then X took fire from many quarters including some governments. (Not ours — caterwauling congress critters no longer count.) Apple and Google also took hits for continuing to allow the app on their respective App stores in violation of existing rules. There were calls for both Apple and Google to follow those rules and take the app down. Something both companies have done for other rule violating apps with and without public punity.

That didn’t happen.

Yesterday, a report from NBC revealed that Apple, in a letter to U.S. Senators, claimed that it worked behind the scenes of the public uproar to demand that the developers “create a plan to improve content moderation.” According to The Verge,

Throughout this covert back-and-forth, Grok and X appear to have remained live on the App Store, a drawn-out process that may help explain the confusing, haphazard rollout of moderation changes announced in real time. This included limiting Grok on X to paying subscribers and attempting to stop Grok from undressing women. Our investigations revealed that neither were particularly effective beyond making the tool a bit harder to access. Later interventions, like X letting users block Grok from editing their photos, are also easily circumvented.

Despite Apple’s approval and xAI’s claims it has tightened safeguards, Grok still appears to be able to generate sexualized deepfakes with relative ease.

So, essentially nothing of any real effect happened. Scratch that. Something did. X and Grok put the feature behind a paying subscription. One that Apple also reaped profits from and still does. As does Google.

The one rule this era has taught us is that if you’re big and rich enough, and can weather the storm of public scorn, you can essentially ignore the rules. Even those you’ve written yourself. With impunity.

U.S. Treasury Wants Access To Mythos

What could possibly go wrong?

The kicker above says it all. According to Bloomberg, the CIO of the U.S. Treasury, Sam Corcos, is hoping to get his hands on Anthropics’s apparently super dangerous AI software, Mythos. The idea is to use Mythos to check and prepare for vulnerabilities. In any normal world that would make sense. We don’t live in that normal world.

Claude mythos.

Set aside that Anthropic and the U.S. Government are feuding over the government designating Anthropic a security threat and supply chain threat. The fact that Mythos can seek out and find vulnerabilities in software that humans apparently can’t, and has done so already for most operating systems and browsers currently in existence, is concerning in and off itself. Add to that what I’m reasonably sure is exploitable software the government is running, and this smells like a recipe for potential chaos.

Anthropic did not want to release Mythos to the public, given its potential for harm in the wrong hands and formed Project Glasswing, inviting a number of tech companies and JP Morgan Chase into the fold so they could check out their systems. Other banks have since also begun testing.

I don’t want to sound all doomy and gloomy, but however this story unfolds, it does appear there is enough there there to be skeptical and concerned. Even before the ongoing daily chaos and incompetence displayed by the second Trump administration, the U.S. government has a much deserved reputation for being slow on the uptake in the digital age. I know several folks working in various government agencies, any of whom could tell you horror stories.

The fear obviously is what happens if Mythos gets into the wrong hands. I don’t know about you, but I think we certainly have enough of those running Washington DC currently. Bottom line, this bears watching and any number of fronts.

Sunday Morning Reading

Optimism comes every Spring, but Winter always nips at the edges

Temperatures are warming. Every day brings more daylight, more blooms in the gardens and trees Yet on the edges of two of my interests, politics and tech, things continue to darken a bit. The common denominator between the two? Humans. But then again, humans are the ones who read this Sunday Morning Reading column. As well as the bots that scrape it of course.

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Some of the big news in tech this week was about a new AI product from Anthropic called Mythos. So fraught with potential peril that Anthropic gathered together the major tech heads to form a consortium to keep lid on it. Monica Verma has a good run down with her piece Did Claude Mythos Break The Cybersecurity Industry.

M.G. Siegler’s The Causal Catastrophe of AI takes a look at maneuvering around Mythos as well. Call me crazy, but I don’t think there’s anything casual about this development.

The reason I’m a pessimist on this is that I agree with a comment from JA Westenberg, “Being wrong about doom costs you nothing.” Check out Optimism Is Not A Personality Flaw. The piece walks a line. You should read it and walk it too.

Mike Elgan takes a look at Black Traffic: The Corporate Sabotage Technique You’ve Never Heard Of. Now you have.

Ng Chong examines The Echo Chamber In Your Pocket. Follow that up with this from Julie Jargon: Over 4,732 Messages, He Fell In Love With An AI Chatbot. Now He’s Dead.(That’s an Apple News lnk. This is an archived link.)

David Todd McCarty thinks one path to reclaiming power over information might be in The Return Of The Local Newspaper.You don’t know what you had until it’s gone.

This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling For Good. The “this,” according to Lief Weatherby, is something called silicon sampling. Yes, you guessed it. AI.

Coming back around to my comment at the top about not having faith in humans, OpenAI’s Sam Altman got his turn in the barrel (again) this week. Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spent quite a bit of time putting this piece together. Check out Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted? FWIW, I don’t need much more time than it takes to put this column together every week to answer their question in the negative. And not just about Altman.

Mean while Altman responded on his blog, after someone tossed a Molotov cocktail at his house. He says “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” For someone who has scraped all the words he can off of the Internet and tried to turn them into something smarter than humans, you’d think his machines could have at least figured out that words have power.

Natasha MH sums up a lot of my lack of faith in humans in her piece, Stop Blaming The Chatbot. As she puts it, “AI didn’t make you stupid. You were already getting there.”

Sorry to be so negative this week, but that’s where I’m living., But to change the tone, Neil Steinberg turns around the Latin term, memto mori, (remember to die) around to memento vivere, or remember to live. A nice little bit of humanity to close out this week with Little LIfe.

(Photo from the author)

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.

Taking Flight On A Glasswing

With the fragility of egos as a pilot

Every time I hear the warnings about the current or next big thing in Artificial Intelligence, I’m reminded of the Surgeon General’s warnings that are printed on packs of cigarettes. I’m also reminded of every new fad I’ve seen in my lifetime, that might have inched over into a trend, but eventually ended up waiting for its turn on the nostalgia wheel of time.

Claude mythos.

As the world was holding its breath from the civilization destroying threats that sprung forth from the mind of the U.S. President, and then exhaling as they turned into the latest episode of “Bluff, Bluster, and Bullshit,” we were learning about a new AI leap and threat from Anthropic, potentially as dire, called Claude Mythos Preview. To get ahead of any damage this coming attraction might visit upon us Anthropic created Project Glasswing. Given that the raving lunatic in the White House came to power a second time with a civilization destroying manual in hand called Project 2025, I’m more than a bit leery of anything with a title that leads with the word “Project.”

From what I’ve read, Mythos is the latest innovation in Anthropic’s flavor of Artificial Intelligence. It is so powerful that it has sought out and found vulnerabilities in so much of the software the world runs on, that Anthropic is only releasing it to a hand full of companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Broadcom, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, NVIDIA, and more.) That’s Project Glasswing. Tech overlords uniting to protect us from their sloppy software. (The lawyers will have a field day.)

Anthropic, having been declared by the U.S. as an unacceptable national security threat and supply chain risk, nevertheless is also working with the same U.S. Government looking ahead to the threats. Somehow security and existential threats always seem to become negotiating partners with their foes when money is at stake. Also occasionally when global annihilation is knocking on the door.

The way I interpret the idea behind Project Glasswing is that these companies, and presumably governments, might use Mythos to seek out all of the vulnerabilities, and perhaps obliterate them (I use that term in the Trumpian and Hegsethian sense) before they can filter down into things like power grids, banking systems, and consumer use. It can supposedly do this at a scale humans can’t. Note that Mythos discovered problems in every operating system and, on a level both big and small, the constantly updating browsers we use on our computers.

During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect.

I think of it this way. Announcing the existence of Mythos is akin to living the moments of terror those responsible for our safety have in House of Dynamite, once they realize the gig is up, misses are inbound, and the interceptors have failed. I’d call it an “Oh, shit” moment.

If you ask me Mythos is also exposing more than a few myths as well as vulnerabilities. The sound you hear is PR slide decks about security enhancements in the latest releases of current software being furiously redone.

As M.G. Siegler puts it,

Historically, many vulnerabilities have been fixed only after someone exploited them in some way. Again, that’s because the incentives are in favor of the attacker versus the defender. If and when Mythos-caliber tools are put in the hands of hackers… yeah.

That’s obviously exactly why Anthropic isn’t releasing Mythos to the public and also why they’ve set up Glasswing. While the company may be first to such capabilities, they won’t be the last. They probably don’t even have long to try to get ahead of the situation. While I generally dislike the nuclear weapons analogy for AI, I must admit, this all does feel a bit Manhattan Project-y. The good guys are racing against the clock to implement a new technology before the bad guys catch up. But they will. They always do.

Yeah, that sounds problematic.

Paul Krugman took a break from agonizing and writing about the situation in the Middle East and weighed in with this,

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.

So, there’s plenty of doom floating around, along with the now clichéd approach to all things AI, that there’s good tech behind all of the bad things that the tech can do. Note that the profits from tobacco helped found the U.S. and twisted science and politics into knots trying not to end up on the ash heap.

I’ve largely stayed away from playing with any of these AI tools and toys, but I follow the news of the advances on all fronts, and those who do play around with it. Like it or not, those who run the world have decided this is our future.

I’ll be honest. Hallucinations aside, I don’t know enough rather or not to trust the software. I have my doubts and I do have fears about the tech. Project Glasswing might be a noble effort. Yet, with a clear mind, I do know enough not to trust any of the humans running the show. Frankly, it feels like they don’t know enough to trust the software either, much less to protect their and our systems from being destroyed by some kid in a basement.

As Natasha MH puts it, not writing about Mythos specifically, but about Artificial Intelligence in general, AI didn’t make you stupid. You were already getting there.

Pinning Tails On AI Donkeys

Does authenticity matter?

Shortly after OpenAI fired the starting pistol for the AI race by releasing ChatGPT, I started saying that at some point the real money was going to be made by whatever company wins the horserace for identifying work created, regurgitated, or recycled by AI. Turns out I may have been wrong. In the face of what can be called abject surrender to an AI filled future, the sprint is now on to determine who has the best tool to identify what was created by humans. My money says everyone involved is running the Mongol Derby.

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Two very interesting recent articles caught my eye. The first is by Jess Weatherbed on The Verge. Riffing off a quote from Instagram’s Adam Mosseri that it will be “more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media,” the article delves into some of the companies working to authenticate human-made work and the challenges they are facing.

The second article is by JA Westenberg, called The AI Writing Witchhunt Is Pointless. Westenberg examines the unreliability of current AI detection tools, and the very reliable human instinct to jump on Internet band wagons loaded with pitchforks and torches at the ready, if they get any sniff of AI in any content.

Both pieces are worth your time.

As someone who has adapted Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers for the stage in both a musical and a dramatic version, in English and for Russian audiences, I really appreciate Westenberg using Dumas and his almost factory-like ways of cranking out his content and how that would most likely be received in today’s Internet world.

I also very much appreciate Westenberg’s conclusion, essentially saying that there’s no way we to tell how this all turns out. It’s too early in the race. I’m a bit more hard-nosed about accepting Weatherbed’s optimism that “maybe we can return to the days of trusting what we see with our eyes.” We’ve never been all that good at doing that.

At this moment, among admittedly many more moments to come in this saga, all of the major AI services come with the same kind of PAY ATTENTION warnings on some of their features, yet not so much when it comes to content. There’s really no incentive to do so. Mosseri’s Instagram makes money regardless of who or what creates whatever Reel you scroll by.

Outside of consumable and ad serving content, AI purveyors urge users to check sources because the output before them may be inaccurate in a search result, a math problem, or a medical diagnosis. Notice that the CEO of America’s largest public hospital system is ready to start replacing radiologists with AI. Every time I hear that AI will remove us from donkey-like drudge work, I hear AI will remove salaries, yet I somehow doubt the billing will change much.

We’ve never been good at heeding these types of warnings whether they come from Surgeon Generals, Terms of Service, or from our parents. We’re certainly not that adept at being able to separate fact from fiction, regardless of how it’s created.

It strikes me as a deeply ironic, and somewhat nihilistic question, that if Artificial Intelligence was as good as promised or continues as problematic as it is in its current form in any of its facets, would we even care? Yet, if it is good enough to plant seeds of doubt as to how a piece of content comes to be, does it even matter? Reminds me of the discussion between Oppenheimer and Einstein, teased early and then revealed at the end of the Oppenheimer.

I understand why human creators are concerned, but I’m afraid those concerns are being handicapped away from the pole position. We’ve allowed our economies, both large and small, to be staked on the outcome of the race. On the other hand, if AI is so great, why the hell are AI advocates, running such a breathless and competitive race, so afraid of having anything it produces labeled as created by AI?

(Image from Erwan Hesry on Unsplash.

Looks Like Thaw Will Be A Good Menu Bar Manager Solution For Mac OS 26

Melting the Ice

I use a lot of Menu Bar apps on my Macs. It looks like I may have found a new solution to managing those apps.

I had previously used Bartender to manage those, especially on the MacBook Air with a notch. But since the release of macOS 26, Bartender had run into some difficulties. I gave macOS 26’s new way of handling Menu Bar items a try, and that just didn’t work for me. I experimented with a few other Menu Bar managers and for a while settled on Ice.

Like Bartender, Ice also had its issues, and its developer has since halted updates. Turns out there’s an app that melts those issues away. It’s called Thaw.

Thaw, created by stonerl, is an open source fork of Ice, so much of what it offers is familiar and you can import your Ice settings. This article by Jannis explains why Ice, and I presume Bartender, ran into difficulties managing Menu Bar items.

So far things are working as expected. The idea is to hide Menu Bar icons that I don’t access frequently, yet make them available with a quick cursor flick to the Menu Bar.

As a side note on this, with the debut of macOS 26, it appeared Apple made was beginning to shift users away from using Menu Bar apps, favoring the Control Panel instead. I could easily get on board with that shift, but very few apps I use actually make Control Panel access available without creating a Shortcut to launch the app. That seems like a waste of time, but perhaps more apps will make accessing them through the Control Panel possible when we move to macOS 27.

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.

Shutterstock 1766228261.

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

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)