Questions

Are Company Contacts as useful as I hope they are?  HT: Recommendo, which I recommend.

Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites — your preferences, your logic._—suggests the answer is yes. Or at least maybe.

When your intentions are inferred by surveillance and AI guesswork, are they really your intentions? This is the question raised for me by MasterCard, with this:  When AI starts buying for you, trust becomes the product—Mastercard introduces Verifiable Intent – a new, standards-based trust paradigm for agentic commerce, co-developed with Google. My answer is, No, it's not.

Is Sam Altman going to sink OpenAI/ChatGPT? Links:

—Casey Newton: What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out? Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?

—Gary Marcus: BREAKING: Sam Altman’s greed and dishonesty are finally catching up to him

—Keith Teare: Missing in Action: Real Leadership

Why not to "verify" your Linkedin identity

Rogi: I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over.

Verily

What's happening today is today. All day.

Also, it's absurd that Indiana is mostly in the Eastern time zone. This time of year, the sun rises at four hours before noon and sets eight hours after noon. 

And fast moving storms from southwest to northeast tend to produce tornadoes.

There's a long arc of thunderweather moving lengthwise to the northeast from Texas and across Chicago right now. ORD is all delays. Good view of the action on Windy. Good view of the delays on FlightAware's MiseryMap.

Apparently, yes

Ted Gioia: Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of Famous Jazz Musicians?

Also, AI Actress Tilly Norwood Drops a Video—and It's Cringe on Steroids "At least Skynet was honest about trying to erase humanity…"

Bzzz

Marginal Revolution: A Fly Has Been Uploaded. It begins, "n 2024, the entire neuronal diagram of the fruit-fly brain–some 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections–was mapped. Later research showed that the map could be used to predict behavior. Now, Eon Systems a firm with some of the scientists involved in the fruit-fly research and with the goal of uploading a human brain has announced that they uploaded the fruit fly brain to a digital environment. The digital fly appears to behave in the digital environment in reasonably fly like ways–this is not a simulation, the fly’s “sensors” are being activated by the digital environment and the neurons are responding.

1

You’re welcome

I don’t hate April Fools Day. I’m just too busy to participate. So this is a fooling-free blog post.

Much to munch on

Getting great hang time with Jon Udell (who also manifests here) lately. Here are two of his recent publishings ya’ll might dig:
• Introducing XMLUI
• Beyond The Dip

Is there also a Gander?

Just discovered Goose.

Also, while we’re not at it, A2UI.

Bad try

This appears to be an interesting story, and available to free (as well as to paying) subscribers, but the shakedown is so hard and blunt that I moved on.

Good song title

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling.

Another example of how BigAIs have become the Great Typicalizers of Everything

Florian Roth is tired of reading AI-written posts. His main take: “They all sound like the same guy.”

I fear that guy is, at least in part, me. The sentence fragments, the short paragraphs, the em dashes. (These: —.) As source material, my writing is thick on the Web’s ground, going back to the early ’90s. Example.

I’ll cop to one of his tells: absurd certainty. Some of mine turned out to be the opposite of absurd. Examples: personal computing, outlining, the Net, the Web, Linux, open source, Cluetrain, blogging, smartphones. And some not (at least so far, or not yet in a big way): home Web servers (or “personal clouds”), desktop Linux, VRM, EmanciPay, the intention economy, MyTerms, personal AI, news commons, market intelligence that flows both ways…

Anyway, AI-style writing is now like Received Pronunciation in the UK: the way things are done.

Something I didn’t know

Ben Collier in the MIT Press Reader: The Secret History of Tor: How a Military Project Became a Lifeline for Privacy

Not  looking good

Thomas P.M. Barnett on the current war:

History doesn’t grade on effort. It grades on outcomes. And right now the outcomes are running about 3-to-1 against anything resembling the vision that justified the operation in the first place.
As usual, the postwar is everything.

Free at last

NiemanLab: The Salt Lake Tribune will drop its paywall.

Might do the same for you

In The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis, the latest episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra compresses by Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, into 55 minutes of pure inspiration. Not just because Demis is a hugely inspired and driven dude, but because a pile of ideas came to me while I was listening.

Big fact

YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly users.

Here's almost looking at you

Imagine scattered bits of coffee grounds, floating in space in front of your face, a few inches to a few feet away. Among them, blurred filaments float around, like zero-gravity worms. These are bits of debris inside my left eyeball, not far from my retina, exfoliated, I am told, by my cornea, which is slowly healing from the effects of cataract surgery that required a somewhat aggressive emulsification of the lens before a new replacement lens was installed.

An interesting thing: if I don't move my eyes, the debris slowly vanishes, erased by my brain as if by Photoshop's healing brush. Then they reappear when I move my eyes. Strange shit.

Observations

Explore these observatories. Read what they are about and how they are produced. One more way (within which are many more ways) that the world will never be the same. Bonus link in the same vein. Big HT to Jim Cowie of the Berkman Klein Center, the Internet History Initiative, and much else.

Unanswered

I still have questions about two Dorothy Parker quotes.

I was invited by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, to contribute my thoughts to their latest study, titled Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures, which just came out. Here is the full report, which runs 376 pages. I am generously sourced on pages 11, 16, 142, and 358. There is a lot of great stuff in the report, which I highly recommend. For what it’s worth, here is the full text of what I sent them.

We are digital beings in a digital world. That’s the main thing. And this world is still very new.

We’ve operated in the natural world for as long as we’ve been a species, and we are experts at it. But the digital world is not only new, but sure to be with us for many years, decades, centuries, and millennia to come. And we still lack countless graces we take for granted in the natural world, such as privacy and independence from algorithmic manipulation.

Making full sense of this new world is very hard because we understand everything metaphorically, and natural world metaphors mask what’s really going on in the digital world. So, while we speak of “domains” with “locations” that we “build” and “own” (though we only rent them), and speak of “loading” and “transferring” “packets” of data in “up” and “down,” data are actually collections of ones and zeroes that are by design immaterial non-things that are instantaneously both here and elsewhere, even though “where” only makes full sense in the natural world. How will all this change and make whole new kinds of sense after a few more decades of digital existence?

Progress is the process by which the miraculous becomes mundane. In the digital world, that transition is now happening almost instantly, and in many domains, because AI is endlessly useful.

Big AI does its best to ingest the totality of human expression in all digital forms, and then to make any and all of it available in the most useful ways it can. At the moment (for me, Noon in The Bahamas on February 2nd, 2026), it does this by bringing hunks of that expression back to us, on demand, in constructive conversational forms. Big AI is the world’s largest Magic 8 Ball, within which floats a polyhedron of answers with trillions of facets, each ready to help.

As with all tech, Big AI has its downsides. (Just ask Gregory Hinton or Gary Marcus.) But its usefulness verges on absolute, so we can’t stop using it, no matter how abyssal some credible prophesies may be.

But there is one saving upside. It’s the same one that saved us from HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s our humanity and independence. Specifically, in the form of personal AI.

We need personal AI for the same reason we need personal homes, shoes, and computers. We need it to know our natural and digital selves as fully as possible, and to participate with full agency in society, its economies, and its governance.

Think about all the data in our personal lives that is not in our full control, and could use some AI help: our schedules, our past and future work, our property, our finances, our obligations, our writing and correspondence, our photographs, our sound recordings, our videos, our travels, our countless engagements with other persons online and off, our many machines, you name it.

Truly personal AI—the kind you own and operate, rather than the kind that is just another suction cup on a corporate tentacle—is as hard to imagine in 2026 as personal computing was in 1976. But it is no less necessary and inevitable. When we have it, many of the questions that challenge us will have new and better answers. And new challenges.

Every form of life, from the microbial to the human, is fraught with challenges. Personal AI is necessary for us to meet and surmount our challenges in the digital world, and to answer all the questions posed to us in this very research exercise.

Amara’s Law says we overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long. I’ve been doing both all my life, and in all my answers to good questions asked by Pew over the years.

Perhaps the most glaring example of short-term overestimation was my response to a request by The Wall Street Journal in 2012 to compress my new book, The Intention Economy, to a single cover piece for the paper’s Marketplace section. My editor at the Journal suggested writing about how the intention economy would look ten years in the future, which is three years ago as I write this. The piece I wrote was titled (by the WSJ) “The Customer as a God.” In retrospect, I was wrong. The economy I described still hasn’t happened. We are not gods in the marketplace. But there are encouraging signs, and I’m still sure my prophecy will prove out. Meanwhile, the first half of Amara’s Law applies.

I’ve been young for so long that I now have the life expectancy of a puppy. So I don’t expect to see personal AI or the intention economy prove out in my lifetime. But I am sure both are worth working toward, so that’s what I do. And I advise anyone wishing to make the world better to look for their best work to manifest somewhere beyond their own life’s horizons.