You ever dread writing a sentence because you know its going to ruffle some feathers? I've been debating on exactly how to approach this for a while now, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I'm not a Quentin Tarantino fan. Sure, I liked his first few movies, but I feel like he peaked at Reservoir Dogs and honestly its a struggle for me to get through anything after Jackie Brown. I won't go into all the details, because I'm not looking to tear down anyone who is a fan, but his films just aren't for me.
Not only do I not love his movies, but his opinions rub me wrong often. He's a loud-mouth, and always has been and that's part of his image. But sometimes he says stuff and I just sit back and think, "Who are you?" Then five minutes later he'll say something else and I feel like we share a brain. This particular post is about one of those moments where we think alike.
Recently, Quentin wrote an essay in Sight and Sound where he discussed current films. The quote that stood out to me was:
I loved going to the movies. These days, however, the concept of what is a movie is more inclined to inspire contempt in me than generosity.
I feel this to my core. Sheesh, maybe I should give Quentin a break. I couldn't have worded my feelings about most current films any better. I see a trailer, or watch a film, and I often walk away uninterested and unfulfilled.
But what really sold his opinion was this quote:
.... but nothing that really held me in its grip and swept me away to the magical land of enjoyment that I used to visit regularly and was the reason I loved movies above all other artforms.
These days I’d rather read a book.
Fuck... like seriously. He's not wrong. As my passion for movies has been reduced, I find myself enjoying a good book more than ever. Which led me to question, why do I get so bent out of shape on the weekends about trying to find something to watch when I have plenty of books? Why do I only read before bedtime or on my lunch break?
And so, this weekend, I stopped the struggle. I decided to finally check out the first book in the Murderbot series. Then I read through I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, while also reading The Equalizer by Michael Sloan. And ya know... I had a blast. I didn't worry about finding something better to watch, I didn't get pissed off at some four quadrant storytelling or shitty CGI. I just allowed a world to materialize in my head and life was good. It really made me think that maybe what I need right now is just a break from the television in all non-interactive forms. Maybe it's time to make a dent in these books and learn to love the art of storytelling once again.
Please forgive me. I am once again writing about taste.
I might spin up a category to collect the thread, that’s been unfolding, here, over the years.
Table of contents
Taste As Interface Behaviour
The Guardian had a great piece over the weekend by pop culture writer Rachel Aroesti called Have I been influenced, or is this actually me? How personal taste fell out of fashion. It’s about taste. Good taste and bad, and the author’s suspicion that due to the state of social media, we might not have any taste at all any more. What we might think of as our personal preference, is in fact just psychic residue left over from having been shown the same thing 100 times a day by a machine. It’s really good! go read it it.
Six years ago in Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste I was thinking the ‘demonstration’ of taste online. In that game, taste is demonstrated by arranging virtual objects in a toy box world. You perform taste by making a place. Later I argued in Good Taste Online that each platform had its own physics and affordances, and therefore its own way of making taste visible: Twitter has retweets and likes and replies. Pinterest has boards. Tumblr has juxtaposition. Minecraft configurable virtual environments.
But after reading Aroesti’s piece, I would put it more strongly.
Taste is an interface behaviour
Millennials and older might like to romanticise pre-internet media discovery and wax lyrical about the noble struggle of crate-digging, mixtape making, and hanging around in bookshops… I know I do! But none of these nostalgia bait memories are pure encounters with culture. Just like the code-spaces we encounter today, bookshops, libraries, the radio all had interfaces too.
Aroesti writes:
This is no longer the case. We increasingly encounter most aspects of the world through a single aperture: streaming and social media platforms. Or, more specifically, the algorithmic feeds of streaming and social media platforms, plus algorithmically optimised search engines and e-commerce sites, from Amazon to Vinted. In many cases, these are programmed to show each individual specific content based on data gathered from their own activities and those of other users – content that will ideally keep them on the platform for as long as possible.
This is exactly right, though I think “aperture” is too passive. A window is something you look through, the feed is something that watches you doing the looking. It’s an apparatus that observes you observing, then changes its own behaviour based on that observation, which in turn shapes the future view you see though the window.
But, the record shop as taste interface was kinda optimised in the same way too. Genre bins ar ea kind of taxonomy. Staff picks are the recommendation engine. The counter both a record and comic book shop is a social checkpoint, and for better or worse, a site of community moderation. If hardcore punk or UK Jungle was getting popularity with customers, the shop would respond by stocking more of that genre. There is how a big difference between a record shop and the feed.
Latency. A lot of what I think of as taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement. I belive things need to ‘settle in‘ to culture. The immediacy of the feed collapses the delay. The feed responds to you, instantly, and the world it builds next is shaped by the gesture you just made. The shop has a feedback loop measured in months and pointed at a market. The feed is measured in milliseconds and pointed at a person.
It’s a bewildering paradox: these platforms made personalisation a major part of their business model, then synthesised, commodified and automated individual taste into oblivion. We no longer choose what we want to consume; we take what we’re given. And we are being given it in such overwhelming quantities that we no longer have the mental capacity to properly digest and assess what we have encountered.
I understand the feeling here, but I don’t think that we no longer choose on social media. Your Attention is Sovereign. We are always actively making choices on social media; by pausing, not skipping, replaying, hovering, letting the next episode begin. I understand these can be influenced by dark patterns and UX tricks etc, but you are still responsible for your actions. Social media is less a battle for attention than what I’ve elsewhere called a Conflict of Disinterest: the ongoing, internal work of choosing what to overlook. The choices are still yours. They have just been turned into a continuous stream of tiny, pre-formatted gestures.
Online taste though an interface becomes behaviour, that behaviour becomes data, and that data becomes prediction. Then you fall into The Loop. Code Space is Bayesian prediction all the way down. Inside the feed you are being presented with a ‘culture-world’ shaped by all your previous gestures of choice. The self is still in there somewhere, but it’s increasingly buried under its own captured behaviour.
This is also why I am not sure taste has been destroyed. Flattened, yes. Operationalised? gamed? automated? captured? Yes. But not destroyed. Taste has been translated into interface behaviour.
Emily Segal’s recent viral piece on “tasteslop” is also useful here.
To riff on this: if taste classifies (and classifies the classifier), tasteslop is what happens when the classifying function is automated, overly explicit, or reduced to spitting out rote taste tokens.
Segal is right that tasteslop happens when the classifying function is automated, but I would put the emphasis on individual behaviour. The machine does not really know taste, it knows the gestures that have clustered around taste.
I think the internet and social media recommendation algorithms made taste programmable, in the same way it made culture playable. The token is not the taste. Taste is the relation between the object and the person, and the social world in which the judgement is made.
There’s a whole sidequest into the concept of ‘Answerability’ here, but I’m going to leave it to one side as that’s what a chunk of the next episode of Permanently Moved is going to be about.
Segal’s own summary gets very close to this. She writes:
“Taste is not really a property of various objects. It is a socially validated relation between objects, people, histories, scenes, and timing.”
Yes. Exactly. But if taste is a relation, then interfaces matter because the kind of interface shapes the relation. A mixtape and a Spotify playlist can contain the same songs, but they do not ask the same behaviour from either the maker or the listener. John Peel or Mary Anne Hobbs were also interfaces in a way. A mixtape or radio show is a sequence of songs with pacing, and tonal change etc — All the things that make the film High Fidelity romantic. An algorithmic playlist does all of that too, but the platform also makes the gesture searchable, measurable, and reproducible at scale.
Taste is not just what passes through you. It is what culture becomes after passing through you, via a particular interface. This is why Animal Crossing still feels like such a good early example. It gives you a little island and a lot of objects and says: okay then, make a world.
I personally have never thought that having bad taste was the bad thing. John Waters didn’t tell you to have faith in your good taste; he said have faith in your own bad taste. But faith in bad taste is not the absence of discernment, it is a higher form of it.
To knowingly like the unfashionable thing, you first have to know it’s unfashionable and why, and step outside that on purpose. That is his whole game. Liking something other people think is bad taste, and being able to say exactly why you like it anyway, is good taste. The judgement is still there, just pointed against the grain. The worse condition is having no taste at all, when your preferences arrive entirely from outside without the practice of discernment. The feed is very good at supplying preferences and very bad at leaving you the latency to act upon them.
Segal lists “Discernment” as the first part of definition of good taste, asking: “Can you tell one thing from another, and can you make a specific, articulated judgment about why one thing is better than another?” I agree with this, but again I would go even harder than Segal does.
If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries. Discernment is not the whole of taste, but in the 2020s it may be the most important part: choosing one thing over another that the feed serves up. Which in many ways we are doing all the time, acticly choosing.
This is the same act I’ve described in the Conflict of Disinterest, but from the other direction. Disinterest is the refusal; deciding what not to spend attention on. Discernment is what that refusal makes possible. Once you have a tighter field of view though the window, you can actually tell one thing from another. I don’t think you can hav the second without the first.
Discernment is the ability to ask and then articulate why you like something, or why you hate something, or whether you have spent enough time with it. Good taste online is the practice of noticing what interface brought the thing and what gesture it is inviting you to perform. The headline “Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?” is actually a very run of the mill millennial crisis of authenticity (which I also think is a silly niche and generational concern). It’s actually I think a crisis of lack of discernment. Being influenced is not the problem online, not being discerning about what is influencing you is the problem. It’s the same with advertising, as the same flattened interfaces that serve you culture, also serve you adverts.
Near the end of Aroesti’s piece, publisher Ione Gamble offers this advice, and it’s very similar to my own.
When it comes to tuning into your own taste, Gamble’s advice is essentially the same. “Always question yourself. Why do I like that? Do I just like it because I’ve been shown it 100 times – or do I genuinely love it?”
But I don’t think you can out-question a system whose whole physics is around the production of rapid questions. You can only take responsibility for where you put your own attention. If taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement, then discernment needs latency. You have to somehow and somewhere put the delay back; to let a thing sit long enough that your relation to it can form before the interface asks what you think about it again.
And once that delay returns, the discernment can move up a level. The wider battle ground in the Conflict of Disinterest not whether this or that video in the feed is to your taste, but whether the entire act of engaging with the form is. Is short-form vertical video to your taste as a way of encountering culture? Is short-form microblogging? Boomer box television? Radio? Podcasts? Do I like the interface and the medium that keeps placing objects in this relation to me?
If your Attention is Sovereign, then taste is what you do with that sovereignty; and discernment is how you keep it from being spent for you. Otherwise you end up with no taste at all. Only a feed-shaped pattern of exposure and reaction.
At the end of 1990, Anderson and his schoolmates worked up the courage to form their own band. They took the name Understand, and by the next year, had also welcomed Coleman. They spent their early years trading time as openers between hardcore bands and the more mainstream rock of Revolver, Stereolab and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. For Understand, this separation never existed; Anderson had digested everything from Iron Maiden to Mudhoney to Napalm Death. Their sound reflected this, honed around the grooving riffs of American post-hardcore groups Quicksand and Fugazi and the melodicism of first-wave British emos Sink and Bad Dress Sense, but also grunge breakouts Nirvana and Soundgarden and the alternative metal rhythms of Helmet and TAD.
I didn’t get involved in the UK DIY punk scene until 1999 when I was 14, so Understand or Fabric were bands I only ever saw written about in the past tense in Fracture Mag.
Not satisfied with just learning its age, the team took things a step further and retraced the physiological characteristics of living species to understand what LUCA must’ve been like 4.2 billion years ago—and the results gave some surprising answers. The scientists estimate that while LUCA was a simple prokaryote, it likely had an immune system, meaning it was already fighting off primordial viruses.
TTI bought Milwaukee and basically let it run itself. Kept the R&D operation in Brookfield, WI. Kept the engineering team intact. Dumped $206 million into R&D in a single year. More than 4.4% of total sales going straight back into product development, every year.
This is an interesting look at the gendered nature of hobbies, how they’re coded, and how people treat them as provisional or non-negotiable. I’ve never been a woman, and never been in a long-term relationship with anyone other than my wife, so I don’t know how this works for other people.
On paper, an agrihood is a simple concept: a working farm surrounded by single- or multifamily housing. Steinberg Hart recently finished two of them in California — one in Santa Clara and another, called Fox Point Farms, in Encinitas. The former, south of San Francisco, features townhouses, market-rate units, and affordable housing, plus a community center and retail shops. The latter, north of San Diego, adds a farm-to-table restaurant, an event venue, and a grocery store, but its housing is primarily for sale instead of rent. “Two different housing programs for two different communities, but built around the sustainability of urban farming,” Mudd said.
it’s been a huge pleasure to be able to finally realize software dreams, even if the UI looks a bit like it was cobbled together by a kindergartener, and I’m not entirely sure about the state of the codebase at this point.
I finished Duncan Barford’s novel The Going Down. It’s one of the best contemporary fiction books I’ve read in ages. As I said last week “Magical dreaming” is very much the operative description. Never read anything like this written by someone in ‘the west’
I moved on to some non-fiction and spent this months audible credit on Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang of ‘Annual Letter’ fame. Really interesting so far. I wish I lived in a highly competent engineering state. lol
If you have been wondering where an album of totally bonkers; euro-rave pop bangers and hyper pop pastiche, performed by an anthropomorphic horse DJ has been all your life then look no further!
This album is fantastic both in concept and its execution. Some potential songs of the summer on here!
Remember Kids:
define the term as a skill that requires a few actions: listening for the full meaning of a message, responding to emotions, and noticing nonverbal communications
Silicon Valley has been trying to come up with solutions to the U.S.’s health care bureaucracy for generations. But the administrative burden on patients, doctors … everyone, really, has only gotten worse. Myriad studies over the years have identified doctor burnout as a critical problem.
It’s been so hard to fix partly because software historically hasn’t been good at transcribing and analyzing one of healthcare’s biggest data sources: doctor/patient conversations.
The other impediment has been that two of healthcare’s biggest players – hospital systems and insurance companies – are ultra conservative and slow moving. They have healthcare privacy laws to enforce. And lives are literally at stake. In healthcare, a Silicon Valley startup that boasts how it likes to “move fast and break things” gets the door slammed in its face.
Now, AI looks like it could actually be a solution to this nettlesome problem. It easily turns unstructured doctor/patient conversations into structured, easily usable data for patients and doctors. And, as you might expect, it’s set off a scramble among AI healthcare companies for market share.
To me, however, the most interesting company to watch in all this is Abridge. It’s run by a doctor – Shiv Rao – who started it to solve his own paperwork burden. It’s hired some of the top AI minds in the country, including CTO Zach Lipton. It’s software is easy to use and works as advertised, something doctors and hospital administrators don’t see a lot. And it’s been fast and relentless at reinventing itself. That’s hard to do in a sector of the economy that radically changes every six months.
It started life in 2018 purely as a medical scribe. When the AI revolution took hold three years ago it leveraged that into taking doctor-recorded patient visits and drafting entire chart notes for the doctor to review and sign at the end of the day.
Now Abridge thinks it can leverage that foundation into every aspect of health care administration – charting, billing/insurance, research and records. It’s an opportunity in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
When I talked to Lipton about Abridge’s tech stack 18 months ago he hinted that this was where the company was headed – to become the operating system of American healthcare.
Back then, in the fall of 2024, that seemed far off. It had just convinced Epic to integrate with their system and picked up the entire Kaiser health system as a customer. But it was only in about 40 healthcare and hospital systems.
Now the company is going for it. Last week it said it now serves more than 300 health care and hospital systems in the country from the biggest research institutions and the Veterans Administration, to community health centers. It said it now integrates with other big electronic medical record companies like Oracle Health and athenahealth. And it told me that nearly 20 percent of all primary care and specialists serving about 250 million patients use it. That’s about 200,000 doctors on the platform.
The announcements fell into two broad categories: expanding its technical infrastructure and deepening its clinical reach. On the infrastructure side, it announced a deepened partnership with AI chip maker NVIDIA, critical for any AI company that has growing processing power needs. It announced an unspecified investment from Eli Lilly, the pharma giant behind among other things obesity and diabetes drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro. And it said it was meaningfully broadening the capabilities of its proprietary AI models to now include apps and functionality for nurses as well as doctors.
It also announced a slew of research publications including JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine and most publications focused on medical specialties that will now deeply integrate their content into Abridge’s AI.
And it said it had established linkages with insurance companies like Cigna and Aetna in an effort to make the lengthy negotiations both parties go through over many patients move faster and be more transparent.
Abridge started out as just a tool for primary care physicians in outpatients settings. Now, Rao says that its tools are being used in almost every outpatient and inpatient setting and in almost every specialty. Maybe to prove it wasn’t exaggerating about its industry influence, top executives from insurers Cigna and Aetna, health systems at Johns Hopkins University and Emory University, and chip maker NVIDIA joined Rao onstage for conversations.
Rao demoed some of the tech for me last month. It’s easy to understand how it works and why you’d want to use it. Before a patient visit Abridge prepares the doctor with pre-charted notes and summaries. During the visit it suggests discussion topics based on the recorded transcript real time. Then Abridge generates clinical documentation, flowsheets, patient summaries, billing codes, and orders for the doctor to review at the end of the day.
When a doctor is reviewing his chart note at the end of the day he/she can highlight and immediately view where in the transcript the system pulled that information. He/she can listen to that portion of the recording at the same time. It does all this in more than two dozen languages.
“So I would think about this technology now like a team of assistants that can do all the different types of work that you wish you could get done. And what’s amazing about this team is that they can work 24/7,” Rao told me.
Rao understands that having first mover advantage in a field like AI where the technology is radically changing every six months, is often more of a problem than an advantage. “There’s now three variants of AI native companies,” he told me. “There’s the post transformer paper, free LLM vintage company. There’s the post LLM free agent vintage company. And then there’s the post agent company. So much of the game … now is how fast can you become the latest AI variant not only in the product that you build, but also in the way that you operate.”
It’s certainly made Abridge more careful about how much detail it reveals publicly about itself. A year ago it was happy to disclose revenues – about $150 million – and valuation – $5.3 billion and how much money it had raised -$800 million. But it wouldn’t say a thing about the Lilly investment or current revenues last week. All it would say is that the company’s workforce has roughly doubled in that period to between 400 and 500 people along with the number of hospital systems it serves.
Maybe that’s wise. It’s not farfetched to imagine cut throat competition ahead. Epic could one day stop integrating its health record with Abridge’s AI, for example. Epic has already partnered with Microsoft’s Nuance, once the dominant scribing platform for hospitals.
Anyone who followed the rise of the Microsoft monopoly during the 1990s knows that Windows was not the most technically sophisticated or reliable operating system. But it won.
And what happens to AI in healthcare administration generally if all these systems start introducing errors? All are set up to require doctor approval of any work they do. But humans under time pressure use shortcuts no matter how well trained.
No matter what happens, it’s hard not to be charmed by Rao’s vision.
“I don’t think anyone purposefully designed a system this way. I don’t think anyone set out to industrialize the care delivery experience,” Rao said during the presentation last week. “And if we’re not careful it could get a lot worse. (We could have) AI vs AI. Agents vs agents. That’s probably a race to some dystopic future nobody wants to live in.
“Our opportunity right now is to use AI to actually rethink the system. Can we compress workflows? Can I (the doctor) let (my AI software agent) attend the compliant documentation lunch so I don’t have to? Can we let AI figure out how to get all that clerical work done so I can spend more time with my patient? And what if we can shift as many of those workflows upstream?”
Animated feature The Violinist looks special. A couple moments in the trailer reminded me a bit of Grave of the Fireflies, although on balance it probably doesn’t go that far into tragedy. Hopefully gets an American release.
Human Stuff is a free weekly-ish newsletter. You’re welcome to share parts of this letter that connect with you on social media, or send to someone you love. Thank you for reading, ‘heart’ing, commenting, sharing, for helping this newsletter continue by being here. In the midst of so much noise, your presence with my words truly means something.
So much of what has been steady is now being uprooted, tugged from the solidity of earth and pulled into the swirl of air, left to float around until a new landing place reveals itself. Do you feel it, too? This sense of, “parts of me are unraveling, making space for what I can’t yet name”? This feeling of free-falling for so long, it starts to disorient who and where you are? This space of being stretched between what was and what will be, of which you don’t yet know? This knowing that What Has Been no longer fits, but What’s Coming Next is still too fuzzy to comprehend? This dizzying place of possibility, tinged with fear that is itself afraid to let go and make way for what wants to arrive? This constriction finally expanding, yet quickly returning to the constricted place because it’s not yet used to the fresh air? This push-pull? This tug-of-war between the known and the unknown? This burgeoning path of finally leaning into the aliveness that has been waiting for you, even as so much crumbles around you, or perhaps because of it?
It’s a tender place to be, yet I feel the world insisting I step into the unknown with less trepidation and more presence. I feel my child’s upcoming transition to a Big Kid School insisting I embrace newness with a wide heart. I feel the rejuvenation of doing my first-ever book event in person, buoying my spirit toward more connection, more human-to-human contact, more generous sharing, more pouring what I have to give outward instead of keeping it in my familiar hiding places. I feel my expressive self trying out new forms, new ways of saying what wants to be said, fresh eyes to see through. I feel my adult self occupying more and more of my body, filling in the places my younger parts once led from. I feel my young selves watching as it all unfolds, slowly trusting I’ve got me now, handing over the reigns to present-day me. I feel a congruence unfolding, perhaps for the first time, and it is unfamiliar, and it is insisting I let it happen. I feel change ushering me into its arms, an embrace instead of a shove. I feel I’ve been leaving breadcrumbs for myself my whole life, and I am just now learning to pick them up and let them change me as they’re meant to.
expanse, 35mm film
Within this uprooting, this change, this shift, is a nudge toward more risk. I’ve always been an incredibly risk-averse person, preferring to stay close to the edges I know, the places I can cling to., the identities I’ve locked in place. Yet as I talked for an hour in front of an audience this past Friday, I felt the risk of humiliation or rejection transform into a path toward connection and being of service. As I think about walking into a new school with my child, I feel the risk of not belonging held with the truth that expanding community is only possible within that risk. As I imagine sharing my work and art and self in new ways, I feel the risk of failing be met with the reality that it is only in taking the risk that I’ll ever know what could go right.
Risk as a path toward deeper connection. Risk as a compass of the heart’s longings. Risk as a marker of trying. Risk as creativity’s partner. Risk as an architect of courage. Risk as the only avenue toward what I want. Risk as a bolstering of grit. Risk as a tether to newness. Risk as a fortifier of what matters. Risk as desire embodied. Risk as power. Risk as the price of admission for expression. Risk as an endeavor of aliveness. And for perhaps the first time in my life, I want to risk. I want to risk. I want to risk.
a peek, 35mm film
David Whyte said, “We are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world. We are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing…” I want to hazard myself for the right thing. I want to feel the edginess of trying, the aliveness that can only be found in risking what I know about myself for the fullness I haven’t yet accessed. I want to feel what my own courage can mirror to others, what the courage of others teaches me. I want to stay close to risking as an opening to more. I want to feel the sensations that come from moving toward what I say I want. When I see others taking risks on behalf of their longings for themselves and the world, I feel my heart expanding. More of that. More of that. More of that.
looking for a different view, 35mm film
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven, can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And I gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang. Mary Oliver, I Worried
I feel my looping habit of worrying transforming into wondering what else could happen, and the freedom in that is like an opening to walk into heart-first. It is what I wish for all of us: this trust to stay with what could be. This orientation toward facing the world with our shoulders back, attuned, listening. This movement toward what we long for, for ourselves and for each other and for our earth. This allowing of when the ripening comes. This leaving the edges of safety for the possibility of something more true, more beautiful.
What right things do you want to hazard yourself for? What do you want to risk yourself on behalf of? What possibility lies on the other side of risking leaving the comfortable, the known, the certain?
May we take our bodies out into the morning and sing, in all the iterations we long for. May the risk of Doing The Thing be met with the gift of all that arrives only by leaning in. May we embrace our longings with the kind of courage they require. And may we remember we’re held all the while.
Thank you, as always, for being here. My newsletter has been a little more off-schedule than usual lately; life is sparkling with so very much, and I’m doing my best to stay present with all of it, letting writing be emergent to match what I need in this sea of change. Your presence here means so much.
My thinking on Anthropic has been shaped most by Ben Thompson and Peter Steinberger. Peter created OpenClaw so is affected by closing models to third-party apps. Ben has an article today after the Fable fallout:
…given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone.
I've just pushed an update to my RSS feed that shows the first 15 words of the note after the date and time, which hopefully makes things more descriptive.
That aside, good post by Michael, you should go check out his blog. 🙃
P.S. apologies for any RSS reader spam.
Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️
Before our daughter Beatrix was born, when we found out we were having a girl, Bethany asked me what I hoped she’d be like.
I said, “I hope she’s just like you.”
I feel like I’ve written enough about Beatrix here and elsewhere over the years that most of my longterm readers can probably imagine what she’s like.
I really meant it (and I’m glad I got what I wished for).
Bethany is, by far, the smartest person I know. The hardest working too. She knows a whole lot about a lot of things and uses every bit of it in service to the world.
She is sweet and thoughtful and generous with her resources.
She has opinions that are held firmly and fiercely defended. She holds those she considers friends in the same way. She is incredibly loyal.
Her wit is rapid fire. It cracks like a whip and can cut like a knife. Mostly, it makes me laugh. If someone could invent a weapon designed to make me fall in love that is hard coded to my DNA, it would work just like her humor and wit.
She rarely says no to anything that seems like an opportunity; to make our lives better, to provide for those she cares about, to make meaningful connections, to make a life — any life — a little bit better.
She is compassionate, loving, and beautiful inside and out.
But what has made our marriage as strong as it remains after two decades together it is that she’s an incredible partner. The way we are able to divide and conquer every daily duty and challenge that comes our way with grace and humor and love. But, most importantly, we remember to let each other know how much we appreciate that regularly and take time to acknowledge and celebrate how special that partnership is.
So, here’s a small public thank you to Bethany Gladhill in celebration of 20 years of marriage. She is the love of my life and I wake each day knowing the seemingly impossible will occur — I will be even more in love with her by the time my head returns to the pillow. Every. Single. Day.
I brought the Leica MP to a windy day at the lakeshore. Wind and sand can be trouble for camera gear. I spent some time cleaning sand from the lens when I got home.
Starry PJsMirror self-portraitA mom trying to light her cigarette in the windBeer board at The ScoreWalking the beachIt was windy.Gail relaxing in the sandMy beat up JOBO CPE 2
Color film suffers from bad exposure sooner than black and white film, so I tend to favor using modern automatic exposure cameras with good meters. The Nikon F100 fits the bill.
The roll was mostly from a trip to Grand Haven, but also contains my usual around-the-house stuff.
A car wash offers fun abstract color opportunitiesAlice relaxing on the deckMirror self-portraitGail in front of some decent-sized waves. Grand Haven.Pink bike. Pride Fest. Grand Haven, MI
I've been using my Mac again for a few days. The Linux machine is just a cable swap away, but I haven't gone back yet. To be honest, I've been frustrated with trying to maintain everything on two operating systems. I wanted to work on the template for this blog yesterday (on the Mac), and it meant almost two hours of frustrating conversations with Claude to get everything working. Paths were wrong, bits were compiled for Linux, etc. I'm tired.
After spending weeks with Vivaldi, I've started using Safari again, Vivaldi is fancy, but Safari is simple and calm. I feel like I could use some simple and calm right now.
As for software in general: There are two timelines converging for me. The first is that there is a massive increase in the amount of software available, thanks to how good LLMs are getting and helping. The second is that I don't want to think as much about software. It's either excellent timing or terrible timing, I guess.
