Crucial Track 🎵 June 8, 2026
📸 A test as much as anything to see what Gemma 4 26B did with providing ‘accessibility text’ for my photo.
This is what it came up with:
A small structure with a dark roof covered in solar panels sits nestled among a dense backdrop of lush green trees.
Not too shabby. It was that kind of phrasing I had in my mind when I took it down by the beach last week, observing how the roof of an old boathouse (Unused? Do not know.) could double up as a baby solar ‘farm’ and not be that distracting.
Farm? Ok ‘backlot’.
🔄 UPDATE: 5 Minutes Later
Now I have read 🔗 Manton’s post properly - point of clarification -
While the checkbox is present in the current build, the server-side work is not yet enabled for any users.
So jury remains out as to how good the local model will be. I will run a test on the same image when it is available … so marking this post 🚧
👁️ A post arriving via the new micro.blog beta that @manton just dropped. I am not a natural ‘grab the beta’ kinda guy - but for this I make an exception. Advance word suggests that it might include a few things I have been looking for … none of which included ‘a local AI model’ - but having just installed a few over the weekend - sure … why not … let’s have a party 🥳
All good - all nice - all working - nicely done sir.
One side request if you are listening Manton … i very much like the categories appearing on the add post screen. Any chance they could be listed as a column on the side rather than the bottom. Bottom works fine for a few categories - close to impossible if you have a sickness like mine.
There’s something about book spines .. you generally tilt your head one way and all the titles are readable - because the title on the spine starts at the top and goes to the bottom. BUT - every now and then one seems to slip through - and as you looking at the shelf - you have to crick in the opposite direction.
This came to mind just now when I saw this …
Human By Design
My Substack is themed on the idea of ‘People First’.
I even used to call it that.
It means;
People ahead of corporations
People ahead of technology
We don’t reject either, it’s just that people are the priority.
🕋🏢
… or to put in another way …
Either way - its not good - and definitely not sustainable.
👁️ Has ‘OTD’ gone away as a plugin? Or was it only ever on GitHub? Either way, cant find it. Different name? Asking for a friend.
📺 Finished watching 🔗 Lawmen: Bass Reeves last night. I like a great Western - but this was only good - though made more interesting by the fact it was based on a true story. ★★
Ladies First, 2026 - ★
Sacha Baron Cohen and the rest of the cast is capable of so much more. I watched it all - sadly. Shining star? Richard E Grant.
📸 Hobbits only … though to be honest, we seem to be a few miles north of their natural habitat.
🔗 Silicon Valley’s Biggest Payday. Yet!
By the time the public gets to participate, the $20 million has become $182 billion on paper. The $900 million has become $120 billion. The risk has been taken, absorbed, and rewarded many times over before the first share is sold on the Nasdaq. Public investors are not funding the bet. They are paying for it after it won.
💬 Om
… Public investors are not funding the bet. They are paying for it after it won.
Crucial Track 🎵 June 7, 2026
"Everybody's Hustlin" by Heads, Hands and Feet
The Third Lee - Albert.
👁️ Got to say Marked 3 is just awesome.
📺 Finished 🔗 Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 last night .. and every bit as good as Season 1. Everything all nearly wrapped up .. with lots of new hanging chads for Series 3 to pickup on. Great job. Well worth ★★★★
📸 I suspect that this was once a proud Foo Dog guarding someone’s property at the gate.
🔗🎵 Music of the Spheres - different ones.
Listening to Mother Earth as tectonic plates move past each other.
Art ➕ Science | Art and Science
.. they aren’t the same as I wrote the other day riffing on Roger
[@bradenslen](https://micro.blog/bradenslen)
I think the two sides issue is the problem - which goes beyond politics.
It is - as Roger had it - the problem of ‘Us and Them’.
The original piece was called ‘Us and Them’, but on Roger’s ‘Us➕Them’ tour - the name subtly changed …
Can’t find an exact quote - but the essence was that ‘➕’ transforms the concept from ‘binary opposition’ to ‘mathematical unity’.
Paraphrasing:
Instead of ‘us versus them’ it becomes ‘us plus them = one humanity’ … a call to action to ‘pool our love’ and recognise we’re all ‘ordinary men’ who should work together.
🔗 Covers from Cerîde-i Adliye, a Turkish Law Journal (1924–26) - The Public Domain Review
🕋 Structured Thought from a 100 years ago.
Good piece from Bob Cringely - 🔗 Detection Is Not a Strategy
🔗 A quote from Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media
The new statement no longer stated that “it’s critical that we maintain humans in the loop'.
🔗 Manton - Anthropic self-improvement, pause
Our biggest problem isn’t speed, it’s vision.
‘Vision’ needs a qualifier. It’s not a lack of vision, we have that in Spades. The problem is lack of alignment and no one is successfully proving they have the right map. Sure, we get isolated pockets of brilliant arguments, but the broader hype machine has adopted a ‘flood the zone’ strategy.
In the old days of ‘move fast and break things,’ I used to call this chaotic energy ‘Brownian motion.’
Today, we’re dealing with the same random collisions, but ‘Brownian vision’ doesn’t sound right to me.