🔗 On God and LLMs … my bold.
I don’t have definitive answers here. But one thing that seems clear is that the newly emerging field of digital ethics (in which I’m currently active) is in the same place today as bioethics was five decades earlier, when new medical technologies began to force tough moral quandaries.
Which is all to say: before we blindly embrace whatever AI product Sam Altman or Dario Amodei declares to be inevitable, we still have a lot of work to do in figuring out what we’re willing to accept.
💬 Cal Newport
Crucial Track 🎵 May 26, 2026
"I'd Rather Be the Devil" by John Martyn
A vastly under appreciated catalogue. This track? 🤯
As always - despite first appearances - there is always a connection to the image.
👁️ Sitting in Aotearoa, working at different times (literally) with people in Europe, the USA, the UK, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore it’s become clear to me that just as ‘the sun never set on ‘the empire’ and thus it is ‘always cocktail hour somewhere’ - so too on any given day we’re having a holiday.
🔗 Renewables Beat Coal for First Time Since 1919
Renewables generated 33.8% of global electricity in 2025, surpassing coal for the first time since 1919.
Crucial Track 🎵 May 25, 2026
"Season of the Witch (2002 Remix w/o Horns)" by Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield & Stephen Stills
A song covered by so many - over so many years - but surely this is the definitive ... Bloomfield, Kooper and Stills for 11 minutes.
🔗 iPhones sales in China grew 3% year-over-year over the May Day holiday.
The iPhone was up against a set of new product launches but still managed to grow while the market declined. It’s a remarkable story. Apple guided to similar growth for the June quarter as for the March quarter. Signals are coming in that this is not a fluke.
💬 Horace Dediu
Clearly Apple is doomed.
🔗 Then again, maybe to become someone who …
not to do because you are, but to become because you did.
💬 Leon Mika
Nice.
🔗 Which age-gates should be skill-gates and vice-versa?
Would it really be so bad to introduce a voting licence? Make people take a short quiz to ensure they understand what they’re voting for and why they’re voting.
💬 Terence Eden
Not those words - but been saying this as a joke for years. In the past few years my cries have become increasingly more serious.
👁️ I’ve lost all frames of reference for comparison purposes between the ‘indie’ RSS readers that have come out in the past 6 months.
- Current
- Silverleaf
- Unread
- Inkwell
- Stream
.. those just off the top of my head - and doesn’t even get to
- the ones I forgot
- the ‘big’ ones we know
- the ‘flotilla’ of unknowns in the app store
Death, Mortality - you know - that sort of stuff.
But you get older.
The horizons get closer and closer as the years go by.
You live long enough, you start to lose people, friends, family.
You lose connections. Your eyesight goes and your hearing.
You hurt. Goddamn, how you hurt after a while.
The world speeds up and you slow down,
things change, complexity increases,
it gets harder and harder to keep up until you just can’t any more.
You become more and more distanced from the world.
💬 Stonekettle Station
I had to reply …
Boomers in a nutshell
- Age: 61 to DEAD
- Currently Looks OLD
- Used to throw hands
- Speaks Sarcasm Fluently
- Great Work Ethic
- Zero Tolerance for Stupidity
🔗😂 Not now, Almighty Zorg! I have to file this report or I’ll lose my health insurance.
Personally I would modify this particular ‘Indexed’. I feel that as work gets more stressful - I think aliens do start becoming a bigger deal to you.
🔗 Nobody is destined for greatness.
There’s a version of you that keeps waiting to feel chosen, and a version that goes down into the hole and gets to work. The first one keeps waiting. Nobody is born holding greatness. People build it in the dark, with pebbles in the mouth, long before anyone arrives to applaud.
💬 Joan Westenberg