Careful What You Wish For California
A wolf in sheep’s clothing? Or maybe the emperor has bought new clothes.
👁️ Before LLMs how many writers included paragraphs containing two sentence that follow this pattern?
That’s not imagination. That’s reality.
👁️ Turns out when I wrote - “🖇️ We are back” - we weren’t quite. Just learned another little thing about Micro.Blog that I had never completely absorbed. Thank you @sod - we are now back .. at least functionally - css and layout remains a WIP.
📚Read Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr - and then keep re reading parts of it and finding more quotes for Readwise.
👁️There aren’t that many great Sax players to begin with - to lose two in a week - on a ratio basis it’s kinda like losing 50 great guitarists in the same time period. 🤯
🪦 Et tu Sonny? Thank you for visiting us.
Training transfers - Learning transforms
Training fills vessels - Learning transforms
Training is what you complete - Learning is what you apply
🔗 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.