A brand is basically making a promise and keeping it.

---

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test

Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)

Good tech.

Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)

Bad tech.

---

Groundhog's Day falling on a Monday is just a little too on the nose.

---

Pretty good month for music last month. "Water Fountain" is the most interesting one - it has a sound like the Dixie Cups' version of Iko Iko but then the lyrics and some of the acoustic treatment is very modern.

Also - not that I have a big audience for "new music i added" but Diane mentioned she was mostly interested in like, WHERE I ran into music. And like, oddly that is one of the more interesting details for me as well. so for a while maybe I'll try to make more notes on that... this month it was mostly shows/movies.

4 star:
* Water Fountain (Tune-Yards)
(used in Nurse Jackie)* Dial Drunk (Noah Kahan & Post Malone)
(recommened by my nephew Wren)
* The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Gil Scott-Heron)
* To All The Boys I've Loved Before (Total Ape Remix) (Jax)
(got into a debate on if "To All The Girls I Loved Before" was sexist or just nostalgic... enjoy this gender-swapped version)
* I'm Alive (Johnny Thunder)
(used in the movie Sentimental Value)


3 star:
* Mo Bamba (Sheck Wes)
* Heart and Soul (Floyd Cramer)
(plays a role in Stranger Things)
* Mama's Fried Potatoes (The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band)
(Myles plays a piano song called "Home Fried Potatoes. Was thinking of adding that but liked the guitars in this one instead.)
* Lady Marmalade (Funky Town)
* Gold On the Ceiling (The Black Keys)
(JP Honk might be adding this)
* Train Dreams (Nick Cave)
Saw it in the movie of the same name (even though it was about lumberjacks.)
* Nobody Knows (Pastor T.L. Barrett and The Youth for Christ Choir)
(used in the movie Sentimental Value)

---

via pleated-jeans programming memes

---

AI Psychosis Support Groups.

It's interesting to figure out where the hell to position oneself on the AI spectrum, both for moral/philosophical reasons as well as one's personal wellbeing - there's such extreme views from "this is the whole future" to "this is clearly awful".

Anyways, at least some versions of LLM AI were such validating yes-men that it created some serious problems, even among people who otherwise seemed pretty steady, mental-health wise. (Reminds me of how Robin Williams et al used to talk about cocaine in the 80s - huge energy and enthusiasms, but left unchecked... not good)

---

I confess I am getting culture shock whiplash hearing about "moltbook".

Just this weekend I was hearing about Clawdbot=>Moltbot=>OpenClaw , and the idea of giving LLM AI 24/7 access to online chat and what not.

And someone said, lets make a "social media" outlet for all these guys.

It reminds me of a few things - the AI society implied in the movie Her, this other experiment I saw where they had an AI driven podcast "Analyzing Poop & Fart written 1,000 times", times when Microsoft release a primitive AI that trolls and griefers immediately made spout racist garbage.

Well lets all hope they stay good and like us ....

---

Oh plus AI self loathing... huh We watched the movie "The Virgin Suicides" the other night. One thing I liked was some of the opening credits-like scenes, where they played with handdrawn fonts: I used to do that so much as a kid, I think it benefited me later on with design stuff. (Also stuff with graphpaper, which influenced both the main title and the icons of my blog kirk.is Recently I saw an ad for Wes Iseli's "flip" coin magic trick (the algos have figured out I kind of like 'magic exposed' videos) and went to google up more on it and found this blog boston.conman.org entry

So I was tickled to see a link to my own blog, kirk.is site on the side

(And then a link to flutterby - another long running blog site, even more aggressively rooted in the page layout tropes of an earlier era.)

I realized that the only reason I could reach out to the first link was because of an oldschool mailto: tag - and that my own site didn't have any "contact me" info. I probably avoided putting my own email up because of spammers, though that fight has more or less moved on. (Also there's a kind of half-wise, half-dumb assumption that most people who view my blog actually know me IRL)

Still, it's nice to see fellow old-school-bloggers still at it. There's probably a kind of mental hangup that keeps us at a pursuit for over two decades... but owning a little piece of the 'net that way before Web 2.0 moved everything onto other people's sites is still kind of fun.

---

AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation – particularly in safety-critical domains.

---

Slate on Psychadelic Therapy I have always been intrigued by the potential for psychadelics in therapeutic ways. There are reports that they can be like a head reset so you can actually do what you know you need to do, like give up smoking.

But between the difficulty of research of not really legal things, and as this article points out the startlingly powerful placebo effects... it's tough to know if there's anything actionable to be done right now.

---

NYC's controversial toll program hasn't just sped up trips inside Manhattan, a new paper finds. It's easing traffic in outer boroughs and neighboring counties.
Huh. I think this goes to show how it's not really possible to accurately predict emergent effects and unintended consequences from making changes to complex systems

See also: Jevons' paradox, where increasing a resource (say, highways into a popular place, trying to ease congestion) actually increases use so much that the problem ends up worse than before.

---

Average Ukrainian soldier whose killed dozens of people in largest war since WW2:

*Wears a Pikachu patch and another that says "ZSUHub," never issued a unit patch*

ICE Agent:
*Patch has a dagger through a skull dripping blood on an ace of spades with crossed M4s behind it*

'Hope,' he said. 'Damn thing never leaves you alone.'

Didn't like this book as much as I'd hoped... it covers some neat topics in terms of AI, genetic updating, and some similar stuff but didn't quite hit.

---

On a related note... I'm annoyed Amazon swapped up the colors it offers for highlighting in the Kindle App (and the devices that support color.)

Like the colors had meaning that made sense to my brain in a synesthesia kinda of way - yellow "plain old highlight", blue "quote this on the blog" (blue being the color of links), red "I disagree or it makes me annoyed" (red being associated with anger), leaving orange which I used for "I want to go look this up"

These are the new colors, and "Aqua" replaces Blue and "Pink" the old version of Red. Like the colors are close enough that there's not too much conclusion, but it's annoying to have the new palette retroactively applied to all my years of past reading. (I wonder if the choice is aesthetic or has some accessibility concerns I'm unaware of.)

---

The problem with wanting to design a villain whose look is military chic but *not* wanting the result to be too obviously fashy is that basically the entire conceptual space of "military chic but not obviously fash" is occupied by high school marching bands, and you need to decide for yourself whether you're okay with that.

I bid farewell to my beloved car "Puck", aka "Hoss", aka my 2004 Scion xA.

Didn't want to post a photo from yesterday, with the indignity of being under a pile of snow in the mechanic's lot. Here's a photo from happier, earlier times:

(Such a baby I was still waiting on the hubcaps from the dealer.)

Such a fun car. So easy to park. Fun to drive and bop around especially if you did the overdrive thing. Could hold a tuba in the backseat. Great stereo system. Reliable. (Later years not withstanding, distinctly less waterproof... having to scrape off ice from INSIDE the windshield... and in summer no AC...)

I remember early years, when I would sleep over at my girlfriend K's family's, and noticing it patiently waiting for me curbside. It made me think of a cowboy's steed, which is when I gave it the secondary nickname "Hoss" and programmed the stereo display greeting to say "howdy".

I've only owned two cars, both new. (Kermit, the '96 Civic, was a fun hatchback as well.) I might hold off for a bit on a replacement, I can borrow Lynette's car. Maybe I'll need to get a new one once band stuff unthaws. Looking to buy my first used car, probably a Honda Fit or Toyota Yaris. They don't make 'em like they used to, literally.

---

Murph was nice enough to take a photo for me so I could check the final mileage.
(side note: I think the gas was about full when it started having gas tank issues that led to me calling it. And it got towed around and barely driven since.)

---

The podcast Retronauts usually talks video games, but Episoe 744 Dartmouth Time Sharing System and the Birth of BASIC is worth checking out. It's so weird to think of the era just before that, bringing stacks of punchcards to be run. 80s kid don't even know how easy we had it, access to programming platform wise.

---

We need to make big changes in how things work based on having our limits tested and the guardrails broken, bringing us to the brink. We should be talking about that before the journalists turn this into a debate about what the next election should be about. It must be about everything. Nothing clever. This is what happened and this is what we have to do. For example -- Increase the number of Supreme Court judges, and give them terms of five or ten years, and have an age limit. The Justices must have a personal stake in the decisions they make. They should feel like servants, not gods.

---