Because the future has just started
We were talking today about life lessons. One of the people in the conversation said, ruefully, “The lesson you learn is never the lesson that you want to learn. Why is that?”
“I think,” I said, also ruefully, “it’s because you already know the lesson that you want to learn.”
I learned very early in my career that you can’t really tell anyone that something is possible if they’ve never seen it. You can talk all you want, but they won’t believe you.
Which is why I learned to make demos. People may not believe what you tell them, but they will be believe you when you show them something that works.
A demo doesn’t need to be a complete solution. It just needs to open a door wide enough to let people see into the next room.
And once people see something working, even in a crude form, then they understand that there is a path forward. Then they will give you the time and resources that you need to move forward.
Which is all you really wanted in the first place.
I use Google’s Gemini all the time. I ask it questions about computer programming, politics, movies, geography, coffee makers, or pretty much anything I’m curious about.
The answers are nearly always very helpful and to the point. Its response to my questions are usually excellent summaries of what I would have achieved if I had spent a lot longer doing a Google search.
But unlike much of the hype I have been hearing and reading, I never get a sense that there is a human-like intelligence at work. Rather, it feels just like what it is — an algorithmic gathering and summation of information from various sources.
I remember when I started using Google search about twenty six years ago. It was extremely useful, but I never felt that there was “a person in the computer”. Rather, it felt like I was interacting with an algorithm, albeit one that had been tuned by humans.
Similarly, the advent of desktop publishing four decades ago felt useful, but not magical, even though it was a radical advance for the time. It was clear that my document was being typeset by an algorithm — an algorithm that was performing calculations based on information that had been fed to it by human beings.
I suspect that people will soon come to see AI bots like Gemini and its cousins in the same way. There is no magical “person in the computer”. Like Google search and desktop publishing before it, a chatbot is just another useful tool in our ever expanding human arsenal of useful tools.
As you probably know, the building housing the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts was recently defaced. What you may not know is that Public Law 88-260, enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed into law on January 23, 1964, quite explicitly makes it illegal to modify the name of the Kennedy Center.
If artists perform in that building before the legal name has been restored, they might therefore be guilty of implicitly endorsing an illegal act of vandalism of a public monument, and of being in contempt of the U.S. Congress. So legally, Chuck Redd had no recourse but to cancel the 2025 Christmas show. To do otherwise could have placed all of the show’s participants in legal peril.
So looking at the situation from a legal perspective, the recent threatening letter to Redd by Richard Grenell was a clear admission of guilt on Grenell’s part. By sending that letter, Grenell was explicitly confessing to having committed a federal crime.
The U.S. Government now has an obligation to bring federal charges against Grenell, for his self-confessed violation of Public Law 88-260. If he is convicted, I wonder how much jail time he will serve.
Then again, he might end up getting a presidential pardon. I hear those are going cheaply these days.
Three episodes in a row of Stranger Things.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
Today is a day when millions of people are united by a common narrative. And it’s no ordinary narrative. In particular, it is one that promises to let you overcome the finality of death.
That’s a pretty darned powerful promise. If somebody has spent their entire life believing in that promise, you aren’t going to change their mind by talking to them about it.
Which leads me to today’s topic: What is most real to people?
We clearly live in a physical world, where we regularly encounter physical objects like chairs and apples. We all have bodily functions, we all feel the tug of gravity, we all experience the tangible world around us.
But you can’t tell a story about those things. People know that those things exist, but those things are not what is most real to us.
What is fascinating to me about us humans is that what is most real to us are things that cannot be seen in our physical world. The reality that we care about exists in an entirely different space.
There are words to describe the reality that truly matters to us. Words like “love”, “jealousy”, “kindness”, “hate”, “compassion” and “trust”.
You cannot see those things out there in the physical world — they exist only within our collective 8 billion minds. And yet they are far more real to us than mere physical objects like chairs or apples.
That might help to explain why so many people are united by a common narrative today.
I like days this, that are one day before a big day of the year. It’s the calm before the storm, the eye in the hurricane, that singular moment of stillness.
Everything sort of winds down, and we all get a day to catch our collective breath. We all definitely need more days like this.
The U.S. Supreme Court has just affirmed that the U.S. president cannot federalize the Illinois state national guard in Chicago to protect pink people in their work of rounding up thousands of brown people.
The fact that many of the people being rounded up are American citizens doesn’t seem to factor into the decision. Those people are brown, so under current federal policy pink people apparently have the right to round them up and detain them.
Many people, both pink and brown, have been exercising their first amendment rights to protest this activity, and the administration argued that those protests amount to insurrection. The Supreme Court disagreed, in a six to three ruling.
A small but helpful win for democracy and the U.S. Constitution.
I am thinking of a TV show from the late 1990s. The main character is a strong and independent young woman, with a mission to take on the world, and a great fashion sense.
As she takes on the world, our heroine has by her side a small but trusty band of loyal friends. Each of those friends represents a different aspect of her own personality.
In the very first episode, we meet the man of her dreams. He is a devilishly handsome yet strangely aloof and mysterious figure. The two of them spend entire seasons of the show in and out of a powerfully alluring yet possibly doomed relationship.
The show was critically acclaimed for its clever and witty dialog.
I am speaking, of course, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I am speaking, of course, of Sex and the City.
How many other pairs of TV shows can you think of which could both be accurately described by the same summary?
On winter solstice, so they say,
You only get the shortest day
But if you look at it just right
You also get the longest night