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New deck (almost) finished
“The Decline of Play”
My childhood could only be described as idyllic. A small town in the ‘50s where we could walk to school (three blocks?) or ride our bikes across town to the city park for little league practice. We stayed out until nine p.m. playing hide-and-seek. No mobile phones, social media or video games. Play was something we did outside with other kids.
It was against this background that I read an article in The Atlantic titled What if It’s Not the Phone? “An evolutionary psychologist (Peter Gray) is challenging the popular understanding of kids and technology.” Gray laments “The Decline of Play”
Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.
Looking back, we (kids) took for granted our almost total freedom from adult supervision. It was wonderful.
Mirroring human consciousness
For the past 24 hours the following story has been in the news:
“Anthropic finds hidden ‘workspace’ inside Claude Al. Researchers say the structure holds unspoken concepts during reasoning, mirroring a leading neuroscientific theory of human consciousness.”
Two subjects I’ve long been interested in. (106 blog posts tagged “consciousness,“ 46 tagged “thoughts.“) I prompted Claude identify my blog posts that seem most relevant to this story? Continue reading
“Is there anything I can do to make it more pleasurable?”
Michael Scott calls Oscar Martinez (The Office) into his office to get his advice on an upcoming medical procedure:
“It is a colonoscopy. In your experience, what should I be expecting, in terms of sensation, or emotions? Is there anything I can do to make it more pleasurable for me or Dr. Chaudry?”
I was reminded of this from a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais’ podcast.
Final lock-in
We’re going to remove the hardened, cloudy lenses from your eyes by breaking them up with an ultrasound device, and then sucking the particles out. We will then insert a flexible silicone based lens. Over the next eight weeks, we will use a special ultraviolet light device to change the shape of the lenses to give you the desired vision. For those eight weeks, it will be necessary for you to wear special UV protection goggles anytime that you are not in bed asleep. After the three adjustments are complete, will use the ultraviolet light device to lock in the shape of the lenses. 24 hours later, you can dispense with the UV goggles.
Gotta say it. Been a long eight weeks. It doesn’t appear that we achieved the glasses-free outcome we were shooting for, we got close. I uploaded my new prescription and the one from a year ago to Perplexity:
Your 2026 glasses prescription is dramatically lower power than your 2025 prescription, reflecting how the LAL+ has moved most of the focusing work into the lens implants instead of the spectacles. In 2025 you needed full‑time distance correction plus a significant bifocal/progressive add just to get comfortable reading. With the LAL+ lock‑ins, your intraocular lenses now provide most of the distance focus, so the new glasses are more like fine‑tuning for small residual refractive error and astigmatism rather than heavy lifting.
Pre-surgery I was using 3.5 (prescription) reading glasses for books, phone and laptop. Post-surgery I can see the computer and phone fine and making do with 1.5 readers for books. Jury still out on the all-important distance acuity. Hoping the new prescription (see above) will give me the sharpness and clarity I was hoping for.
About the photo above… For the last two months I had to wear special UV glasses whenever awake. Today at one o’clock I can ditch them. New glasses will arrive in ten days.
AI has hacked the code of human civilization (Yuval Noah Harari)
“The job that was once performed by Lenin and Mussolini is now performed by AI.”
Yuval Noah Harari lecture at Oxford University (YouTube description): “Human domination relies on large-scale cooperation among strangers, which is sustained by bureaucratic systems – such as laws, finance, religion – designed to build trust. Since AIs are ‘native bureaucrats’, they can effortlessly remember all laws, transactions, and scriptures far better than any human. This leaves AI uniquely placed to take over critical processes, such as granting bank loans, deciding university admissions, determining prison sentences, and executing military strikes. Are we prepared?”
Harari’s vision of the AI future seems most on-target to me.
How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi
From an article in The Atlantic (that is behind a paywall):
“The (British) health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680.”
From my dentist friend, Bob:
No wonder so many come to the states. Have a good friend who is one of two radiation oncologists at (a local hospital) who just retired. The other oncologist told (the hospital administration) since he was now the only one that he wanted a salary of 1.4 mil. They told him see ya! They’re now looking for two. Pay much better in US but some are really greedy.
SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Go USB Type-C flash drive
128GB capacity. It will be used to store back ups of this blog (>6,500 posts and a couple thousand media files) as well as KBOA830.com and The Basement Diaries.
Putting a face on AI
I have resisted (for the most part) anthropomorphizing the AI tools I use. But it’s getting harder. I think of Claude as male (my maternal grandfather was named Claude); Gemini seems genderless; and Perplexity is female because the voice I hear on my iPhone and with CarPlay is feminine.
Dave Winer asked ChatGPT for an image of a ChatGPT talking head. 
I prompted Perplexity to do the same. (below)
The ChatGPT image is closer to how I picture Perplexity. I think I can resist thinking of these tools in human terms but it is getting more and more difficult to think of them as just software.