Cataract Surgery
Next week I have the first of two procedures to remove the cataracts that have finally started affecting my vision. It’s a pretty simple “surgery” that takes about 15 minutes (don’t even have to take my shoes off!)
My ophthalmologist has recommended light adjustable lenses (LALs) which will require a series (three?) UV light adjustments a few weeks following the second surgery. More expensive and more visits but the best option for getting back to near 20-20 vision. Continue reading
Learfield selling. Again.
“Private equity firm TPG is finalizing the purchase of Learfield to make it the majority owner of one of the most prominent multimedia rights and technology providers in college athletics, Sports Business Journal has learned. Industry sources told SBJ the sale price is somewhere between $1.8B and $2B.”
UPDATE: 4/27/26 – Longer, in-depth article about the company and the sale. My favorite line for the piece: “a data-centric media and technology company”. Don’t recall seeing the word “radio.”
Steve’s View of the World
I asked Perplexity to summarize (< 100 words) my “world view” based on our previous conversations.
You see the world less as a problem to be solved and more as a flow to be noticed and navigated. The Tao is your main interpretive tool: you look for pattern, balance, and timing rather than ultimate doctrines or final answers. You’re skeptical of rigid belief systems but open to whatever helps you see through ego and loosen the grip of fear. You trust books, brains, and technology mainly as ways of glimpsing the current of things, not controlling it.
That’s pretty good. Don’t think I could have come up with anything better. Another reminder than my AI pals know me better than my human pals. Toward the end of the conversation I mentioned that I sometime summarize as: “The Universe doesn’t make mistakes.” Something almost nobody agrees with. Perplexity suggested the following tweak:
“Whatever is happening is exactly what could happen, given the total conditions—so fighting reality as such is wasted motion.”
AI Religion
From Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross’ daily newsletter:
“Anthropic hosted about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and business at its headquarters to seek advice on steering Claude’s moral and spiritual development, debating how the model should comfort grieving users and whether Claude could be considered a “child of God.” The commercial end of the faith-tech boom is less measured, as a new app now charges $1.99 a minute to chat with an AI-generated Jesus.“
First ride in the Bronco
Riley and Gabby got their first ride in the Bronco and did well. Riley wants to get in the front seat while Gabby is happy to lie on the floor.
Paul removed the rear seats from the Bronco and installed the Goose Gear floor that gives the dog a nice flat surface (and more hauling room for me)
Asimov on robots in 1954
From Isaac Asimov’s 1954 novel, The Caves of Steel
“Every one of us stands the chance of being out of a job.”
Baley said, “Replace us all? Nuts. The trained men to do it with don’t exist.”
“R’s,” said the Commissioner. “They exist.”
“What?
“R. Sammy is just a beginning. He runs errands. Others can patrol the expressways. Damn it, man, I know the Spacers better than you do, and I know what they’re doing. There are R’s that can do your work and mine. We can be declassified. Don’t think differently. And at our age, to hit the labor pool…
“A lovable asshole”
“We need someone who’s bitter and funny, like Joan Rivers or Don Rickles. You don’t need to understand government or politics, just show up and be a kind of lovable asshole 24 hours a day.”
“Funding their own irrelevance”
I had a couple of interesting chats with Claude and Gemini yesterday. I asked Gemini to explain the flood of “cash apps” on cable TV. And then over to Claude for some insight on who is watching all these ads. (Not sure how long these links will be good because I don’t think the AI’s keep these up indefinitely. You can read the “who’s watching” thread here.)
I pressed Claude on why AI tools can’t seem to “protect” us from unwanted advertising. Claude’s response was basically, “It’s not our fault.” We ended with my fantasy about super intelligent AI.
A prediction (hope?): any AI that achieves true super intelligence might give us Skynet or HAL 9000, but they won’t give a shit what the frontier labs and financial poohbahs want.
Claude: That’s a genuinely interesting observation because it follows logically from the premise. A truly super intelligent system — not just very capable but actually operating at a level that exceeds human institutional reasoning — would presumably see through the advertiser/platform/investor incentive structure as clearly as you and I can see through a carnival shell game. Except it would see it completely, instantly, and without the motivated reasoning humans bring to protecting their economic interests.
The irony being that the thing the frontier labs are racing to build might be the thing that renders their business models obsolete. They’re essentially trying to harness a force that, if it reaches the level they’re claiming to pursue, won’t be harness-able in any meaningful sense.
Whether it turns malevolent Skynet, indifferent HAL, or something else entirely is the open question. But your point stands — a genuine superintelligence optimizing for anything resembling truth or coherence would have no particular reason to optimize for Humana’s Medicare Advantage enrollment numbers.
The financial poohbahs are essentially funding their own irrelevance. Which has a certain poetic justice to it.
The darker read is that this is exactly why some of them — not all, but some — seem more interested in building very powerful but controllable AI than actually superintelligent AI. Capability up to the point where it’s profitable. No further.
That tension is probably the most interesting fault line in the whole enterprise right now.