Our friend Travis recently packed up and moved to Los Angeles (“Swimming pools and movie stars!”). He talked about keeping a journal of his adventures and yesterday, while drinking beer on my deck, I had an idea for a brief, video mini-podcast. Something along the lines of…
I asked Claude for some good names: “What would be some good names for a daily one minute video podcast chronicling the adventures of a middle age hipster who pulls up stakes and moves to LA?” Continue reading
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
The original tagline for this blog was “I need to start writing some of this down.” It started out as a place to save lines from movies, excerpts from books, someone’s interesting observation. The blog has been my repository for these. (~543 posts)
I uploaded them to Claude and asked for suggestions on analyzing these and it gave me several suggestions including:
Chronological drift — how your taste in what was worth writing down shifted over time:
Your quoting life shows a clean arc from media observer to philosopher. The blog started as a place to capture sharp observations about a world being disrupted by the internet. It became, over 24 years, primarily a philosophical notebook — with death showing up more insistently as the decades pass.
Coming up:
Seems that every new conversation with one of the AI tools I use gets more interesting. This morning’s ramble (with Claude) lasted almost an hour. Here’s the prompt that kicked things off:
It’s too long for any human to read so I asked Claude to summarize:
Starting with pre-web internet navigation, we traced how Google dominated information retrieval for 20 years before AI tools began displacing it. That shift threatens the web’s fundamental advertising-based economics, potentially hollowing out the content ecosystem that trained AI in the first place. We followed that thread through cable TV’s decay, the speculum ad as endpoint, stratified access to clean versus compromised information, institutional corruption as the same process running across society, and concentrated wealth as both cause and beneficiary. Ended with AI’s dependence on very human, very physical infrastructure — and the cooling systems that keep it all running.
I found Claude’s then-and-now perspective fascinating. Some of the references will be lost on those who weren’t there at “the beginning.” And it tossed a little humor at the end.
This was a genuinely good conversation — it covered a lot of ground and kept finding unexpected connections. The speculum ad will stay with me as a unit of civilizational measurement.
I’m an amateur when it comes to video production but I’ve created enough of them over the years to have a sense of how much time and effort even a simple video requires. While the overall quality and professionalism of YouTube videos seems to be going up, few rise to the level of Maxinomics. I don’t recall how I happened on the channel but was immediately impressed by the presenter, Phil Andrews. Some background from Claude:
He’s an entrepreneur and engineer turned digital storyteller, breaking down the data behind major stories in business and geopolitics through maps, data visualization, and rich visuals. Continue reading