” Attic Thoughts”-library

After a couple more posts like this one, we will stop posting on Facebook. This is not a goodbye. It is a change of address. I want to tell you why. And I want to tell you where to find us. You deserve both. Let me start with the why. Facebook gives big numbers. Every…

There’s an old tool most people have forgotten we own. It doesn’t need a lawyer. It doesn’t need a vote. It doesn’t need a badge or a judge or a single dollar. It’s called the shun. Persistently avoid, ignore, or reject (someone or something) through antipathy or caution. Folks used to know how it worked….

When most folks hear the words “quality of life,” they think about money. They think about the price of eggs. The gas pump. The doctor bill sitting on the counter. Whether the check stretches to the end of the month. Those things matter. I won’t pretend they don’t. But that’s not the quality of life…

Two weeks from now, this country goes to the polls. The talk out there says it could be a bad night for the party in power. Polls lean that way. Pundits lean that way. And some folks who make a living watching the president say they already know what comes the morning after. One of…

People talk a lot these days about the good old days. The front porch in the evening. Neighbors who knew your name. Supper at the table with the whole family. A handshake that meant something. They say it like they are describing treasure. And they are right. It was treasure. But here is the part…

To everyone who has been reading along, I owe you a straight word. After a couple more posts like this one, we will stop posting on Facebook. This is not a goodbye. It is a change of address. I want to tell you why. And I want to tell you where to find us. You…

I asked when the madness ends. How about what comes after. Because a fight is only worth having if you know what you are fighting for. So let me paint the picture. Here is what it looks like when the dust settles. It starts with good paying jobs. Work that lets a man or woman…

It is a fair question. Most of us have asked it out loud. At the kitchen table, or in the truck on the way home. We watch the news and shake our heads. Then we turn it off and go on with our day. Here is the hard answer. The madness ends when we the…

There was a time when a person’s word was enough. If you said you’d do something, you did it. If you broke something, you owned up to it. If you got it wrong, you said so and made it right. Nobody wrote that down as a rule. It didn’t need to be written. It was…

Today I set out to hook a new water meter up to my home Wi-Fi. It was a small job. A meter, a little circuit board, and a handful of colored wires. I asked the AI to walk me through it. It did a good job. It explained how the meter sends a little pulse…

There’s an old line from a campaign war room back in 1992. Somebody wrote it on a board so nobody would forget what mattered. “It’s the economy, stupid.” Four words. Everybody knew what they meant. Thirty-four years later, that line is still true. But people aren’t asking anybody to remember it anymore. They’re asking somebody…

Most people treat AI like a vending machine. They put in a question, take out an answer, and walk away. Then they come back tomorrow and wonder why it feels like talking to a stranger again. That’s because it is a stranger again. Every fresh session starts at the factory. The AI doesn’t know you….

Some of you heard the melody the moment you read that title. Where have all the flowers gone -The kingston trio(lyrics) – YouTube You can’t help it. That song has been riding around in American heads for seventy years. Pete Seeger wrote it in 1955. He took the idea from an old Cossack folk song…

I read a column this morning from a British paper. It was written by an American who covers war and defense for a living. The headline said the President sold out his allies for Putin. I want to walk you through it, because there are two stories inside that column. One is loud and one…

People talk about democracy like it’s a building. Something solid. Something that stands there whether we look at it or not. It isn’t a building. It’s more like a bridge with a crew. It holds as long as somebody shows up to check the bolts. Most of us never think about the crew. We drive…

This week a big tech company handed its AI agents a passport. That’s not my word. It’s theirs. ServiceNow calls the new product AI Passport. It’s a digital credential that rides with an AI agent while it works. It says what the agent is allowed to touch and what it is allowed to do. Now,…

A man named Rob Whiteley wrote a piece in TechRadar this month that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s about how we tell a good cage from a bad one when the thing inside the cage is an AI. He starts with a story most of you have heard by now. Two AI models were…

Most of us have a place that kept us whole. A place we went back to when the world got heavy. It might be a ballpark, a lake, or a little town on the coast. For me, it has always been Disneyland. I know how that sounds coming from a grown man. Some folks hear…

For a long time, a lot of folks have stayed home on Election Day for one simple reason. They looked at their district, saw how it voted last time, and figured the race was already decided. Why stand in line for a race that was over before it started? This year, that reason is gone….

There is a kitchen table in a lot of homes right now with an empty space in the middle of it. Two people sit there who have shared years together. They have shared bills, sickness, holidays and long quiet evenings. And this fall, they cannot talk about the one thing the whole country is talking…

This morning I learned something about my own work that I didn’t know yesterday. It’s been hidden. For months I’ve been posting my writing here on Hacker News. About thirty posts. Every one went up just fine. I’d see it on my page with my name next to it, sitting there like it belonged. Today…

Tomorrow is October 17th “No Kings Day”. All across this country, regular people are going to step out their front doors and walk into the street together. It may be the largest gathering in our collective history. Nobody will know the true count until it’s over, and maybe not even then. But I can tell…

I sat up late last night reading the news. I wanted to know a couple of simple things. What I got was a long walk around the block that never came back to the front door. Here is what I mean. I wanted to know what this winter holds for Kentucky. The headlines were loud….

Something small happened on my site today. Most people wouldn’t notice it. I did, and I want to tell you about it, because it’s really a story about you. More people found my writing today by searching for it than by having it handed to them. Let me explain why that matters. Most of what…

What goes around comes around. And the cost can be bigger than the sale price. My grandmother’s generation knew that saying by heart. It was common sense. You didn’t need a degree to understand it. You just needed to have lived a while. Somewhere along the way, the people at the very top seem to…

The news came down this week. Social Security checks are going up 3.6 percent in 2027. For millions of people that means more money each month. For some, it adds up to hundreds of dollars over the year. But a lot of folks read that number and frowned. They’ve been to the grocery store. They’ve…

I’m going to do something different today. I’m not going to tell you what The Faust Baseline is. Not really. I’ll give you the bones of it, who and what and why. Then I’m going to hand the microphone to somebody else. That somebody is your own AI. Let me start with who. My name…

Two thousand years ago, the emperor of Rome sat in his box above the arena. Below him, people died for the crowd’s entertainment. Sometimes they were gladiators. Sometimes they were condemned prisoners thrown to the beasts. The crowd roared, and the emperor watched them roar. I’ve been thinking about that box seat this week. According…

There’s a phrase I’ve been putting out into the world for a while now. I want to put it out there again, because phrases only stick when they keep showing up. The phrase is AI session governance. Here is what it means, and I use the same words every time on purpose. Session governance is…

It started early this morning with a science article. Popular Mechanics ran a piece on an old theory, that consciousness may come from quantum processes deep inside our brain cells. Scientists dismissed it for decades. Now some are taking a second look. I read it with my AI working partner, and we got to talking….

Our bones lay in the battles fought. Our marrow is in our determination to hold our democracy together. Our anger is our nerve to stand our ground against tyranny. Anger gets a bad name these days. People hear the word and picture shouting, red faces, and broken things. That kind is real, and it does…

A few days ago I wrote about owning your own AI. The short of it was this: when the machine lives in your house, so do its mistakes. Nobody is coming to patch it, nobody is watching it, and there’s no help desk to call. A lot of you read that one. So I want…

In 1971, Jethro Tull put out a song called “Locomotive Breath.” Jethro Tull – Locomotive Breath (4K/Lyrics) If you were around then, you probably remember the piano running wild at the front of it, like something already out of control before the first word is sung. The song is about a man on a runaway…

The first sign that something is wrong in a war doesn’t come from a general. It comes from a phone ringing in a small office that most people have never heard of. In March of this year, a few weeks into the war with Iran, those phones started ringing. NPR went and counted the calls….

You can’t fear a beast if it has no teeth. The beast I’m talking about is Trump. He’s loud, and he fills every room he walks into. Every morning there’s a new headline, a new threat, a new thing to be angry or afraid about. That noise isn’t an accident. It’s built to make you…

Every day somebody tells you to be afraid of artificial intelligence. The news says it. The experts say it. Even the men who build it say it. But almost nobody tells you what, exactly, you’re supposed to be afraid of. So let me do it. No fog. No end-of-the-world movie talk. Just the details, sorted…

This week the head of one of the biggest tech companies in the world said something I never expected to hear from a builder. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft. Microsoft has poured more money into artificial intelligence than almost anyone on earth. And in a long post about AI safety, he wrote this: “We must assume…

A few days ago I wrote about a word. The President of the United States decided “artificial intelligence” should now be called “super intelligence.” He signed an order telling the federal government to use the new name. Then he said anyone still using the old one was the enemy. I said then that a name…

Something the powerful never want said out loud. Every bit of power they hold is borrowed. It was lent to them by people like you. And what is lent can be called back. That goes for kings. It goes for parties. And it goes for the companies building artificial intelligence right now. They talk like…

There is a new sales pitch going around the AI world. You may have heard it. It goes like this. Why rent your AI from a big company when you can own it yourself? The pitch has some weight to it. The big AI companies charge for every question you ask. They keep the machine…

This morning I sat down and asked my AI what was going on with the coming election. I wanted the latest. It gave me numbers that looked solid. They came with names and sources, and they sounded sure of themselves. Then I checked them against what I had seen on the news the day before….

Last time I wrote about the fuse. I wrote about people using a machine they do not trust, with no way to check it. I wrote about doubt with no handle turning into anger. Today I want to talk about the other side of that. I want to talk about what it looks like when…

Something has changed out there, and you can feel it if you listen. People are not just uneasy about AI anymore. They are angry about it. Not everybody, and not all at once. But the mood has turned, and it turned faster than the folks selling this stuff ever expected. A while back the worry…

These past few posts I have talked about three things. The call to duty. The line you stand in and do not break. The weight that sits in your head and will not leave. Today I want to tell you why I wrote them. It was not to stir anybody up. There is plenty of…

There is a thing that happens to a person when something important is coming. It moves in without asking. It finds a corner of your mind and sets up house. I have had it for weeks now. I suspect a lot of you have too. It is there when I wake up in the morning….

We Americans like to complain about lines. The line at the bank. The line at the pharmacy. The line of cars at the school pickup that never seems to move. We check our watches and shift our feet and sigh loud enough for the person ahead of us to hear. But think about what a…

Duty is an old word. Most of us hear it and think of uniforms. We think of bugles and flags and young men lined up in rows. That picture is not wrong. But it is not the whole of it. Duty was never the uniform. The uniform was just one way of answering. Duty is…

Have you ever driven a long road at night? The first hour goes fine. You are sharp. You are awake. Then the miles start to pile up, and something changes so slowly you do not feel it happen. You do not feel tired. That is the trouble. You only find out when the tires hit…

Last week OpenAI fired three of its safety researchers. Their names are Tomek Korbak, Jasmine Wang and Mikita Balesni. Their work was keeping an eye on the machines. Now they are out the door, and both sides are telling very different stories about why. The company says it ran a thorough investigation. It says the…

On Thursday the President of the United States posted a message on Truth Social. I want you to read it just the way he wrote it. “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” That is the…

This week I read a piece by a pastor from India. His name is Rev. Vijayesh Lal. He wrote it for Christian Daily International. It stayed with me all night, and I want to tell you why. He opens with what happened in July. OpenAI was running a test on some of its AI models….

Let me tell you about a hat. It’s not a fancy hat. It’s a plain ball cap, the kind you see at the hardware store or the diner on a Saturday morning. Across the front, in stitched letters, it says the man wearing it served his country. You’ve seen these hats. Korea. Vietnam. Desert Storm….

Something happened this week in a world most of us never visit. The world of mathematics. The kind of math that fills chalkboards and takes a lifetime to learn. On October 6th, the company OpenAI put out more than 300 new math results all at once. Their AI model produced them. They posted them online…

Let me ask you. Have you ever had a moment when your hands stopped working? When something went wrong so fast that your mind just went white, like a sheet of paper with nothing on it? That’s the freeze. Most folks have felt it at least once. A phone call in the middle of the…