Blog Tweaking

The left sidebar now includes a random picture that changes on a daily basis. The right sidebar now includes my linkblog. Clicking on a link takes you to a page where I might have a few comments about the link. From there you can get to the original post by clicking on the title.  

Insider Trading is Nothing to Brag About

This has been going on for decades and the only people who can legally stop it are far too busy profiting from it.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his wealth managers executed nearly 28.7K security transactions in the 17 months following his second inauguration—outpacing all members of Congress combined
   - from Seeking Alpha

A Beautiful Day In Peachland 

I'm attempting to catch up on my reading for the men's book club I've joined. We're reading Lonesome Dove. I've heard it's a great book but I've never read it.  I've also heard the miniseries from the 90s is incredible but, again, I haven't seen it. I'll plan to watch it after finishing the book. I'm a bit surprised that the author of such a seemingly masculine book (Larry McMurty) also wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain.

We ended the day with dinner at 19 Bistro, a gorgeous place. Capped off with a tasting at Crown & Thieves (my favorite winery in the Okanagan) and a very cold plunge in the lake.

Why are AI Companies Warning Us About AI?

As I write this there has been a surge in AI doomsday warnings, started by a researcher from Anthropic. Several other CEOs and AI execs began piling on, echoing many of the warnings that had previously been expressed.

"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (opens in new tab) wrote that he thinks AI could decimate national security. OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki (opens in new tab) has talked about AI agents potentially turning against humans. Elon Musk (opens in new tab) said it could “kill us all,” Mark Zuckerberg (opens in new tab) warned it could contribute to mass surveillance and tyranny, and Bill Gates (opens in new tab) said it could quickly wipe out industries."
    - from The San Francisco Standard

This seems very strange - why would companies warn consumers against using their products? My BS detector is tingling - something doesn't smell right here. So why is this happening?

The executives warning us about AI’s threat are trying to program us into believing how powerful and critical to society AI is, justifying potentially massive valuations before their initial public offerings (IPOs). The more people believe AI is extremely powerful and has a massive positive impact on society, the more likely AI IPOs will skyrocket. These guys act like they're being good citizens warning us about the risks of AI when they are far more concerned about their IPO valuations (especially given the rising backlash over the ROI of AI). There are already laws in place to guard against the release of potentially dangerous products. If the AI companies were truly concerned about the risks they would halt their pending IPOs and take these dangerous products off the market.
The people warning loudest about AI risk are, almost without exception, the same people whose net worth, company valuation, and public standing depend entirely on AI being seen as enormously powerful and consequential.

This reminds me of a story about an incredibly brilliant guy who invented something decades ago that impacted society far more than AI ever will. He then gave it away for free so anyone could use it.
My, how the world has changed.
Thank you, Tim.

When you put all your eggs in one basket don't be surprised when they are broken

Is anyone truly surprised that a monopolistic provider detrimentally impacts its market?
According to Downdetector, 30 percent of users reported problems with AWS, citing issues involving Amazon EC2, the service that provides virtual servers for websites and applications.

Another 29 percent reported problems with AWS’s US-West-2 region in Oregon, where Amazon confirmed it was investigating connectivity failures. A further 23 percent cited issues involving US-East-1, the company’s Northern Virginia region.
Source: https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16002517/internet-cloudflare-major-websites-outage.htm...

Bear Encounter

I was out for a walk this morning with my mother-in-law when we came upon a bear on the side of the path. We couldn't have been more than three to four feet away from it.
it jumped up a tree and looked at us. I think we might have scared it more than it scared us.
I hope I never get that close to a bear again.

An Article About Eliminating Paywalls is Behind a Paywall

Tim Berners-Lee’s article calling for the elimination of paywalls is ironically behind a paywall (not likely his choice). You can read the article for free here.

Debating with Claude

I installed the Claude app on my phone so I could have a debate with it while I made lunch. It's a fun toy but its biases quickly become obvious when you try to debate things that disagree with its founders views.

Almost Done

My wife and I have been enjoying evening watches of Better Call Saul, a prequel to Breaking Bad. I personally think BCS is a far better show than Breaking Bad. My wife never saw BB and loves BCS, We just finished season 4 and only have two seasons left. This makes me sad since there are very few shows that can match BCS in terms of writing, cinematography, and direction. This show was wonderful.

I Built My Own Rich Text Editor (and You Can Too)

I recently got my old Known (now Idno) blog back up and running. I ran into a genuinely broken TinyMCE integration in the current build. Rather than wait on a fix, I built a small custom editor to replace it. 

The error: $(...).tinymce is not a functionmeans the rich text toolbar never loads, no matter what theme or page you're on.

Instead of fighting the bug further, I wrote a lightweight editor using nothing but plain JavaScript and the browser's built-in document.execCommand API. It includes:

• Bold, italic, headings, blockquotes, links, and lists
• A custom "floated image" feature for small inline graphics 
• Keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, Ctrl+K for links, Ctrl+Shift+. for blockquotes, and more)
• A raw HTML toggle for anything the toolbar doesn't cover

It hooks into Idno's theme override system — specifically the shell/footerjavascript template hook — so it layers on top of the existing install without touching core files. If you're running into the same TinyMCE bug, I filed a bug and posted my fixes to GitHub if you need them.

I'll post more soon about the other IndieWeb tinkering I've been doing with idno — a FeedLand-powered blogroll, paragraph-level permalinks, and more.

This was also posted to the Reddit Dumb Phones and Flip Phones communities.

I was unable to find a decent calendar app for a flip phone that synced with Google Calendar so I built my own.

This is a fully DPad navigable native Android calendar app for de-Googled flip phones. The calendar syncs with Google Calendar and no Google Play Services are required.

There are no ads and I don't make any money from the app. The app doesn't share any of your info The full code is available on GitHub at the links below.

This is a simple tool I built for my TCL Flip 2 and thought others might find it useful. This app should work fine on other flip phones as long as they are jailbroken and running AOSP 11.

NOTE This app will not work on flip phones running KaiOS.

You can get the app (APK) here: https://github.com/jevdemon/flip2calendar/releases.

To install see here: https://github.com/jevdemon/flip2calendar#installation

Before using the app you’ll need to setup Google OAuth for your account – follow the instructions here: https://github.com/jevdemon/flip2calendar/blob/main/README.md#google-oauth-setup-required

NOTE: If you need to jailbreak your AOSP-based flip phone I suggest consulting one of the many online guides such as this one: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-MIkXxDkNXKJvHGgAItGbsWlFX1xQ2j5q-o0eOtPYNk/mobilebasic and https://github.com/neutronscott/flip2/wiki. These guides are not for flip phones running KaiOS.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Feedback welcome.