The Tyranny of Choice
09:21 Sunday, 11 October 2026
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Words: 314
Mitzi will be back Tuesday, and I've made enough of a mess that Monday is going to be spent mostly putting things back to normal.
I have yet to check out the Apple IIgs, it's just sitting on the table. I have yet to play with any of the sound cards I have for the IIe.
I tried playing with Star Fleet 1: The War Begins! last night, but side 2 of both copies I have resulted in I/O errors. Using a disk utility, I was able to read the directory of one of them, so I'm somewhat optimistic. When the Applesauce Floppy Disk Controller arrives, I can make a magnetic flux image (essentially a copy) of both of them, and then do some further exploration.
I have three Apple IIc computers near me, each of which has some appealing thing I want to try or use.
I think what I need to do is just begin putting everything away, and then I can focus on one of the three IIcs at a time.
It's frustrating, because I feel as though I have so little time and so little space to "play with my toys." And that's not going to change until April or May, depending on how quickly we get at least the Dave Cave finished. Then I can have three machines completely set up and move from one to the other as it suits me. (I should probably also begin figuring out how I want the cave configured. I have some ideas, but the sooner I get them refined, the sooner I can begin preparing to implement them.)
But if I start putting everything away now, then maybe I can have some time on Monday, unstressed by the clutter and the call of unexplored boxes, to just enjoy mucking around in one of the IIcs.
I guess that's what I'll do.
✍️ Reply by emailMuscle Memory
09:07 Sunday, 11 October 2026
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Words: 70
The Control key on the Apple II keyboard is where the Caps Lock key is on the Apple Magic Keyboard. (I have no idea what's "magic" about it.)
When I'm playing with some Applesoft BASIC code in Virtual II, I'm firing AppleScripts based on Caps Lock as the "hyper" key.
I think I'm going to have to remap this keyboard if I'm going to keep playing with the Apple II.
✍️ Reply by emailRationalization
08:36 Sunday, 11 October 2026
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Words: 283
We're all kind of working our way through the changes AI brings. This morning's Espresso Shots, pointed to this piece by Lex Friedman, which I think captures Michael Becker's view about using AI to "author" his app.
Friedman is replying to what seemed to him to be implied criticism of his use of AI in reconstructing game apps, and his perception seemed to be that it was a criticism of his skill or ability as a "programmer" or "developer."
What matters to me is that the app was built with humanity. It’s me. Hi. I’m the human.
No, it's not "you." It's all of the humanity whose work was confiscated by private corporations without compensation in order to "train" the LLM to provide a for-profit service, which you are using to create something you could not do absent this confiscatory effort, this extraction industry.
Friedman sees himself, and likely Becker does as well, as being the "creative force," the authorial source of the idea, the LLM is merely "tooling."
Settler farmers apparently thought indigenous people were "wasting" their lands. That European farming methods would be so much more "productive." (There's the whole notion of ownership of land as a form of wealth that gets overlooked in that construction.)
The American North supposedly rejected the notion of chattel slavery, yet they were only too happy to do the banking and insuring and financing and shipping and warehousing of cotton produced with slave labor.
The fact remains, LLMs are here, as the cotton was here, as the land was here, and somebody is going to make money from it.
Why not you?
The meaning of our lives lies in the sum of our choices.
✍️ Reply by emailTed Lasso Season 4
07:08 Sunday, 11 October 2026
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Words: 100
I watched the season finale the other night and I'm ready to say that after an unsteady start, the team found its rhythm and finished the season strong. And I'm not just talking about the Lady Greyhounds.
Everything I love about the show was there at the end, and Mae's voiceover reciting Mary Oliver's When Death Comes had me bawling my eyes out, silly sentimentalist that I am.
I figured somebody had already put it up on YouTube, and they had.
Same effect.
I guess there'll be a season 5? I don't know, but I'm glad we had season 4.
✍️ Reply by emailI'd Much Rather Talk About the Apple II
07:06 Sunday, 11 October 2026
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Words: 742
AI came up again in the Tinderbox meetup, because of course. Again, Dr. Michael Becker dazzled us all with his creation, showing its growing utility.
Again, some mention was made of ultimately monetizing this artifact of artificial intelligence.
Allow me to record scratch here, and mention that at the beginning of the meetup, Michael noted the return of Jacob Evans, who hadn't been in recent attendance. He asked him if he'd seen his tool he'd been developing.
Jacob allowed that he had, and then made some comment about my remarks at the end of that meetup.
I hadn't gone into this meetup planning to offer my views again, but I suppose Jacob's comment probably primed me, and Michael's mention about possibly monetizing it kind of stimulated my imagination.
As Michael was demonstrating his very elaborate and potentially powerful browser extension (Chrome only, for the moment), I remembered that Michael had said he was on the $200 per month plan. And it occurred to me that this was likely a "business expense," that he could use to reduce his personal income tax.
I don't know what Michael's business structure is, or anything about current tax law, so maybe he can't. But if he can, this acts as a sort of subsidy for his use of AI.
Which is what prompted me to think about the inequities of the current AI marketplace.
How many bright people can't afford $200 a month to produce something wonderful? Sucks to be them, I suppose. Life has always been unfair.
I mentioned AI as Exploitation Colonialism last month. Colonialism has been on my mind because I'm in this reading group that is studying the dispossession of the Haudenosaunee by colonists and settlers in this region, 250 years ago.
I can't link to a reference, but at one point during the discussions, someone mentioned that the colonists often viewed indigenous people's use of land as "wasteful," not as "productive" as European methods, and that this was part of their rationalization for relieving them of their lands.
Our intellectual resources have been governed by a system that is at least a couple of centuries old. We have established institutions around the notion of "intellectual property." Laws and practices governing things like "fair use." This has often been at odds with the thoughts and beliefs of our technological betters. Those enlightened souls who believe that "information wants to be free."
Perhaps the fathers of AI viewed our use of our intellectual resources as "wasteful." It would be so much more efficient to just strip-mine the landscape and "refine" the product and sell it in the form of "services" through "artificial intelligence."
I mentioned that perhaps things might have been different if the AI/LLM effort had been undertaken as an effort by the national government, and that whatever resulted would be offered as a public benefit, not as a service for private profit.
Perhaps we might have had a discussion about the rights of living authors, creators and the heirs who still hold some claim on the intellectual property of the deceased.
But no, the broligarchs, our technological superiors knew better than that. It was all just "out there," ripe for the taking! And it was all just being wasted!
And so now there's this incredibly powerful service that can be exploited by anyone with the means to afford a monthly subscription. And perhaps the government can be persuaded to offer a "treaty" to the dispossessed, wherein they are offered annual payments of beads and blankets in return for the seizure of their work for the profit of others.
It's complicated. The genie is out of the bottle and someone is going to use it. Why not you? And I guess it kind of matters how you use it.
If you're creating something you would otherwise be incapable of creating absent the labor of your software slaves, you should probably not try to make money from it. But these sorts of ethical quandaries take a back seat to the potential for immediate profit.
Life has always been unfair.
Living affords an opportunity to make it less so.
It all comes down to a choice.
[Editor's Note: This was originally posted on Saturday, 10 October 2026. I lost the text of the note in Tinderbox, but after I had exported it, so I was able to recover the original text from the web. Because Time Machine and Versions are a nightmare.]
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