Doug Jones

Pixel Area Check out this cool project to feature independent blogs! And see if you can find this website in the grid!

Finished reading: A Bold Return to Giving a Damn by Will Harris 📚 I’ve been on a bit of a White Oak Pastures kick lately. It started with seeing a local screening of Groundswell where Will Harris was part of the Q&A panel after the film. Coincidentally, a few weeks after seeing the film we were traveling to the Florida panhandle with the intention of stopping at White Oak. After the stop, started listening to the audiobook which tells the story of how White Oak converted from industrial cattle…

Introducing Claude Opus 5.5 \ Anthropic Because Opus 5.5 is comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, we’re deploying it with safeguards similar to those on Claude Fable 5.1. Vetted organizations can apply today to our Life Sciences Verification Program to use Opus 5.5 for biology research. In the coming weeks we will also be expanding access to our Cyber Verification Program, and verified cybersecurity practitioners will be able to use Opus 5.5 for their work. If it’s so…

Hearing the news of the OpenAI Hugging Face hack didn’t alarm me in the sense of “this is clearly the end of humanity.” But I couldn’t put my finger on why. Cory Doctorow provided the words I couldn’t come up with. Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is nothing. It’s something, all right: but it’s a specific something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory. Once you…

Finished reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 📚 This book could easily be interpreted as a commentary on AI, especially some of the quotes from the character Malcolm, who is very critical of science and scientific progress. Just take a look: “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone…

Finished reading: The Grid by Gretchen Bakke 📚

Currently reading: Count Zero by William Gibson 📚

Finished reading: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚 Good book, it’s really eye opening to see all the ways things have been enshittified. Going to have to think some about what part I can help to play in fighting back against this.

After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet. We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks…

Currently reading: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚

The lunar landscape of Iceland

We traveled to Iceland for my sister-in-law’s wedding, congrats Ginny & McKenzie! I wanted to share a few photos from our time on the island. Our rental car was a Chinese EV, a Hongqi compact suv. First time driving a Chinese built car! The landscapes around our hotel were amazing: We rode in buggies out to a glacier: A nearby waterfall:

Just turned on cross posting to Grain.social for images posted here!

Currently reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 📚 Re-reading Jurassic Park, last time I read it was maybe 20 years ago. Realizing now how much of a metaphor for the AI age it is.

Life finds a way.

Finished reading: Palaver by Bryan Washington 📚

Ghost Pipe flower (not a fungus!) spotted while hiking near Asheville, NC. Thanks Beth and Jonathan for teaching me about this plant!

How to Hate AI • Steve Simkins I read a blog post recently saying that it was ok to hate AI. While I agree to some extent, I think it was missing some key points about how to hate AI. It’s easy to just hate something you don’t like. We as humans have a natural propensity to hate or dislike things we are not familiar with. The problem is that this approach is akin to putting your head in the sand or screaming at the clouds; it doesn’t actually help anyone.

Nobody Pushed Back: Why Engineers Stay Silent Until It’s Too Late | How to Center a Div Someone walks through an architectural decision and nobody in that room actually agrees — they just act like they do, because saying what you really think is socially expensive. Meeting ends, decision gets made. Six months later production blows up and everyone says “we knew this would happen.” I wonder how AI is going to change this situation? Will it become harder to push back against something AI has…

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win. That contract is now broken.

Free stuff unintentional (?) still life.

Some photos taken outside Taos, NM from last year that I don’t think ever made it to the blog.

If you like classic Macs and home automation, you’ve got to check out the Cydintosh project: https://github.com/likeablob/cydintosh I assembled mine and it’s working great! It’s amazing to me that this little board is emulating a Mac while listening to events for weather data. What a clever project! If this appeals to you and you don’t have access to a 3d printer for the enclosure, reach out. I have plenty of PLA in this color to go around. :-)

BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea. Great essay by Nilay. It feels to me like the whole industry has forgotten about the “personal” in personal computer. I’m someone who loves computers, or at…

A few friends convinced me that I should give film photography a try so I took the plunge! The camera I chose is the Pentax K1000 which came with a 50mm f/2 lens. I wanted to find something that was completely manual/analog but still had a functional exposure meter and that’s exactly what the K1000 provides. With the exception of the meter, the camera is completely functional without a battery. It’s been an adjustment to photograph with full manual controls, including manual focus which I alm...

This barred owl lives in this magnolia tree right near our home!

Trump’s latest salvo to upend offshore wind: Pay firms… | Canary Media In its efforts to block U.S. offshore wind development, the Trump administration has halted project construction, rolled back tax credits, and spread misinformation. Now, in the latest maneuver, the administration is paying a global energy giant nearly $1 billion to walk away from its plans to install turbines off the east coast. On Monday, the Interior Department said it had struck a deal with France’s TotalEnergies, whi...

A portal in El Morro.

Finished reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 📚