Interesting things to share with the smart people that I know
Reading this piece on The End of Google, I couldn’t help but think this is the end of Web 2.0. If you are wondering — or have even forgotten — about Web 2.0, a refresher is in order. According to wikipedia: “Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease … Continue reading On the end of Web 2.0 and possibly…
I can’t say that work is changing more in this decade than other decades. I can say two major forces have hit many workers in this decade and the impact of those forces have made work challenging for workers, to say the least. The first major force was the pandemic. While many people have returned … Continue reading On work in the era of AI and the pandemic
I see that Amazon Prime is coming out with a TV miniseries based on what is happening in the Blade Runner universe in the year 2099. I have watched the trailers and they seem….fine. You can see details on the upcoming series, here. More here and here. Personally I would have liked something more like … Continue reading Blade Runner: 2099 or Blade Runner: 2048?
It’s been a year since I wrote about New York City and two years since I’ve visited. Who knows when I will be back. I do know I still love to read about it, which isn’t hard, since it’s often in the news. So here’s my annual post on NYC, brought to you by the … Continue reading M is for Midtown and Manhattan and Mamdani (and much more)
If you are Canadian, chances are you have the day off today. Maybe you have no great plans other than to hang out in a hammock or beach yourself somewhere. And that’s fine. But if you are someone like me who likes to be productive even with down time**, then perhaps you’d like to not … Continue reading What to do on a day off
On July 21st OpenAI published this piece about how they and Hugging Face partnered to address a security incident during model evaluation. Like many people, I was shocked by the news of how agents at OpenAI broke out of their secure environment and attacked the Hugging Face site. Later, though, in reading other pieces, I … Continue reading On how OpenAI lost control of an AI Model that ended up…
It is an odd time to be a Canadian, located north of Trump’s America. As in previous months, Trump has stepped up his attacks on his neighbors to the north. And as before, he’s slamming more tariffs on Canadian goods, this time due to the smoke from the forest fires, he says. Who knows? Here’s … Continue reading On fires and bridges: Canada and Trump’s America
It’s an odd thing, what Emily Wilson did in writing this piece, An Uncomplicated Man, for the London Review of Books. Suddenly the discussion of Christopher Nolan’s new film turned into a debate on whether or not Nolan gets the history right. I want to delve into the second part for a bit. It’s a tricky thing … Continue reading The odd bun flight about The Odyssey, the Sea People, and the Bronze…
Fashion can be many things, from frivolous to functional, with stops in between. Here’s a dozen plus fashion links that center on the functional, the famous, the frivolous and more. Functional You don’t get more functional than this: Artemis III Astronauts to Wear Prada Spacesuits Also functional, though less other worldly: Everything We Loved From Kirkland … Continue reading From Prada Space…
Thanks to the good folks at Yanko Design (and some others), I’ve pulled together a list of interesting links over the last year that touch on the topic of design (e.g., smart phones) and interior design (e.g. chairs). Devices: Let me start off with devices. Some IT based, some not…. I was impressed by this: A … Continue reading A mouse, a house, and an inflatable chair (what I am interested in…
Like many Canadians, I’ve been wondering why the price of beef is so expensive. This article from the CBC explains why. To summarize the article: supply is low, demand remains strong, production costs are soaring, and the processing network is highly concentrated with inter‑provincial regulatory. Canadian farmers need to growth their herd sizes, but it … Continue reading On the high cost of…
I have seen a consistent set of issues when it comes to DevOps implementations. The issues are: Clients say they are emploing a DevOps lifecycle, but it’s more the case they are simply doing continuous integration and deployment (CI-CD) supported by an associated tool chain. Many times the Dev (development) teams are separate from the … Continue reading On using game theory to better understand…
Is this the beginning of the decline and fall of OpenAI and their leader Sam Altman? I thought that recently, when I read how Apple was suing OpenAI for supposedly stealing its secrets. And that’s not the only lawsuit against them: the New York Times and other media companies are also suing them for theft. … Continue reading On the decline and fall OpenAI?
Every year I like to let go of these links I wanted to write about but never found a way to and likely never will. They’re interesting still. Last year it was 60 or so. This year it’s a little less. A few travel stories I liked were this, 21 US airports that let you … Continue reading On parenting, getting older, torture, and being useless (i.e., interesting things I wanted to write about and…
By accident I came across this article in Jstor on the Cagots, the forgotten untouchables of France. They suffered discrimination for many centuries, but no one knows seems to know why, although there are many theories. They were erased as a group from France through assimilation, even though up until the beginning of the 20th … Continue reading On the Cagots
I have not published a Friday Night cocktail post in some time. Possibly because I have been drinking much fewer cocktails than I did a few years ago, especially during the pandemic. While I have enjoyed many different cocktails in that time, my preference tends to be a martini, which I have often posted about … Continue reading Friday Night Cocktail: the Lower-Alcohol Dirty Martini
I get why popular restaurants don’t want to take reservations. Case in point, the very popular Chubby Fish restaurant in Charleston, S.C. According to this piece: Chubby Fish doesn’t accept reservations because London (James London, Chubby Fish chef and co-owner) doesn’t want the restaurant to be exclusive. The goal is for people to be able … Continue reading On the problem of popular restaurants…
The first half of 2026 is done. I was planning to write a recap over what has been happening since December, when I posted my last newsletter. Today I decided to change that plan. I’ve been posting newsletters regularly since my first one in March 2020. Back then, they were monthly: lately they’ve become biannual. … Continue reading Pressing pause on the newsletter (i.e. what would have been the…
I realized recently that Halls cough drops do more than assist with a cold. They also assist with your mental health! These are some of the phrases I’ve captured on the wrappers than come with each lozenge: Lots of good encouragement there. And the exhortations are in English and French. Formidable! 🙂 Kidding aside, I … Continue reading Things are tough? You need Halls as a coach!
I have been playing the New York Times Crossplay game against the computer in hard mode and most of the times I win. Here’s what I’ve discovered: These have been my observations. Give that, to increase my chances of beating the computer, I will: I say most of the time I will beat the computer … Continue reading How to win the New York Times Crossplay game against the computer in hard mode (June…
While I have written a fair bit about cleaning on this blog — a chore I do not like — today I want to share something different, how not to clean. Specifically, 7 TikTok cleaning hacks to avoid according to The Washington Post. Some of the hacks are a waste of time, others could potentially kill … Continue reading How not to clean your house
I became interested in the topic of peppercorn rent when I read how the English Royals use it. That lead me to reading these two pieces (Peppercorn Rent: A Comprehensive Overview and What Is Peppercorn Rent – and why is it in the news?) I recommend them both. That topic lead me to think of other … Continue reading On nominal amounts
Just wanted to add a small note on SpaceX and the insanity around it all. Paul Krugman and others have been dismissive of the value of SpaceX. Is it a meme stock? Is it a scam? I can’t say. I can say this. The value of SpaceX allows Musk to deploy his Mongolian Horde approach … Continue reading A small note on Musk and SpaceX and the Mongolian Horde Approach
Over on his Substack, Paul Krugman makes the case for Elon Musk being a Ponzi Scheme. He says: “We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human … Continue reading On Ponzi Schemes
If someone makes the following business prediction: event X will happen in 5 (or more years) think to yourself: they absolutely have no idea. As I said in an earlier post: For any business prediction, the time frame determines the probability. If they say in a year, they either are doing it themselves or someone … Continue reading Bernie’s rule of business predictions of 5 years (or more)
The New York Times asked experts to “share the literature that has helped them cope with death, illness and despair” and the result was this article: 5 Books to Lift You Up During Life’s Hardest Times (gift link). You may have these or have heard of them already: ‘Being Mortal,’ by Atul Gawande ‘Meaty,’ by … Continue reading Books for reading when you’re going through hard times
Ok, technically the IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch was better than 150 extra engineers. I can’t provide you with one of those, but I can provide you with this list of links on what I find interesting in tech lately (besides AI, which I have posted on separately since it is a big topic in … Continue reading What’s better than 150 Extra Engineers? This blog post! (What I find interesting in…
When it comes to AI, there are 1) lots of people doing practical things with AI and 2) lots of people writing about AI. They rarely overlap. 🙂 But overlap they do in this post! For those of you not doing practical things with AI, skip to the second section. 1) Here’s a bunch of … Continue reading AI: what people are doing and what people are saying (June, 2026)
As a frustrated artist, I not only gather links about artists, but I also gather links about art. Here are just some of the ones I’ve picked up recently: If you want to be an artist, it might be good to ask established artists what their thoughts are. Artsy.net did a series on this, … Continue reading How to be an artist, how to do art, and what art can do for you
Here’s the latest edition of #theartsonwednesday, a mini-newsletter within my blog highlighting recent stories on visual artists new and old that I’ve found interesting: I love the work of Keith Haring. What I didn’t know was I would love his Ordinary, Extraordinary To-Do Lists. They are a great look into the 1980s art scene in … Continue reading From the todo lists of Haring to the cutouts of…
Paul McCartney is everywhere, it seems. He played 2 big shows in LA in March. He was at the recent closing of The Late Show with Steven Colbert. Not only was he a big part of the 50th anniversary celebration of SNL, but he closed out the 51st season. Now he has a new album … Continue reading On the ubiquity of Paul McCartney
I am not doing as much study in the area of math and science lately and haven’t written on the topic since last May, but I still found time to note these pieces and wanted to share them. A typical smattering of astronomy, physics, math, biology, what have you…. Astronomy Ask Ethan: Can we … Continue reading Back to Dirac (What I find interesting in math and science, May 2026)
Over the years I’ve developed a habit of writing politicians. I shared this habit with my friend Norbert and I after that chat I decided to share it here in case you want to develop a similar habit. If you want to write politicians like me, you need to know how to contact those pols … Continue reading On developing a habit of writing politicians
What are the best novels of all time? What about the best Shakespeare plays? And what do these two lists have in common? What they have in common is that The Guardian has taken a crack at both of them: The 100 Best Novels of all Time All of Shakespeare’s plays, ranked This is smart … Continue reading What are the best novels of all time? What about the best Shakespeare plays?
The minute I read this review by Pete Wells, I knew I had to go Libertine. I love a French bistro generally, and this one sounded especially good. On the night we went, everything about it was ideal. We snagged a lovely table near a window and had a waiter that bent over backwards to … Continue reading Restaurants loved and lost: Libertine in New York City, Rodney Scott’s in Charleston
I wanted to go back to the very beginning of blogging, where someone’s blog could consist of just a simple html page with maybe some images to go along with it. But I also wanted to have an easy way to update it. I’ve succeeded in doing just that, with the result visible here: https://berniemichalik.com/simpleblog.html … Continue reading How to set up a blog that’s just a simple html page
I could try to explain it beyond the title above, but without further adieu, I recommend you go experience HASU It’s really great, really smart.
It’s an exciting time to be a software developer. Exciting and weird. It’s exciting because of what developers are capable of doing with agentic AI tools from companies like Anthropic. It’s weird because as Clive Thompson writes: “In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming”. Yet while programmers … Continue reading On AI generated code and the DevOps…
I was feeling stuck lately. I thought I needed some goal or purpose to get me going again. But what? Lately when I’ve been stuck with personal challenges I’ve been turning to my own personal AI (i.e., Ollama running the LLM gpt-oss-120b), for advice. I asked the software: What are 3-5 goals I could set … Continue reading Microchanges: or how to get unstuck when you are stuck with the 10 minutes a…
If you had to buy only one ebook, I would recommend this one: 50 Masterpieces You Have to Read Before You Die. Coming in at just over forty thousand pages, it has the following: Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice Austen, Jane: Emma Balzac, Honoré de: Father Goriot Barbusse, Henri: The … Continue reading If you had to buy only one ebook…
Barbara Kruger once slammed some as “a ridiculous clusterfuck of uncool jokers”. I think of that phrase often, and I thought to apply it again when I read about Palantir’s manifesto on a recent thread on X. It’s easy to dismiss it as “the ramblings of a supervillian”, but I think there is something more … Continue reading A few thoughts on Palantir as dangerous uncool jokers
Every so often the debt of a country becomes a political issue and writers start cranking out pieces like this in the Wall Street Journal about how: “The U.S. national debt now exceeds 100% of gross domestic product, crossing a once-unthinkable threshold, on the way toward breaking the record set in the wake of World … Continue reading On thinking about the U.S. national debt exceeding 100% of the…
I’m been running gpt-oss-20b on my Macbook Pro for some time now. I typically run different LLMs on my Macbook using ollama as the basis for this. While I’ve tried various models, this model from OpenAI is the one I found that gave me the best answers to the questions I’ve been giving it. I … Continue reading On running GPT-OSS-20B on my Macbook Pro
I turned a certain age today. While I have been happy or at least ok with turning most ages, this one has been challenging. Perhaps because it has greater significance than most birthdays, in terms of how your life changes. Perhaps because it nails home the fact that I am old, regardless of how I … Continue reading On turning a certain age and how to approach it
As someone who struggles with keeping a clean house, I was drawn to the book, “How to Keep House While Drowning – A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing” by KC Davis. Some points in it that struck me: laziness is likely not the reason you are not cleaning your house…indeed laziness may not even … Continue reading On the book, “How to Keep House While Drowning” by KC Davis
Jack Dorsey, a rich man who many mistake for a smart man, wants to use A.I. to help eliminate middle management. According to this article: Jack Dorsey wants all 6,000 Block employees to report directly to him — with zero management layers — using AI to replace the coordination and oversight work that middle managers … Continue reading Will middle management survive AI? Jack Dorsey says no. Let’s…
You may not know it, but you are an expert. So am I. So are most people you meet. I was thinking about this when I was reading this piece by Amy Stewart on The Self Appointed Expert. I especially liked her templated approach: And this is exactly the template for becoming an expert in … Continue reading How to become an expert in your own way by adopting the Wirecutter way and Amy Stewart’s way
My reading has really dropped off since the pandemic. Perhaps that has happened to you as well. I’ve tried various ways to read more, but two things I’ve recently adopted that have helped me read more are the Libby app and the Bookbub site. The Libby app in conjunction with a library card from the … Continue reading Free or a small fee: Libby and Bookbub help make reading easier for me again
Previously I wrote about my top 10 desktop tools. Here’s what I would say are the top 20 tools (apps) I use on my iPhone. I use far more apps than I do desktop tools these days. I suspect others are like that too. NYTimes: Every day I wake up and check the news. And … Continue reading My Top 20 tools: iPhone apps edition (2026)
I think people benefit from seeing the tools other commonly use. Here’s mine: hopefully you’ll find it useful. A one on my iPhone apps will follow this post. Microsoft Excel: No surprise, but I use this every day. Specifically I have a master checklist in Excel that I use with supporting worksheets. One worksheet is … Continue reading My Top 10 tools: desktop edition (2026)