Via @adactio Your website won’t appear in search results unless you explicitly opt in. Your website will be used as training data unless you explicitly opt out. 🔗 The 411)

Via The Information News: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that xAI’s Grok will join Google’s Gemini as the second frontier AI model on GenAI.mil, the Pentagon’s internal generative AI platform. The integration, set to go live later this month, will give 3 million military and civilian personnel access to Grok’s capabilities across both classified and unclassified networks — even as the model faces mounting international criticism over safety failures.

🔗 Daring Fireball: Jackass of the Week: Elon Musk I dunno John - just ‘Jackass’ works just fine.

🔗 A culture where only seeing is believing. is an interesting read from Mathew Ingram - but doesn’t this also mean that this particular culture has no understanding of history and even a lot of geography?

🔗 Keeping the Light On - Doc Searls - do read. 🖇️ Used this quote before. There cannot be life without death, it is inescapable. 💬 Keisei Tagami .. and as I have said myself death defines life.

Today’s Surprise From History - 🔗 Filling in some Burbank history. 🖇️🔎 Other Surprises

🔗 One From Patrick I watched a young man get snatched by ICE outside yoga this morning. I filmed the whole thing. His name is Lucio Fabian Navos Nietos. I know this because they just left his passport and all other identification in his car. And left his car. They don’t care who he is. They will deport him anyway. 🔗 A Follow Up From Patrick If in my last post one were to replace the word “ICE” with “SS” and an obviously Jewish name with an obviously Latino one and imagined him being put on a train instead of a plane… There is no difference.

Laura Karen Ingram is upset by protestors wearing masks - but seems to have no problem with ICE doing the same. 🤷🏻‍♂️

🪦 Weir all sorry to see you move on to the great gig in the sky Bob. Thank you for your earthly contributions.

🔗🎵 ”The most influential prog band", according to Geddy Lee Not wrong IMHO.

Today’s Surprise From History - 🔗 Back in 2018 I wrote a series of ‘true life’ stories about people I randomly met - this is Benjamin’s 🖇️🔎 Other Surprises

Based solely on the prosecutor’s testimony, the defendant would likely be found guilty of multiple charges related to the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, facing a potential total sentence of 5 to 13 years.

🔗 Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards – Pixel Envy Hard to disagree as to how rules are not being applied consistently …. Quelle surprise❗️

🔗 Thought Shrapnel I have no idea if I’m neurodivergent. I don’t think I’ve got ADHD, and all men are probably on the spectrum somewhere. Who’d want to be neuro_typical_ anyway? My bold - but would surely explain a lot in this household 😂

Just pulling some history to day after reading 🔗 Room temperature from Seth. Stable systems regress to the mean. Things level out on their way to average, which maintains the stability of the system. The same pressures are put on any individual in our culture. Sooner or later, unless you push back, you’ll end up at room temperature. 🖇️ Me - July 2024 - We Are Being Forced To Conform

Today’s Surprise From History - 🔗 From 8 years ago - you say complacent - I say complicit 🖇️🔎 Earlier Surprises

[🔗 My morning’s peruse of my RSS feeds was ‘chokka’ with great @gruber words](https://john.philpin.com/2026/01/10/john-gruber-at-daring-fireball.html) … and then ‘other people’ writing about ‘great @gruber’ This is the latter from 🔗 Anil Dash Not about Gruber per se - all about Markdown - but in so many ways written as a dedication to JG and a really great primer/history on it. Well worth a read. Final paragraph The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free.

🔗 The Genius Whose Simple Invention Saved Us From Shame at the Gas Station - WSJ Paywall … but am sure it is on Apple News … if you have that access. Sharing because I was driving with my friend Cliff a few months ago - stopping for gas - and couldn’t recall what side my filler cap was. What does the arrow say .. asked Cliff … 🤯