AI in America – A Critique

As someone who has worked in IT for… well, almost 30 years now, I have generally embraced new technology as it arrives. Certainly there have been trends in the industry that I have not been enthusiastic about at all, such as the domination of the software market by subscription models which require you to pay a monthly or a yearly fee. That trend has also led to software makers not selling software on a CD anymore, and that led to computer makers not putting CD-ROM drives in computers anymore. I am not a fan. I also dislike the trend that makes devices smaller and thinner at the cost of said devices not having 3.5 mm headphone jacks or ethernet ports or even many ports at all. It means that to connect things that used to be quite standard (like a printer, or a network cable) you now have to buy an adapter or a dock of some sort (unless it’s Bluetooth or wireless). And that’s annoying to me.

But the hands-down worst thing (in my opinion) that the technology industry has embraced in recent years is AI, or as the orange moron in the White House and his sycophants like to call it, SI [I don’t particularly care what he calls it and so I will continue to call it AI and risk the ire of Trump and MAGA everywhere]. There are a lot of reasons I dislike AI: it has been vastly oversold to the public in terms of what it can actually do accurately; it is costing a truly gigantic amount of money and so far has not shown much return-on-investment (in fact it seems to have all the makings of a big financial bubble); the technology is supposed to put a lot of people out of work, and many companies are already using AI as an excuse to trim their workforce; far too many people in the industry are pushing uses of the technology out without thinking of the constitutional, ethical, and legal implications of what it does (not to mention them not having any real plans to deal with the rapidly mounting instances of misuse of the technology); and finally, the tech CEOs and billionaires pushing all this absolutely DO NOT have the best intentions towards democratic societies, civilization, and the overwhelming majority of the human race. They are out for themselves and don’t care about democracy. They want to accumulate as much money and power as possible before everything falls apart. So no wonder they have embraced Trump so quickly. The speed at which data centers and AI-based surveillance technology is being pushed out in the United States should absolutely be cause for alarm, and not just because they cause a host of environmental problems as well as consume obscene amounts of electricity and fresh water. They also play a huge role in the domination of cultural and societal narratives on media and social media. That’s why some people freaked out so much when Ukraine destroyed Russian data centers. The attacks showed that much of the traffic on social media (and probably millions of Elon’s followers, for example) are actually bots. Traffic and number of followers determine things like ad revenue for social media platforms. The guy who used to go on and on about how he wanted to get rid of all the bots on the social media platform he wanted to buy actually benefits from millions of bot accounts on his platform because they pay monthly subscription fees to get blue checkmarks and as long as he gets paid and they drive the messages that he agrees with (and they most certainly do) he won’t do anything about them.

Also, AI has become such a huge part of surveillance technology that the cameras that use AI to help identify license plates (known as ALPR or ANPR cameras generally) have inspired a whole new social movement that is very anti-surveillance state: websites (such as deflock.org) dedicated to showing you exactly where the cameras are located; helpful instructions on how to fight the companies trying to put up the cameras in your community; some folks are just cutting all the cameras in their community down; some people are using expandable foam insulation to disable the cameras without even having to remove them; some people make signs with very long poles to block the cameras. It’s fascinating to see the creativity as well as the fact that people are all across the ideological spectrum in their opposition to the cameras.

But despite this encouraging collective effort against AI surveillance, some of the kids are not alright. There seems to be a growing trend in which young people are using AI for virtually anything and everything. And their parents, for the most part, have no idea what their kids are doing with AI. Kelly and I personally overheard a conversation in our little Vermont town between a parent and their tween-aged kid in which the kid insisted that AI was their friend. Kids, at least broadly, do not have the ability to determine the difference between real emotions and the emotions simulated by a chatbot. They don’t have the experience and judgment to question the answers AI gives them. And they certainly don’t realize that chatbots are basically intended to agree with you all the time because the designers made them that way to encourage more use. So AI will tell you that you are right even when it comes to encouraging destructive or suicidal behavior. Even AI bots specifically designed for mental health purposes have failed when dealing with suicidal users. Parents of tweens and teenagers who become emotionally dependent on AI bots, as well as those with younger kids should try to be wary and informed when it comes to AI and their kids’ interactions with it.

So if you want to use AI to do your homework for you, or if you want to hand your creative impulses over to it and let it do all your writing and thinking for you, be my guest, but don’t expect me to support you by enthusiastically embracing the technology and the slop that it generates as “literature” or “art” or anything of the sort. I think it’s crap. And I think that techbro billionaires would LOVE to not have to worry about paying salaries and benefits to human beings if they could just buy robots or AI tokens to do all the work instead. But I will keep insisting that my books and music and movies be made by people, and I hope society will ultimately agree with me.

-Geoff

Today in History – John Brown Leads Raid on Harper’s Ferry

On October 16th, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a group of followers in an armed attack on the U.S. Armory and Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Brown had hoped the attack would spark a slave revolt across the South, or at least cause many slaves to join him at Harper’s Ferry. But it seemed nothing went as Brown had planned. By the morning of the third day, October 18th, U.S. Marines under LT Israel Greene (overall commander of Federal forces opposing Brown was Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future Confederate general) stormed the engine house where Brown and the last of his men had fortified themselves. Of the 22 raiders, 10 were killed during the raid, 7 were captured and later hanged, and 5 managed to escape. Brown himself was badly wounded but survived to stand trial. Brown was tried in Virginia state court rather than a Federal court largely due to the intervention of Governor Henry Wise and the ease with which he convinced President James Buchanan. Brown was convicted after the jury deliberated for less than an hour. On November 2nd, 1859, after Brown gave a statement that became known as his “last speech,” he was sentenced to death by hanging. Due to Virginia law a month had to pass before the sentence could be carried out. In the intervening time, plans for a rescue were made by some abolitionists, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but none were carried out. That month Brown had hundreds of visitors, wrote over 100 letters (most of which were immediately published), and hundreds of letters were received by Brown, Governor Wise, and others connected to the trial. Brown’s trial was the first to be reported in newspapers around the entire country (even the West Coast) due to the recent completion of the transcontinental telegraph. Although newspapers everywhere reported on the event, only a few papers actually had reporters present, and at least one of those reporters went to great lengths to hide his identity from locals. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, the first person to ever be executed for treason in the United States. His funeral would take place on December 8, 1859, after his wife Mary had traveled with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and others to retrieve the body from Virginia and bring it home to North Elba, New York.

Kelly and I took a trip to northern New York in late November 2024 and had the opportunity to visit the Brown farm and see his grave. Note the snow already on the ground in November.

The grave, using the headstone Brown brought from Connecticut that had previously belonged to his grandfather who died in 1776. After that grave got a new headstone, Brown brought the old one to his New York farm.
Statue of Brown by Joseph Pollia that was erected in 1935.

As I get back into the habit of posting here in our blog, I will put up more pictures from our little day trips like this.

– Geoff

Some thoughts on the state of America

One of the things I have missed about regularly posting on our blog has been the ability to really work out my thoughts in writing, which is ordinarily not something I get to do much anymore. We don’t use social media much these days, especially since Elon Musk bought Twitter and then proceeded to wreck it. I am still on Twitter (I steadfastly refuse to call it X), because there are still good people on there and I refuse to let Elon and his troll mob chase me away. Kelly is on Instagram a good bit. But Twitter is not designed to really let you express yourself eloquently when you have to pay Elon money to write anything more than 140 characters long. And he has enough money, he doesn’t need any of ours.

The 2026 midterm elections are now less than a month away, and I am admittedly a bit apprehensive about what will happen. All hyperbole aside, this election is going to be immensely consequential because it may present the only chance the American public has to stop Trump and his enablers in Congress before the 2028 presidential election. Without even going into whether or not the 2028 election is going to happen and whether Trump will put himself on the ballot, I am just not sure how much damage will be done to the country by November 2028 to be confident that we can wait until then. Trump’s first term was bad enough. But after having four years to plan how they would do things differently if they returned to power, Trump and his supporters have been rapid and methodical in their destruction of America’s reputation on the world stage, in the erosion of our civil liberties, in the sheer scale and variety of the virtually open public corruption now happening, and in the reduction or elimination of countless Federal programs and departments (much of it through DOGE) that were designed to serve the public good. It will take decades, possibly generations, to repair all of the damage that is being done, and I think we don’t even know or understand the full scale of it all yet.

The Republican party essentially no longer exists except to support Donald Trump. It has become increasingly authoritarian and even less willing to tolerate dissent than before, which hardly seems possible. I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that Trump’s popularity of late has weakened considerably, but I worry that the Democrats, particularly among their leadership, may not measure up to the crisis that is building. Supposedly they are planning for all sorts of possible problems that may happen concerning the midterms. I sincerely hope so. I have great confidence in local and state officials here in Vermont. My confidence in the Democratic party at the national level is less than I would like. And I worry that there will be voters that, although they don’t like or trust Trump and his party, they may not feel great about the Democrats either. And that needs to change. People desperately want to see real results. I know we do. People need to feel like it is still possible to save our democracy and that the Democrats are able and willing to do so. I think that is what people want and need to hear.

-Geoff

Goodbye to a sweet kitty

I am a little late in posting this, as it happened a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to make a post about our cat Mabel. She was the older calico cat that we adopted about three years ago. She mostly stayed in her room, and so the person she interacted with the most was me. And she was daddy’s girl, in many ways. She loved to sit with me when I was reading. She also loved pets and cuddling near me in cold weather. We were really hoping that she would eventually be comfortable enough with the other animals to not just have to live on her own in her own room, but it just wasn’t meant to be. We know that Violet really wanted to be friends with her. I wish that had happened. Still, she was loved dearly, and we were happy to have given her a comfortable and loving home in her golden years.  We miss her already.

-Geoff

Mabel Hopkins-Michael 2013-2026

Massive winter storm on the way

This weekend promises to have both record-breaking cold and deep snow for us here in Vermont. We have an Extreme Cold Warning for tonight and tomorrow where the wind chill is expected to be 25 to 35 degrees below zero and a Winter Storm Watch where we are expecting total accumulations of snow from Sunday to Monday to be between 12 and 18 inches.

Of course, if you are a nimrod who doesn’t understand the difference between weather and climate, like the current occupant of the White House, you may ask “what happened to global warming?” But hopefully no one reading our blog is that dumb.

-Geoff

Hello, and long time no blog

Well, it occurred to me today that it has been a very long time (two and a half years – yikes) since either of us have posted anything here on the blog so I thought I would do something about it.

We have been steadily making changes and improvements to our house here in Vermont. The two most notable things done in the last year or so are 1) the clearing out of all the overgrown invasive species in the front, side, and back yards, and 2) the addition of a solar panel array to the house.

The solar panel array as seen this fall. Note also the lack of heavy vegetation in the yard.

So once I can remember how to properly post everything, I will put up some more posts.

-Geoff

160 years ago today, a young Union officer was killed on his birthday

December 29th, 1862. Young Major Adolph G. Rosengarten, temporarily in command of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, is killed while leading an ill-conceived charge on two regiments of South Carolina infantry concealed in a cornfield behind a fence at Wilkinson’s Crossroads, in Middle Tennessee. It was his 24th birthday. His second-in-command, an even younger (only 20 years old) Major Frank Ward, is mortally wounded in the same charge.

The 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as the Anderson Cavalry, was a unit with something to prove. The regiment had actually mutinied at the beginning of the Stones River campaign due to problems with the commissions of their officers, and so only 300 or so men from the regiment actually left camp on December 26th. But there was a great need for cavalry, and so those men were put at the front of the right wing of the army commanded by Major General William Starke Rosecrans to scout Confederate positions as the army advanced from Nashville to Murfreesboro. They skirmished with some cavalry from Texas at Nolensville on December 27th and then made contact with Confederate infantry on the 29th at Wilkinson’s Crossroads.

I will write up a bit more on this fascinating (at least to me) unit in another post when I have more time.

One reason I love this house – the fireplace

Doing some housecleaning today in the kitchen and the room next to it. The room next to our kitchen is kind of a warming room, at least that is how I look at it, but we also call it the library annex since it is next to the library and will, most likely, contain a number of bookshelves and lots of books.

The room’s most distinguishing feature is the mantle and fireplace. It is gorgeous. They literally do not make them like this anymore.

The most important function of this is, of course, to provide a place to hang stockings at Christmas time for our furkids.
The mirror just needs some cleaning, but otherwise is in great shape. Not sure how old it is, but older than us for sure.
Love these details. Beautiful.
The cast iron insert and cover, which are rare enough to be notable, were clearly designed for coal. Still, we should be able to build small wood fires in it.
Close up of one of the columns.

I can’t wait until the day I am able to make a small fire in there, and enjoy the space by sitting with Kelly while having a glass of port or Madeira and maybe some of the furkids warm themselves in front of it too.

~Geoff

Greetings, everyone, from our new home in Vermont.

As we had mentioned earlier, we had been looking for a house in Vermont for some time. We had been looking for months, and then a few days before Christmas last year, we put in an offer on this house. That offer was not accepted for a good while. That’s a long story.

Well. It has been a long, long time since either of us posted here. But to be honest, we really had a lot going on. After all, we packed up all our stuff, put it in storage, moved to a long-term hotel, found someone who could board both of our cats, cleaned out and fixed up the house in Winthrop, sold that house, looked endlessly for another house in Vermont, finally found it, put in an offer, waited for it to be accepted while we struggled to find others, got our offer accepted, then had to threaten to take the seller to court after he had signed the purchase and sale agreement and then changed his mind, moved to another hotel, finally closed on the house six months after our initial offer, found contractors, struggled to get them scheduled in a timely fashion, looked for new jobs, changed hotels again, found new jobs, started new jobs, moved into the basement of the house, got Vermont identification and car registration, and waited for all the contractors to finish their work so we could figure out when we could actually move into the actual house and not have to sleep on Army cots in the basement anymore.

And if you think that’s a lot, that’s really just the abridged version. We also lost our beloved Scratch Fury, who suddenly threw a clot, became paralyzed while boarding, and then rapidly deteriorated, so we had to quickly go see him while we still could.

Oh yeah, and I also had my left knee replaced, and had to undergo the surgery, recovery, and physical therapy while all this other crap was going on. Like I said, busy.

So anyway. We finally found the sort of house we wanted, in the village of Bellows Falls in the town of Rockingham in Windham County, nestled in the southeast corner of the state. This beautiful old Victorian was built in 1904, and came with a first-generation garage that was built sometime in the 1920’s. Both the house and the garage are part of the Bellows Falls Historic District.

The house, sporting its new roof. Please note the ridiculously overgrown foliage in the front yard.
The garage, which was clearly designed for a car the size of a Model T and would be a tight fit even for our Mini, Maisie. Also note the jungle-like foliage and distinctly NOT dachshund-proof fence and gate.

So there have been a LOT of projects here since we closed on the house in June. The first was replacing the roof on both the house and the garage. We also repaired (inside) and replaced (above the roof) the chimney.

Our gorgeous new chimney, complete with ornamental brickwork and chimney cap.

We also had the entire electrical system rewired, as it was largely still knob and tube, and while the electricians did that they also wired parts of the house for ethernet and for speakers. They even replaced some of the fixtures with pretty ones that Kelly and I had found on craigslist.org. Some were cheap, and some were free. Much shopping Kung fu on Kelly’s part.

The dining room, with the awesome new brass chandelier, painted walls, refinished floor, and original stained glass.

Also also wik, we had all the wallpaper taken down and we picked some lovely (and historically appropriate) colors for the walls. They really turned out beautifully.

This is the main bedroom upstairs, with painted walls and newly refinished floor.
The warming room (next to the kitchen), which we also call the library annex. Note the gorgeous mantle and fantastic cast iron fireplace insert.

There were also some other improvements made to the house, such as improving the half bathroom next to the kitchen and making some other adjustments and improvements to the plumbing in the basement. We also got a brand-new dryer (the old one died a sudden death, after popping the breaker a few times) and as of this weekend, we will also have a new kitchen refrigerator. The old basement fridge died within 48 hours of the dryer dying, and so we had the contractors move the old kitchen fridge to the basement to take its place. We also added a security system, which is nice for seeing when packages get dropped off. Seriously, it works GREAT for that. And we had gutters added to the house, because it didn’t have any for some reason. We also had to make some adjustments to the fence in the back yard, after Nymeria proved she was more than a match for it on several occasions.

So I will make a point of doing some follow-up posts to show you our progress.

~Geoff