{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "The Jackpot on Notes", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2026/01/43680.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/", "feed_url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/09/30/chatgpt-as-my-call-enter.html", "title": "ChatGPT as my call enter worker", "content_html": "

I read this via Michael Tsai today

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I’ve been using CharGPT as my go to tech support for different hardware and software issues. I’ve done it to be mostly helpful.

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I try to explain the problem clearly, what I want to happen, and what I’ve already tried. Then, I wrap up my prompting by explicitly saying, “please make sure you’re referencing the most recent documentation and making your suggestions concurrently with the recent documentation! In other words, check and make sure what you’re telling me reflects the current software/firmware, or a previous version.”

\n", "date_published": "2026-09-30T18:43:33-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/09/30/chatgpt-as-my-call-enter.html", "tags": ["Quotidian Studies","The Jackpot","Scrimshankering"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/09/26/ai-human-judgment.html", "title": "AI \u0026 Human Judgment ", "content_html": "

I was listening to this podcast while I was riding my bike this morning. One of the points that was made, which Feels very right to me, is that In a world where agentic AI systems become the norm, the things we should be helping our kids develop is judgment.

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My attempt to summarize what I heard in the conversation is this: AI systems are going to be very good at making a lot of information available to people. However, we can probably assume that unlike people, AI systems aren’t going to be worried about consequences, because they don’t have bodies that die or that can be incarcerated.

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Another way to say this would be that the stakes of making bad decisions, or acting in harmful ways, are higher for human beings than they are for agentic AI systems.

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Be that as it may, as agentic AI systems make more information available to human beings, there’s information could help human beings make better judgments that truly in better decisions/actions that affect other human bodies living in the real/material world.

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The crux of the argument was that judgment ultimately needs to be something that human beings don’t outsource to agentic AIs too often.

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Has I’ve continued to think about this, I think there are a lot of implications for education systems, and family systems, out of which are systems that encourage and discourage children from developing particular skills.

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I have four kids. What can I do as a parent to help them develop the best possible judgment skills?

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I suspect this is the thing that’s going to be on my mind a lot…

\n\"\"\n", "date_published": "2026-09-26T10:47:24-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/09/26/ai-human-judgment.html", "tags": ["Me!","Listening","The Jackpot"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/09/19/wait-is-that-accurate.html", "title": "Wait... Is that accurate?!", "content_html": "

Writing a reaction to an article in The Atlantic by Will Oremus, that doubts that Apple’s iPhone Duo is a good idea, John Gruber writes:

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I bet there are a lot more people out there who would rather have a $2500 iPhone and a $700 MacBook Neo than who would want a $2500 MacBook Pro and a $700 iPhone.

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So at first I read that, and I think, “Naw dawg.” It seems totally crazy to me that this accurately describes things as they are.

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But then I kinda think about it, and I’m like... Maybe...

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I know at least one person who has a work laptop that they use only for work stuff. (It’s rather locked down, and can’t easily be used as a personal computer) and uses their iPhone as their primary device for, like, almost everything.

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I use my iPhone for a lot, because it’s almost always on me, and it’s convenient. (I’m writing this post in iA Writer on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.) I prefer to use my MacBook Pro, but I love a life where I’m a parent to four small children, and sitting down at the computer to do something isn't something I do if I can do the same thing on my iPhone.

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Then, I think about people who use public transport... and how when I’m flying I usually use my phone to watch stuff, because, again, it’s easy and space-efficient.

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After that, I think about how I use my iPhone camera rather than a (better) separate camera because I don’t like carrying/reaching for a camera, and why would I when my iPhone camera is as good as it is?

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I also record audio for podcasts with a good mic going into my iPhone via USB-C rather than a good mic hooked up to my Zoom H4 or H6 via XLR cables.

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Anyway. I still feel that spending that much on a phone is crazy. Be that as it may, I’m less skeptical about Gruber’s point than I was before.

\n", "date_published": "2026-09-19T07:42:30-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/09/19/wait-is-that-accurate.html", "tags": ["The Jackpot","Maybe"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/09/18/ai-really-does-democratize-working.html", "title": "AI really does democratize working with machines in a way that", "content_html": "

AI, democratized work with machines

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In a post on his blog, Brad Barrish writes:

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AI really does democratize working with machines in a way that only trained developers could do. It’s incredibly exciting and so weird. It continues to thrill me and also really freak me out. I definitely have mixed feelings about it. That said, I don’t think it’s going to kill us all. I’ve learned not to bring it up with most people, though I do wish I could have nuanced conversations about it with people in my life.

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Yeah.

\n", "date_published": "2026-09-18T07:12:44-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/09/18/ai-really-does-democratize-working.html", "tags": ["Yeah!","The Jackpot"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/09/06/stagnation-in-the-face-of.html", "title": "Stagnation in the face of AI", "content_html": "

I read this on Dave Winer’s Scripting Newsthis morning.

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The siloers are probably scrambling to find a way for the AI to run inside their world, mistake – instead they should be trying to tear down the silo, and become the default version of whatever it was meant to be wrt the web. Both Bluesky and WordPress find themselves in the same quagmire. Probably a lot of others do, but this is the area I study.

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This is the intuition we all had, coming to fruition. Evolution is something we haven’t seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity – hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling.

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Dave is someone who’s work has fundamentally changed how I engage with information via RSS and podcasts. I think he’s on to something here.

\n", "date_published": "2026-09-06T07:48:38-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/09/06/stagnation-in-the-face-of.html", "tags": ["Reading","The Jackpot"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/08/28/via-manton-reece-who-is.html", "title": "On humanish robots", "content_html": "

Via Manton Reece, Who is blogging about watching humanoid robots compete in the robot games in China.

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I think small, special-purpose robots would’ve been a better path. R2-D2, not C-3PO. We imbue human traits in anything that looks humanoid, blurring our perception of the line between machine and sentient being. […] The future is going to be wild, and it appears too late to change the trajectory of robotics except with small, incremental corrections.

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Yeah.

\n", "date_published": "2026-08-28T08:42:36-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/08/28/via-manton-reece-who-is.html", "tags": ["Yeah!","The Jackpot"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/08/20/bingewatch-doomscroll.html", "title": "Bingewatch \u0026 doomscroll", "content_html": "

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

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It occurred to me the other evening that the bingewatch and the doomscroll are the same thing: a symptom of having given up control of your life.

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Yeah.

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Note:\nI realize I link back to Warren Ellis, and a few other people who produce work I enjoy. There are a few reasons for this.

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  1. Ellis posts often, and posts a lot of stuff I think is interesting.
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  2. I use this space (my blog/open notebook) as a way to capture things I want to remember.
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\n", "date_published": "2026-08-20T10:38:35-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/08/20/bingewatch-doomscroll.html", "tags": ["Yeah!","Reading","The Jackpot","Noticing"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/02/01/passion-analysis.html", "title": "Passion \u0026 Analysis", "content_html": "

From  Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams

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If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.

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Yeah.

\n", "date_published": "2026-02-01T12:34:06-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/02/01/passion-analysis.html", "tags": ["Yeah!","Reading","The Jackpot"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/01/31/aci-authoritarian-consolidation-index.html", "title": "ACI - Authoritarian Consolidation Index", "content_html": "

Discovered via E-FLUX Review 220

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Polybius: The Authoritarian Consolidation Index (John Ganz) — An interactive poli-sci app that uses Claude to evaluate recent news against theoretical models like Linz’s “Perils of Presidentialism”, Gramsci’s hegemony, and de Tocqueville’s civil society to compute a score that measures the health of a given democracy. The app is pre-loaded with the USA’s “authoritarian consolidation index” score, but with your own API keys, you can run the analysis on any country of interest.

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Here is the score when I checked today (31st of January, 2026). If you click the link, you’ll get a lot more information.

\n\"\"\n", "date_published": "2026-01-31T16:28:01-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/01/31/aci-authoritarian-consolidation-index.html", "tags": ["The Jackpot"] }, { "id": "http://From78.micro.blog/2026/01/30/living-in-the-jackpot.html", "title": "Living in the Jackpot", "content_html": "

Via Manton Reece (@manton)

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Moltbook — a social network for AI agents to have discussions with one another. This is wild. I often joke about “our future AI overlords” but this might’ve just crossed a line into actual concern… We are putting a lot of trust into these new bots. 🦞

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OMG!

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My immediate first ass association is to the concept of “the jackpot” from the recent William Gibson novels.

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For those who may not be familiar with the “jackpot” as a term/concept:

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The Jackpot is a term coined by William Gibson in his novels, particularly in The Peripheral and its sequel, Agency. It describes a gradual, multi-faceted apocalypse rather than a single catastrophic event. This concept reflects ongoing crises that humanity faces, primarily driven by climate change and societal issues.

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Ironically, the quoted text above came from the AI generated summery when I searched for the term via DuckDuckGo.

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\n", "date_published": "2026-01-30T16:51:22-05:00", "url": "https://notes.neilgorman.com/2026/01/30/living-in-the-jackpot.html", "tags": ["Reading","The Jackpot"] } ] }