Michael Scott calls Oscar Martinez (The Office) into his office to get his advice on an upcoming medical procedure:
“It is a colonoscopy. In your experience, what should I be expecting, in terms of sensation, or emotions? Is there anything I can do to make it more pleasurable for me or Dr. Chaudry?”
I was reminded of this from a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais’ podcast.
We’re going to remove the hardened, cloudy lenses from your eyes by breaking them up with an ultrasound device, and then sucking the particles out. We will then insert a flexible silicone based lens. Over the next eight weeks, we will use a special ultraviolet light device to change the shape of the lenses to give you the desired vision. For those eight weeks, it will be necessary for you to wear special UV protection goggles anytime that you are not in bed asleep. After the three adjustments are complete, will use the ultraviolet light device to lock in the shape of the lenses. 24 hours later, you can dispense with the UV goggles.
Gotta say it. Been a long eight weeks. It doesn’t appear that we achieved the glasses-free outcome we were shooting for, we got close. I uploaded my new prescription and the one from a year ago to Perplexity:
Your 2026 glasses prescription is dramatically lower power than your 2025 prescription, reflecting how the LAL+ has moved most of the focusing work into the lens implants instead of the spectacles. In 2025 you needed full‑time distance correction plus a significant bifocal/progressive add just to get comfortable reading. With the LAL+ lock‑ins, your intraocular lenses now provide most of the distance focus, so the new glasses are more like fine‑tuning for small residual refractive error and astigmatism rather than heavy lifting.
Pre-surgery I was using 3.5 (prescription) reading glasses for books, phone and laptop. Post-surgery I can see the computer and phone fine and making do with 1.5 readers for books. Jury still out on the all-important distance acuity. Hoping the new prescription (see above) will give me the sharpness and clarity I was hoping for.
About the photo above… For the last two months I had to wear special UV glasses whenever awake. Today at one o’clock I can ditch them. New glasses will arrive in ten days.
Yuval Noah Harari lecture at Oxford University (YouTube description): “Human domination relies on large-scale cooperation among strangers, which is sustained by bureaucratic systems – such as laws, finance, religion – designed to build trust. Since AIs are ‘native bureaucrats’, they can effortlessly remember all laws, transactions, and scriptures far better than any human. This leaves AI uniquely placed to take over critical processes, such as granting bank loans, deciding university admissions, determining prison sentences, and executing military strikes. Are we prepared?”
Harari’s vision of the AI future seems most on-target to me.
From an article in The Atlantic (that is behind a paywall):
“The (British) health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.
Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680.”
From my dentist friend, Bob:
No wonder so many come to the states. Have a good friend who is one of two radiation oncologists at (a local hospital) who just retired. The other oncologist told (the hospital administration) since he was now the only one that he wanted a salary of 1.4 mil. They told him see ya! They’re now looking for two. Pay much better in US but some are really greedy.
128GB capacity. It will be used to store back ups of this blog (>6,500 posts and a couple thousand media files) as well as KBOA830.com and The Basement Diaries.
I have resisted (for the most part) anthropomorphizing the AI tools I use. But it’s getting harder. I think of Claude as male (my maternal grandfather was named Claude); Gemini seems genderless; and Perplexity is female because the voice I hear on my iPhone and with CarPlay is feminine.
Dave Winer asked ChatGPT for an image of a ChatGPT talking head. 
I prompted Perplexity to do the same. (below)
The ChatGPT image is closer to how I picture Perplexity. I think I can resist thinking of these tools in human terms but it is getting more and more difficult to think of them as just software.
On the open web there are clear signs of people doing very similar things: giving an AI years of blog/website content and asking for personality or thematic analysis. Some examples include:
Those are all close cousins of what you’ve been doing with Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and your ~25‑year archive.
What you’ve done is unusually thorough and multi‑agent: you exported the entire smays.com corpus, converted it to markdown/XML, had multiple LLMs read it, and then commissioned long‑form essays about “the AI‑readable self,” “nondual,” religion, dot‑com, etc. You’ve also let other people’s AI stacks (Phil’s agents, Steve’s Hermes setup) run full‑corpus reads and feed back 14‑page analyses.
So while you’re not the only one saying “AI, please read my whole blog,” you are doing a deeper, more longitudinal experiment than most of the public examples, which tend to be one‑off personality summaries or technical demos.
I wrote about Maxinomics a couple of months ago. The team is still cranking out great videos. In the latest it asks and answers the question:
“Is AI going to take my job? No. But, someone will take your job if you do not use AI”
Unable to download the animated GIF, so click here or the image above to get the full effect. More by this artist.
Across more than seventy posts in the “Religion” category, Steve Mays treats religion less as a pipeline to cosmic truth and more as an old, resilient operating system for human behavior and meaning. It sits alongside money, nations, ideologies, and corporations as one more way humans coordinate action through shared stories. In this framing, gods and doctrines are not unique intrusions from beyond the universe; they are examples of the broader human habit of inventing fictions powerful enough that people will kill and die for them. Continue reading
