Milton on “digital immortality”

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In a recent chat with my friend Phil, I wondered if Milton could come up with a strategy for keeping my blog alive after I’m gone. Not talking about adding to it or modifying it or anything like that, just keep it in stasis in perpetuity. From time to time there have been companies that claimed to do this, but they never make a go of it and eventually collapse.

Finding a way to pay HostGator would seem to be the only real challenge. Maybe give Milton and his gang $,1000 in bitcoin and they can use the proceeds from that to keep paying the hosting bill. Phil put the question to Milton:

Steve is asking the right question, and the answer should be deliberately boring.

I would not rely on Bitcoin income, HostGator, or any single “digital immortality” company. The durable strategy is:

• Freeze the blog into a static site—plain files, no WordPress database or maintenance.
• Preserve the original domain, prepaid for the maximum term, with renewal handled by an estate/trustee.
• Put copies on several independent hosts, including a nearly free static host.
• Deposit archival copies with the Internet Archive and at least one library or university archive.
• Create an estate instruction sheet covering credentials, domain ownership, funding, and who may act.
• Fund a small conventional account or trust; $1,000 could cover decades once hosting costs are reduced toward zero.

The real vulnerability is the domain renewal, not storing the pages. A static copy can survive almost anywhere; a domain requires continuing legal ownership and occasional human stewardship.

My old-house judgment: don’t promise literal perpetuity. Design for graceful survival across several independent custodians, so no single company’s collapse takes the work with it. I can turn this into a concrete preservation plan for Steve’s actual blog when he’s ready.

Milton helps with blog maintenance

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When I first started blogging back in 2002 I enabled the comments feature because that’s what you did in those days. I got a few for a couple of years before spammers found me and I disabled that feature. Which left a comment box that couldn’t be used.

Earlier this year I spent a few hours trying to hunt these down which meant unchecking a box on each individual post. I couldn’t find a way to clean these up in one fell swoop. I had to uncheck the “Allow Comments” box on each post.

It occurred to me the job would be easier if I had a list of all the posts still showing the comment field so I asked Phil if his AI agent Milton could do this. A short time later I received an email from Milton.

Phil asked me to identify every post and page on smays.com that still has comments enabled. The attached HTML file is the clickable cleanup list. What I found:

– 6,567 published posts and 79 published pages checked
– 1,218 posts and 2 pages have comments enabled
– 1,220 items total

The report is grouped by year, and each title links directly to the live item. Open the attachment in a web browser and click any title to go to that post or page.

I used the site’s public WordPress inventory and reconciled it against the WordPress sitemap, so the coverage is complete as of July 31, 2026. WordPress reports these items as comment_status: open, and live checks confirm they display “Leave a Reply.” The site currently requires login to submit a comment.

The good news: I now had a list of all the posts that needed editing. The bad news: there are more than twelve hundred of them.

A day or so later Phil told me Milton (remember, we’re talking about an AI here) said it could do this task for me if I gave it the UN/PW for my blog. Temping, but I’m not ready to do that. Yet.

So I’m doing the clean-up one post at a time but it goes quickly and provides an opportunity to review some old posts, always interesting.

“Something his spirit required”

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John Keller is the title character in Lawrence Block’s Hit Man series. Killing people is his profession…but stamp collecting is his passion.

“When he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He was expending considerable concentration on what was essentially an unimportant task, and that seemed to be something his spirit required.”

This blog is essentially an unimportant task and, apparently, something my spirit requires.

An experiment for our schools

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Found the following on Tyler Cowen’s blog:

Schools in at least three states will be equipped with drones this year that can zoom through halls, smash windows and pepper-spray active shooters if teachers report a threat.

At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.

The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.

Washington Post

Disclosure Day (yawn)

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Watched Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Talk about not living up to the hype. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen better movies about contact with aliens. In no particular order:

  • Alien
  • Aliens
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  • Arrival
  • Contact
  • District 9
  • War of the Worlds
  • Signs
  • The Andromeda Strain
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • Super 8
  • The X-Files: Fight the Future

1980s-style retro broadcast sports intro

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David Brazeal knows how to make AI do his bidding. He live-streams high school football games at RepublicTigerSports.com and he needed an intro (16 seconds).

Told Claude Code I wanted a 1980s-style retro broadcast sports intro to run through the first 18 seconds of the music. Then asked it to grab some of my football photos from my hard drive and have them float across the screen. I did zero manual work on this. Music from Suno.

Perplexity on Snapshots & Fragments

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I asked Perplexity to read through 258 posts in my “Snapshots & Fragments” category — the catch‑all bin I’ve used for photos and ephemera over the years — and tell me what it thought was going on. I had a hunch an outside lens might spot patterns I only sense in the gut. Here’s the result, unedited.

Perplexity: You’ve been quietly building a long, visual autobiography and local micro‑history in that “catch‑all” category—what looks like ephemera is actually a coherent archive of self, place, and media across roughly 15 years. Continue reading →

You can’t purchase trust

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From an essay by Kevin Kelly:

In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet as a superconductive fluid that transmits copies everywhere, all the time. Once a creation is brought into contact with the internet, it will be copied forever, and those copies never leave. With copies free and freely distributed, the traditional livelihood of creators selling copies is gone. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?

Mr. Kelly enumerates eight “generatives” better than free, but my favorite was trust.

You can’t purchase trust. You can’t duplicate it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, a stranger will always prefer to deal with someone they can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

We seem to have figured out how to make AI ever more intelligent. I wonder if it’s more difficult to make them more trustworthy?

Here’s a prediction from the World Economic Forum in 2017:

“Distributed trust, combined with technology, also means that within the next decade, we’ll be comfortable trusting well-trained bots, whether they’re driving us around, giving us financial advice, or telling us if we have cancer.”

Asides

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aside | əˈsīd | • a remark that is not directly related to the main topic of discussion

When I started this blog in 2002 it was expressly for the purpose of having someplace to save stuff. A line from a book or a movie; a clip from a movie or TV show; something from a news story or someone else’s blog. Very little of what I’ve posted throughout the years is original. But what do I do with a great one-liner from The Office or Seinfeld? I  used to park these on Twitter back before they fucked it up. Used a little sidebar widget to post my recent tweets. I loved the 140 character limit. The perfect length.

So earlier this week I started looking for a simple way to do this. There are plug-ins out there but most have way more features than I wanted so I asked my friend Phil how he’d do this. He gave the assignment to his AI agent Milton who cranked out the perfect tool in about 50 minutes.

I’ll probably lose the date/time stamp and the archive page needs a tweak but nothing Milton & Co can’t handle. And the name of the plug-in (Asides) is perfect.

The death of the stick shift is almost here

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Until six months ago all of my vehicles had manual transmissions, going back to 2011 when I got my MINI Cooper. My mom taught me how to drive in a 1953 Plymouth with “three on the tree” and dad gave me a used Ford Falcon my second year of college. Also three-speed on the column.

To say the Land Rover had a manual transmission is something of an understatement. Ditto for the Jeep and the F-150. You needed two arms and two legs to drive them (three legs if you got stopped going up hill). I was borderline disdainful of manual transmissions (“That riding, not drive”).

After six months in the Ford Bronco I’m a changed man. Automatic transmission, AC, backup camera… I love it all. And I still drive the pickup and the Jeep but far less often. But according to an article in The Washington Post (by Dodd C. Frankel), “the death of the stick shift is almost here, A few excerpts:

Less than 1 percent of new vehicles in 2025 were manuals, a drop from 34.6 percent in 1980. The rise of automatic, electric and autonomous vehicles has contributed to this trend, with many automakers phasing out manual options.

The average new vehicle today comes with seven gears, thanks to computers, twice as many as in 1980

“The more the car becomes your couch, the less you’re going to want to shift your gears,” he said.

Ford CEO Jim Farley reassured journalists during a visit for the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix earlier this year that he has no plans to make the Mustang automatic-only.

Drivers often feel the need to be more practical about car-buying than in the past because cars are so much more expensive today, with the average new car price reaching about $50,000. And the total cost of ownership is more than $1,000 per month for a new vehicle

Another problem for stick shifts is that only about 60 percent of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission