“The so-called ‘truth’ of the universe is irrelevant because our tiny brains aren’t equipped to understand it anyway. […] Our human understanding of reality is like describing an elephant to a space alien by saying an elephant is grey. That is not nearly enough detail. And you have no way to know if the alien perceives color the same way you do. After enduring your inadequate explanation of the elephant, the alien would understand as much about elephants as humans understand about reality. […] Today when I hear people debate the existence of God, it feels exactly like debating whether the software they are using is hosted on Amazon’s servers or Rackspace.”
DirecTV AI support better than human
Yesterday my wife lost the picture on the TV in her bedroom and called DirecTV Customer Support on the phone. The call went on for quite a while (as such calls do) with the support person having my wife check various settings, changing HDMI port, look up serial number, etc.
As I listened I was impressed with how good this support lady was. Patient, polite (“thanks for confirming”), knowledgable. Maybe the best support call I’ve heard which I mentioned to my wife.
“It’s an AI,” my wife replied.
I was speechless (rare occurrence). I’ve been playing with AI for three years and have heard countless examples of AI “voices” and I’ve always been able to recognize them as such. I was completely fooled by the DirecTV AI.
“Are you sure?” I asked my wife. “Yes. ’She’ said so at least three times during the call.”
Still skeptical, I went to Claude for confirmation:
Voice AI for customer support has gotten good enough that many people can’t tell — that’s actually one of the selling points companies look for. A few things make it convincing:
- Natural-sounding TTS— modern text-to-speech (services like ElevenLabs, or the voice layers built into platforms like Google’s Contact Center AI, Amazon Connect, etc.) captures pacing, intonation, and small imperfections that used to be a dead giveaway of “robot voice.”
- Patience is actually easier for AI — it doesn’t get tired, frustrated, or rushed, so infinite calm is a natural byproduct, not a performance.
- Scripted-but-flexible responses — large phone-support call trees have always been semi-scripted; an LLM just handles the branching more fluidly and can respond to unexpected phrasing.
- DIRECTV specifically — AT&T (DIRECTV’s former parent) and DIRECTV have both publicly discussed using AI/virtual agents in their support lines, so it’s plausible your wife’s call routed through one, especially for a first-tier troubleshooting step before escalating to a human.
Tells that usually surface eventually: it struggles with a genuinely novel or emotional situation, it can’t access account-specific systems a human rep would casually reference, or the call abruptly transfers once the issue gets complex. If your wife is unsure, she could ask directly — some companies require disclosure now, some don’t.
Am I concerned that I can no longer tell when I’m speaking with a human or an AI? Not really. In my experience, humans are really shitty at this job. Bored/apathetic if not just plain rude. Slow. Everyone knows the drill.
iPod Touch
Barb found this relic while cleaning out a drawer. Perplexity took a stab at identification (with very little info):
“This appears to be an original (1st-generation) iPod touch, specifically the 16 GB version, made in the 2007–08 period. It is the first “iPhone without the phone” Apple ever sold—and it has become a genuinely evocative piece of early touchscreen history.
At the time, this was unusually advanced hardware:
- A 3.5-inch Multi‑Touch display, the same basic form factor as the first iPhone.
- Wi‑Fi for Safari, email, YouTube, and the iTunes Store—but no cellular service, phone calling, GPS, rear camera, Bluetooth stereo audio, or App Store at launch.
- It originally ran a version of iPhone OS 1, before Apple renamed the platform iOS.
- The App Store arrived for it with iPhone OS 2 in 2008; this model’s final official operating system was iPhone OS 3.1.3.
- It used the large 30‑pin Dock Connector, not Lightning or USB‑C, and had a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
The original iPod touch was sold as an 8 GB or 16 GB model at launch; Apple added the 32 GB configuration in February 2008.
I think I purchased my first iPod (Nano) in 2005.
Treadmill headed for a new home
In 2016 Barb and I paid $1600 for this professional grade treadmill. It’s been in a dark little windowless room in the basement ever since and I’ve used it numerous times over the years. But having joined the YMCA recently, with access to newer better machines, it was time to find it a new home. My good friend Paul came by to pick it up and take it home to his mother (who is excited about having it.)
The monster weighs 269 pounds.
Mechanical genius Paul was able to get it through a couple of doorways and up into the bed of his pick up truck.
So long, Mr. Groundhog
Relocated to an undisclosed location. I paid the wildlife guy 500 bucks to get rid of this guy and all he trapped was a raccoon. “What about the groundhog,” I asked. “It’s $500 for every critter trapped” explained our former wildlife guy.
Barb purchased this trap for $35 bucks. Tossed in some cucumber and voila. He (she?) now roaming free in an undisclosed location. Click the “critters” tag below to see my previous adventures.
Abundance
It’s a word you hear a lot from proponents of AI. Yeah, some jobs will be eliminated but a bunch of new jobs will be created. And even if the new ones don’t pay as much, AI will usher in an age of abundance that will provide for much of what we need and want (and used to pay for). There are lots of acronyms but UBI seems to get tossed around a lot: Universal Basic Income. Somehow you’ll have all you need (shelter, food, entertainment, etc) and can spend your days in creative (recreational?) pursuits.
Sounds pretty good at first blush. But after watching the latest episode (Season 3, Episode 5) of Special Ops: Lioness, I’m not so sure. One of the characters is a college professor (who happens to be an agent of Chinese intelligence) lecturing an auditorium filled with students:
What is paramount to understand: AI will likely render what I do and what you aspire to do as obsolete.
Likewise to careers in marketing, accounting, engineering… whether software, biological, mechanical… data analysis, research management.
All of these careers will disappear in the next decade.
You must alter the focus of your education to include machine learning, computer vision and management strategies, NLP engineering, computer vision engineering.
And you must prepare yourselves for a world in which your endeavors are not compensated with money.
Your compensation is in the collective betterment of our society, of our state.
What, no money, you say? Yep, that’s the future.
Your efforts will be compensated through the services provided to you in return from the state… housing, health care, food, clean transportation, entertainment.
And as you prepare yourselves for a career in the future, you must prepare yourselves also for a world that replaces the imperialist goals and economic meddling of a “free–market society” with a dedication to a state that in turn dedicates itself to an equitable life for all humankind.
The episode was written by Taylor Sheridan, “an American screenwriter, director, showrunner, and former actor known for redefining the modern Western and neo-noir genres. After roles in Sons of Anarchy and Veronica Mars, he shifted to writing, earning acclaim for his “frontier trilogy” films: Sicario (2015), the Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017), which he also directed. His hit television catalog also includes Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Special Ops: Lioness, and Landman.” (Gemini)
Bill Gates’ concerns about AI
I share Dave Winer’s take on this topic:
“We humans are doing a fine job of wrecking everything, all on our own, denying climate change, giving into the same old tricks that lead to WWII and the Holocaust, so maybe it isn’t the worst idea to turn management of everything over to the machines.”
RadioIowa.com: 100,000 stories
Radio Iowa News Director O. Kay Henderson called yesterday to report the network website now has 100,000 stories. More on the website but first a little background on Kay.
Roger Gardner and I hired Kay right out of college (Iowa State) in 1987 as we prepared to launch Learfield’s second state news network. Thirty-nine years! The most recent “new hire” in her newsroom was in 1995! Since day one it has been one of the companies most successful networks, due in no small part to Kay’s leadership.
It was the first network for which we created a website. Don’t recall why but probably because of the state’s high political profile. The earliest screen-grab on the Wayback Machine was from December, 1996 with another capture in January, 1997.
For reasons I never understood, web pages in those early days of the “WWW” all seemed to have a grey background.
These first efforts were hand-coded by Allen Hammock and Dan Arnall, two young college students we hired to help us “get online.” Those two, along with the amazing Learfield engineers, figured out how to “stream” audio in those early days.
Where does gayness come from?
Apple Watch (Fitness Tracking)
In another month I will have been wearing my Apple Watch for two years. Not sure I could list all of the features I like about the watch and use a tiny fraction of what the watch can do. I do use the Health app on my iPhone to to remind me to take my medications at bedtime and last night I started browsing some of the fitness data that gets captured by the watch (without me doing anything). I then had Gemini provide some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I am in better shape than I would have guessed.(Some final thoughts in the comment section below) Continue reading
“Let the future decide whether it matters”
The approach I’ve always considered was some kind of archive. Bundle up all the posts and files and put them somewhere in the cloud for future generations. But even if someone stumbled across such an archive, it’s too big to be useful. Which has led to our recent experiments with Milton. Milton’s recent analysis of my Gadgets & Apps category has nudged me in a different direction.
Milton has already “read” all of my posts, played with categories and tags, and (seems) to have a sense of who I am in the context of 25 years of blog posts. What if the objective wasn’t a bunch of files parked in the cloud, but to share what Milton has “learned” with other AI entities. Which are certain to get ever more capable. Continue reading