Scott D. Strader – An Echo That's Reversing

Power, effort

I don’t have an answer to why today’s AI empowerment of non-coders is different from the hope, years ago, that technology should be simple enough that those unfamiliar, those not “geeks”, would be comfortable using it.

Years ago I created an Android app that was in a very small way my attempt at a visual programming language. It allowed a user to create an Android app within their phone with no external assistance or compiler. For the non-programmer, you could see the flow of pages based on button selection, and create branching, looping, and conditional choices without writing code. For the semi-programmer, you could see the C-derived programming language that drove the app, write code manually, step-debug, and inspect live variable states to your (admittedly simplistic) content.

My impulse was: we have in our phones a device that can connect to the web, calculate as much as a desktop computer, connect to a cell network and GPS and navigation, provide visual and audio access. And yet people are left to have others sell access to an immensely powerful sensory/logical/environmental device to them in order to access those features. A phone is a universal tool there for you to use. Use it as you want.

Barbarella the Smuggler–Losing the thread

My writing has been inconsistent.

This is not unprecedented and not without cause. Many time before I’ve involuntarily, shamefully, paused on an idea I’ve loved, the story, returned, and finished. I’d thought that I would compose more while in Italy but stress and uncertainty from different directions has slowed not the ideas but the manifestation of those. I still have that “voice in my head” that elaborates on the story and the melodies and the structure as they should be, but… don’t act on it.

verse 5, where the people show her their most cherished possession: a map that can tell the future

Le porte di Genova

Updated 26 Feb 2026

I arrived, the second of my three arrivals, and exiting the elevator at my front door I was serendipitously greeted by my elderly neighbor who was, beyond all pre-expectations for the genovese, more friendly than I’d expected in this or in any other city. I was disoriented by his kindness. The reason for my appreciation is obvious but it doesn’t take into consideration the rudderlessness you feel (I feel) in a foreign land etc. And, again, the unfair reputation the Genovese people get for being aggressively aloof with the non-Genovese is now something I will fight against.

The people I’ve met since have been just as piacievole.

Monsters

One of my favorite political commentators slash Canadians slash humorists is Jeet Heer. Also: cool name. His podcast is “The Time of Monsters” and the title references a quote from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. To my shame I had never heard of it (quote) or him (author) before Heer’s reference and it is these happy necessities or current events (wtf, “happy”?) that present such introductions.

It’s an absolutely beautiful quote that is, in English:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.

Not gonna link to it even if you can reverse-image search because I still have time to buy it.

The AI

The software industry has become a pretty immoral bunch of assholes, but the software industry married to the new AI revolution has exceeded this baseline immorality.

I’m a Malcolm Gladwell-y maven, or I aspire to be, w/r/t technology and it was a trip to Italy with the family several years back that gave me an opportunity to press to them the importance of what was coming and the importance that they, disregarding their disinterest or disgust, involve themselves with LLMs directly in order to understand how the world was going to change. I knew there was value there but I also understood that there was existential upheaval. Maybe they already knew that; I’m not sure.

For most of the time after that I’ve sworn off ChatGPT (let’s use the Kleenex-ified terms “ChatGPT” for the technical “LLM”). Its harm to the environment and social equality, and the socially inequitable harm that it causes, is horrifying. (Though, admittedly, extreme statements should generally be responded with doubt and verification.)