The Secret to Business Success
June 18, 2025
Just a dinobaby and a tiny bit of AI goodness: How horrible is this approach?
I don’t know anything about psychological conditions. I read “Why Peter Thiel Thinks Asperger’s Is A Key to Succeeding in Business.” I did what any semi-hip dinobaby would do. I logged into You.com and ask what the heck Asperger’s was. Here’s what I learned:
- The term "Asperger’s Syndrome" was introduced in the 1980s by Dr. Lorna Wing, based on earlier work by Hans Asperger. However, the term has become controversial due to revelations about Hans Asperger’s involvement with the Nazi regime
- Diagnostic Shift: Asperger’s Syndrome was officially included in the DSM-IV (1994) and ICD-10 (1992) but was retired in the DSM-5 (2013) and ICD-11 (2019). It is now part of the autism spectrum, with severity levels used to indicate the level of support required.
Image appeared with the definition of Asperger’s “issue.” A bit of a You.com bonus for the dinobaby.
These factoids are new to me.
The You.com smart report told me:
Key Characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome (Now ASD-Level 1)
- Social Interaction Challenges:
- Difficulty understanding social cues, body language, and emotions.
- Limited facial expressions and awkward social interactions.
- Conversations may revolve around specific topics of interest, often one-sided
- Restricted and Repetitive Behaviors:
- Intense focus on narrow interests (e.g., train schedules, specific hobbies).
- Adherence to routines and resistance to change
- Communication Style:
- No significant delays in language development, but speech may be formal, monotone, or unusual in tone.
- Difficulty using language in social contexts, such as understanding humor or sarcasm
- Motor Skills and Sensory Sensitivities:
- Clumsiness or poor coordination.
- Sensitivity to sensory stimuli like lights, sounds, or textures.
Now what does the write up say? Mr. Thiel (Palantir Technology and other interests) believes:
Most of them [people with Asperger’s] have little sense of unspoken social norms or how to conform to them. Instead they develop a more self-directed worldview. Their beliefs on what is or is not possible come more from themselves, and less from what others tell them they can do or cannot do. This causes a lot anxiety and emotional hardship, but it also gives them more freedom to be different and experiment with new ideas.
The idea is that the alleged disorder allows certain individuals with Asperger’s to change the world.
The write up says:
The truth is that if you want to start something truly new, you almost by definition have to be unconventional and do something that everyone else thinks is crazy. This is inevitably going to mean you face criticism, even for trying it. In Thiel’s view, because those with Aspergers don’t register that criticism as much, they feel freer to make these attempts.
Is it possible for universities with excellent reputations and prestigious MBA programs to create people with the “virtues” of Aspberger’s? Do business schools aspire to impart this type of “secret sauce” to their students?
I suppose one could ask a person with the blessing of Aspberger’s but as the You.com report told me, some of these lucky individuals may [a] use speech may formal, monotone, or unusual in tone and [b] difficulty using language in social contexts, such as understanding humor or sarcasm.
But if one can change the world, carry on in the spirit of Hans Asperger, and make a great deal of money, it is good to have this unique “skill.”
Stephen E Arnold, June 18, 2025
Up for a Downer: The Limits of Growth… Baaaackkkk with a Vengeance
June 13, 2025
Just a dinobaby and no AI: How horrible an approach?
Where were you in 1972? Oh, not born yet. Oh, hanging out in the frat house or shopping with sorority pals? Maybe you were working at a big time consulting firm?
An outfit known as Potomac Associates slapped its name on a thought piece with some repetitive charts. The original work evolved from an outfit contributing big ideas. The Club of Rome lassoed William W. Behrens, Dennis and Donella Meadows, and Jørgen Randers to pound data into the then-state-of-the-art World3 model allegedly developed by Jay Forrester at MIT. (Were there graduate students involved? Of course not.)
The result of the effort was evidence that growth becomes unsustainable and everything falls down. Business, government systems, universities, etc. etc. Personally I am not sure why the idea that infinite growth with finite resources will last forever was a big deal. The idea seems obvious to me. I was able to get my little hands on a copy of the document courtesy of Dominique Doré, the super great documentalist at the company which employed my jejune and naive self. Who was I too think, “This book’s conclusion is obvious, right?” Was I wrong. The concept of hockey sticks that had handles to the ends of the universe was a shocker to some.
The book’s big conclusion is the focus of “Limits to Growth Was Right about Collapse.” Why? I think the idea that the realization is a novel one to those who watched their shares in Amazon, Google, and Meta zoom to the sky. Growth is unlimited, some believed. The write up in “The Next Wave,” an online newsletter or information service happily quotes an update to the original Club of Rome document:
This improved parameter set results in a World3 simulation that shows the same overshoot and collapse mode in the coming decade as the original business as usual scenario of the LtG standard run.
Bummer. The kiddie story about Chicken Little had an acorn plop on its head. Chicken Little promptly proclaimed in a peer reviewed academic paper with non reproducible research and a YouTube video:
The sky is falling.
But keep in mind that the kiddie story is fiction. Humans are adept at survival. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs captures the spirit of species. Will life as modern CLs perceive it end?
I don’t think so. Without getting to philosophical, I would point to Gottlief Fichte’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis as a reasonably good way to think about change (gradual and catastrophic). I am not into philosophy so when life gives you lemons, one can make lemonade. Then sell the business to a local food service company.
Collapse and its pal chaos create opportunities. The sky remains.
The cited write up says:
Economists get over-excited when anyone mentions ‘degrowth’, and fellow-travelers such as the Tony Blair Institute treat climate policy as if it is some kind of typical 1990s political discussion. The point is that we’re going to get degrowth whether we think it’s a good idea or not. The data here is, in effect, about the tipping point at the end of a 200-to-250-year exponential curve, at least in the richer parts of the world. The only question is whether we manage degrowth or just let it happen to us. This isn’t a neutral question. I know which one of these is worse.
See de-growth creates opportunities. Chicken Little was wrong when the acorn beaned her. The collapse will be just another chance to monetize. Today is Friday the 13th. Watch out for acorns and recycled “insights.”
Stephen E Arnold, June 13, 2025
Will Amazon Become the Bell Labs of Consumer Products?
June 12, 2025
Just a dinobaby and no AI: How horrible an approach?
I did some work at Bell Labs and then at the Judge Greene crafted Bellcore (Bell Communications Research). My recollection is that the place was quiet, uneventful, and had a lousy cafeteria. The Cherry Hill Mall provided slightly better food, just slightly. Most of the people were normal compared to the nuclear engineers at Halliburton and my crazed colleagues at the blue chip consulting firm dumb enough to hire me before I became a dinobaby. (Did you know that security at the Cherry Hill Mall had a gold cart to help Bell Labs’ employees find their vehicle? The reason? Bell Labs hired staff to deal with this recuring problem. Yes, Howard, Alan, and I lost our car when we went to lunch. I finally started parking in the same place and wrote the door exit and lamp number down in my calendar. Problem solved!)
Is Amazon like that? On a visit to Amazon, I formed an impression somewhat different from Bell Labs, Halliburton, and the consulting firm. The staff were not exactly problematic. I just recall having to repeat and explain things. Amazon struck me as an online retailer with money and challenges in handling traffic. The people with whom I interacted when I visited with several US government professionals were nice and different from the technical professionals at the organizations which paid me cash money.
Is this important? Yes. I don’t think of Amazon as particularly innovative. When it wanted to do open source search, it hired some people from Lucid Imagination, now Lucid Works. Amazon just did what other Lucene/Solr large-scale users did: Index content and allow people to run queries. Not too innovative in my book. Amazon also industrialized back office and warehouse projects. These are jobs that require finding existing products and consultants, asking them to propose “solutions,” picking one, and getting the workflow working. Again, not particularly difficult when compared to the holographic memory craziness at Bell Labs or the consulting firm’s business of inventing consumer products for companies in the Fortune 500 that would sell and get the consulting firm’s staggering fees paid in cash promptly. In terms of the nuclear engineering work, Amazon was and probably still is, not in the game. Some of the rocket people are, but the majority of the Amazon workers are in retail, digital plumbing, and creating dark pattern interfaces. This is “honorable” work, but it is not invention in the sense of slick Monte Carlo code cranked out by Halliburton’s Dr. Julian Steyn or multi-frequency laser technology for jamming more data through a fiber optic connection.
I read “Amazon Taps Xbox Co-Founder to Lead new Team Developing Breakthrough Consumer Products.” I asked myself, “Is Amazon now in the Bell Labs’ concept space? The write up tries to answer my question, stating:
The ZeroOne team is spread across Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to job postings from the past month. The name is a nod to its mission of developing emerging product ideas from conception to launch, or “zero to one.” Amazon has a checkered history in hardware, with hits including the Kindle e-reader, Echo smart speaker and Fire streaming sticks, as well as flops like the Fire Phone, Halo fitness tracker and Glow kids teleconferencing device. Many of the products emerged from Lab126, Amazon’s hardware research and development unit, which is based in Silicon Valley.
Okay, the Fire Phone (maybe Foney) and the Glow thing for kids? Innovative? I suppose. But to achieve success in raw innovation like the firms at which I was an employee? No, Amazon is not in that concept space. Amazon is more comfortable cutting a deal with Elastic instead of “inventing” something like Google’s Transformer or Claude Shannon’s approach to extracting a signal from noise. Amazon sells books and provides an almost clueless interface to managing those on the Kindle eReader.
The write up says (and I believer everything I read on the Internet):
Amazon has pulled in staffers from other business units that have experience developing innovative technologies, including its Alexa voice assistant, Luna cloud gaming service and Halo sleep tracker, according to LinkedIn profiles of ZeroOne employees. The head of a projection mapping startup called Lightform that Amazon acquired is helping lead the group. While Amazon is expanding this particular corner of its devices group, the company is scaling back other areas of the sprawling devices and services division.
Innovation is a risky business. Amazon sells stuff and provides online access with uptime of 98 or 99 percent. It does not “do” innovation. I wrote a book chapter about Amazon’s blockchain patents. What happened to that technology, some of which struck me as promising and sort of novel given the standards for US patents? The answer, based on the information I have seen since I wrote the book chapter, is, “Not much.” In less time, Telegram dumped out dozens of “inventions.” These have ranged from sticking crypto wallets into every Messenger users’ mini app to refining the bot technology to display third-party, off-Telegram Web sites on the fly for about 900 million Messenger users.
Amazon hit a dead end with Alexa and something called Halo.
When an alleged criminal organization operating as an “Airbnb” outfit with no fixed offices and minimal staff can innovate and Amazon with its warehouses cannot, there’s a useful point of differentiation in my mind.
The write up reports:
Earlier this month, Amazon laid off about 100 of the group’s employees. The job cuts included staffers working on Alexa and Amazon Kids, which develops services for children, as well as Lab126, according to public filings and people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. More than 50 employees were laid off at Amazon’s Lab126 facilities in Sunnyvale, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings in California.
Okay. Fire up a new unit. Will the approach work? I hope for stakeholders’ and employees’ sake, Amazon hits a home run. But in the back of my mind, innovation is difficult. Quite special people are needed. The correct organizational set up or essentially zero set up is required. Then the odds are usually against innovation, which, if truly novel, evokes resistance. New is threatening.
Can the Bezos bulldozer shift into high gear and do the invention thing? I don’t know but I have some nagging doubts.
Stephen E Arnold, June 12, 2025
Google Makes a Giant, Huge, Quantumly Supreme Change
May 19, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zellenials.
I read “Google’s G Logo Just Got Prettier.” Stunning news. The much loved, intensely technical Google has invented blurring colors. The decision was a result of DeepMind’s smart software and a truly motivated and respected group of artistically-inclined engineers.
Image. The old logo has been reinvented to display a gradient. Was the inspiration the hallucinatory gradient descent in Google’s smart software? Was it a result of a Googler losing his glasses and seeing the old logo as a blend of colors? Was it a result of a chance viewing of a Volvo marketing campaign with a series of images like this:
Image is from Volvo, the automobile company. You can view the original at this link. Hey, buy a Volvo.
The write up says:
Google’s new logo keeps the same letterform, as well as the bright red-yellow-green-blue color sequence, but now those colors blur into each other. The new “G” is Google’s biggest update to its visual identity since retiring serfs for its current sans-serif font, Product Sans, in 2015.
Retiring serifs, not serfs. I know it is just an AI zellenial misstep, but Google is terminating wizards so they can find their future elsewhere. That is just sol helpful.
What does the “new” and revolutionary logo look like. The image below comes from Fast Company which is quick on the artistic side of US big technology outfits. Behold:
Source: Fast Company via the Google I think.
Fast Company explains the forward-leaning design decision:
A gradient is a safe choice for the new “G.” Tech has long been a fan of using gradients in its logos, apps, and branding, with platforms like Instagram and Apple Music tapping into the effect a decade ago. Still today, gradients remain popular, owing to their middle-ground approach to design. They’re safe but visually interesting; soft but defined. They basically go with anything thanks to their color wheel aesthetic. Other Google-owned products have already embraced gradients. YouTube is now using a new red-to-magenta gradient in its UI, and Gemini, Google’s AI tool, also uses them. Now it’s bringing the design element to its flagship Google app.
Yes, innovative.
And Fast Company wraps up the hard hitting design analysis with some Inconel wordsmithing:
it’s not a small change for a behemoth of a company. We’ll never knows how many meetings, iterations, and deliberations went into making that little blur effect, but we can safely guess it was many.
Yep, guess.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2025
Scamming: An Innovation Driver
May 19, 2025
Readers who caught the 2022 documentary “The Tinder Swindler” will recognize Pernilla Sjöholm as one of that conman’s marks. Since the film aired, Sjöholm has co-developed a tool to fend off such fraudsters. The Next Web reports, “Tinder Swindler Survivor Launches Identity Verifier to Fight Scams.” The platform, cofounded with developer Suejb Memeti, is called IDfier. Writer Thomas Macaulay writes:
“The platform promises a simple yet secure way to check who you’re interacting with. Users verify themselves by first scanning their passport, driver’s license, or ID card with their phone camera. If the document has an NFC (near-field communication), IDfier will also scan the chip for additional security. The user then completes a quick head movement to prove they’re a real person — rather than a photo, video, or deepfake. Once verified, they can send other people a request to do the same. Both of them can then choose which information to share, from their name and age to their contact number. All their data is encrypted and stored across disparate servers. IDfier was built to blend this security with precision. According to the platform, the tech is 99.9% accurate in detecting real users and blocking impersonation attempts. The team envisions the system securing endless online services, from e-commerce and email to social media and, of course, dating apps such as Tinder.”
For those who have not viewed the movie: In 2018 Sjöholm and Simon Leviev met on Tinder and formed what she thought was a close, in-person relationship. But Simon was not the Leviev he pretended to be. In the end, he cheated her out of tens of thousands of euros with a bogus sob story.
It is not just fellow humans’ savings Sjöholm aims to protect, but also our hearts. She emphasizes such tactics amount to emotional abuse as well as fraud. The trauma of betrayal is compounded by a common third-party reaction—many observers shame victims as stupid or incautious. Sjöholm figures that is because people want to believe it cannot happen to them. And it doesn’t. Until it does.
Since her ordeal, Sjöholm has been dismayed to see how convincing deepfakes have grown and how easy they now are to make. She is also appalled at how vulnerable our children are. Someday, she hopes to offer IDfier free for kids. We learn:
“Sjöholm’s plan partly stems from her experience giving talks in schools. She recalls one in which she asked the students how many of them interacted with strangers online. ‘Ninety-five percent of these kids raised their hands,’ she said. ‘And you could just see the teacher’s face drop. It’s a really scary situation.’”
We agree. Sjöholm states that between fifty and sixty percent of scams involve fake identities. And, according to The Global Anti-Scam Alliance, scams collectively rake in more than $1 trillion (with a “t”) annually. Romance fraud alone accounts for several billion dollars, according to the World Economic Forum. At just $2 per month, IDfier seems like a worthwhile precaution for those who engage with others online.
Cynthia Murrell, May 19, 2025
Google Innovates: Another Investment Play. (How Many Are There Now?)
May 13, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zillennials.
I am not sure how many investment, funding, and partnering deals Google has. But as the selfish only child says, “I want more, Mommy.” Is that Google’s strategy for achieving more AI dominance. The company has already suggested that it has won the AI battle. AI is everywhere even when one does not want it. But inferiority complexes have a way of motivating bright people to claim that they are winners only to wake at 3 am to think, “I must do more. Don’t hit me in the head, grandma.”
The write up “Google Launches New Initiative to Back Startups Building AI” brilliant, never before implemented tactic. The idea is to shovel money at startups that are [a] Googley, [b] focus on AI’s cutting edge, and [c] can reduce Google’s angst ridden 3 am soul searching. (Don’t hit me in the head, grandma.)
The article says:
Google announced the launch of its AI Futures Fund, a new initiative that seeks to invest in startups that are building with the latest AI tools from Google DeepMind, the company’s AI R&D lab. The fund will back startups from seed to late stage and will offer varying degrees of support, including allowing founders to have early access to Google AI models from DeepMind, the ability to work with Google experts from DeepMind and Google Labs, and Google Cloud credits. Some startups will also have the opportunity to receive direct investment from Google.
This meets criterion [a] above. The firms have to embrace Google’s quantumly supreme DeepMind, state of the art, world beating AI. I interpret the need to pay people to use DeepMind as a hint that making something commercially viable is just outside the sharp claws of Googzilla. Therefore, just pay for those who will be Googley and use the quantumly supreme DeepMind AI.
The write up adds:
Google has been making big commitments over the past few months to support the next generation of AI talent and scientific breakthroughs.
This meets criterion [b] above. Google is paying to try to get the future to appear under the new blurry G logo. Will this work? Sure, just as it works for regular investment outfits. The hit ratio is hoped to be 17X or more. But in tough times, a 10X return is good. Why? Many people are chasing AI opportunities. The failure rate of new high technology companies remains high even with the buzz of AI. If Google has infinite money, it can indeed win the future. But if the search advertising business takes a hit or the Chrome data system has a groin pull, owning or “inventing” the future becomes a more difficult job for Googzilla.
Now we come to criterion [c], the inferiority complex and the need to meeting grandma’s and the investors’ expectations. The write up does not spend much time on the psyches of the Google leadership. The write points out:
Google also has its Google for Startups Founders Funds, which supports founders from an array of industries and backgrounds building companies, including AI companies. A spokesperson told TechCrunch in February that this year, the fund would start investing in AI-focused startups in the U.S., with more information to come at a later date.
The article does not address the psychology of Googzilla. That’s too bad because that’s what makes fuzzy G logos, impending legal penalties, intense competition from Sam AI-Man and every engineering student in China, and the self serving quantumly supreme type lingo big picture windows into the inner Google.
Grandma, don’t hit any of those ever young leaders at Google on the head. It may do some psychological rewiring that may make you proud and some other people expecting even greater achievements in AI, self driving cars, relevant search, better-than-Facebook ad targeting, and more investment initiatives.
Stephen E Arnold, May 13, 2025
Innovation: America Has That Process Nailed
April 27, 2025
No AI. Just a dinobaby who gets revved up with buzzwords and baloney.
Has innovation slowed? In smart software, I read about clever uses of AI and ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning). But in my tests of various systems I find the outputs occasionally useful. Yesterday, I wanted information about a writer who produced an article about a security issue involving the US government. I tried five systems; none located the individual. I finally tracked the person down using manual methods. The smart software was clueless.
An example of American innovation caught my attention this morning (April 27, 2025 at 520 am US Eastern time to be exact). I noted the article “Khloé Kardashian Announces Protein Popcorn.” The write up explains:
For anyone khounting their makhros, reality star and entrepreneur Khloé Kardashian unveiled her new product this week: Khloud Protein Popcorn. The new snack boasts 7 grams of protein per serving—two more grams than an entire Jack Links Beef Stick—aligning with consumers’ recent obsession with protein-packed food and drinks. The popcorn isn’t covered in burnt ends—its protein boost comes from a proprietary blend of seasonings and milk protein powder called “Khloud dust” that’s sprinkled over the air-popped kernels.
My thought is that smart software may have contributed to the name of the product: Khloud Protein Popcorn, but I don’t know. The idea that enhanced popcorn has more protein than “an entire Jack Links Beef Stick” is quite innovative I think. Samuel Franklin, author of The Cult of Creativity, may have a different view. Creativity, he asserts, did not become a thing until 1875. I think Khloud Protein Popcorn demonstrates that ingenuity, cleverness, imagination, and artistry are definitely alive and thriving in the Kardashian’s idea laboratory.
I wonder if this type of innovation is going to resolve some of the problems which appear to beset daily life in April 2025. I doubt it unless one needs some fortification delivered via popcorn.
Without being too creative or innovative in my thinking, is AL/ML emulating Khloé Kardashian’s protein popcorn. We have a flawed by useful service: Web search. That functionality has been degrading for many reasons. To make it possible to find information germane to a particular topic, innovators have jumped on one horse and started riding it to the future. But the horse is getting tired. In fact, after a couple of years of riding around the barn, the innovations in large language models seems to be getting tired, slowing down, and in some cases limping along.
The big announcements from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI focus on the number of users each has. I think the Google said it had 1.5 billion users of its smart software. Can Google “prove” it? Probably but is that number verifiable? Sure, just like the amount of protein in the Khloud dust sprinkled on the aforementioned popcorn. OpenAI’s ChatGPT on April 26, 2025, output a smarmy message about a system issue. The new service Venice was similarly uncooperative, unable in fact to locate information about a particular Telegram topic related to its discontinuing its Bridge service. Poor Perplexity was very wordy and very confident that its explanation about why it could not locate an item of information was hardly a confidence builder.
Here’s my hypothesis: AI/ML, LLMs, and the rest of the smart software jargon have embraced Ms. Kardashian’s protein popcorn approach to doing something new, fresh, creative, and exciting. Imagine AI/ML solutions having more value than an “entire Jack Links Beef Stick.” Next up, smart protein popcorn.
Innovative indeed.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2025
Zuckerberg Wants WhatsApp To Compete With Telegram
April 24, 2025
After 13 years of just borrowing Telegram’s innovations, the Zucker wants to compete with Telegram. (Wasn’t Pavel Durov arrested?)
Mark Zuckerberg is ready to bring WhatsApp to the messaging race and he plans to give Telegram and Signal a run for their money. Life Hacker posted a press release about the updates to the message app: “WhatsApp Just Announced a Dozen New Features.”
Group chats are getting a major overhaul. There will be an indicator that shows who has WhatsApp open in real time. This will allow users to see how many people are active on a threat. There will also be a “Notify for” section in group chat settings for managing thread notifications and there will be a “Highlights” option to limit what alerts users. The option to create events will be extended to one-on-one chats. Apple iPhone users get the exclusive update of a built-in document scanner and WhatsApp can now be set as the default message app.
Calls have been updated too:
You’ll notice three new features when placing calls. On iOS, you can pinch to zoom when on a video call. This works on both your video feed, as well as the feed of the person you’re talking to…You can now add a friend to a one-on-one call by swiping over to their chat, tapping the call button, and choose "Add to call.”…Finally, WhatsApp says they’ve upgraded their video call tech, optimizing the routing system and boosting bandwidth detection.”
Updates will has some important changes:
“There are also three changes to the Updates tab: Channel admins can record and post videos to their followers directly from the app (though these videos need to be 60 seconds or less). You can also see a transcription of voice messages updates in channels, and channel admins can share QR codes to link to the channel.”
Why not implement the live video, the crypto wallet, and the bots? Oh, right. Those are harder to emulate.
Whitney Grace, April 24, 2025
Google Is Just Like Santa with Free Goodies: Get “High” Grades, of Course
April 18, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby himself.
Google wants to be [a] viewed as the smartest quantumly supreme outfit in the world and [b] like Santa. The “smart” part is part of the company’s culture. The CLEVER approach worked in Web search. Now the company faces what might charitably be called headwinds. There are those pesky legal hassles in the US and some gaining strength in other countries. Also, the competitive world of smart software continues to bedevil the very company that “invented” the transformer. Google gave away some technology, and now everyone from the update champs in Redmond, Washington, to Sam AI-Man is blowing smoke about Google’s systems and methods.
What a state of affairs?
The fix is to give away access to Google’s most advanced smart software to college students. How Santa like. According to “Google Is Gifting a Year of Gemini advanced to Every College Student in the US” reports:
Google has announced today that it’s giving all US college students free access to Gemini Advanced, and not just for a month or two—the offer is good for a full year of service. With Gemini Advanced, you get access to the more capable Pro models, as well as unlimited use of the Deep Research tool based on it. Subscribers also get a smattering of other AI tools, like the Veo 2 video generator, NotebookLM, and Gemini Live. The offer is for the Google One AI Premium plan, so it includes more than premium AI models, like Gemini features in Google Drive and 2TB of Drive storage.
The approach is not new. LexisNexis was one of the first online services to make online legal research available to law school students. It worked. Lawyers are among the savviest of the work fast, bill more professionals. When did Lexis Nexis move this forward? I recall speaking to a LexisNexis professional named Don Wilson in 1980, and he was eager to tell me about this “new” approach.
I asked Mr. Wilson (who as I recall was a big wheel at LexisNexis then), “That’s a bit like drug dealers giving the curious a ‘taste’?”
He smiled and said, “Exactly.”
In the last 45 years, lawyers have embraced new technology with a passion. I am not going to go through the litany of search, analysis, summarization, and other tools that heralded the success of smart software for the legal folks. I recall the early days of LegalTech when the most common question was, “How?” My few conversations with the professionals laboring in the jungle of law, rules, and regulations have shifted to “which system” and “how much.”
The marketing professionals at Google have “invented” their own approach to hook college students on smart software. My instinct is that Google does not know much about Don Wilson’s big idea. (As an aside, I remember one of Mr. Wilson’s technical colleague sometimes sported a silver jumpsuit which anticipated some of the fashion choices of Googlers by half a century.)
The write up says:
Google’s intention is to give students an entire school year of Gemini Advanced from now through finals next year. At the end of the term, you can bet Google will try to convert students to paying subscribers.
I am not sure I agree with this. If the program gets traction, Sam AI-Man and others will be standing by with special offers, deals, and free samples. The chemical structure of certain substances is similar to today’s many variants of smart software. Hey, whatever works, right? Whatever is free, right?
Several observations:
- Google’s originality is quantumly supreme
- Some people at the Google dress like Mr. Wilson’s technical wizard, jumpsuit and all
- The competition is going to do their own version of this “original” marketing idea; for example, didn’t Bing offer to pay people to use that outstanding Web search-and-retrieval system?
Net net: Hey, want a taste? It won’t hurt anything. Try it. You will be mentally sharper. You will be more informed. You will have more time to watch YouTube. Trust the Google.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2025
Automobile Trivia: The Tesla Cybertruck and the Ford Pinto
March 11, 2025
Another post from the dinobaby. Alas, no smart software used for this essay.
I don’t cover the auto industry. However, this article caught my eye: “Cybertruck Goes to Mardi Gras Parade, Gets Bombarded by Trash and Flees in Shame: That’s Gotta Hurt.”
The write up reports:
With a whopping seven recalls in just over a year — and a fire fatality rate exceeding the infamous Ford Pinto— it’s never been a particularly great time to be a Cybertruck owner. But now, thanks to the political meddling of billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk, it might be worse than ever. That’s what some Cybertruck drivers discovered firsthand at a Lundi Gras parade on Monday — the “Fat Monday” preamble to the famed Mardi Gras — when their hulking electric tanks were endlessly mocked and pelted with trash by revelers.
I did not know that the Tesla vehicle engaged in fire events at a rate greater than the famous Ford Pinto. I know the Pinto well. I bought one for a very low price. I drove it for about a year and sold it for a little more than I paid for it. I think I spent more time looking in my rear view mirrors than looking down the road. The Pinto, if struck from behind, would burn. I think the gas tank was made of some flimsy material. A bump in the back would cause the tank to leak and sometimes the vehicle would burst into flame. A couple of unlucky Pinto drivers suffered burns and some went to the big Ford dealership in the great beyond. I am not sure if the warranty was upheld.
I think this is interesting automotive trivia; for example, “What vehicle has a fire fatality rate exceeding the Ford Pinto?” The answer as I now know is the lovely and graceful Tesla Cybertruck.
The write up (which may be from The Byte or from Futurism) says:
According to a post on X-formerly-Twitter, at least one Cybertruck had its “bulletproof window” shattered by plastic beads before tucking tail and fleeing the parade under police protection. At least three Cybertrucks were reportedly there as part of a coordinated effort by an out-of-state Cybertruck Club to ferry parade marshals down the route. One marshal posted about their experience riding in the EV on Reddit, saying it was “boos and attacks from start to evacuation.”
I got a kick (not a recall or a fire) out of the write up and the plastic bead reference. Not as slick as “bouffon sous kétamine,” but darned good. And, no, I am not going to buy a Cybertruck. One year in Pinto fear was quite enough.
Now a test question: Which is more likely to explode? [a] a Space X rocket, [b] a Pinto, or [c] a Cybertruck?
Stephen E Arnold, March 11, 2025
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
