The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!
I've known of the Colt 1855 Sidehammer revolver shotgun for years. It was used (in the rifle version) by some sharpshooter units early in the Civil War, and sold reasonably well on the frontier and out West. What I didn't know is that some unknown pioneer or trooper decided he wanted his Sidehammer to be somewhat more portable and accessible. Well, "portable" is relative for a gun well over a foot long and weighing more than 6 pounds . . . but I'd say he succeeded.
If he tried to fire that beast one-handed from the back of a galloping horse, I suspect it would have been really hard to hold onto it. The recoil must have been pretty snappy, to put it mildly! Nevertheless, given the opportunity to modify a modern replica Sidehammer into that configuration, I'd kinda like to try it. Typical 10ga. shotguns of the period used up to 1.5 to 2 drams of powder behind up to 1.5 ounces of lead shot. The Sidehammer's chambers were shorter than sporting guns, so I daresay it wouldn't have used the top end of those ranges, but even so, I suspect it had a real kick on both ends.
We've all read warnings and horror stories about how algorithms are analyzing our online behavior and trying to steer us to their products, their channels, their platforms. Thing is, it's a very real danger, and it's getting worse. EKO provides this perspective. I highly recommend reading the whole of the excerpt below, and watching both video clips.
let’s start here with something seemingly innocent, the budweiser ad from the superbowl.
in the primary signalling sphere of “positioning and product” this represents a profound volte face from the recent bud light echo chamber brand self-immolation fiascos, a return to images of growth and aspiration and rippling pride.
it’s a great ad. if you have not encountered it, see for yourself. experience it.
ok. got that?
it’s practically cinema, right? a story of friendship and coming of age and of becoming.
it’s got it all.
it’s moving stuff.
but it also has something you probably did not see, a meta game beneath the game where the real magic trick is taking place at a deeper neurological level, a firmware level cheat code to which the human mind has very little access.
let’s explore:
now watch this video. [The critical bit comes from about 1m. 40sec. onward; skip ahead to that point if you wish.]
now watch the budweiser ad again. see how they took this exact fractionation strategy and amplified and optimized it took you up, down, up, down, rain, protect, strive, fail, leap, fly, power chords, free bird, aaaaaaaand beer ad.
they boiled this whole concatenation down to its most bare bones, essential elements and ran a whole suggestability enhancement procession in a one minute experience.
i would wager they knew that.
i will also bet you that it has sold absolute truckloads of beer.
but this is not the scary part.
we, as humans, are used to ads. we know what they are for and embed a certain skepticism. OK, so maybe we buy a few more brewskis, but whatever, this is hardly the stuff of civilizational threat.
but you have to start stepping back to see the rest of the picture.
social media has become a barrage of short form information, increasingly video driven and increasingly exposed to savagely intense evolutionary stressors. the currency of online is attention. it’s time. twitter speaks of "maximizing unregretted user-seconds." this is what that means. it means “how can i get you to watch more of this and to want to watch more of this?”
keep in mind that algorithms are psychopaths. they have no theory of your well being that factors into this sort of optimization. it’s just “keep the typewriter monkey happy and online.” and every outlet is locked in the same arms race so no one gets to opt out. those who do not play this way get left behind and the user seconds go somewhere else.
there’s a worrying parallel to what happened with US food companies. they did not set out to create travesties of sugar and salt and over-amped artificiality, but as they experimented with it, they saw that people bought more. the feedback loop of “people will eat more froot loops than fruit” was obvious on revenue lines and if you do that for too long, pretty soon customers basically cannot even taste wholesome food anymore. it’s not enough of a dopamine hit.
media is the same.
what started as an inevitable game to maximize user time and click through rates has becomes somehting altogether other, a monster in the depths that cannot be seen, only felt as its machinations twist minds and demolish perspective.
It's almost diabolically clever, isn't it? The thing is, it works. It works so well that every single major player in the news media, social media, advertising and the entertainment industry is using it against us every single day. So are politicians, from both sides of the aisle and everywhere else in the public sector. We aren't being respected as individuals. We're sheep to be shorn, votes to be manipulated, suckers to be fed pablum in exchange for our dollars and unthinking loyalty.
Remember that. We're all being manipulated daily. It takes sustained effort and really hard work to break free from that cycle and recognize it for what it is.
Squire and his team could see, from the type of light sockets and electrical outlets visible in the images, that Lucy was in North America. But that was about it.
They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.
So Squire and his colleagues analysed everything they could see in Lucy's room: the bedspread, her outfits, her stuffed toys. Looking for any element which might help.
And then they had a minor breakthrough. The team discovered that a sofa seen in some of the images was only sold regionally, not nationally, and therefore had a more limited customer base.
But that still amounted to about 40,000 people.
"At that point in the investigation, we're [still] looking at 29 states here in the US. I mean, you're talking about tens of thousands of addresses, and that's a very, very daunting task," says Squire.
The team looked for more clues. And that is when they realised something as mundane as the exposed brick wall in Lucy's bedroom could give them a lead.
"So, I started just Googling bricks and it wasn't too many searches [before] I found the Brick Industry Association," says Squire.
"And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, 'how can the brick industry help?'"
She offered to share the photo with brick experts all over the country. The response was almost immediate, he says.
One of the people who got in touch was John Harp, who had been working in brick sales since 1981.
"I noticed that the brick was a very pink-cast brick, and it had a little bit of a charcoal overlay on it. It was a modular eight-inch brick and it was square-edged," he says. "When I saw that, I knew exactly what the brick was," he adds.
It was, he told Squire, a "Flaming Alamo".
"[Our company] made that brick from the late 60s through about the middle part of the 80s, and I had sold millions of bricks from that plant."
Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades.
He did however reveal a key detail about bricks, Squire says.
"He goes: 'Bricks are heavy.' And he said: 'So heavy bricks don't go very far.'"
This changed everything. The team returned to the sofa customer list and narrowed that down to just those clients who lived within a 100-mile radius of Harp's brick factory in the US south-west.
There's much more at the link. It's well worth reading in full, to give you some idea of the difficulties involved in tracing missing children.
The horrifying part of the story, to me at any rate, is that when police finally raided the house and rescued the girl, they learned she'd been raped by a sexual predator for six years. Six years - and she was 12 years old when rescued. That means she'd been missing and abused for half her life. She was a child, with no resources to call on, no parent to lean on, nobody to help at all. How she survived such abuse is something I can't comprehend. Now in her 20's, she has a few things to say in the article about her experiences.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of missing children in our country. Many of them were sent here by human traffickers, sold on to predators and abusers across the country. It's heartbreaking to think that Lucy is only one such person. If only we were all more alert to the warning signs, we might be able to help so many more . . .
I had no idea that one of my favorite Jethro Tull songs - "Wond'ring Aloud", from their 1971 album "Aqualung" - had an extended version. I'd only heard the abbreviated version from the album. However, there was a longer edit, on the 40th anniversary re-issue of the album.
That made my week to hear that. After 55 years, an old favorite lives again!
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter.
. . .
I've always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren't incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
And here's why this matters to you, even if you don't work in tech.
The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first... because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That's why they did it first. My job started changing before yours not because they were targeting software engineers... it was just a side effect of where they chose to aim first.
They've now done it. And they're moving on to everything else.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.
. . .
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is "really getting better" or "hitting a wall" — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It's done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn't used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what's happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don't say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous... because it's preventing people from preparing.
. . .
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn't replacing one specific skill. It's a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn't leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it's improving at that too.
. . .
We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet.
I can only recommend very strongly that you click over to Mr. Shumer's blog and read the entire article. He knows whereof he speaks, and does so with far more authority and experience than most so-called "experts" in the field. If you wish, compare what he says with Elon Musk's views on the short-term evolution of AI. They're pretty much in step with each other.
This is extraordinarily important. It's going to affect all of us in ways we can hardly foresee or imagine right now. Naysayers who dismiss AI as "just another fad" or "only a large language model" or "only as good as its programmers" are missing the point. AI is becoming a self-perpetuating, self-improving, self-expanding phenomenon that may well have a greater impact on human society - in a vastly shorter time - than the Renaissance. Its impact is likely to be at least as great.
Go read the whole thing, and talk to your spouses, your children and those of your friends who are in the workforce about these things. How can we prepare for the "Brave New World" that confronts us? Mr. Shumer offers several very useful suggestions. Which of them can we apply to ourselves?
