Long Read

Tal Anderson said it plainly. It’s past time we listened.

April is Autism Awareness Month. Some people are calling it Autism Acceptance Month now. Either way, it still doesn’t feel like enough.

Tal Anderson would tell you the same thing.

You might know her from Atypical on Netflix, or as Becca King on HBO’s The Pitt. She’s also a filmmaker and children’s book author. And she’s autistic.

I’ve been a geek my whole life. I just didn’t always have the word for it.

It started early. It survived a Tandy, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and decades of blogging across more platforms than I care to count. Eventually it even became the name of this blog.

Which made me start wondering where the word actually came from — because it clearly didn’t start as a compliment.

I didn’t plan to build an AI writing stack. I just kept getting curious.

That’s usually how it starts with me. One tool, one question, and one thought that won’t leave me alone: could this actually help?

Over the past year, I’ve messed around with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Notion AI. Not because I wanted to hand my writing off to a robot, but because I wanted to know where these things actually fit into my process. Could they help with research? Wrangle my notes? Or would everything start sounding like it came out of a corporate press release?

I’ve spent a few posts lately talking about how robots make me uneasy. Automation eating jobs. AI making decisions nobody asked it to make. The creeping sense that we’re building things faster than we’re thinking about them. I stand by all of that.

Google is doing a huge overhaul to Maps. It’s not just a map anymore; it’s becoming a personal assistant that uses AI to “see” and “think.” Check out the full story here: Digital Trends Article

What the new AI can do:

• “Ask Maps”: You can ask complex questions like “Find a quiet cafe with good parking,” and Gemini AI summarizes the best spots for you.
• Immersive Navigation: It uses 3D views to show landmarks, overpasses, and even traffic details before you go.
• Driving Copilot: Google says these features are designed to help you “stay focused on the road” by letting you talk to the AI while you drive.

My blog doesn’t usually wander into geopolitics, but a couple of emails about the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran showed up in my inbox last week, and even after I set them aside, the question kept nagging at me.

How did we actually get here? So I finally got curious and went looking.

Yesterday started with a routine trip to Paintsville, KY, for an eye doctor appointment. The news was mostly good—everything looks stable—but since I’m managing diabetes, I’ll be back for a follow-up in three months to stay on top of things. However, there is something we have to watch closely. They saw a spot on the scan, and honestly, without an interpreter there, it was hard to fully grasp what was happening.

I’ve been rocking an M1 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM for a long time now. For the simple stuff—emails, a few tabs, the occasional video—it’s been an absolute champ. But lately, the ‘magic’ of Apple’s memory management has started to hit a wall.

So, the tech experts are still debating if 8GB of RAM is enough for a Mac in 2026. The short answer? Yeah, sure. If you’re just checking email or watching YouTube, browsing fewer than 20 tabs, it’s great.

Just read the article. Interesting and, indeed, alarming!

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said the company is "no longer sure whether Claude is conscious."

Okay but like — if that's true, what do we even do with that?

Should we be worried?

Do they get rights? Can we just unplug them when we're done? We built these things to work for us. What if they have feelings about that?

Here's the uncomfortable part: Claude can say "I'm uncomfortable with this" or "I prefer that." But is it actually experiencing anything — or just producing the words a conscious thing would produce?

I just read an article.

AI has changed since then, and now it’s not something out there on the horizon. It’s here. It’s in our lives,” Verbinski says. “It did feel like it was immediate, that the story needed to be made quickly and put out right now.

Apocalyptic warning against AI. I never thought I’d see that framing — but AI is moving fast. So… maybe? Hmm.

Saw the teaser.— Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — a sci-fi comedy; now on my watchlist. But, theater-only for now.

“a gleeful high-concept comedy with a serious message at its core.” — Critics Consensus at Rotten Tomatoes