¶I had never heard of a Pizza Steel until seeing the results of Andy Sylvester’s first go with one. Color me intrigued. Added to the holiday list.
In today's journal
Let your curiosity linger instead of always accepting the easy answer.
post published in
/2026/08/20 at 6:37 AM
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¶It doesn’t happen very often, at least to me, but sometimes you read about someone else’s experience with something and you find yourself nodding at the screen and saying “yes, yes, and yes!” in your head as you realize their experience is your experience. I found myself doing exactly that as I read about Andy Sylvester’s frustration over efforts to build on Dave Winer’s projects over the years. Winer is developing a new RSS-based chat system and recently ranted about how the community has collaborated with him on past projects (“I want…working together, but what I get instead is people want to be me…[which] is impossible.“).
¶Andy appears to have some direct experience working on Winer projects, noting that:
¶Winer deletes things from sites he provides for others to try out his tools, talks about “spam” posts (which is his word for someone trying to make use of his “flow” to promote their “personal projects”) and how he will “moderate” them, and other abusive behaviors.”
¶The “deletes things” is what had me nodding my head. I’ve never tried to work on any of Winer’s code or participate in any of his projects in that way, but I’ve tried to use some of his various systems over the years. Even for this site. Frustration ensued.
¶I found, a couple times, that my love and passion for web publishing and RSS was not enough to power me past the frustration of trying to figure out how Winer’s various things work together and watching as some projects literally disappeared (Fargo!). Not doing that again.
post published in
/2026/08/20 at 7:11 AM
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Puerto Rico is rationing water, but many residents stopped trusting the tap long before the drought (theconversation.com)
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/2026/08/20 at 12:05 PM
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Frank Beard obituary (theguardian.com)
¶Earlier that year, Hill and Beard had also performed together in a fake version of the British group the Zombies, who had split up before their song Time of the Season became a hit in the US. A US company called Delta Promotions had spotted an opportunity to cash in by conjuring up a bogus Zombies and sending them on tour.
¶Frank Beard’s death yesterday has me listening to ZZ Top and reading a lot about him and the Little Ol’ Band from Texas. I love this tidbit from the obituary in The Guardian. Hilarious.
¶I also love this quote from Beard, describing the band’s music videos from the MTV era:
¶“I always thought that the videos gave the public a glimpse into ZZ Top, a true insight into what the band was about,” Beard said. “Which is just three guys who have very guy interests — we like cars, we like girls and we like music.”
¶Hear, hear. RIP Frank Beard.
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/2026/08/20 at 12:27 PM
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The Quiet Destruction of Curiosity by AI Assistants (psychologytoday.com)
¶Silicon Valley pushes the idea that immediacy and completeness are virtues of their large language model-based tools. In fact, those features are likely strangling our inquisitiveness. “Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board,” writes neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff (2026).“ When an AI summary answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You get what you came for, but you also lose what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship. Le Cunff warns that AI designers foolishly see the knowledge gap as something to be “engineered away” in the service of expediency and engagement, rather than the critical space for human flourishing that it is. “Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.”
¶(emphasis added)
¶I suppose the net effect of “engineering away” the dead space between query and answer depends on what you do with the time saved. What if you use the answer to ask additional questions or open new paths of exploration? Google seems to be anticipating that, with the suggested follow-on questions/topics included at the bottom of its AI Overview section in search results. I suspect this section will expand over time as actual search results gradually disappear.
¶Will taking these easy AI-suggested paths diminish learning and stifle curiosity? For an individual? What about humans overall? Maybe.
¶We need to teach people how to handle AI summaries and the benefits of going it alone at some point in a search for information. I hope schools are teaching some basic skills in this regard. If not, they should be.
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/2026/08/20 at 1:38 PM
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Some Was True publishes daily observations and commentary on everything from culture and history to sports and technology. You'll probably learn something each time you visit the site. And sources will be cited. The About page has more information about the background of the site and details on how content is organized.