Good morning good morning. Howdy ho. Hi. How are you? Love you.

It’s April 21st and everybody knows today is Earth Day.

Except of course tomorrow is Earth Day. They later changed the lyrics to the song:

This used to be a giant mystery here at GMHHAY. We investigated it thoroughly in the early years of this esteemed publication. Even before the band themselves ultimately fixed the lyrics. The source of the confusion lay in the history of the original Earth Day concert in SF and what day of the multi-day festival they were booked… and probably substance abuse.

Important update I forgot from my Walmart outing last week: I succumbed to my urges, after encouragement from Michelle, to try the Sam’s Club Diet Cola and, reader, it fuckin rules. It is basically 99% of a Diet Coke and it costs one dollar per two liter bottle. Just great. Strong recommend. Will nutrasweet kill you? Yes, probably. Do not make it a habit. But also… oh my god. delicious.

Don’t have much time today because I have my annual physical in an hour. This is very exciting for me not only because I get to prattle on about myriad medical annoyances happening to my aging body, about which doctors can and will do absolutely nothing. But also because I get to fret endlessly about whether or not to give consent to my doctor using an AI note-taking app.

It is absolutely insane how much I have thought about the question of Doctor AI note-taking. I know I am not rambling on and on about AI discourse in GMHHAY anymore. But that is because I have mostly made up my mind that I want nothing to do with it. I will have to do some shit at work. That sucks enough but it is unavoidable. But in the rest of my life? It can suck it.

I have however, in my hundreds of hours of ethical introspection, come to the conclusion that the one place where AI is potentially defensible is in medical science.

But this does not mean note-taking? It means, like, finding new diseases or making life-saving diagnoses. Shit, man. I could write a whole book about this. I mean, I am not a fan of writing single-topic books anymore. But god. A little chapbook on the ethics of saying Yes to your doctor’s AI note-taking app? I could get into that.

There is the normal AI shit – power consumption, labor theft, geopolitical futility a la nukes, the inexorable trend of putting all this power into the hands of the biggest douchebags on the planet.

But then it’s “medical” so maybe it’s all right, right? But is it really medical? Isn’t it really just note-taking? So who benefits? Does the doctor benefit? The Patient? So they… what? get to see more patients? Have a higher workload and throughput? Are they getting paid more for this? Where do the benefits accrue? With the hospital? The insurer? Dubious. What’s it to me?

How much are these hospitals paying for this AI software? Is it some sad-ass free add-on to their Epic system? Or are they now paying millions to those self-same Silicon Valley assholes?

Who is really benefitting from this?

Do the doctors even want it?

Has there been a single study proving this tech is helping anyone in a clinical non-emergency environment?

Which of course leads to, like, the polite-society discourse. Is this a case of a vegetarian quietly sitting there keeping their morals to themselves at a Fourth-of-July barbeque while everyone chomps dead flesh in front of them? Keep my mouth shut because it makes my doctor happy and I like her and I want to be a polite member of society?

Or does she secretly hate it too?

Would she even tell me? Is she a captive? Blink twice if you want me to say no.

And, like, it’s not like I can ask her. She does not want to have that conversation. Unless she’s at the bar.

Be weird to go to the bar with your doctor.

It is occurring to me I am friends with a bunch of doctors down here in my personal life maybe I should ask them.

Let me just call one of them right now at 7:30 in the morning. “I NEED HELP RIGHT NOW.”

Anyway, I am fucked. I have no idea whether I will say yes out of politeness and then hate myself after or say no and have everyone judge me like I’m one of those lunatic parents in The Pitt.

Tim Apple is retiring and so now we will get Johnny Apple, who runs Hardware. This is probably the correct choice, since hardware and chips are the only parts of Apple that aren’t rotten. It will be interesting to see what changes come Sept 1 when the guard changes.

I am pleasantly surprised that Tim’s legacy is already being questioned. Those who judge companies solely by their stock price have been tempted to lionize Tim as a genius, but luckily the recent stock medicrity has tempered their sainting. Instead we can see the true cost of his legacy: billions spent on a car that never delivered, the introduction of a single new product line that has been, up to now, a failure. The absolute corruption of the world’s manufacturing capability and the selling-out of your country to the Chinese, only to turn around and sell out your country to its own fascist leader with outright bribery. An OS that has evolved mostly in ways no one wants, while introducing innumerable bugs that go unaddressed for years. The enshittification of everything because of a pursuit of “service revenue.” I will grudgingly give him respect for avoiding crypto and AI.

Mostly I say good riddance.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

I am listening to the new (ish) Voxtrot this morning, came out a few months ago. Second listen. It is a shockingly solid batch of very well-written rock songs. It is somewhat confusing Voxtrot has returned, it is confusing they have returned with such a polished, confident batch of songs. I do not know what to think about any of it other than these dudes know their way around chord changes and the studio. It is quite good, maybe not exactly my cup of tea, and all very mysterious.

The thing about GMHHAY that is really under-appreciated is the things we don’t write about. Like I mentioned above, I am not writing about AI much anymore because it is boring and I have made up my mind and I am not pining to be a public intellectual on the topic, because public intellectuals are mostly garbage. I do think it’s funny, though. I got all hot and bothered to write a “Why AI sucks” book and eventually abandoned it because I figured someone else would get around to it but it’s been a year and no one else really has? That is weird.

But the point we’re making here is that you don’t have to have a comment on everything. And to illustrate that point, here is a quick list of topics I made notes to write about that eventually I chose not to, and why. Any one of them, I coulda made a whole essay or argument about this shit, but… not worth it.

On the topic of Mythos, Anthropic’s supposedly wildly dangerous AI that can find thousands of zero-day bugs and it’s a whole new world of catastrophe in software, blah blah blah. I don’t buy any of it. I don’t buy it for several reasons:

• Anthropic was supposedly using it for months and their own software is still bug-ridden

• Anthropic has a history of histrionic and self-serving announcements that then go nowhere

• Absolutely no actual stats or studies released with the announcement

• Zero-day bugs are overrated in terms of security risk. You still have to find a way to exploit them. Most are not worth exploiting. Most people do not want to exploit them because it’s illegal.

• The important ones get patched quickly. We had a supposed critical-level hacking event yesterday in the way of Vercel and… not much will happen from it.

• Which is the usual outcome of big hacking events.

So all of this, I say: Meh.

Ticketmaster antitrust suit: very excited that we won, doubly so that we won even after the Feds dropped out. But until the remedies get announced, it doesn’t mean anything. I am getting too old to be excited about antitrust judgements before the remedies phase is ennounced.

Ditto with The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars. I got too excited about this last time, only for the judge to toss out the deal that The Onion and the liquidators made. So until the judge blesses this deal, I remain skeptical. Were I younger and still into swag collecting I would def be buying some merch right now to put in a box and laugh about in a decade or so but I think I have mostly gotten over that terrible habit.

All Birds: it is not interesting to me that a failing company sold its assets and then pivoted to something else. AllBirds have always been Silicon Valley bros. You could see them really as a prototype for this whole AI absurdity: an entire financial ecosystem that picks favorite humans and showers them with endless sources of capital for whatever they dream up. It was absurd ever giving AllBirds as much money as the VC world gave them, just as it was absurd to do so for Warby Parker, that sock company, tht gym, that coworking company, etc. They just loved the dude. So of course they’re gonna give him more money. It may seem surprising they are bothering to do their new thing in their old company, but this is just a financial mechanism Elon has made hip these days. The whole deal is boring-ass SV being SV.

Shit I gotta go. Jane is good. Do I have a Jane anecdote from yesterday? No I don’t think so. We did daddy school the other night. We learned about Video Games and Fossils. Largest class yet: eight stuffies and a cabbage patch doll.

Got a W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe mix for you today and man it sure would be a great world if you randomly heard late-period Pankow at a W Hotel why cant we live in a world like that. Except that, all new stuff. Oh shit there are two Joji songs sorry. NO TIME TO FIX.