A tidal wave of spam

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Head of products at Twitter/x.com, Nikita Bier, said this on February 11th, 2 months ago today:

“Prediction: In less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam & automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense: iMessage, phone calls, Gmail.

And we will have no way to stop it.”

Anthropic’s newest AI model, called Claude Mythos, is not being released to the public due to concerns about its ability to uncover high-severity cybersecurity flaws in major operating systems and web browsers. But make no mistake, this AI version and more (some privately owned and some free and open source) will be available in the next month. With this will come a tidal wave of security breaches, identity theft, and corporate as well as personal blackmail crimes.

The fact is that these AI models are professional lock pickers put in the hands of anyone who wants to use them. Almost no skill needed. Unlike the movies where the people doing a heist needed to recruit that one-of-a-kind safe cracker with crazy skills, now a 15 year old in his parent’s basement can do it without leaving the house.

This wave of ‘safe crackers’ is going to be let loose soon. But something else is headed this way and that’s the scammer coming for you and me via our phones, laptops, and social media accounts. These used to show up in poorly written emails, or broken English texts and phone calls that made them easy to detect. Now three things have fundamentally changed:

1. The quality of the messaging is flawless;

2. The ability of spammers and scammers to target you and share enough information to seem legitimate;

3. The sheer volume of spam coming our way. 1 spammer used to mean 1 phone call at a time being followed up with a real person. But with AI agents, one command could unleash wave upon wave of simultaneous emails, phone texts, and messages across many social media platforms.

The biggest problem with AI in the next 5 years isn’t what AI can do on its own, but rather what people with bad intentions can… and will… do with AI. It’s bad faith actors who will be our nemesis. Ultimately, the tidal wave is coming, “And we will have no way to stop it.”

Honing Observation Skills with Questions

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I love this quote by James Clear:

“Observation is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained and honed.

Even if you’re not a negative person, you may be skilled at noticing negative things. Sometimes people are good at noticing the reason things won’t work out or have a tendency to fixate on the latest distressing story.

But you can train your eye toward the opportunities each day quietly presents. You can become competent at noticing your good luck: the little moments of joy, the stranger who helped, the small things that went right, the opportunity in front of you right now.

What are you competent in observing? And which types of observations seem to serve your life best?” ~ James Clear

I’d add one more question, and that is, ‘What questions are you asking to ensure you are making the right observations?‘

‘Why don’t things work out for me?’ …is a very different question from, ‘I wonder what good will come of this?’

‘What else could go wrong?’ …is a very different question from, ‘What opportunities will present themselves now?’

James Clear makes a great point about needing to observe opportunities, I just think the path to get there is giving our brains, which are massive answering machines, the right questions to ask and then answer.

Mental gymnastics

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I know it’s a very small percentage of people in the world that think the world is flat, but this group fascinates me. You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to live in 2026 and think that every scientist and millions of others are all conspiring to fool you. The mental gymnastics needed to ignore blatant evidence and then double down on thinly veiled lies and poorly contrived talking points has to far exceed the effort to actually look at the obvious evidence. How much must it hurt to admit you are wrong to continually have to fight logic, facts, and data that contradict your beliefs?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can marvel at Artemis II, travelling to the moon and back , and sharing incredible photos of this pale blue marble that we all live on. There is so much we still don’t know about the universe we live in, mysteries still to be solved… and here is a group of people who not only fight science with oblivious imagination, they hide from the enjoyment of seeing our globe from angles we have not enjoyed in decades, at resolutions we could not have previously imagined.

Maybe Artemis II will be the thing that has flat eathers ‘come around’ to the global reality… but stupidity defies logic, and I’m afraid the mental gymnastics will continue to work against people dedicated to sharing their ignorance in a loud, proud, uninformed, and uneducated way.


Trying to rebuild old posts

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Yesterday after work, I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole. Apparently my ‘Subscribe by email’ button isn’t working on my blog and a relative asked me to add her to my subscriptions because hers was broken, and she was no longer receiving blog updates from me. I spent a bit of time looking at it, but even with AI help, I think I need to add a plugin to fix it and the first one I tried had an expensive subscription that I didn’t want to sign up for. After playing around for a bit, and then moving all my old ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ subscribers to Daily-Ink, (not fully realizing what I was doing), I decided to hold off on any more tinkering with subscriptions.

However, now I was on the back end of my blog and I realized that a post I was looking at had a related post with a broken image. So I clicked on the post, ‘Alan November: “Do learning”‘, and discovered that the image, probably a screen shot of a Tweet, was the point of the entire post, and I don’t have a back-up of it. It was an Alan November tweet, so I thought I’d go to X.com and find it, but Alan deleted his account and so now I have no idea how to fix this?  Essentially, the post is meaningless now, and there’s nothing I can do about it. That said, I will dig up my old laptop and see if I have it saved there as a last resort.

This happened because I used a proxy website, Posterous -now defunct, to be able to blog from my phone when I lived in China. However, as I meandered around my Daily-Ink blog I also found additional broken links. I was able to update 2 videos that were no longer available, with the same video at a different link. I also found references to other people’s blogs and those links are no longer working. I can’t do anything about this. Then I realized that I have shared a bunch of links with different link shorteners that are defunct. One of those is tr.im, which is also in a few of my old presentations. And there are a bunch of links across my blog where I used my own link shortener 2di.me (from my ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ blog days). I still pay to use this domain, but at $40 a year, just to maintain old links, it seems like a waste of money. But before I give it up, I think I’m going to do my best to find these links and update them with the full URL. That will take hours of time, but I have a plan to do it in the next year.

I don’t know when I’ll eventually give up my blogs and let them go the way of the dinosaur, but even these posts will disappear one day. What I’m surprised about is how many links to blogs I’ve referenced are already gone. Bloggers I admired and respected have let their blogs go, links to them just hit ‘404 – Not Found’ pages. Sometimes these links and broken images are not essential to the message I’m sharing, but other times what I shared loses its meaning without them.

It’s sad, but also not really worth worrying about. With over 2,500 posts now, all the broken links probably don’t add up to 2% of these, and in all honesty, nobody is seeking out Daily-Ink posts from over a decade ago. I’ll update what I can as a labour of love… and keep blogging. This too shall pass, but not yet. To misquote one of my favourite poems, ‘there’s miles to go before my blog sleeps’.

So, as a final thought, to those that subscribe, read on social media, and meander here occasionally, thank you for finding your way to my writing. I’ll do my best to keep this space tidy, with live links, and working images.

Agency, not information

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One of my favourite quotes comes from Derek Sivers,

“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.“

I was reminded of this in a video shared with me yesterday morning, “Can Paper Stop Tyrants?“. In it the vlogger, Tad Stoermer, shares:

“Too many people are still talking as if words act on their own; As if law acts on its own; As if constitutions act on their own; As if conventions just magically act on their own. They don’t, people act…”

He sees the futility in people waiting for action against tyranny… which simply is not coming. Then he continues with something he was told by European literary scholar, Dr. Julia Holloway:

“Evil continues when people convince themselves that stopping it is somebody else’s job… What is missing in our time is not information, it’s agency. It’s the capacity to see suffering as real, and then understand that action is required. Her point was that a culture that devalues the humanities also devalues the habits of empathy and moral imagination that make action possible.”

We seem to live in an era of outrage, whereby there is some expectation that outrage itself is action. “Can you believe this is happening?” is not a statement that prevents something from happening at that point, or in the future. Yet, that seems to be the stance most people hold.

Outrage without action is a loud but impotent form of acceptance. 

It holds no agency, and does not promote change. When conventions are broken, it’s easy to be upset, but conventions are only conventions because good people hold them up as such… and it’s that ‘holding them up’ that just isn’t happening.

_______

*Update: I read this by Chris Williamson after posting, and it seems too fitting with this post not to share:

“The gap between words and actions has never been bigger.

You can be the least virtuous, meanest, most dishonest human on earth, but if you say the right things on social media, the world will be unaware.

No one stress tests the words coming out of most people’s mouths.

Which means that appearing good becomes more important than being good.

Performative empathy is more rewarded than genuine empathy.

Posting about mistreated groups is more incentivised than helping mistreated groups.

Words have become more important than actions, because you can tweet the words without needing to do the actions.

It’s the path of least resistance for everyone.

This isn’t me saying that you can’t do good whilst posting about it online.

But that many (maybe even most?) of the people who proselytise about how virtuous and caring they are, and how it’s everyone else who is evil/malignant/the enemy, are allowing their morality to stand on the shoulders of limited scrutiny.

Beware the people who only say good things, but don’t do good things.“

​

So easy to cheat

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We aren’t far away from contact lenses that can do the same. The article, ‘Smart Glasses for Exam Cheating: Best Models, Prices and Risks in 2026’, shares multiple options that can provide AI delivered test answers, in seconds, via a small ear piece or even projected text answers which can only be heard or seen by the user. Banned? Of course. Easily detected? Not all models, with more sleuth and hidden models being developed every day. And as mentioned, what happens when these are as invisible as contact lenses?

Make no mistake, cheating has been around as long as tests have. In some respects this is not new. But most methods of cheating demand guessing what questions will be on the test in advance. Methods like these are responsive to every question asked. And the speed of responses are natural. While you are still reading the question, a response is already headed your way. No need to shift your eyes from the screen or test paper. No hidden notes to conceal, and no wrong answers unless you are choosing to get less than a perfect score, to not seem suspiciously smart.

I remember a friend telling me about him and his friends getting hold of their ethics exam a couple days before they had to write it. The irony of cheating on an ethics exam is not lost on me. They memorized the questions and answers, and all chose different ones to get wrong, while still achieving high ‘A’s. Then on the day of the test my friend was horrified when his friend raised his hand 30 minutes into a 3-hour exam, and shared a typo on a question that no one should have gotten to in such a short time. Despite this poor choice, they all got their ‘A’s.

That’s going to be the new challenge in cheating, how to not do too well to bring attention to yourself. A good problem to have for a cheater.

So here we are in a new era of cheating. Prescription glasses, hidden cameras and microphones, and curated wrong answers. And in all honesty, less and less opportunity for detection. Ultimately, it’s the tests that will need to change.

In living satire

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A few years back I heard someone say that we are living in the timeline that is the laughing stock of all other timelines, and I’m routinely reminded of this.

I read a quote from the leader of the most powerful nation in the world today, shared in a social media post commenting on it, and my BS detector went off. This had to be fake… satire to anger those not intelligent enough to get the joke! So I went onto the web version of this man’s social media propaganda machine that bears the word ‘Truth’, (again this screams satire), to see if the quote actually came from the horse’s mouth.

It did.

He actually said this ridiculous statement. I know what you want to ask. I know I’m being too vague, and you are wondering, ‘What did he say this time?’ But here’s the sad truth: I could have written this a week ago, a month ago, a year ago… the only thing that would be different is the quote itself. Not the fact that it’s so obtuse that it is offensive. Not that it’s a disgrace to the office he holds. Not that it’s so off colour that you’d think it was satire if you didn’t read it at its source.

So here we are in living satire. Living in a joke of a timeline, where we can’t distinguish the difference between the truth and what is satirical, fake news shared on ‘The Onion’. And here I am writing a post that will be just as relevant a week, month, or year farther into our comical, if not sad timeline.

Way more Waymo

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Here is a statistic from the company Waymo:

“In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today.” Source: Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

This is amazing growth. It’s not an isolated statistic. We are seeing this kind of growth in robotic focused manufacturing, and we are seeing it in the use of AI to do many jobs that humans used to do.

Are we ready for this? Are we ready for the gig economy to be eaten up by automation? Are we ready for not just blue collar but also white collar jobs to dwindle as AI takes over these jobs at an exponential rate? Are we ready for AI teachers, AI servants, AI drivers, AI delivery, AI accountants, AI lawyers, AI programmers, and AI in fields we thought would always need humans in them? Are we ready for way more of this kind of Waymo growth occurring simultaneously across many sectors?

We aren’t ready. Yet this is coming our way. It’s that simple.

Our responses in each case will be reactionary. For every current Waymo passenger there are probably a few potential customers thinking, ‘That’s scary, I’m not ready to put my life in the hands of a robot driver on the highway or the busy streets of downtown at rush hour.’ But those stats will dwindle. For every worker who thinks, ‘My job is safe, they’ll always need me,’ there are others who thought the same just a few years ago, and they are now looking for a job, often in a different sector than what they’ve been in.

Yes, there are limitations to this growth in some sectors. Yes, new jobs may come up that are uniquely human in nature. Yes, there are yet unharnessed opportunities for people to make a greater income (with less effort) in areas that they would not have imagined just a few months ago. It’s not all doom and gloom… but make no mistake, the exponential growth of AI powered advances will be drastically affecting all of our everyday lives sooner than most people realize. Waymo’s growth is emblematic of the kind of growth we will see in almost every aspect of our lives.

…and rest!

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The one area of my life that most needs fixing is sleep. While I don’t dwell on the numbers, (that would stress me out), my Garmin watch averages my score at 48/100 over the last 4 weeks. That is by no means something to be proud of, especially when half of that time was when I was on holidays.

I have a few strategies in mind to improve this, but I’m also keenly aware that worrying about my score is not a way to improve it. Still, if there is an area of my life that I know can improve my health and longevity, better sleep is probably my highest priority.

Another related area is rest between workouts. My discipline and dedication to fitness has not necessarily been all positive. After all, it was extended rest (with accompanying massages and physiotherapy) that finally rid me of months of sciatic pain down my leg. Then I came fully back into working out and today I could feel my pecs, my lats, my triceps, my quads, and my hamstrings, which are all a little sore. Yes, it’s a good kind of ‘I worked these muscles well’ sore, but that’s a lot to feel all at once. So today I rest.

After writing this, and before bed, I’ll meditate and stretch. I need to remember that giving my muscles a rest is as important as giving both body and mind a rest during sleep. It doesn’t matter if I’m working different muscle groups on different days, I still need to put full gaps in between workout days.

I thought I was being smart, not yet going back to weekly sprints to work on my Max VO2, and giving my legs and back a little longer to recover. This week I was also working with slightly lighter weights, not getting near my maximum weight on any sets. But my body still told me that I’d done more than enough. That said, 6 months ago I would have made this a cardio day instead of a full rest day. Maybe I’m learning.

Maybe I’ll go beyond listening a little more closely to my body, giving it needed rest when it tells me. Maybe I’ll integrate rest as a regular part of my routine. Thats my new plan. It starts today with a stretch and meditation to end a very mellow and exercise-less day.

A new groove

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It wasn’t that hard getting up on Monday morning at 5am to get to the gym. Coming back from a two week break didn’t hurt that much. But getting back into the routine of writing before I got to the gym at 6am has been a struggle.

It’s almost 11pm now and I’m laying down on my couch rattling this off to keep a commitment to myself to write every day.

The thing I am most looking forward to with retirement is time to write. The idea that I can schedule writing time that isn’t rushed excites me. Not having to think up ideas on the toilet first thing in the morning, or while washing my face and brushing my teeth. Not having to edit my work while on a treadmill. Actually sitting at a laptop with a coffee in my hand rather than hunting and pecking away on my phone… these are things I can’t wait to do as part of a daily routine upon retirement.

Before the March break people would ask me if I’m excited about my pending retirement and I’d answer honestly that I haven’t thought much about it. Now, after the break, I can’t say that anymore. I am thinking about it. I’m wondering how to design my days? I’m looking forward to finding a new groove that doesn’t involve a 5am wake up time and rushing to get my whole routine done before starting a long day at work.

The real test will be next September, when everyone is back at work and I’m home. I’m confident that I’ll build a routine that works. I’ll find my groove.