Mitch's Blog

P.J. Vogt, host of the Search Engine podcast, interviews writer Meghan O’Gieblyn, “who started lying to herself about her relationship to alcohol and God. And afterwards wondered: when did it start? Why did it happen? How do you make peace with the part of yourself that wants something that could destroy you?”

“There’s this ideal state of wholeness that I think is the motivation for so many religious disciplines or spiritual disciplines. This idea that, oh, if I can finally let go of my ego, I’ll finally be at peace with myself, and I won’t be arguing with myself.”

O’Gieblyn talks about surrendering to addiction as ecstatic experience.

I am not an alcoholic or an addict (other than caffeine, which I don’t think counts for this type of discussion). I was a heavy smoker and compulsive eater at one time. I am very familiar with having a constant, self-critical voice in my head and I can absolutely understand the temptation to do a thing that shuts that voice down, even if doing that thing burns your life down in the process.

I think I will read her book next. It’s “Will and Attention.”

Huawei’s secret weapon wasn’t the CCP. It was IBM

How did Huawei become one of the world’s most formidable tech companies? Washington blames the CCP. But Huawei’s rotating chairman, Eric Xu, credits IBM.

Huawei paid IBM nearly $600 million between 1997 and 2006 to build a product development system that put customers first. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley bet that money could create markets, then watched the dot-com and optical bubbles burst.

My colleague Steve Saunders argues America is repeating the mistake with debt-fueled AI data centers, while Huawei builds the integrated stack for AI in the physical world.

China builds industry to serve customers and the interests of China. The U.S. builds businesses to enrich billionaires.

Why is Meta building pervert glasses? It’s not because people want to replace their phones – people love their phones. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the phone is an obstacle to him becoming a trillionaire.

HPE won’t merge Aruba Central and Mist, but the platforms will share AI, applications and hardware

My latest on Fierce Network: Merging Aruba Central and Juniper Mist is unnecessary, HPE networking chief Rami Rahim says.

Instead, HPE is converging what’s underneath, sharing its Marvis AI engine and new access points and switches across both platforms.

HPE trails Cisco, the campus networking big dog, and Cisco is growing nearly four times faster, according to analyst reports. HPE says it’s integrating faster than Cisco did with Meraki, but the market numbers don’t show it yet.

I always take a photo of every El Camino I see. I don’t know why. I just do.

A brief history of classroom overhead projectors — much more interesting than you’d expect. (Version History / The Verge)

Overhead projectors were one leg of the multimedia trinity for 1970s classrooms. The other two legs were the filmstrip and the 16-mm film projector, the latter used to project educational films from the 1950s that looked old-fashioned and ridiculous in ways that I don’t think educational videos from the 2000s would look to kids today.

“You think my goal is to win — only? That’s not my goal. My goal is to govern well. We treat getting elected as if that’s some sort of achievement. That’s when the thing starts.” — Abdul El-Sayed

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

— Heather Cox Richardson

Meta shut down the “No Kings” Instagram account during Saturday’s protest. “No Kings” was using the account to coordinate the protests. Meta later reinstated the account and said it was an error.

“Meta’s action against No Kings is the latest in a series of ’errors’ impacting the accounts of Trump critics.”

And it’s not just Meta. Meta and TikTok have shut down the accounts of Trump opponents at critical times, claiming technical glitches and errors. I’m sure this is all a series of unfortunate coincidences and has nothing to do with the fact that Meta and other social media companies are owned by Trump’s billionaire buddies.

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